By coming home between semesters, I missed Chinese New Year. When I first realized this would happen, I was a little bummed, but the schedule just wasn't going to work out well any other way. My subconscious wasn't bummed, though, and now I know why. The hallmark of the New Year Festival month is the firework. A lot of fireworks. A lot of very loud fireworks. Set off at random times all day and all night all month.

So if you are averse to loud noise, you might want to give China a pass for that month. I caught the last week or so and it sounded like a refugee camp in Gaza. Lantern Day, the final day of the Spring Festival, was supposedly the end of it; the attack started right at 8 when everybody in town started setting off all remaining fireworks. From the roof I could see that people were, in many places, setting off fairly heavy ordnance from streets, patios, roofs. Fortunately there's no lack of bare cement surfaces, so the fire risk is less than you might think.

The campus changed less than I expected in the seven weeks I was away. Pay phones sprouted all over the place, probably brought on by the incipient monsoon season. The road in front of the school continues to erode under a steady trickle of leaking sewage, so that the bus drivers now must negotiate a hundred-foot patch of hummocks and potholes; this they do with aplomb.

I learned a new academic rule today: students who fail a class can retake the final. The new score for the final is recorded in place of the original grade for the class. So the student I failed got a retest. Another student was also due a retest, but I explained that that student, from another department, had only come to class a few times and didn't take the midterm or final.

Later I realized that there were two students from another department, and while one seemed to drop out, the other completed and passed the class. But when I filled out grade sheets, he wasn't on any of the sheets and I forgot to report his score. So I went back to the office the next day to try and straighten that out. Late that evening, the student came to my door with all his homework in hand to prove that he shouldn't get a zero.

"No no, it's my fault," I reassured him. "You passed. You don't have to retake the final tomorrow."

He was quite relieved.

When I lost my Palm Pilot in Alaska, I lost about six weeks worth of data. Phone numbers, to-do's and to-done's, band names, song lyrics, and notes. The lost notes bothered me most. I have a screwy memory. Some facts are not only permanently stored but permanently accessible, as if they were in a shortcuts list. Other facts are stored forever but can't seem to keep themselves indexed: when reminded, all the details are there, but without a prompt a whole year of my life can stay completely unremembered.

When I take notes on my Palm, I apparently licence my brain to abandon any indexing altogether. Some vital librarian brain-organelle, a medula uvula or whatever the current candidate might currently be, shovels memories into long-term without even glancing at the contents. So when I lost my Palm, in some ways I lost six weeks of my life. I tried to jot down the index, the notes and words that might help me remember the LA trip, the great weekend in Hong Kong, before they were forever marooned in my brain, but I couldn't remember the half of it.

Or so I thought, until, rooting around on the hard drive I'd brought with me back to China, I found a recent backup that I thought I'd lost. Suddenly I had five of the six lost weeks back. And I checked my hasty notes against the originals, and it turns out that I didn't forget anything important. It was just that nothing very interesting happened.

To conclude the story of the lost Palm, I got a new one in Hong Kong. I went back to the area Des has showed me in Mong Kok, failed spectacularly to find the computer store arcade, and found a different one in which PDA stalls alternated with pirated porn. After pricing stuff, running over to the other computer area two subway stops down (which I still remembered, vaguely, from 10 years ago but it hardly looked the same), finding the original Mong Kok computer area from a map in the subway, trying several used models with poorly reglued cases, and acquiring another hard shell like I had before (but blue instead of silver), I ended up with a like-new-in-an-opened-box Palm Vx. Identical to my old one except four times the memory and a shiny little "x" next to the V on the bezel. Total cost: US$130.

I want to get a whiteboard for my shower. Because I do my best thinking there, but by the time I've finished bathing, toweled, and dressed, I forget. One thing I always forget is the neat move I've invented to maximize distribution of hot shower water on cold mornings. I call it the Oscar Maneuver. First, stand directly under the (vertical) showerhead, feet together. Second, clasp your hands over your chest like an Oscar statuette. Third, tilt forward slightly and then begin rotating clockwise. That is to say, keeping your legs and spine straight, slowly tilt in a circle, so that the water hits you on one shoulder, then on your back, then the other shoulder, then the front.