insulation | The Dubious Monk

when you’re out of fuel, i’m still afloat, puking and shivering

Sunday I learned that I like songs about surfing much more than the actual act. There’s something about swallowing all that seawater and relying on my spindly arms for propulsion and being so terribly cold that isn’t really conveyed in the melodies of the Beach Boys.

The members of our house got a deal on surfing lessons and so we took them. At the time Holly said “Really?” when I said I’d try too. And yes, surfing probably was never going to really be for me, but I’m here in Australia and it seemed like something I should do when I’m here. I mean, I haven’t had the chance to manhandle koalas or introduce an invasive species or anything. But surfing I could at least try. Maybe I would really like it.

I didn’t.

It might have been better if I’d had a wetsuit that actually fit me. Supposedly they’re supposed to let a little water in but it gets stuck in there and your body warms it up and you’re all insulated. When you’re skinny and wearing a rented wetsuit that’s flopping around and isn’t close to being tight, the water just flows through and it’s like you’re just splashing around in the cold cold ocean. Which I don’t really do for enjoyment.

I ended up bailing out after being flung around by the sea enough to know that the fleeting moment of being pushed along by the sea trying to touch the moon wasn’t worth the pain and pukiness.

The instructors were good about coming to check on me sitting on the beach and shivering, to make sure I was all right. But the one guy said I would have really enjoyed myself if I’d gone back in. I know myself well enough to be able to call him on that lie, but he was just a twenty-year-old trying to talk about the stuff he loved to do, so I just told him not to worry. I did not explain how little my body and I have in common, and how little trust there is between us, and how that trust was easily shattered and wasn’t going to be repaired by heading out into the ocean again to get even colder.

So yes, I have tried surfing. I don’t live everything completely secondhand. Which was kind of the point of that endeavour.

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.

The Dubious Monk

chinese curses since twenty aught two

Tag Archives: insulation

when you’re out of fuel, i’m still afloat, puking and shivering

trappings of winter

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