Tuesday, September 24, 2013

The Frenchie In The Elevator

I've been learning Chinese progressively as I try and establish my life here in Zhengzhou. When I first got here, my vocabulary consisted of only, "Hello," "What," and "Hello, how are you?"

To supplement, one of the first things I learned was the phrase for, "I don't understand." I've used this in basically every occasion you can think of. Now that my understanding of Chinese is getting a little better, I try and use it less, but people talk quickly so I'm subject to what I know.

Today I arrived at my building and ran to the elevator as the doors were slowly closing. Missing the elevator is basically the worst waiting game since everyone ever seems to be leaving or entering the building and it can take awhile for it to go all the way up and down (I've waited 10 minutes to get out of my building before. Why didn't I take the stairs? Because I live on the fourteenth floor and I do that justification thing where I've already been waiting for long enough so I just have to stay.). I reached the button just in time and climbed into the elevator where an older woman walked in after me.

As the doors closed, the woman looked at me and said something quickly. It was only minutes later that I understood it to vaguely mean, "You barely got in," but at the time I had no idea what she meant so I relied on my go to phrase.

"I don't understand."

She looked at me with a rather quizzical look. This phrase can backfire because when you say, "I don't understand." A lot of the time, Chinese take that for meaning you didn't hear or catch the meaning, so they say it again. I also see the irony that I'm saying I don't understand in the language I'm not understanding.

She looked at me and said, "You don't understand..." I looked down at her and smiled, trying to not really engage and just make it to my floor. The elevator bounced and opened up on the fifth floor where two other women hopped along for the ride. The first woman in the elevator turned to the first two and pointed at me,

"He told me he doesn't understand."

"He doesn't understand?" said the other women.

"Yes, he said he doesn't understand, in chinese." said the first woman

The group looked up at me and laughed a bit, repeatedly saying, "He doesn't understand..." followed by a little chuckle. The other two women arrived at their floor and exited the lift which left me and my first companion. We shortly rode to her floor and as the doors were beginning to open, she muttered to herself,"

"Ugh, French."

French? "No," I said in English, "I'm American," I said in Chinese.

She looked me up and down, shook her head, and walked out of the elevator.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Throwing Up

It's been one of the few days that I've decided not to wear my headphones on the way home from my kindergarten. I usually wear them to drown out the noise and also to avoid general conversation, but the new headphones I have don't really cooperate with the size of my ear-hole and after awhile they begin to hurt. Not that these headphones really stop anyone from talking to me here anyways, but I always hope that the western influence will leak over and that social barrier will come into effect.

Without my headphones, I got to hear a little splash on my last bus. It was right next to me and was accompanied by a wet feeling on my foot. Great, someone must have spilled some kind of juice all over me. I turned and expected to find some child being scolded by their mother for spilling their drink. I kept looking. And looking. I turned my head up and found the source of the liquid; a twenty-something year old man with glasses and little wet spots all down the front of his grey-blue polo. Then I noticed this was dripping down from his mouth.

Bodily fluids usually fall into a category that most people can agree upon as things that don't belong on anyone but yourself. Swallowing our own spittle: acceptable. Even consider swallowing another person's spittle: completely unacceptable beyond all reason. I'm not a stickler when it comes to sharing food or drink, but the very idea that someone else has inserted their saliva into something I'm about to consume makes my whole body seize up. I think this goes along with eating things off the ground. As a child, I'm sure I wouldn't have hesitated to rescue a fallen piece of chocolate had it escaped my grasp, no matter where it came to land. But like most people, I grew into a greater knowledge that ground food is off limits. Every single day I see children under the age of five picking food off the floor and stuffing it into their small mouths without a second thought. Basically anything can go into their mouth as far as they're concerned.

What really gets me now is the weird defining difference that I feel about these things whether they're coming from an adult or a child. If a child has their hand in their mouth and wants a high five, I try and steer them towards using the other hand, but if they manage to grab me, I try not to mind. Even when one student got so upset that their mother left them at school that they vomited all over my foot, I was surprisingly not very agitated. A quick wipe from a tissue and the vomit went out of my head.

But with an adult, there is a comfort threshold that is breached. All of the sudden my senses are heightened and I can feel every little droplet of vomit dripping down my leg. My mind identifies some sort of smell that must be everything littered all over the floor. I can feel my skin pull slightly tighter as the liquid begins to dry to the hairs on my leg and all I want to do is die.

What is this arbitrary line? Maybe it was just some point of innocence. Children usually don't intentionally mean to wrong you (in this case, vomiting on you, but other liquids are in the same category), they just do. An adult has this type of responsibility to the community to try and keep their fluids inside their bodies (at least until we get to the next bus stop). Is it really some kind of innocent vomit if it comes from a child's mouth? What is the distinction? There was the possibility that I was being highly inconsiderate with this man's expulsion. I really took no account of what had been happening to him, maybe he had innocent vomit too.

Despite this, I found myself sitting on a bus for another ten minutes as saw the liquid spread itself throughout the bus. I had been fortunate in that aspect that nothing was chunky and he hadn't fully thrown up on me.

I stared at this man with a look of utter disgust on my face. I'm sure that I made an audible sound of disgust, but the man never noticed as he seemed to be in his own world. Whether drunk or sick, the man stood up with some after-vomit still clinging to his nose, and stumbled off at the next stop, leaving the rest of us to deal with his mess.

Moving my head around, I gave a look that said, "I can't believe something disgusting like this could happen." and expected to get this look in return. As I kept looking, the look I read on people's faces generally said something like, "Eh." as they turned their heads back to the windows. It was like I was the only one who knew what this man had done. I looked around again, almost desperate for someone to agree with me in this. Was it the same look, or were they saying, "It was an innocent vomit."?

I resigned myself to staring down resentfully at the mess that was now moving towards my other foot until my stop came. As the doors opened, the next crowd of people exited and entered the bus as I hopped over a puddle, now smeared and forgotten so quickly.


Tuesday, September 10, 2013

The Saga of the Toilet

The bathroom has been in revolt. As a crucial part of my apartment, I was getting fed up with its constant complaining and spewing up shit that I plainly didn't want to deal with.

My bathroom first started behaving terribly awhile ago. We thought we fixed the problem with a copious amount of cement but that only held down our anarchist toilet...for awhile. I couldn't have known that it was just quietly plotting its revenge for this insurrection.

Like most upheavals, things started off small and quietly. A few times the flush wouldn't completely flush everything in the bowl. Next, I would hear a gurgling noise, a noise that would soon be synonymous with a rebellion; the cries of the toilet empire.

In the passing weeks, things started to move more quickly with this little troublemaker. His sudden cries would be accompanied by a small stream of water trickling out from the bottom of the sink. How dare he. Roping the poor, innocent sink into this he was risking war, war I say! What started off as water soon became littered with the casualties of the fallen toilet paper that had braved the porcelain bowl, only to see the light of day again so soon. To have pledged their service so young, it was heart-wrenching.

Not wanting to risk any more casualties, we made the pact of not sending in any more troops to fuel the fire. We figured that this would stop the floods and for a time, we thought we had won. We cleaned up the mess left behind by the toilet and hoped for the best. He stayed quiet for some time, but there was still that aching fear that he would once again try his hand at overtaking the bathroom.

We went on and off like this for a few days until the toilet decided that it was time to pull out the big guns. One fateful Saturday night, my roommate and I were having people over to our house to eat pizza and socialize. One of our Chinese friends ventured into the bathroom, only to return with the sound of an attack.

"Something is wrong with your toilet."

Our fears had come to a head. We were sure that without the assistance of toilet paper, nothing would come up. Our toilet had decided it was going to just send everything back up. Everything. From sink to wall, the feces looked up at us while we looked down in defeat. We locked the bathroom door and resigned that the bathroom was simply "broken."

The next few days we feared to enter the room. The toilet was seemingly winning with each flush. We attempted a plunger, but nothing could calm his rage. The poop remained stale on the floor as we waited for backup to arrive. It was kind of a shitty time.

The next Friday rolled around and tensions were growing high. Our bathroom had become an unusable mess with a smell that lingered any time we ever tried to venture into it. We even sacrificed a pair of unwanted flip-flops that we'd use like a hazmat suit when we'd walk into the poop zone.

Fortunately to our rescue came our landlord. She ventured into the bathroom and gave the toilet a few flushes to see what the problem was (because fecal matter strewn across the floor wasn't enough). Lacking the ability to properly communicate with her, I can only assume she said, "The plumber will be here soon." That or, "You're on your own, bud."

Fortunately, it was the former. I went to work and came back to find a spotless bathroom accompanied by our toilet standing alone. I doused the bathroom floor in bleach just to make sure things were...sanitized. The cement that had been holding it back was gone, only leaving behind a faint ring to remind us it had actually been there. I walked tentatively into the room, staring at the toilet expecting there to be still be some recoil from our battles, but he didn't make a move. In fact, he seemed slightly askew from his previous position. He was stuck to the floor with actual sealant that was going to forever hold him in this new angle to remind us of his past misdoings.

Could this really be true? I texted my roommate the joyous news.

 "The cement around our toilet is gone."

He responded in kind.

"The toilet gods have blessed us!"

It actually felt like that, like some porcelain deity had intervened to let us release our bowels peacefully. That, or a plumber.

I gave it a flush. Only the sweet sound of trickling water going down a drain was heard. No backing up, no gurgling, no more rebellion; we had won. Every time I flushed, there's still that slight feeling of fear that our own sewage is going to come breaching the borders of the sink, but nothing has happened yet.

He sits in the bathroom quietly now. I wonder if he's resigned his plans to take over the apartment or he's simply biding his time for when we get too comfortable. Strangely, I got used to being on my toes all the time.

 Looking at him without the cement made him seem kind of naked. Now, he was just a toilet that sat slightly askew instead of toilet that seemingly sprang from the ground bursting forth from the cement that housed him.

Friday, September 6, 2013

Still Here

I feel like I've been neglecting you all. I mean, I told myself that I'd write more all about the experiences I would have in China since they are more unique. I wouldn't go as far to say that they're one of a kind since there are about nine million people in my city, but I can at least share my perspective, right? It's the least I could do.

I'd like to say that this sort of hiatus is due to some sort of influx in work, but that's a lie. I always seem to find myself with time on my hands and instead of writing things down, I find myself watching reruns of America's Next Top Model and The Newsroom (Which I'm kind of obsessed with; thanks a lot, Brad.). The closest thing that I think I could call this would be some kind of mental rut. I know that I have the time and capacity to do something, but I find it a lot easier to just lie back and drink in someone else's creation. You should be writing in your journal. You should be studying your Chinese. You should researching something. These could-a, should-a, would-a's start to pile up and it's really easy to tell myself that it's too much. I've done enough today, I can always do it tomorrow. I don't though and it's frustrating.

I've mostly been the type of person that tries to keep up to date on their word and when I don't, I put myself down. It becomes a weird cycle where I eventually have to force myself to do something. Even if I think the project I churn out is mediocre, I force myself to do it to kick my brain into gear. Oh yeah, this is something that I like doing. It becomes less of a chore and I can pull myself out of that mental rut.

Part of the downward cycle I've been in recently is attributed to my move, I won't lie. Was it the expectation that I set things so high that I'd have the most interesting time; more so than everyone else? I really must have just not been looking hard enough at the situations I was having to get anything out of them, which means I'm a dull person. These thoughts that I kept having didn't really get me anywhere at the time. They are valid questions, but in the state of mind I was in they just cemented the idea that I didn't need to--that a lot of didn't matter.

Moving halfway across the world was incredibly exciting at first and still is. What I hadn't prepared for was the reality of the different. Back in little Cedar City, even going to the store to pick up some groceries meant I would be able to communicate with a human being. Now, just leaving my house and talking to another presents problems on its own, mostly dealing with communication. Growing up in a largely individualistic society, I wasn't prepared for the different sense of community here. It'd be false to say that I didn't find some things annoying, because I can name several, but that's culture. I'd say I'm experiencing a certain type of longing for the culture I grew up in; to have people back to how I was used to them acting. In truth it's lonely.

But do I have to stay lonely? No, was the conclusion I came to. I could take the path I seem to be going and drudge through my days, just waiting for an end, or, I could try and alter my perspective. In no way am I forcing myself into a mold that makes me uncomfortable, but more of like into a new speedo that I have to break in. It feels kind of foreign, but I've already known the feeling, and before long I can get back to swimming the laps...of life.

 So bad simile/metaphor aside, I gave myself attainable goals. Literally, wrote out goals and posted them on my wall to remind myself. Each one has a subheading to further explain the point and also to give myself a pep talk so I can't weasel my way out of it. I can take this chance to redefine my mental vocabulary and set myself on a better path. If I've learned anything from watching internet videos, is that you can't reach too far and expect to not fall off of a moving car. I can start at the bottom of the stairs and take one at a time...or any other goal reaching metaphor you can think of.

That makes this the mediocre jump start. Even in writing this, I veered way off topic of what I was actually going to write about (simple updates, blah blah blah) and my brain guilted me into being honest with how I really feel sometimes. To me the public declaration to be more proactive says that I have to hold myself to that promise. Even though this could turn on itself in the ugly spiral of defeat, I'm still taking that chance. Euch, feelings. But now I have the goal to keep myself on some type of schedule, sharing with you whether you like it or not.

Now how about something to take your mind off all that. Here you go:
I actually own this entire calendar.
Cats doing yoga. Yup.