If you want to send me music or a book in China, you can go to my Amazon wishlist and buy me something. The shipping address is already set up. When I leave, I'm giving my books and CDs to my students.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/wishlist/1I6CCB62V13HE

Today is the last day of my first week back in China. It rained loud enough last night to wake me up at three a.m., but in the weather was perfect for a climb up Yao mountain. Cloudy and a bit humid, but 58 degrees and almost the best visibility I've ever seen. A bit before noon I was up enough to get started. I threaded my new door key on my shoelaces, grabbed for my water bottle only to discover that I've already lost it so I took some cash, and headed out.

I jogged to the cable-car station at the base of the mountain, and the air was so clear that hills as far away as 500 yards seemed so close I could reach out and touch them. After buying some water, I headed up the trail. The view at the top was quite satisfying, and soon I headed back down. Despite the wet clay on the trail, it wasn't very slippery and I never fell, but my right knee (not the one with the torn cartilege, which by the way I'm happy to report never bothers me except that the knee gets stiff when I sit for more than a few hours) started to hurt.

Most of the way down, the path goes directly underneath the cable-car route, and a (Chinese) tourist bus had recently arrived, because every single car held a couple who shouted down "Hello," and then invariably giggled when I shouted back, without looking away from the trail, "Ni hao!"

Distracted (I claim) by the barrage of greetings, I lost track of the main trail when I crossed the cement base of one of the pylons. Shortly after going too far to turn back, I realized that the trail, despite being quite clear at the ground, was much more overgrown than the one I'd come up on. Undeterred, I pushed forward through the bush. I had gravity on my side, and I knew I was on a trail because there was garbage every few feet.

This strategy ultimately failed when I charged headlong into a chest-high tangle of thorny vines. That hurt. I retrenched, swore, ducked, and continued, more carefully. Soon, though, I was at the bottom of a ravine, trying to climb up a muddy slope. Then there were lots more thorns. Then I dropped my bottled water. And I'm not (very) ashamed to admit that, in the middle of doing the thorn limbo and on the verge of slipping down the hillside, I just left it there.

I finally made it to the sled track, climbed through the barbed wire, and then followed that until it met up with the main trail. My knee got progressively worse as I jogged home, so that I was limping by the time I got on campus. I think this is one of those psychosomatic things, like when old people don't die until after a birthday or a grandchild is born or something - my body was pacing the pain alerts. Then I discovered that my big bottles of acetominophin and ibuprofin are missing, probably because I never got them back after I lent them to Art when he was in the hospital. Fortunately I still have Aleve, but it's not ideal. I hope I don't limp for a month the way I did when I got a similar pain under the other kneecap when I went hiking and unconsciously favored the knee with recovering cartilege.

All this joint trouble, along with the migration of hair growth from the scalp to the ears and nostrils, is just another symptom of how I mysteriously managed to screw up, miss my twenties altogether, and go directly from sullen teenager to an aged curmudgeon.

Things are generally fine here. I never got a reply back from anyone at the school about my travel plans, so I just flew in, took a shuttle bus to town, and then a taxi to the campus. The taxi driver refused to turn on her meter and wanted 50 yuan; I argued her down to 30 for what should have been a 15-yuan fare. I'm pretty sure running without a meter is illegal, but the cop standing watching us dicker didn't seem to think so.

On campus, I lucked out and found Li Xu and family in the office when I arrived late Sunday night, and he gave me the key for the new metal security door. When I left, everything was in order and I had a fresh water bottle and tank of gas. Zhang Ming apparently ran a laundry in my apartment while I was gone, because there was an extra washing machine in the kitchen and a second, empty, tank of gas. Also the water bottle was gone, along with, as I discovered over the next few days, my fork, my screwdriver, my scale, and my computer's network card. But it's all been sorted out now.

I was boiling water for noodles (since I was out of bottled water) and discovered that the plastic in the handle of my cheap little pot has a melting, or rather, charring point, somewhere *below* 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientifically trained readers may recognize this as the boiling point of water. So if you leave the pot on the stove with boiling water, the handle smokes just from conducted heat. Cf. New York Review 18 Oct 2001, p 50, from "China's Assault on the Environment", "... the continued production of low-quality goods for which there is little or no demaind. Chinese society would have been much better off if the goods had never been produced at all."

Students trickled back onto campus all of last week, though the cafeterias are mostly closed. (Free noodles Tuesday morning, but my Wednesday they were charging and the Noodle Lady (all Noodle Ladies are fungible as far as I'm concerned) couldn't resist giving me a dash of chicken broth.) Thursday and Friday students started flooding in, and I ran into a few of my students. Forest says that there's a roll call Sunday night; absence counts against a grade students receive which is seperate from academic grades. I asked if it was a grade for "obedience" and he agreed but wasn't sure what the word meant; I may have been leading the witness.

Classes start next week, but my classes start in Week 2. I'm writing the first lecture, which I'm going to give out in writing the week before instead of delivering orally in class. Also I have to sort through the finals, which I'm going to give back and review.

I've been on a bit of a leaving-behind streak recently. To wit:

The big item is, of course, the Palm Pilot left behind on the roof of a car in Alaska. It's still AWOL. Despite finding a recent backup, I still lost two phone numbers, Michael Jordan's email, a song lyric (which I can remember, though: "Like a genie in a coma/I see the sun but feel no warmth), and a band name

My Buffy hat, probably in Steve's apartment

My green wool hat (my dad claims it's his) which I left at Toby's

my favorite bookmark, of Captain Picard, which Blanc gave to me inside a James Joyce book when I was very sick one time in college

Steve's "Scientific Stretching" book that promises that, within three months, you'll be able to do a full split. I didn't leave this behind so much as I forgot to steal it.

A Vancouver Folk Festival water bottle that I left in San Diego years ago. Michelle brought it up to LA but then I left it at Tasha's.

And a few things I meant to bring but forgot: A baseball Some Buffy and Prisoner episodes A coffee grinder. That book about the Falun Gong. But I decided it wasn't worth the risk.