Currently Reading The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: LIFE (Worst Case Scenario) By Joshua Piven, David Borgenicht see related

so a break from real writing to bring you an update on the mundane events of my daily life:

today, i woke up at 7am as usual, had my 烧饼油条 for breakfast, did some reading, went to the flower market, watched a few episodes of friends, moseyed around, and then had the great pleasure of SETTING A MAN'S HEAD ON FIRE.  yeppp that's right.

all right. dear friends, some of you may remember pyro stories from sophomore year (http://www.xanga.com/jo_star/237855894/item.html).  it appears as though ... because i'm me, stuff like this ... just ... happens.  (contrary to what one might expect, it DOES NOT go away with aging and 'maturity'.)

so my mom's sales team comes over tonight for their annual super fancy and formal new year's celebration.  18 people are all dressed up and seated in our living room at a long table, set with 5 candelabras by the caterers.  because one of the team members couldn't make it, there was an extra place setting and i was made to sit and take part in dinner against my wishes.  two minutes after we begin eating, i reach to pass the bread, manage to tip a candelabra slightly, at the SAME instant that the gentleman across from me inclines his head to drink his soup.  his hair ... PROMPTLY CATCHES FLAME.  i kid you not.  the top of his head is on FIRE.  as the flames dance on his head, of course i shriek, the hair starts to singe and emit fried burnt hair smell and the dude starts beating his head to put it out.

okay kids.  note to self: lesson to take away from tonight ... no candle-lit dinners for this one.  ever.  no matter how romantic.

Currently Listening Little Voice By Sara Bareilles see related

On my room with a view

          At the crack of dawn just before the day breaks I lie in bed and enjoy the quiet stillness that envelops my entire house.  Through the floor to ceiling windows that flank the east wall of my room, a young sun rises to edge out the witching hour of last night.  As it begins a slow but sure ascent to its throne, rice farmers follow in its steady steps.  The yellow manages to erase slivers of shadow in perfect rhythm with bobbing straw hats, always just one stride ahead.  The sun peels away the dark's gray carefully, layer by layer, revealing a new paddy circle with each angle of its pathway up the horizon.   Gray-yellow-green wedding cake-like tiers climb up my window to meet the blue and white icing above.  Soon I can no longer tell whether the tiers are rising upwards or extending away from me.  The dewy fields stretch out forever until I can barely make out a horizon line where the green meets the sky.  Like Dorothy's hesitation with her emerald city, I cannot decide whether the rice fields are truly majestic and endless or if they're merely an illusion and I have just found the one redeeming side effect of pollution in this grossly populated city of 21 million. 

           I'm almost convinced by the Orient's version of a pastoral scene:  villages need rice, so the farmers diligently toil to provide the staple; nature provides light for man to work with and animals to rise by; all this happens with an easy early morning rural cadence.  I say almost, because right before the rhythmic stillness claims me, sounds from the north window disrupt the peace of the countryside.  A stream of trucks blare by on the highway against a backdrop of mule-drawn carts trotting below and street vendors on the sidewalk chitchatting while kneading dough and feeding their makeshift stoves of metal barrels filled with coal.  Cooks sing out their menus enticing pedestrians in tune with the knick-knack man on his rickshaw honking a rubber horn and banging a hollow drum.

I peel myself out of bed to crack open the city-facing window and breakfast smells of man tou - steamed buns and the local favorite: gou bu li bao zi - literally 'dumplings even dogs ignore', notorious for their miserly meat filling, waft a delicious breeze in to my room. 

Further down the street, a wrinkled leathery face bends over her precious grandchild, lifting up his almost frostbitten cheeks exposed in traditional split pants.  Her worried son follows, wheeling a bicycle, as he nervously watches with new fatherly eyes.  She clucks at him, 'how dare he question her ability to bring up a child!' but her face glows with visible pride as a toothless smile spreads.  She's an object of envy, with two males in the house securing the family lineage.  Nothing can be too good for the family's hope and joy, so the bicycle basket overflows with fresh duck eggs and meat cuts from the neighboring butcher's newly slaughtered stock.

The marketplace bustles with morning activity as neighbors exchange gossip while bargaining for spreads of fruits and vegetables, freshly kneaded tofu and squawking chickens.  A procession of geese waddle from a nearby stall to the edge of the river, leading me back to my east windows.

My room with a view.

Currently Reading A Free Life: A Novel By Ha Jin see related

on beginnings.

          On the way home this winter, I read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.  I began in the Boston airport chewing through thirty some pages, continuing on the flight to Chicago, ate through some more the next morning at O'Hare, meditated on a large chunk flying 14 hours to Tokyo, and finally loving through the end with a satisfying finish, half an hour before I landed in Shanghai.  When she gave me this title, Laura said it felt like a book that anyone could write.  I quite agree after reading it.  Perhaps it flew by so fast because of its immediate relate-ability, accompanied by its low score on my scale of "literary value", thus requiring little processing and few 'deep thoughts'.  Indeed, it seems like many people have parallel experiences to write about, those that would rival this lady's stories and be equally interesting and accessible to readers.  Apparently what separates her, a published author, and us, regular others, is our lack of motivation, muse, self-discipline, (or perhaps just …  没劲儿), to sit ourselves down and document our extraordinary encounters or even mundane epiphanies.  I realize my life thus far has been rich in these very experiences, whether measured by the 30 some odd countries my parents took me to before I turned fourteen, the over 250,000 miles we logged in our mobile home for me to go to school in China, the solitary only-child number of my exclusively nuclear family, or even just the books I've had the privilege to read, and the people I've been 'semi-charmed' enough to meet.  Eat, Pray, Love made me feel like I really had to start writing again, like I owed it to … the happenstance (a la rachael yamagata), 不然的话， 真说不过去了， 像对不起经验本身一样。

          After this mild jolt of motivation, I arrived at home to find it promptly replaced by the more immediately pressing task of indulgence in hours on end of mindless $1 DVD chickflicks, mmm home food, double mmm street food, guiltless free reading, the list goes on.   And then, as I persevered through 657 uncomfortable pages of Ha Jin's A Free Life, a strangely magnetic book given its almost painfully awkward prose (perhaps I was spurred forward by the reminder of the author's usual literary prowess, e.g. Waiting, and his use of clumsy narrative as an "intentional employment of a literary device" << IB HL English commentaries, anyone?>> to parallel the immigrant lives and language mastery of his protagonists, and perhaps also the slightly superficial second reason that my copy is addressed to my Chinese name which he complimented when I met him at a book signing); as I finished this ordeal which was entirely about a poet who really had to write to live, yet, somehow never got around to doing it, I figured as far as signs go: could I BE wearing any more clothes?

          I haven't been able to shake this desire to seriously write, of the non-blog-top 10 list/shout out-ellipse-filled-colloquial-computer-lingo-rant variety, for a full week now.  I looked back on my writing during college.  I am ashamed to say that I clocked in a weak handful of free writes and three poems: one about a homeless man I met, and two about my disillusionment with God.  That's it? Even my relatively angst-free grade school was more productive than that.  It appears as though Calliope-muse encounters and literary journal publications are memories from a distant high school past.

Well, I will summon all my self-discipline balls and challenge this looming existential quarter-life crisis with a commitment to write.  (to apathy, to entropy, to empathy, ecstasy ... to no shame ... to lamb vinadloo!)

          So unlike Elizabeth Gilbert's 108 prayer bead number stories that are exactly divisible to a holy trinity three countries for a 36 full circle chapters each, I have no clever numerology or great synthesizing umbrella with specific spokes to write for or under.  I do, however, have two weeks with which to eagerly embrace free word association.  So. 

To beginnings, 干杯!