ChinaClown's best video yet

Just finished and posted at thecalifornias.org, or with a direct link here.

You might want to sit down first.

Summer plans

In five weeks, the following:

1. Tuttle + Mizell.
   
2. Touring bikes.
3. August 1-25.
   
4. Shanghai to Hong Kong, <60 miles/day.
5. Monsoon season.

Bam.

Correction: ROCK GOD

As noted by the previous comment, yes, I meant ROCK GOD.

Found a new way to kick last night's caffeine jitters: 10 sets of 30 pushups, the Rincon core routine from Sunburn frisbee, and week 4 of Air Alert 3. I'm hoping to be sore when administering exams today. Also wondering what my theoretical maximum hourly pushup output is. Physicists? Anyone?

Midterm time.

Inaccessible to me

Blogger and Blogspot are, again, toast. The Great Firewall is up and at it again, and I now need to use an email work-around (thanks Chris) to stick things up on it. Unfortunately this also means I can't keep up with my brother, who throws material up on his Blogspot account periodically. So much for family ties, eh China?

Today is Dragon Boat Festival, which means a great deal of nothing much unless you're Chinese. If you're Chinese, then you're granted a holiday unless your employer pays you three times your normal salary for the day's work. If you're a foreign teacher for Aston in Hohhot, it doesn't mean much because you already have Thursday off. I spent mine making up my Chinese class, then enjoying lunch and a cappuccino at the Shangri-La Hotel across town. Heck of an establishment, that building. I almost want to save up and check in for a night, if only in hopes of a bath tub. The lobby and its accompanying wireless let John, Becci and I relax for quite some time, though, during which I prepared some more material for our upcoming website launch and read Stiglitz's recent book. Not much to write home about in the first hundred pages.

Yesterday night we stayed in and I played guitar for a few hours. Some day, oh some day, I will be a rock god.

Until then...

May goings-on

It's been hard dealing with the sudden transition back into living on my own after Genevieve left on May 5. We had a wonderful time together and, as our lives are temporarily going in different directions, we're scaling back how often we're talking. It's hard. Early May really got me down. As happens with time, I'm winding my way back to a version of the life I led before she came to visit. Less time's being spent in front of my textbooks, with more time spent out in Hohhot using the language and trying to find things that I'll cherish about this place.

One trip I'll remember is the DIY camping John and I pulled on Monday night. We both teach Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. With our weekend equivalent on Monday and Tuesday, we can find places when they're not busy with typical weekend traffic. After buying Giant mountain bikes two weeks ago we decided to take them for a big spin by huffing it northwest out of town into the mountains and spending the night.

I'm always at my best when exploring. We passed highways, distant suburbs still retaining their village flavor, elongated quarries, and orchards in the foothills. Sporting light packs, we dodged off the main road that weaves up and through the entire range in favor of a dirt path, remnants of the old road now closed to traffic. With the green mountains rising up in front of us, we climbed past two knolls before finding an adequate place to hide our bikes for the night. A few hours later, we were looking down on Hohhot 2,000 feet below, sinking smugly into the soft earth beside some greening shrubs. We wrote songs while waiting for the sun to go down. Actually, "wrote" is an overstatement. We did record about twenty tracks on my digital recorder, all improv. Some nuggets there waiting for polishing. John, fortunately, brought a ukejohn (known to much of the world as a ukelele), so we threw together everything from heartwrenching tangos to Aston hymns. I'm half-surprised that our hearts didn't explode with the unbridled emotion amplified in the mountain air.

Tomorrow we pick up business cards we designed and had printed for a different project we're working on. I should probably nab some project management software given all the media development balls we have in the air right now. Or buy a white board.

Nearly done with Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. After that and the author's other book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, it's hard to see the world as anything more than a bundle of ecological interactions. Then I pull the false veil back down and read more of The Economist's guides to the world, which return me to my delusions that our species has everything under control. Balance in everything.