Peaceful Rise

I'm sorry I haven't been writing.  I think there's something wrong with my brain. Perhaps it's all the Chinese. The last time I was going to write was just after Christmas, when me and my friends all got detained overnight in a police station.  I got about halfway through a very detailed and winding narrative of the night when I became distracted and then forgot what happened. I think it's mostly that writing frustrates me.  My life could be portrayed so much more vividly and entertainingly in documentary format.  Particularly because so much of anything I want to write is inspired out of discontent, which comes off as whining self-pity.  If I had a videocamera on me at all times, then the tragicomedy of my existence in China could be fully appreciated. But since I don't, I'll try to keep this brief again. Let me begin by proudly introducing MomaDVD.com , Beijing's first online DVD rental service.  This was an idea that my friends Guy and Jeff ca...

Well it's been more than a month since I left my old company to its inevitable prolonged withering demise, and have since promptly lost all motivation to continue posting here. Despite my lack of creative impulse, things have been good.  I've been keeping afloat with a little bit of translating work for Greenpeace  (see the PDFs), which fills me with a warm glow of self-righteousness and makes pandas shed tears of joy.  I've also been doing a little research into the possibility of realizing my long held dream of opening a bagel shop (and investors, I think this is a great opportunity for you.  A low risk alternative to the U.S. financial system, I think).  I should be moving into a nice new apartment with the French guys where I'll finally have my own private bedroom at the end of this week, assuming the agent we're using is only acting like an infuriating cheating lowlife scumbag and is, in fact, not.  And I just bought a roundtrip train ...

Don't let the title fool you, I don't actually love my job. Nor have I seen Dr. Strangelove. Nevertheless, it's been such a long time and I wanted to write something about my job.  The reasons I haven't written about it for so long are a mixture of respect for whatever nondisclosure terms might have been lurking in my contract, a fear of seeming disrespectful or disloyal to any potential future employers who might grace the pages of this blog, and mostly, the fact that my company's website is so ridiculously awful and the content is so immensely stupid that it's not even worth the space on this page to point it out.  I was also somewhat concerned that a coworker would stumble upon my site and I would be in trouble, except that a) my coworkers can't really read English, and b) I kind of half want to get fired at this point.  So what merits this special occasion today?  Well, I just happen to be so numbed by the Olympics, the insipid circle-jerk of the ...

As I began work this morning, and dove into my daily task of figuring out how to procrastinate for eight and a half hours, I started, as usual, by reading through the China articles on the New York Times website.  The first article to fall across my screen was yet another monthly reminder by Jim Yardley of why, exactly, the Chinese Communist Party is still in power, because apparently we keep forgetting.  Either that, or we're just downright impatient.  The headline was: China's Communists, Resilient in Face of Change A few hours later I found that the page had refreshed itself, inexplicably bearing a new title: China's Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change The second title is actually more fitting for the article itself, which is more informative and less colored than the first title would lead you to believe.  But I wonder what the explanation is for the title change.  Did it all of a sudden occur to some editor that "Oh yes, those pesky Communist...

Dreamy riot police, where are you now? (from www.telegraph.co.uk) There was a crazy man on the subway during my commute this morning.  He sat across the car by the door and swore uncontrollably, punctuating the end of each string of curses with a tight swipe of his arm, as though he were smacking a child upside the head.  Then he would look around, half indignant and half afraid, and self-consciously stroke his long thin hair back behind his ear with the other hand.  As if suddenly remembering that the imaginary child hadn't quite learned his lesson, he would then burst out with another barrage of cursing, and strike the air again with his palm. This went on for at least ten minutes before I reached my stop.  Some people got nervous and went to other cars, and some people laughed at him openly.  Eventually one lady wearing a red security volunteer armband came by from the adjacent car and peered worriedly at the man.  People looked from the man to t...

This was yesterday's picture of the day on Telegraph.co.uk , taken at Crab Island, a beach resort area near Beijing.  Who is this guy?  He is my new hero.

Welcome, foreigner! Although it's been policy to require foreigners to register residency with their local PSB for a long time now, it's probably only this year that the policy has grown some teeth, and the police have actually become insistent about enforcing it.  Just last week I found big white posters on the bulletin board by the gate of my apartment, and also on the doors to our units, marked with our police cartoon friend Jingjing (not to be confused with the Olympic panda mascot , whose name is spelled the same), giving us a friendly reminder to register at the local station for a temporary residence permit within 24 hours of the start of our stay.  And though personally so far I've been spared the intrusion, over the past several months I've been hearing stories from friends of friends who have had the police go door to door through their apartments asking to see foreigners' registration and fining those without. But what I just discovered, to my shoc...