Crisp and Focused

Shanghai is hot.  I exercised for the first time in too many weeks today, but that was in an air-conditioned room.  I’ve been working since before dawn at a desk here in my furnished apartment.  The dials are set to twenty-three degrees Celsius, which I now know to be seventy-three degrees Fahrenheit.  Most times that’s just the right temperature to keep it crisp and focused.  If it gets too brisk I put it up a degree or two.  Before going to sleep its always back down to seventy-three degrees, if I remember to make the adjustment.

The temperature only matters if you step outside.  Ninety-five degrees is well outside the comfort zone I’ve been toying with in this room.  Apparently, this is a big improvement over the last week where it was well over one-hundred-and-five degrees in Shanghai.  I consider the people working outside, people who need to be out there in this weather.  I have a modest agenda of heading up to the ATM.  And then returning the same direction for some hundred-and-fifty yards back towards the Starbucks.  The Family Mart is out of tall orange juices.  I buy two bananas.  The Starbucks guy charges me wrong amount for a triple.  I correct him and his colleague jumps all over him.  Punching my straw through the plastic I notice a woman I’d passed on my way to the bank, sitting now with her friend off to the side.   

This morning I had the managed apartment’s breakfast buffet.  I usually pass.  I cracked open hard boiled eggs and stared at the large flat screen TV against my will.  A town hall was underway with Al Gore discussing the climate crisis.  He seemed oddly familiar as if he should look quite a bit older.  I am very glad he does not.  CNN then seemed to run a story about a lawsuit against Fox News that the parents of a murdered young man have now brought.  The suit suggested that Fox and the White House colluded to make up a story about this young man’s death somehow being connected to the break in at the DNC, where he worked. 

Later I looked on New York Times home page.  They didn’t seem to think that law suit was news.  It was nowhere to be found.  Hours later at the gym, with another TV beaming at me, which I could not turn off, CNN was once again playing this story incessantly.  I was at one and the same time annoyed that this story was seemingly being blown out of all proportion, curious as to whether I wasn’t actually, missing something important and very, very glad that I did not choose to generally use this medium to consume my news.  Back in my seventy-three-degree room, I looked again.  Nothing in the Wall St. Journal, nothing on the Washington Post.  But there, on Slate, there was an article which spoke to this story.  Now I know. 

Wednesday, 08/02/17