These Very Same Songs

I thought my biggest problem would have been getting the old music that’s loaded on my iPhone over to my new one.  This remains a head-scratcher.  The songs are somewhere on my backed up hard drive.  I just can’t find them.  These very same songs are somewhere on my old Macbook Pro.  I fired it up.  It needs a third-party screen as its screen has been out of commission since a bike trip I took to France, three-summers back.  And if that was my only issue I would have minded much.  I’ll keep searching.  I’ll find it eventually. 

But an annoyance from the night before returned with a vengeance.  The iPhone software kept demanding over and over I re-enter my apple ID.  I know my apple ID.  I reentered it.  And it rejected it.  So, I became locked out and went to some sign and changed it and re-enter it and found the same problem repeating over and over.  If the applet could just be retired, I would care but it had the self-wrought authority to return again and again and again every three seconds after cancelling.  This was a fool’s game and I decided around noon that I would simply have to return to the Apple store in San Li Tun. 

They’re good down there.  I found a nice young be-spectacled lady who stuck with me, asked a colleague or two and eventually suggested I start refresh the who set up and start over.  Some old iTunes were assigned to an old id and they were making this impossible.  Having only set the phone up yesterday there was nothing to lose except time and I went forward.  She was right. The problem disappeared. 

Standing there an older man, by that I mean he was a peer, standing across from me began complaining that the set up in the Apple store was all rather inconvenient.  I politely begged to different and suggested it was pretty cool as far as I was concerned.  Then I felt my neck and didn’t want to talk to strangers any longer.  My neck had been stiff since the morning at the gym and I did what I could to stretch it backwards and then make a circle.  Just that one motion, pulling those weights downward, left me compromised all day long. 

Today, when I call a DiDi, I will wait till I get out by the road itself. The guy is coming southward now.  I step over the railing and wave him down. 

Thursday 4/18/19

Many, Many, Many Minutes of Pressing

I’ve gotten batteries for my iPhone replaced two times since the time I purchased this iPhone 6 a few years back.  The screen’s replaced at least twice the charging jack and the ear phone jack holes were cleaned out, with balls of dust removed.  And each time, before I went in, I was certain that this was the end of the phone. This was the time it would finally have to end. Charging had depleted with intolerable rapidity.  The audio became impossible.  The luck required to get the charging cable just-so was insufferable.  And each time I was able to have someone fix it and return it to something like my good-old phone.

This time a new problem developed.   The touch screen had become unresponsive.  The only way to get it to engage was to press and press and press and eventually it would respond, however it would then keep responding to all those old pressure points moments later, and notes would be shot off in wechat or whatsapp that said:  “ae;lkj5reiopq”  and people assumed I was drunk or falling asleep.  

When I came back from my two weeks in Brazil, last month, I was determined to have this fixed.  Kevin, the phone fixer man said I would need to leave my phone with him for a day.  When I got it back, he fixed it and it was better for about two days and then, it was back to the old problem.  I tried one more time for fifty bucks more last week and I really thought I had cheated death.  It was great for about seventy-two hours.  But then, it was worse, requiring many, many, many minutes of pressing to activate.  And with this, and all the compound aggravation, I gave up and decided to get myself a new iPhone, finally. 

Heading down to SLT I knew I’d only have about ninety-minutes.  But that should be enough. Right?I wanted to make sure my old iTunes made it over to this new phone.  The rest should have been simple.  I got myself the iPhone XS.  The smaller one.  And set out to do so.  But soon I was on a call that had been ninety-minutes out, trying to be cute and quick while waiting for a file to transfer from my hard drive to my laptop.  The young kid in the Apple store kept going back and forth between me and another person who he was helping.  There would clearly be no haircut and no time to solve this problem I was only mid-way through solving.  Time to go to my 2:00PM meeting.

Wednesday, 4/17/19

This Time in the Winter

What a lovely bike-ride this morning with my younger daughter.  I got her up before six, and gently stirred her, prepared for flat-out rejection with my reminder that it was time to roll.  With knitted brows, she considered my disturbance of her dreams and I told her in a quiet voice to meet downstairs in ten minutes if she wanted to go to the gym, as she’d suggested she had wanted to.  I went back down, put on my jeans, found my school facilities ID card, and the keys to the front door, fully expecting to head out on my own this morning but she soon made her way down. 

I considered but demurred on drawing her attention to how beautiful it was to bike around in the early, spring morning.  She might experience that, but it would almost certainly kill the sentiment to have it broadcast.  On the way out the compound we past the high school principal who was walking his two, strikingly beautiful Golden Retrievers.  “Hey, you’ve got her going this morning?”  “Indeed.” 

We got their early and were ready to leave early as she insisted we do.  I was able to share with her, with someone, for the first time all year what it was like to do this bike ride over first thing in the morning.  “This time in the winter it is pitch black.  You can still see the stars.”  Biking home I pointed out the place that had been a teacher’s watering hole with one or another small market beside it that had recently been demolished.  There’s glass in the street.  We don’t need to drop another thirty dollars for two more inner tubes as we did over the weekend.

When I got home, I had a few minutes in the kitchen before my 8:00AM call would start.  My mom had entered the words “Notre Dame” in my phone.  I know how she communicates, and this was unlikely to be good news.  And my mind turned towards the college in the Midwest, somehow.  Ignorant, I assumed that there had been a school shooting at the Catholic university.  I checked the ‘New York Times and nothing was listed.  What was she looking at?  Then I searched for the term “Notre Dame’ and then, bang, there it was, the burning of the cathedral.

Like a murder or a car accident I shouldn’t have watched the video but couldn’t help it.  And it felt, as I’m sure it did for more than a few people, oddly reminiscent when the fragile tower in this holy landmark toppled, the same pang of pain I felt when I witnessed the first of the Twin Towers fall, as though human impermanence were suddenly revealed and mocked in flames.  What a sad thing to see, the large oval eyes, the flying buttress, that always made this gothic cathedral look like a terrestrial whale, or Jules Verne octopus, helplessly burning away, while the world looked on. 

Tuesday 4/16/19

A Solid Red Bar

I should know better.  Monday morning traffic.  Into the city.  I called a cab at 6:50AM.  But it was already too late.  You wanna believe what you wanna believe and I had been considering that the ride would be an hour as it normally is.  Maybe I’d get lucky and arrive in fifty minutes.  Now, sitting here on the Jing Cheng road, after the toll booth we are confronted with a solid red bar on the driver’s GPS and mine, for the next few miles.  I had pushed a person to meet at 8:00AM, instead of 8:30AM.  Now I’ll be lucky to get there by 8:30AM.  Wretched traffic.  Just wretched.  What a dope. 

It isn’t exactly Singapore but the road-side flora along the Beijing, Chengde expressway has come a long way.  And on a day like this, just about every tree planted to bloom is now in- bloom.  The sky is clear there’s a cool breeze.  If you live in the northern hemisphere and you have proper seasonal weather, could there be anything better than April? 

Guy wanted to take a short cut.  It’s alright with me.  Now we’re heading west.  Stuck at another light.  I’m considering all these cars and wondering if people saw them from another time might they consider them to be sentient beings and not just vehicles that much smaller people inside were manning?  There are a bed of crocuses outside. They help.  Beijing tries.  I can remember seeing crocuses as a child in Harrison, New York, and being mystified when everything popped up out of the earth in the spring.  Something was happening.

His short cut seems to have paid off.  We made better time cutting across town than we ever would have if we stuck to the main road in and attempted this on the third ring road.  We’re turning left now, southward.  This will be the last.  It looks green on his GPS but this stretch may prove nettlesome.  I’m thinking of my father who said he stops reading these Dustybrine blogs whenever I begin to talk about traffic.  Which I can understand must invariably be boring.  Apologies tender reader.  

Monday 4/15/19