I don’t want to do that.

But thanks to those of you who have been sticking around to read this despite the increasing lag time between posts. Since NaNoWriMo is almost finished (which is not to say that I am – with the laptop dying I think I’m officially out of the running to finish this novel by December) I should be back on track with things soon.

Hijinx of the day: In Hong Kong yesterday I bought one of those Nike+iPod sensors, which talk to your iPod while you run and keep track of how far and how long you run. They say that you have to buy special Nike tennis shoes to install them into, but I just took my trusty pocketknife (which I have thanks to Julia) and a hotel sewing kit (which I have thanks to Mom) and voila, my right shoe now has GADGETRY installed into its tongue.

I am immensely and disproportionately proud of myself for this.

Oh, and thank you Mary David for the letter I received today! Proof positive, folks: the address given in the “Contacting Andrew in China” page here on this blog is accurate and it takes about a week until I receive mail (provided that it’s a small, regular sized letter of about an ounce or so). I have some stationery (thanks to Mom) but I’m still on the search for Hello Kitty prints to send to an un/lucky few of you.

Working on finding a replacement. I do want to just replace the adapter for now, as the rest of my laptop has decent usage.

Anyway, I brought them up because not only are they cute new roommates, but I can crassly use ‘em as a metaphor here. Like, “Andrew has not posted for such a long time – perhaps he has withdrawn into his hermit shell again.” I had previously been averaging a good rate of posting 5 days out of the week, and this is the first time I haven’t for an entire week – I did better when I wasn’t even here.

The reason for this is that I’ve finally settled into a good solid routine aimed at achieving all those goals and enjoying all those hobbies that I wanted to try for here. During the school days when I’m not teaching, I sit in the English Department office and study Chinese and write my book. After class I go for a run on the school track and to the gym a few blocks north to lift weights, and next week I’ll probably start going to that hip hop dance class that they offer just to see what it’s like. I’m also practicing erhu and guitar, and when I can manage to get into the music room, piano too.

I think I’m doing all these things to forestall a future midlife crisis (hello, hip hop dance) and also to fully enjoy all these hobbies that I wanted to explore and appreciate before I shelve them for medical school next year. I also want it to be time well-spent in a useful way, with hopefully a finished book, good health, better Chinese and better musical skill being tangible results of the year (of course I am also hoping for an elusive answer to questions like “why am I here” and “who am I,” but those are slightly less tangible, especially when I am unsure how to phrase those questions anyway). After all, even though this is a “year off,” it’s still real time spent and a real year of my life.

But these self-improvement and self-fulfillment activities do take up a lot of time, which is why I’ve posted less frequently here. More worrying, though, is that they’ve also been distracting me from being here in China. Other Chinese teachers who I had earlier met on promising terms have recently been saying “Oh, where have you been? We haven’t seen you for some time, you must be very busy.” I should probably work harder to integrate myself with the school teachers more, and that means among other things playing basketball with them after class (even though I hate basketball because I suck at it, plus the childhood fear of jammed fingers – try playing the piano sometime with jammed fingers). So far I’ve had a good cover; many of the teachers here are too busy preparing for a rigorous professional test that, if they pass, would bump them up on the income bracket with better pay, better benefits and something like tenure, I think (it seems like the graduates of certain universities get this automatically, but others have to work for it). That test is tomorrow (加油!) so I better get back into the social groove quickly. Maybe I’ll make some cookies for people with my toaster oven…at a pokey rate of six cookies a batch….

Talking to the teachers here and opening up to them more would take some additional effort on top of the nice schedule I’ve lined up for myself, but it would be worth it for the Mandarin practice and the sense of inclusion into the community here. But no matter how integrated I become here, I am starting to realize that my little life here in the Shekou neighborhood of Nanshan District in Shenzhen – read, the most westernized neighborhood of a particularly new and affluent district in a special city experiment with capitalism – is probably not going to give me a good answer for the question “what is China like,” although of course there is no discounting that Shenzhen’s situation is to be uniquely appreciated as part of that answer. Even harder to grasp is a general answer to the question “what is my place here in China, and who am I when I am here and who am I when I am not” – because so far it seems like there isn’t too much of a difference, and not to the credit of whatever erudition of self I might have. My parents are coming to visit in two weeks, and I can just imagine the look on my dad’s face when he gets here: looking quizzically around for signs of the poignantly complicated China he remembers leaving, for the smell of nightsoil and the yells of roadside cart vendors, and warily thinking of all the things that a father knows and would rather his son not. He will look around at the Nanshan suburbia with some puzzlement and then might laugh: “Well Andrew, it seems China came to you instead.”

More essays and random not-China things will be popping up in the blog section soon; just roll with it, please. They’ll disappear into the ebb and flow of the archives soon, but will always be easily accessible with links in the “Piecemeal Papers and Projects” section.

Unless they’re ethnically Asian, many of whom found that Chinese tutoring schools and Chinese parents would rather have a white person teach their children English. There being no equal opportunity laws in China here, this is done quite openly, and I know of a few ethnic Americans who have been sent letters plainly telling them that their application was appreciated but not of the, hm, persuasion they were seeking. And that’s just for the ESL chain schools and institutions; the individual families who could hire personal tutors for their children don’t bother asking them at all.

Happily, this situation has been much different for me, mostly because I am in the more open-minded Nanshan District I think (these suspicions being confirmed only a few days ago by one of our program coordinators, which I can write about later). I have had one tutoring offer already (though it was put on ice later for lack of participants), and nobody here seems to doubt my English skills. But still, I haven’t and probably won’t do any teaching work outside of Yucai Third Middle, simply because…of time!

Already I have found plenty of things to do:

- Run and work out at the gym on Gongye Ba
- Practice three different musical instruments (guitar, piano and erhu) and even doodle around with jazz piano when I can
- Write fiction (which still hasn’t really gotten anywhere yet, but I’m hoping to at least start before NaNoWriMo officially starts
- Practice Chinese
- Catch up on my reading list (Working right now on Yu Hua’s Brothers and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore)
- and oh, a new project, try to figure out some music production software like Sony ACID or FL Studio.
- PS: maybe one day make a video montage too.

So suddenly having all these projects to do is taking time away from keeping this blog as current as I’d like, to speak nothing of finding additional employment! But I reason it this way: with so many projects and hobbies to find fulfillment in, for me right now, time is more valuable than money. Especially with medical school looming imminently in the near future, I think this year is my year to basically take care of everything that would otherwise manifest as a terrible, terrible midlife crisis (band, anybody?). I may not have as much pocket change as other expats, but I’m not really here for the reasons other expats are, either. More on the that (which I’m still discovering anyway) later.

Baby Aidan is very cute!

That said, I expected yesterday’s post stats to be above average given that I finally unloaded a decent post after a week of stallposts, but it turned out that a two-line blurb about my dead internet got just as many views as that whole cultural treatise. And only after glancing at some friends’ IM statuses did I realize what I had forgotten.

The USC-Ohio State football game! All my friends still at school must have been watching it with bated breath; as the most anticipated game of the early season, I would have been too if I had remembered that it was this weekend. I also finally figured out how to actually do that, thanks to Jason.