Of Writers

Yesterday my mom asked me, "How come you don't write any more?" and I said, "Because I don't have the time or personal space." She thought to disagree. Today was an early day at work, and while driving home I thought, "I should write for a few hours before everyone else gets home. It's a nice day, I'll sit outside with my notebook." Upon arriving home, I find mom home early because she was sick (but that still-functioning sick, not stuck-in-bed sick). I then am treated to a frequent passive-aggressive sigh while she's struggling with some sort of work stuff on the computer, and her moping because she won't be able to go to Sasha's birthday party. This sort of put me off writing, because how can I focus with that sort of energy around? Because she had to come home early, mom had taken Andrew's car, so when he got off work he had to take the train, meaning it was my job to pick him up at the station. Long story short, he kept calling me while I was driving, which I took to be impatience (reality: calling to tell me he was at a different station than usual). I was annoyed at his calls, then annoyed at myself when I had to turn around and drive to the other station, and annoyed because it was getting uncomfortably hot in the car. Mom had given me her card to buy Burger King on the way back for dinner--her "I'm sick and giving up" meal idea. The thought of ingesting fast food at this particular time was mildly repulsive to me, but as there are two other hungry people in the house, we went and got a mix of things for everyone. My dad was home by the time we got back, though he was also not feeling well and did not come down to eat right away. Just as I was finishing choking down a few chicken nuggets and getting ready to retire upstairs, he (dad) starts a typical conversation/argument with Andrew in his room (i.e. directly next to mine, i.e. something I would be forced to listen to.) So, mom, to answer your question..... Case rested and dismissed.

Hair blues.

I made some poor decisions in regards to using a new hair toner this evening. My locks are now a sort of patchy dark perriwinkle/blonde. (pic related)

It elicited a few responses from me, mostly along the lines of:

Oh God what have I done?!
Noo purple toner, why have you betrayed me?
I probably should have seen this one coming.
And that's why we don't do it at home, kids!

I was told to make another post, so here it is.

I want to tell you how my morning has gone so far. I had one of those "get up, go back to sleep, get up again" mornings, you know how they go. Didn't officially get up until late morning/early afternoon, because I sort of live like I'm unemployed and all that. I'm getting ready to take a shower and have to pee, and just as I start to wash my hands after, the toilet starts overflowing. Massively. Huge sheets of water pouring out from under the toilet lid. My first reaction was to step the hell out of the bathroom so I don't have to stand in pee water. I've never really had to handle a zealous overflowing toilet by myself before, so I wasn't sure if it would stop overflowing after a point or not on it's own, or if I actually had to go over there and shut off the water valve (I vaguely remembered my dad doing that in past overflowed toilet incidents). It took about 5 seconds of me standing there to decide it was NOT going to stop on it's own (by now the water had reached the edge of the bathroom linoleum where I was standing). I was like, "oh, shit" but didn't feel like putting my bare feet into the rapidly rising half and inch of water on the bathroom floor, so I fled a moment to shove on some waterproof shoes (in hindsight, a waste of 10 or so seconds), slogged over to the still overflowing toilet and the water valve knob thing which of course requires kneeling down and almost hugging the toilet to reach. I had no idea which way to turn the damn thing, so I guessed to the right. After about 3 difficult turns (I had not had the chance to wash off the soap from my hands from when I was trying to wash them, and thus could not form a strong grip on the stiff knob. That sounded dirty.) to the right nothing had happened yet, so I tried to the left instead. Turns out it was already all the way to the left, so when 3 turns back the way I had come revealed that it would turn no more lefty, I had to quicky reverse and keep turning righty until (finally!) it started to take effect and shut the water off (around 6 turns I think). This toilet has overflowed in the past and leaked down to the downstairs ceiling below it and caused visible water damage, so as I crouched there in almost inch-deep toilet water, I knew I had to act fast to try and avoid this. I grabbed every damn towel or towel-like object that I could lay eyes on. Luckily, I suppose, we keep towels in cuboards in the bathroom (as opposed to a hall closet), so for the initial layer I was able to just literally fling towels out of the cuboard onto the floor, where they immediately became sodden. When that source was exhausted, I turned to the dirty laundry basket in the hall just beyond the bathroom to pull whatever towels were in there. Finally, I fled to the other bathroom upstairs to raid its cuboard and back again. I was forced to step on soggy towels in order to reach all the corners of the bathroom to maximize towel placement, and since by this point my shoes were long gone, you can see why my trepidation of getting my feet wet earlier was a waste. After stamping all over the towels to make sure they got soaked all the way to the top layer, I then had to remove them in small, drippy groups to the washing machine. Luckily, I had missed one or two towels that I was then able to use to wipe up the last damp bits on the linoleum, and one washcloth which I had to cram around the edges of the room to try and catch water that might be trapped along the baseboards or heating vent. (As per my dad's instructions, as I called him as soon as the inital danger was over.) By now most of me had been touching toilet water, so I was in desperation for a shower, but alas, all the towels were dirty! Well thank God for an equally dirty bedroom, as I was able to find one lying around in the laundry piles. Not the freshest towel, but it would suffice. I didn't want to use the same bathroom's shower and cause more moisture in the area, so my only other option was to use the shower/tub in the other bathroom. (It is important that you note that that particular bathroom is used only by the men in the family, mainly because the women in the family won't go in there. Because it's pretty gross.) I decided that since trying to fully shower in there would not really get me that clean feeling, I would have to simply rinse and wash off toilety gunk and shower again later on today. Thanks for your attention! I know that was a long story but I felt it needed to be shared. I hope my ordeal brought some amusement to you.

Road Trip

I put a lot on facebook, but here's most of the shots of me.

 Runza: apparently a Nebraska thing. (Ground beef, cabbage, onion baked in bread.)

 At AIC

 At the bean

 Feeling sad because the lookout point didn't really have a view

 Found the view

 Huge trees!

 Hug a Redwood

 Help!

 Baby cougar

My llama and deer friends

Driving

All the pictures of me driving Eugene the U-haul. How exciting!

Changlish

So that concludes the basics of my China trip. I'll leave you now with some of the more hilarious attempts at English that were found.

And to those good ones that I couldn't get a picture of:

"No scribbling" (no graffiti)
On a woman's shirt: "A woman who daoesn't wear perfume has no future"
On another girl's shirt: "Power girl dies! never"
On the train bathroom doors: "No occupying while stabling"

and as always, the shirts with english "text" on them found randomly in stores. "A K H Y T F B A E R N"  etc. Mash keyboard in caps + picture = cool shirt bro.

Shanghai

Stepping off the airplane in to Shanghai was strange, because for some reason I felt like I should be stepping out back in Chicago. Though--Shanghai is so cosmopolitan, it was more like New York, if you were having a nightmare about being in New York and you can't read any signs or understand anyone.

Vincent drug us all down to the Bund, which felt a lot like Michigan Ave. He had to point out all the buildings along this strip, and who built them and when, etcetera, and it was a lot of Europeans in the 20s, so they all looked European and 20s-ish.

Then we crossed through People's Square on a little train-shaped bus cart thing (it's a long walk. I'm not sure where the Square part was, because it seemed like People's Really Long Street to me) to get to the Shanghai Art Museum, which is like the only museum in China.

Stanley took his sweet time leading us through 3 of the Musuem's exhibits, which was the equivalent to a days worth of lecture if the lecture was held in a meat locker, since that's about how warm it was inside.

By the end, Stanley was forced to resort to a falsetto British voice (one which Grace and Beatrice started at the beginning of the trip and slowly infected most everyone else with by the end). It was quite entertaining, and prompted his example of Stanley's lecture in Texan later that evening at dinner.

The food we had for dinner was invented by a bunch of monks who got sick of their boring veggie diets, and invented a style of cooking where they make vegetable dishes look and kind of taste like meat. I don't know how, I imagine some sort of witch doctor magic is involved.


Outside Shanghai there are a series of famous gardens, tucked away behind walls and houses in some town. For our shortest train ride, we picked the most comfortable one. It was sort of the Chinese bullet train, with well-reclining seats and tons of leg room. Best 25 minutes of travel.

For the first garden, Stanley led us through the "labarynth of stone" just to make sure we knew how to fully appreciate a garden. It was very hot, and since my sunglasses broke 2 days before, I was finally forced to get some fake Ray Bans from a stall nearby. At least they didn't say Roy Bons like some of the others we'd seen. The garden was awfully like the Chinese Garden in Portland, only bigger.. and actually Chinese.

 We stumbled on a photo shoot.

 The cracked ice pattern is for the "winter" part of the garden.

The majority of the group elected to go back early with Han, since they wanted to go shopping or on a boat tour or something. I stayed, and so did one other student, and both Stanley and Vincent. We went next to the Lion Grove garden, which was pretty much all rocks and a pond. That might sound boring, but I can assure you that I spent the entire 45 minutes we had there trying to find my way out. The garden was more of a playground than retreat. Once I started on the single path, I had no choice but to follow it down through caves, up stairs to pavilions, over bridges, under bridges, around the pond, through some water that was overflowing from the pond, up to more platforms, down through more caverns, and never once going the direction I intended.

We also got to ride in some of those rickshaw things because apparently it is impossible to get a taxi in that town.

Poor man had to get off the bike and haul us over a hill to get to the train station.

Anyway, that was the last thing we did as a group in Shanghai. It was a hot and tiring day at the end of a hot and tiring trip, so I just showered and stayed in that night. Got to watch the "international" channel because it was in English, and also because they were showing an episode of the Sing Off that On the Rocks was on. Then they played the news from 2010. They should probably get new material.