Tag Archives: heat

sex drugs and spoken word

I don’t think I’ve been this blah about returning home in a long time. It’s not like I was out of money. Longer visas than a month are possible. And I wasn’t sick of hanging out with Holly. Ha. But still, here I am. Far away.

We spent New Year’s Eve with our friends Michelle & James in Chengdu. We had dinner at their apartment (which thankfully had the heat on) with a couple of their friends and then went out. There was a Euro techno-style DJ at the place we went, who seemed very good technically, and if I was into that kind of music I probably would have really liked it. There was another foreigner in a red track jacket who was hanging around the DJ a lot, kind of being nosy, like a small dog that wants to see what’s going on. Red jacket was given the chance to spin a few records and well, yeah, it was obvious he’s not super experienced. He fumbled around a bit, not matching things up quite right. But the music he was using was way more to my taste than the first guy. If I saw Red Jacket a year from now I’d probably like him a lot more. But I didn’t see him in the future. I saw him four days ago at the beginning of 2011 when he still sucked.

The male female ratio in our group was skimpy on the estrogenous, and became moreso when Holly and I left around 2 (because Holly’s 1/3 of the female contingent was much more significant than my 1/12 of the male). The first cabdriver wanted to charge us 50Y for a 20Y ride. We were already sitting in the back seat and when he told Holly that the apartment was too far away we got out again to get into the cab behind him. (The second didn’t try anything funny.) The next day James had a theory that that first cabdriver was actually off-duty and just looking for someone the right amount of drunk for something like that to work. And maybe he did. There were a lot of people in that bar.

New Year’s Day we spent reading on the couches of James & Michelle’s. Then we watched Moon. I love that movie so much. And then Holly and I went to the good Turkish restaurant, where the food wasn’t quite as good as the last time we had it, back in the summer, the night before we left for Winnipeg.

And that’s part of the blahness. Last time we parted Holly was heading back to see her family so she was excited. And I was about to move to Vancouver so I had distraction aplenty. This time I just came back to take more courses, which is less new and exciting. Especially since I was prepared at some level to be a library school dropout. Not a really prominent level, obviously. I worry about my inability to make the grand over-the-top gesture of throwing away a career(ish) for love. I mean, it’s probably for the best. Especially when Holly gets here for good, but now at the beginning of the term it just feels crappy.

Anyway, once assignments start piling up, it should be a little distracting, right? At least enough for the next six weeks.

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trappings of winter

It’s gotten cold around here. Last night it snowed in Chengdu. The internet says we’re somewhere around 4 degrees outside right now. Which isn’t bad if you have well-insulated buildings and heating, but is mighty shitty if things are otherwise.

Holly has an air conditioner in her apartment which is also a heater, but we can’t run it at night because it’s kind of noisy and it keeps her neighbours up. They left a note on the door about “their bedroom shaking” after the one night we did turn it on. So it’s all about the multiple blankets, which gets inconvenient if you ever want to leave the bed. For food, say.

Although today we did make some good soup/stew/vegetables. We bought the vegetables to make this soup yesterday because of the soup stock Sam’s mom brought us, but when lunchtime rolled around the water to the apartment had been cut off for some reason. It’s hard to make soup without any water. (Also, pooping into a hole you can’t flush brings cholera epidemics to my mind, so it was kind of an uncomfortable day.) The water was restored at like 10pm but before that we bought soup from a nearby restaurant that Holly is rapidly losing faith in. Today we cooked our soup in the rice cooker for hours until really there wasn’t much soupiness to it at all, but it was tasty.

I’ve been getting some writing done but nothing’s going as smoothly as I would like. The story I was working on turned out to be crappy. No, just uninteresting. So I’m repurposing the good details that I had into something else which is interesting. Moreso. I hope.

We went for hotpot the other day and it was some special style of hotpot using a copper pot with a chimney and coals instead of a gas flame. I love mushrooms in hotpot but for some reason, though we had a tray full of them, mushrooms were the last things to get dumped into the cauldron. I had to brave so many unpleasant mouthfuls of bony fish before we got to the stuff I enjoyed.

It’s also really nice having a girlfriend at hotpot who likes stuff like duck intestines so I can pass them off to her when our hosts were placing the choicest entrails in my bowl. Thank you Holly. I don’t know why duck intestines are so cringe-inducing in me, when I can eat those shredded stomachy bits with impunity. Probably because I ate those stomachs for so long before realizing they weren’t a kind of chewy mushroom.

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