Turned on the Lights, And

I had to be home by 8:30PM. “Sure, I can do that, but I’ve got to be back at the house at 8:30PM to do this call.”  My wife had the house key, so I swung by the place on my way back out home from the city.  She was, at the shopping plaza near our house, dining with a few friends there at an outdoor bistro.  I was served a glass of wine and began with some small talk when my wife took a call and began talking in a way that could only mean that it was my younger daughter on the other line.

Soon it became clear that someone, me, should go and pick her up at the school dance which apparently sucked, and bring her home and feed her.  She’d missed out on the school dance pizza.  A few friends wanted to come over.  “Really?  How many?”  “Go get her.  You’ll find out.”  “Let me have the key.  Where’s the car?”  “Back home.”  “You’re joking?’ I asked in Chinese.  I would have kept my cab if I’d known that.  Fondling the key, I started off on my twenty-minute walk home.

A call.  “When are you coming?” asked the younger one.  “I’m on my way but I have to walk home first.” “What?”  “Don’t ask.”  Another call: “Can you pick me up?”  It was the older one now.  “Sure.  Are you at school, cause I need to be back home by 8:30PM. . . OK.  Wait at the main door.”  The younger one was waiting, with . . . six friends.  Oh.  Six?  “Come to the gym.  You have to sign us all out.”  I knew most of these young ladies but I didn’t know many of their parents.  “Have you guys all spoke with your parents?  You sure?”  I recognized the two teachers who had the Friday night chaperone duty, considering that they were now free and I was now not. The kids all scrunched in to the car, and we drove back home. “I can’t feel my legs.”  “That’s my arm.  You’re squishing me.”

Everyone was quite happy to get out of the car and be home.  I’d managed the time, just right, so that I had five minutes to get ready for this call.  The air-conditioning felt lovely as we walked in, turned on the lights and then . . . had all the light is in the house, suddenly go off.  We had, it seemed, just run out of electricity.  I’d need to go charge.  “No air internet?”  No.  I’m afraid not.  “No air con?”  Nope.  Air con most assuredly requires electricity, ladies.” 

I took my call standing at the counter, asking the guy to charge my electricity card.  It all worked out.  I joked about what happened with the person on the other line.  It occurred to me that had I been a woman in this position, a working mom, I probably would not have been so candid. 

Saturday, 8/26/18

Other Plans for Lunch

I’ve got to head to Jinan this afternoon.  But first I have a meeting over in the north part of the city near the third ring road.  Flipping up my lap top I consider the afternoon train schedule.  There is one first class ticket left on the three o’clock train, one on the four o’clock train and one on the four thirty train.  After that there are no more high speed trains.  Only hard sleeper berths on the good old fashioned trains of my early China days. 

This journey will be undertaken with a colleague so the one ticket per train option doesn’t seem like a winner.  After a chat with my colleague, who hasn’t gotten a ticket either I decide I may as well just get one if I can.  One after the other the web interface informs me that the tickets, which I was trying to buy, have vanished.  There are no more tickets available that will get me to Jinan before midnight.  There are no direct flights from Beijing to the city.  There are no flights to the next city over, Weifang, either.  I explore a few more drive and plane and drive and train combos, none of which is realistic. 

Communicating all this to my colleague, he suggests we’ll drive.  It is a rather important meeting and I can consider this.  “I’m here now.  How far are you?” I ask him.  “Need ten minutes.”  Standing on the street I look for a place to get out of the sun and sit on the front wall of a parking garage.  From inside the unenviable pillbox office area, the guard eyes me suspiciously.  I turn to my phone and enter in “Jinan” as the destination in my phone’s GPS application.  Wow.  Five and a half hours?  The high-speed train is only ninety-minutes. 

Not stopping to consider for very long how the five-hour drive from New York to Boston would be rather different with a ninety-minute train to hop on, I back away from a woman approaching with a Styrofoam box and a toddler on the front of her bicycle.  The toddler hops off the bike and she adjusts the scarf on her head beside all the smart professionals walking up and down the street for lunch.  She pops open her white box and props up a little sign and commences to shout out to all the passers by that she has noodle lunch boxes for sale.  I consider her accent and her child who isn’t in school and decide that she is some construction workers’ wife, trying to add some income, here in the city, where they won’t teach her child.  No one pays her any mind.  Everyone, myself included, has other plans for lunch.  Finally, a young woman, who seems to recognize the lady stops and buys one of her lunch meals. 

Friday, 8/25/17

It Isn’t My Cart!

I’m sitting here in the back of a cab in Shanghai.  Before me is an ad.  I have seen this ad before.  There is a young guy.  I guess he is “attractive.”  He doesn’t have a shirt on.  His body is reasonably fit with some abs and no body fat on display.   Our friend is cutting vegetables.  While he does so, he looks coyly up at the camera.  Perhaps the ad has a textual subtlety that justifies this rakish look.  More likely he is simply promoting the importance of spinach and mushrooms which are in not only being cut before him but are arranged in bowls of to the side.

Deep inside Pudong Airport now.  It’s not an insignificant schlep to get your ass out to boarding gate eighty-five here at terminal two.  The plane is . . . delayed.  The plane is, already here, which is a great thing.  It could be that we leave in ten minutes.  The likelihood we’ll leave at all is greatly increased with possession of the plane here on this tarmac.   I’m at a restaurant.  I looked at the marketing materials and there was no mention of the name of the restaurant.  One would imagine that marketing materials would want to profile such things.  Presumably there is a nice big name of the place profiled outside.  But before I could get up to look I asked the waitress and she told me: “Huh? Oh. “Ya pin.”  I see.  This could mean many things.   There on the marketing, in rather modest profiling I can see there is a character before the next three that anyone could recognize as “pin” restaurant.  OK.  I’m having roasted goose.  Perhaps the “ya” is for a duck?  I just checked.  It isn’t that 'ya.'  I tried to take a photo.  It’s too small.   I’ll return home and check with my older one.  She’ll laugh at me and say no one could read that sign dad.  Perhaps there will be a big, fat name of the restaurant that I‘ll be able to positively photograph outside.  Perhaps I’ll even know what it says myself.

One lady pointed to the space across from me.  There is not chair and it is empty.  Another woman acknowledge that it was indeed empty.  She then stood up and took her airport push cart and moved it directly in front of me.  She then took her seat.  At no point did she bother to look at me and secure basic acknowledgement that she had just significantly invaded my space.  I looked for a while.  I may as well have been a potted plant.  I know.   I’ll photograph the cart.  That will signal to her that I must think this is a bit of an invasion.  I photographed it from below and from above.  I made photography motions that were exaggerated.  I really wanted her to look at me and cognate that I was aware of her luggage in my foot space.  But she kept eating her noodles, oblivious to anything I might do. 

I have a good view of the gate eighty-five holding pen across the way.  No one has moved.  If I crane my neck I can see the physical gate itself.  No one is doing much of anything there.  I’ve ordered another Asahi beer.  A week from tonight I’ll probably be there having one in Tokyo.  The cart has been pushed by one two three people who’ve moved through and found it to be blocking their way.  I keep imagining explaining myself in Chinese that it isn’t my cart!  But no one cares about the fact that this cart is in my space but isn’t mine.  It’s irrelevant.  Just like it will be when she takes it and leaves.  And . . . there she goes. 

Thursday, 08/24/17

The Sluice of a Cement Mixer

I set out for the train with just under two hours to go. The station’s is on the completely other side of my rather large metropolis.  An hour down there in the afternoon, when I’d normally left at 5:00AM turned out to be quite a bit longer than the morning’s affair.  I considered myself lucky to pull into the station with twenty minutes to spare, one hundred minutes after leaving home. Efficient pass through security, nice, a not insignificant line for ticket pick up but mine proceeded effortlessly and I was at the ticket counter, securing my ticket by 4:50PM for my 5:00PM train.  As I was buying my ticket a guy came up beside me and positioned himself to ask the ticket lady a question, saying to someone behind me that his train was at 5:00PM.  I turned to him and said: “Don’t waste her time.  I’m also on a 5:00PM train.”  Yeah.  

But I knew I was good as I took my ticket and headed across the station floor and over to consider the big-boards to discern where my train gate would be. Hendrix “Hey Baby” was on up in the ears and I necessarily glided through all the people like a knowing fish. Requisite crowds to navigate, requisite squinting up at the big board that isn’t big enough for my eyes.  You’re train’s on track sixteen.  I eyed the Starbucks but erred on the conservative side and figured I’d get whatever food I needed on the train. Play it safe, for once, big guy.  Once you’re in, you’re in, and I exhaled riding down the escalator, turned and made my way all the way back to car three.  Not much time left but now I could dart in a door, whenever I heard the bell, if necessary. 

I reached my seat but was confused.  I’d gotten a biz class ticket and this was an economy section.  Over by the open door was a young stewardess and I trotted over to speak with her about this. She asked where I was heading.  “Huh?”  “Shanghai.”  “This train is going to Tianjin.” She said flatly.  “But. What?”  “You are supposed to be on that train.”  She said, pointing to the train on the other side of the platform that was now rapidly pulling out of the station . . .

This all hit me like the sluice of a cement mixer, fixing me in place, as the train I was supposed to be on picked up speed.  Fortunately, I had just been looking at Plan B’s as I had almost arrived too late for the train.  After a few calls that didn’t work to CTRIP I was told that the ticket I wanted, from Beijing Southern Airport would need to be bought on line.  Adventure or predictability?  I chose adventure and standing there in the horrible Beijing cab queue I bought myself a ticket online for the 8:45PM flight to Shanghai from the Beijing Southern Airport, the former air force facility which had recently opened to commercial traffic, and from which I’d never flown before.

We headed over quickly enough and soon I was in the airport’s only restaurant, slurping noodles, charging my computer, ingratiating myself to the staff.  This neighborhood of Beijing reminded me of the musty Beijing’s of my youth.  In the nineties, Beijing was content to be more “magnificent” than any other Chinese city save Shanghai, which set the bar rather low.

With plenty of time before the departure I headed over to the check-in at China United Airlines.  (nothing shanzhai’d there, certainly.)  You’re on a flight from Beijing capital airport sir.  Huh?  I checked my receipt and sure enough, inexplicably the ticket I’d bought had me leaving from the northern part of the city, a two and half hour drive from where I was.  I thought back to my purchase standing there in line.  I can't see how that happened.  Reluctantly, very reluctantly, I bought one more ticket with the young ladies help and secured myself a ticket on the flight I’m now writing you from.  Sometimes intercity commuting is all rather enervating. 

Wednesday, 08/23/18

To Organize All the Blas

I woke up and checked the time on phone.  But I couldn’t avoid the text message that was there on the top of the list.  “Hey there, when is bla bla bla going to get done?”  Bla bla has been near the top of my to-do list for some time now.  Ambling down the stairs, splashing water on my face I knew that today would be the day I’d need to take care of bla bla bla.

Bla bla bla would involve sitting down for many hours and working through a long list of bla’s.  It isn’t going to be mentally taxing work.  It might prove interesting to consider where each of  bla came from and whether any of these bla might lead to revenue.   I created a rudimentary excel sheet to organize all the blas and made my way through the hundreds I had on my list, bla by bla. 

Normally I don’t deal with Russia.  Though it’s probably the biggest country in “Asia” it doesn’t usually fall within my APAC remit and things for that country are usually handled out some company’s Russian division.  But today I accumulated forty Russian bla’s.  Regular readers know I’m reading about Russia and considering a trip there for next summer.  I have to find a way to reckon with all these Russian bla’s on my list.  You never know. 

And it was a good day for music.  Doing this work I didn’t have to segregate out music that had lyrics.  If I’m writing, I cannot listen to music with lyrics, at least English lyrics that I can become distracted by through the process of comprehending.  But sorting through bla’s required no such clarity.  I made my way through one three-hour show and started another with my home-girl Trouble on WFMU.  At one point, she had a song by Syl Johnson on: “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.”  I looked him up on Youtube and added the song to a play list.  He had a porcine-rich oeuvre of material and song after song was fabulous.  I must have played “Annie Got Hot Pants Power” about three times, loud.  I sent a link of the song of my dearest comrades. 

The bla list was finished around five.  It took the full day to do, as I knew it would but it was done.  Now I went off to the kitchen to make some dinner.  Lamb chops, zucchini and mushrooms in mustard.

Tuesday, 08/22/18

The Nicest, Oldest Idea

Tuna salad and singularity.  “Singularity is Near” has interrupted my review of Russian Medievlia.  Where is “my” book?”  I couldn’t find the book I was in the middle of.  I must have left it somewhere.  Upstairs?  In my bag?  Lunch time is an armistice time.  A time when one doesn’t need to read emails, nor Trump foibles, nor the must-get-done-immediately-ies.  At lunch, you get to read something interesting that is purely for pleasure, purely for personal edification. 

I’ve got thirty books on my shelf that I’d like to start.  There is no obvious progression as to how to proceed.  Other than the self-restraint, which suggests the next book cannot be started in earnest until the current one has been finished.  Unless of course, you can’t find the current one.  I pulled “The Singularity is Near” off the shelf to accompany me for lunch today.

I generally read novels and nonfiction in equal measure and my nonfiction reading is fairly predictable.  History, or Sinology in the main.  I rarely find myself reading layman’s books about science or technology.  Though when I do I always enjoy myself and wonder why it was I took so long to read the next one.  Probably because my work is all about working with technology companies and their stories, all the doo-dah-day.

Over tuna salad I read the first chapter or two of Mr. Kurzweil’s book.  I read it and considered his glass-will-be-brimming-over, thesis.  Perhaps predictably, the one that took hold of my lapels, involved reengineering one’s corporal body and living forever.  Or, as Mr. Kurzweil suggests, define one’s own time of dying. 

This is a nice idea.  It is, perhaps, the nicest, oldest idea humans have ever thought.  It served as the catalyst for every religion known to man.  Death is terrifying.  What if it could be put off for a few hundred years or at least redefined, re-conceptualized so that all the relevant body parts were operating quite reasonably at a thirty-year-old’s arc of maturity for as long as one needed?  What if knowledge acquisition could be magnified exponentially so that the store of information of the internet were readily available to my thinking mind.  Of course, this man has my attention. 

Scraping up the last bits of tuna, and consider the subsequent 450 pages of this book.  This is certainly now on-deck, after we get through the “Life of Archpriest Avvakum By Himself” who was also concerned with eternity.   I must go check the upstairs bathroom. 

Monday, 08/21/17

Pedalling With All My Might

Biking back from the gym. It’s on a random mix just like it was at the gym.  But the biking part is supposed to be the part where you drive the cardiovascular exercise.  You don’t need to push up and down on the stair master for twenty minutes if you’re biking fifteen minutes over and fifteen minutes back.  Right?  Accurate, largely?   Yes.  As long as you push it when you do you pedaling.  If you just meander over and back it’s akin to a power walk and no sweat is generated.  

Tunes came and tunes went and I was pushing it as best I could until, “Jazzy,” from Willie Colon’s first album, “El Malo”, filled my ears. Oh.  Now thoughts turn to Jose Morales.  Jose, where are you man?  Jose and I taught together at High School Redirection in the late eighties, early nineties.  We laughed together, played music together and reckoned with all those kids shoulder to shoulder.  I had developed a love for New Yorican salsa around the same time we were teaching.  And for him all these tunes were memory lane.  One time we were driving around East New York and “Jazzy” came on.  “Oh shit, this tune . . . this tune . . . we used to play this tune in a band when I was a kid at social event.  What the hell is this, this is “Jazzy” right?  “Yup.  From “El Malo.”  “Damn.”

And with the first slide of the trombone, I knew I would now be pedaling with all my might.  The piano solo is lovely, if somewhat simple.  It effortlessly maintains the positive upbeat amphetamine drive of this tune.  But it’s the timbale solo at the end, that leaves one panting.  Presumably this guy sat around imitating Tito Puente from sunrise till sunset until he could leap off and cut up the world all by himself. 

I came up upon my driveway before the timbale solo had reached its climax.  No, no, no.  Do not park your bike.  Continue till the cul-de-sac at the end of the road and turn around and keep going straight back again.  The timbale solo is not something you want to listen to stationary.  Nor should I be doing air-timbales riding these fast over speed bumps.  I turned and continued to pedal back past my home for the second time.  Now I rode fast.  Fast as I could possibly push the bike, driven by the incredible pace of the timbales until the final two rim shots that ended Nicky Marrero (yes, I had to look that up)’s improvisation and signaled the return to the song’s assertive head.  I’m not sure if Jose felt the invocation from all the way over here in Beijing.  Sent with love.  Drenched now.  Cardio box, most assuredly ticked.

Sunday, 08/20/17