Worst Kept Secrets

This weekend I’m running around China completely unsupervised for the longest time since I moved here (previous record was maybe, oh, six hours). I’m TOTALLY eating nothing but super expensive imported pop-tarts, raiding the grown ups’ liquor cabinet and re-upping the bottles with water so it’s not immediately obvious I’ve broken in, turning up the stereo too loud, rearranging furniture in the middle of the night, and having lengthy out loud conversations with imaginary best friends. I’m happy as a clam with my living situation, but three whole days all on my lonesome (and seriously - almost everyone I know is out of town) is taking me STRAIGHT back to those precious moments when I got the house to myself as a teenager. Chris is away at a weekend long bachelor party, and one of my former- students- turned-awesome friend sent me a blunt email - “Do you fear the strippers?” And no, honestly I don’t (and I should note that strippers are probably not involved for the sake of reading family members) but I’m much more worried about having completely forgotten how to take care of myself over the past year and a half. I keep reminding myself that I lived rather healthily and quite happily on my own for some time, but I can’t for the life of me remember HOW. Seriously, one of the problems with having a fantastic roommate like Chris is that I’ve cooked an actual meal ONCE since I moved here (not counting a few grilled cheese sandwiches and mac ‘n’ cheese, and perhaps a few other cheese-based microwavable heart attacks on plates). I’m not exaggerating the severity of the situation - I’ve already inadvertently started a fire. Granted, it was a small one, and my reflexes were good - I put it out immediately by grabbing the nearest wet substance, simultaneously extinguishing the flames, making a huge syrupy mess, and wasting nearly all of my weekend coca-cola stash.

And… since there is almost literally NO ONE for me to launch into hyperbolic ravings about the minutae of my day, guess what internet. It’s you and me, and you’ve got my undivided self-loving exhibitionist attention (which, having typed that sentence, isn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds, as we shall soon see).

I woke up this morning and saw Chris off, and decided to get a jump-start on Junk Food Private Dance Party Fest 2009 by shoving strawberry cream cheese danish pop-tarts into the oven (let’s go ahead and add that to the list of things that sound and are absolutely disgusting that I just can’t get enough of). But I forgot the special circumstances involving our uncleaned oven, and soon flames were licking around the edges. So I dumped a two litre of coke on/around it and let the apartment air out before spending a fair amount of time cleaning up after myself. Then I chased Scout around the apartment imitating her meowing until I made myself late for my paycheck pickup/voice recording appointment. I turned up my tunes and sprinted out of my apartment and to the Ministry building, grabbed a stack of cash* for my doctor class, and rode the elevator down and started running toward the voice recording studio. This was a twenty minute urban obstacle course as I dodged older couples looking in bemusement at the foreigner running down Beijing Xi Lu with headphones the size of ostrich eggs, ducked and skirted bird cages hanging on lamp posts and the games of mah-jongg being played by their owners, nimbly scampered up and around ankle-breaking uneven sidewalks, benches, ramps, crumbling steps, and bicycle ramps, greeting a notable number of co-workers out and about on a beautiful Friday afternoon and even a former student, all the while sending frantic text messages to my recording contact and trying not to get hit by a bus.*

I showed up at voice recording, which for me is a little island of sanity. The studio is warmly lit and there’s a steaming cup of hot water waiting for me (I’m starting to like the hot water, actually, especially during recording), as well as print outs of inane dialogues sitting on my table under my microphone, serving as absurd invitations to forget everything remotely complicated in my life and to submerge myself in barnyard animals and unlikely dining preferences (”Tweet Tweet! says the chick!” “I want hamburgers and ice cream. I don’t want cakes or bananas.”). Voice recording is also nice, because it’s a world away from teaching. There’s no preparation, no thinking on my feet, I get to sit down, and I can completely zone out and let my mouth move on autopilot while I work out whatever problem I’m having at the moment. And I get paid for it.

Today was fairly basic stuff for primary school and junior high (see previous parenthetical), but there have been some definite comic gems sprinkled throughout my “career.” Once my partner and I had to read the listening texts for the police academy’s English class, which took about twice as long as it should have, since we’d have to double over in laughter every two or three minutes. That particular script covered pretty much the full range of material - whoring, thieving, kidnapping, smuggling, public intox, murder, embezzlement, traffic violations - you name it, we read it. A lot of the dialogues came from the interrogation room, and they inevitably went along these lines:

Police: Did you kill Mr. Brown?

Suspect: No, I’m innocent!

Police: Did you tell a lie?

Suspect: I confess, I did it.

I mean, EVERY character cracked immediately under that kind of investigative pressure. It sort of made me want to be a cop, since I was enjoying my lady cop voice so much (then I started watching The Wire and that plan went straight out the window). Here was another choice dialogue from the same session:

Police: Who is she?

Suspect: She is my sister!

Police: Is it true?

Suspect: [pause] I confess. She is a whore.

Find a partner and see if you can do a dramatic reading of that without cracking up. And sometimes the dialogues for children are just surreal. One time Chris was reading with me and we’d been trading totally monotonous vocab sentences for a long time (”Color the TIGER GREEN. How many peaches? THREE peaches. What do you like to do? I like HOPPING., etc) when Chris busted out with “Can you put an EGG on your HEAD?” And of course there are the occasional difficult phrases rendered unutterable by my lack of any considerable maturity: “I have TWO BIG BALLS!” Also, on a cultural note, recording has taught me that in China, monkeys eat peaches and rats eat rice.

So that was nice, relaxing, and lucrative, and after that I walked home to begin Project Learn Chinese in Seventy-Two Hours While Making My Filthy Apartment Parent-Ready. Mom and Dad are coming in a few weeks (YAY!), and I figured this weekend would be a good time to clean the place up a little bit.

I’ve only been here a year and a half, and when I arrived, I was LOVING the feeling of having just enough stuff to fit into two suitcases. Crap just really stacks up, you know? I’ve already done our junk room, which contains things like my wedding dress, the Christmas animal hats, microscope paraphenalia, a cat skeleton Chris found in Gulin park, a trash bag full of stuffed alpacas, a grand total of THREE unused TV sets that came with the apartment, and oh my god unimaginable quantities of product. We have seven different brands of American deodorant, and multiple containers of each. And you would not believe how much hair stuff I’ve brought over… I know what my thought process was like: what if, when I’m in China, I decide that it’ll be the day that I do more with my hair than brush it? Never mind that that day hasn’t come once throughout my twenty-six years on this planet, if it comes in China, I want to be prepared. And I know that I must have been taking into account my total lack of styling product knowledge, and hence decided just to buy several bottles of each. I’ve been here a year and a half, and they’re all unopened. So I guess if you’re reading this in Nanjing, and you’d like some product, come on over, because I can’t just throw that kind of stuff out. And yet, at some point, I was willing to throw out the sunblock, which led to Chris and I absolutely roasting in the Philippines this winter. But not the mousse. Or the volumizing gel. Or the callus-removing foot cream (I had this after completely freaking out over the state of my feet pre-pedicure at Amy’s wedding, but I’ve since returned to the much happier state of just not thinking about what my feet look like, hence no need for pumice stones or callus scrubs). And then there’s the hand sanitizer. Both my mother and I have been operating under the reasonable assumption that there’s no such thing as too much hand sanitizer, and let’s face it, China’s filthy. However, at this point, I’ve got enough of the stuff to probably ward off a bird flu pandemic single-handedly. Which is all to say that the junk room was something of a project, and I’m not sure if I’ve got the strength to move into higher priority areas.

That’s really about it. I’m going to get back to my Chinese, and sorry for journalling at you like this.

*I love being paid in cash. My regular salary is deposited in my Unionpay bank account, but recording and extra stuff like the doctors comes to me as glorious Red Grandfathers (100 yuan bills). I paid for both my new compter and my freaking wedding dress with cash. DAMN it feels good to be a gangster.

*Not getting hit by a bus here is a fairly serious undertaking. If a bus doesn’t get you, a car, a taxi, a wheelbarrow, or a scooter with a family of five riding it might. When I walk to work in the morning, it honestly feels like a commute in which I have to stay focused enough to not get into a wreck. Walking.