Maybe a week ago, I was talking to my brother and somehow boglins came up, in a “hey, what were those little monster things called? Do you remember that?” It turns out, EVERYONE remembers Boglins, and is surprised that anyone else does. Now I’m experiencing ridiculous Boglin synchronicity, which seems like a subject too specific for the synchronicity effect to even kick in (it reminds of the year where my sister and I were being haunted by Dee Snyder from Twisted Sister - we still both sort of flinch every time we see him). Anyway, there was an adorable post about tarsiers at Zooillogix, which was notable not only for its mention of tarsiers, which featured prominently in our AWESOME vacation that got completely trumped by other news in terms of things we talk about, but also for the astute parallel between tarsiers and boglins. So I shared it in google reader (which, really, you should all use), and Shaun promptly re-shared it, saying, “how in the world did anyone remember boglins?”

So here’s the wikipedia article on boglins, if you need a refresher. When I read the article, I was seriously puzzled by the advertising slogan: “If you take us home, we’ll kiss your Aunt Martha, we’ll eat your peas, and we hope you know lots of girls.” I couldn’t figure out if it meant that boglins were brown-nosing serial dating pests who ate all your fresh produce, or what. Watching the commercial on youtube cleared up the meaning, though:

So say it with me: “can you BELIEVE how cold it is out there?”

A couple of months ago, I got hit with Dog Fever, and BAD. I’d spent the bulk of my life being completely comfortable with my identity as a Cat Person, but something clicked over in my system with a degree of intensity that I can only compare to my fearful imagining of my biological clock suddenly going off and demanding offspring.

[further: I'm really afraid of this. I hear so much about that stupid biological clock, and the way it gets described sounds vaguely like turning into a werewolf - one day you're your normal twenty-something self eating ice cream for breakfast, thinking of money mostly in terms of how many cheeseburgers and Apple products it can eventually bring you and absent-mindedly planning to apply for a volunteership at the Orangutan Foundation in Borneo, and the next day, YOU MUST BREED. Now, I have friends planning on taking the leap into parenthood, which is all well and good and PLANNED, making it different from what I'm describing here, so I'm not trying to insult anyone - I'm just really hoping that the biological clock business is a myth steeped in gender expectations, because otherwise it's a devastatingly frightening concept to me]

I went a little crazy with it - reading dog books and making lists of names, melting with desire and envy every time I passed a canine on the street, etc. Enter Larry, the bichon frise/poodle mix with a bad leg that Chris fell in love with and that in throes of my dog obsession I was unable to combat with common sense (common sense said that we had three cats and 1.5 jobs between us).

I always thought that I wanted a big wolfy dog, but it turns out that in my heart of hearts I’m actually a lame poodle mutt kind of gal, and I freaking love my dog. His ears do this ridonkulous flutter thing when he walks, he does handstands when he pees, he makes me feel like a god when I get home from work, and he’s the most patient, polite, agreeable little guy I’ve ever met (excepting anything that involves strange dogs on the porch or squirrels). There aren’t any problems with the cats, who I still love more than people, and it was all around a good decision, against unimaginable odds of us making a stressful mistake.

Larry’s name was Lucky, but he got renamed by his rescue foster mom - there’s just nothing particularly lucky-seeming about a starving animated cotton ball with a badly injured leg left untreated for who knows how long who got dumped at the animal shelter and was very nearly euthanized. Marcia pulled him out from under the needle and got him some vet attention, and now he lives with us and generally makes my life a happy goofy cuddly experience. Marcia, incidentally, also founded Spay Arkansas, and they do good work and would be an excellent beneficiary for any yuletide charitable impulses you may be feeling.

So there’s that - as of now, there are six mammals in my house vying for snacks and cuddles, and we’re doing just fine.

But it WAS special. It was the first place outside of the school building that my comfort zone tentatively expanded into and was the marker of the alley that led to the place I spent most of my time in China. It was a small rug, but it definitely got yanked out from underneath me. It’s an absolutely horrible idea to get attached to a structure here - the destruction/construction is constant, and there’s a neverending shuffling and reshuffling of clothing boutiques, key cutters, migrant worker stalls, street food, and odds and ends shops. Ninghai Lu itself (the major focus of the two years I’ve spent here) is about to get completely redone into a four lane highway, and in the process will probably lose all of its considerable charm. Things absolutely do not stay fixed. Additionally, most of my friends are transient - there’s no telling when someone’s going to up and leave for Shanghai, home, Thailand, etc. The whole bit about never stepping in the same river twice is more applicable to China than any place else I can imagine. But it’s one thing to be IN the river, no matter how wildly it changes course, and something else entirely to get out and dry off, maybe telling yourself that you can come back whenever you want, even though you know that the Nanjing you’re leaving is quite seriously never going to exist again. Most of the time it’s true that you can never *really* go back, but you can *sort of* go back, if you need/want to (although it’s usually a hideous experience). But I don’t think it’s possible to *sort of* come back here. I could come back to China, but I guarantee that in one year I won’t even recognize it.

Moving back was a snap decision, and this is happening incredibly fast. We’re going to Shanghai tomorrow, and getting on a plane on Monday. I think it was a good decision, but it hurts - this is an absolutely maddening place, and I love it and I’m honored to have been here for two years. I’m sure I’ll get excited about the future tomorrow, but right now at 5 am in my apartment that we’ve managed to make a home in, this is really painful.

This is, of course, why you always have a spare pair of glasses, especially if you’re like me and quite seriously can’t function without them. I DID have a spare pair when I came to China. They were an older prescription that had been severely chewed upon by my parents’ dog, and I always wore them to Castle Bar to avoid my good pair getting jostled or broken in a spasm of dance fever (they were my quite literal beer goggles). I also wore them for snorkeling in the Philippines - the idea was to wear them under my goggles, which worked fine on Borocay last year, but not so much on Bohol this January. I was floating around with the starfish and sea urchins, and my mask kept filling up with water, so I tucked the glasses in my swimsuit, and they are now a little piece of Anne Treasure buried in the depths of the Cebu Strait.

I have BAD eyes. I’m entirely helpless without corrective lenses - without them, I’m drifting in a sea of gently undulating blobs of color. This won’t cut it for crossing the street here, let alone sidestepping the blood splatters from the chicken slaughter carts, the potholes and detritus in the sidewalks, and everything else that makes walking around in Nanjing an incredibly active experience requiring fast reflexes and concentration. So something had to be done, and Leif had the answer - Danyang, a town about thirty minutes away by a CRH train.

Danyang is famous for eyeglasses. I keep hearing that 70% of the world’s glasses come to Danyang, and while I’m skeptical of that claim, it’s definitely a big player.  It’s not unique in its massively scaled industrial specialization - Danyang has glasses, Suzhou has wedding dresses, and Datang has socks. Here’s another really good article (long, but worth reading) by Peter Hessler about from National Geographic:

In Wuyi, I asked some bystanders what the local product was. A man reached into his pocket and pulled out three playing cards—queens, all of them. The city manufactures more than one billion decks a year. Datang township makes one-third of the world’s socks. Songxia produces 350 million umbrellas every year. Table tennis paddles come from Shangguan; Fenshui turns out pens; Xiaxie does jungle gyms. Forty percent of the world’s neckties are made in Shengzhou.

I’ve dealt with one intensely focused product district before in Suzhou - their wedding district on Huqiu Lu is a site to behold. When I first saw the dress district, my heart faltered - I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stores. But still, within a couple of hours, I was shaking hands with the lady who was going to make a dress almost from scratch for me within one week (and she delivered, too. No joke. Custom dress. Seven days. 1.5 hours to find it.).

To get glasses in Danyang, you leave the train station and cross the street, where you’ll see the giant sign that says GLASSES CITY. I came out of that with my old pair repaired, two new pairs, and some prescription sunglasses. I’ve never had sunglasses in my life because I’ve never been able to wear them. Turns out, they’re awesome! I couldn’t believe that they’d be able to get my prescription right through the language barrier, but they had me look into a machine where a little picture of a farm house came in and out of focus with some beeping and tapping, and then they asked me to wait for ten minutes while they put the glasses together. And ten minutes later, they were finished and I was on my way. The prescription’s fine, too - if anything, it’s better than my old pair. As a bonus, I got to skip the glaucoma puff test, which I hate more than I hate strep throat cultures, pap smears, and dental cleaning combined. I could have gotten presription goggles there, too, but I’d had enough for one day.

UPDATE: Ok, it’s probably just a phone number phishing scam and not some kind of poltergeist (even though it was the EXACT two measures that nearly did my head in when I was learning the piece in sixth grade - I’m actually completely convinced it’s a poltergeist, but for the sake of appearing like a reasonable person I’m offering an alternative explanation).

Well, to be fair, I haven’t had absolutely zero social contact - I did more recording this morning, and I went to the store to buy milk for the last box of mac and cheese that I’m not sure I’m going to get to eat because the kitchen’s soaking wet and I’m afraid to boil water on the hot plate, lest I electrocute myself. I got back in from all of that, and ever since I’ve been cleaning. It’s not the self-imposed hermit thing that’s done my head in (I can go a LONG time like that and suffer no ill effects), but rather the ten hours spent giving my apartment a good what-for while listening to Learn in Your Car Mandarin Chinese. After ten hours of that, I regret to report that I’m not fluent, but instead, completely batshit insane. I’m still sort of compulsively and hoarsely shrieking over-pronounced phrases while  looking for things to scrub. I’m just trying to keep it together enough not to start vacuuming Scout while yelling “WO YAO LIANG ZHANG DAO BEIJING DE PIAO!”

In other OCD news from Hu Qiu Lu, a valuable life lesson: start a coin stash. We’ve got 1,303 yuan stashed away in ziplock bags. Why do I have such a precise number for that? Because I COUNTED THEM. It was like Rain Man in super slow motion or something. I wasn’t actually that bored and pitiful, I was just desperately seeking something to do to put off dealing with my kitchen - some of the mould in the pantry was starting to practice primitive forms of religion and had established rudimentary political structures. I didn’t go so far as to count the jiao, though (and friends, there are a LOT of jiao). I did want to go through all of it, though, because once in the US, I took a huge jar of coins to the bank in a frantic effort to scrape together enough money to cover the massive overdraft waiting for me when I returned from London (the pawn shop was the next stop), and the lady got really, really, really mad at me because there was a stray British pound floating in there and she had to dig through all of it to find it. I didn’t want to cause a bank in China the same difficulty, and this time I pulled out Hong Kong coins, Filipino pesos, a large number of quarters (which were weird to see - they really stuck out), and arcade tokens. So now, by god, our stockpiles of spare change are neatly sorted into baggies by denomination.

And that’s been my day. I meant to go out somewhere and take pictures, work more on my blog, and get busy with a few other personal projects I’ve been thinking about, but damned if cleaning house didn’t wind up taking all day. But WOW is it over-the-top organized and clean. Mom and Dad, I’m afraid you’ll need to change your tickets so you can come here tomorrow before I trash the place again…

And… it’s getting late, and I’m pretty much out of things to do, so I guess I’m off to bottle my own urine or something fun like that.

(Edit: I did have the choice to go with some wonderful people to Hangzhou, I just decided that I needed a weekend to clean up, relax, recharge and kick it old school Gresham style. I’m actually having a really good time. Also, if youtube wasn’t blocked, I’d make you a video of me trying to vacuum Scout while screaming horribly botched Mandarin, but apparently that poses a threat to the State. Also, I’m not drunk, I’m just hyper and up too late.)

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.

1. Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden.

2. Deliberate displays in which private parts are only obscured by limbs or small coverings are forbidden.

3. Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable behavior shall be fostered. A sympathetic understanding of the problems of love is not a license for moral distortion.

4. Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly nor so as to injure the sensibilities of the reader.

5.  Sexually suggestive or provocative content that leads to sexual thoughts is forbidden.

6. Disparaging or mocking depictions of leaders, heroes, important historical figures, and major domestic and foreign literary works and their main characters are forbidden.

7. All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.

8. Intense scenes of murder, bloodshed, violence, suicide, kidnapping, drug use, gambling, and the occult shall not be permitted.

9. Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals.

*I changed up some of the grammar so the answers wouldn’t be immediately obvious.

For the full text of the Comics Code, go here.

For another piece in the puzzle of why youtube has disappeared in China and the source of all my pre-translated Chinese quotes, go here.