Yesterday I saw a bee walking along the ground with its wings out, and I wondered if I was seeing a victim of Colony Collapse Disorder. A few years ago I’d lost my conviction that we were having an apocalypse. These days it seems that much more immediate. Are the alarms only ringing now, or are they always going off and we just tune the signal in and out?
Yesterday we got a letter telling us that we’d have to move out of our duplex, a no-cause termination. All we got out of them on a phone call was the word “schedule”, as in, two weeks’ extra notice “doesn’t fit with their schedule”, so we’re guessing it may be that they want to develop the place up and rent it out for more money. Reasonable enough in this market. Reasonable, but it bites.
I went out for a coffee to take home for dinner — having flailed the other day and broken the coffeepot — and the neighborhood was beautiful, the play of a thousand shades of green over the streets, dusk light making shadows through the leaves — and I smiled and tipped the woman in the coffee shop, and paid attention to the place I love, the restaurants I’d want to go to before I leave, the changes since I left for China last year.
Was it worth all that rent I sent home for what turns out to be my last two months in this spot? I don’t know. What’s money worth? It’s part of the world of imaginary things. The world walls are thin this week. A battle against the Daleks makes more sense than finances. They’re both games of symbol and abstraction, and it’s hard to say which one is more strongly anchored to reason.
On the block ajdacent to mine, I saw a small sign on a post in someone’s garden: “My America Doesn’t Torture.” I had to grin. It tells me so much about the world right now — about Portland people, and just people — that we’re willing to make that leap, to believe better of the future and the world enough to call it ours.
In China, the assumption that other people have reasons for what they do kept me anchored. Everyone: governments who follow vile policies, landlords who make no exceptions for loyal four-year tenants who always pay the rent on time, health-care organizations that don’t actually care for health — everyone. They all want something; they’re all trying to get it, sometimes the wrong way, but you’ve done that too.
And I don’t know what will come tomorrow or next month or next year, but right now it’s enough to know that we keep on living despite the unreliability of the world and the people in it. It’s the same old battle, the creative chaos of humankind against entropy, the fight to create something new and lasting in a universe where generally things are running down. We are who we are because we stand up and fight.
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Pingjiang Lu, Suzhou: You can almost forget the modern world here, for a few moments, until the next galoot on an electric scooter reminds you by nearly running you over. But even then, there’s something unique amid the canals and pathways and worn stone steps. Perhaps it’s that it isn’t swept clean.
Oh, sure, the traditional Chinese music is piped in via carefully hidden speakers, but this isn’t and can’t be a Disneyland, not with less-than-rich locals poling down the canals on very real boats and hanging their laundry on iron rails outside the hutong courtyards. The street sports the usual share of ash and broken glass, a man passes by selling twine on a bicycle via his hawker’s cry playing on a recording megaphone, a Duracell beach-umbrella shelters a few worn wooden chairs where old men sit and smoke (and one offers me a seat when he sees me writing), a crowded group gambles inside one of the old buildings while a woman empties out the coal heating pieces from a stove — in short, it’s a way of life preserved, not untouched, bits of the modern world folded into it.
And that’s China, a grainy emulsion of cultural contexts, people doing what they can with what they have. Once I might have seen contradiction in it, but the longer I’ve been here, the less ironic it’s seemed.
And now I’m going home.
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I’m going home in eight days.
All of these things I wanted to get around to are suddenly urgent.
I just said farewells to my smaller class, the one that’s half shy geniuses and half boisterous slackers. They were a disciplinary nightmare but I’m still going to miss them anyway. The larger class, tomorrow, I will miss more. Fifty-six students (!!) and most of them conscientious or at least bright-eyed and knowledge-seeking; most of them came from less advantageous backgrounds than the students in the other class, and many of them made amazing progress, by their own effort, over the course of the year.
Chinese college is more like American high school and Chinese high school is more like American college — the effort to pass end-of-high-school exams is regarded by most as the pinnacle of achievement, and everything after that is gravy.
The Olympic torch is coming to Yangzhou today, and some of my students are going to be involved. The halls are full of young adults showing off their official torch-relay T-shirts. Downtown will be insane. I have been advised by one of my students (who I believe will actually carry the torch? but it isn’t clear at this point) to snag a window in a department store on the top floor and watch from there. I’ll try it and see if it works.
My writing has stalled a little: I’m in one of those phases where the desire to write a certain kind of thing has leaped ahead of my ability to handle the language and technique necessary to write it. That’s usually resolved with lots of books, so I’m guessing when I finally get back I can get up to speed by barricading myself in Powell’s for a while.
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Well, that’s the first time I’ve tried to access a Chinese government agency webpage (SEPA, to check the air quality as I’m headed to Beijing this weekend) and found it either down, or blocked.
I’ll be charitable and accept the possibility of the former, but something in me doubts it. If it’s the latter, well… damn. Now that’s a nice hearty helping of EPIC FAIL.
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Dear Anonymous Woman at Paul Hastings Law Firm,
You’re incredible. You’re a hero.
You took what would be four years of my cost of living (I know, I know, it’s not the same amount of money for you, but still) — three years of my cost of living with more vacations and meals out — and gave it up to change the world.
I mean really change the world. Not in the butterfly-flaps-its-wings yadda yadda cyclone elsewhere way. More like the butterfly stares the tyrant in the eye and flaps out an immediate storm complete with lightning and category four winds.
Sure, I know $60-70,000 isn’t the same for an attorney as it is for a chronically underemployed writer. I know she’s gambling on what will probably happen, which she has a better shot at than most, being an attorney: which is winning the sex discrimination lawsuit and making that lost money back.
And sure, it was stupid: if I were a powerful law firm that wanted to keep running things without regard to the employment laws passed in the last forty years, I’d have offered someone I screwed over in this fashion at least a million if I wanted a fighting chance at shutting them up.
But even granting lack of altruism on the part of Ms. Anonymous, and lack of competence on the part of the tyrant, I’m still rooting for the girl with the slingshot.
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I remember being a kid and spewing out masses of rudimentary fan-creative kid brain stuff. When I encountered a story, I made other stories based on it, usually transitory ones played out with whatever toys I could get my hands on.
Part of the transition between a blithely unpopular and unaware childhood and a somewhat more socially connected adulthood was the unfortunate realization that not everybody does this. Mind you, to realize that was to go in search of the people who do, so I’ve been surrounded by them all the while, but it always struck me as depressing that creativity was not considered part of the “base set”.
And now that may be changing. See this fascinating bit by Clay Shirky via Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who nicked it from Warren Ellis. Click the link; there’s apparently a video, for those of you who aren’t in China. I read the transcript, and here is one awesome Eureka moment:
(…) In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”
At least they’re doing something.
Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s [sic] message–I can do that, too–is a big change.
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I just signed a contract with a totally kickass literary agent at a reputable agency!
(It was late at night when I asked, so I don’t remember whether it’s OK to post her name. For now, I will play it safe.)
Coy smart-aleck framing tricks fail me. This is purely and simply a fantastic piece of news that I’m finally willing to let out. After some going back and forth and some editing and other goodness, she contacted me with the good news on the day before my birthday, about a week ago. I immediately called the spouse who was awake at the time and whooped wildly into the phone. Then I wrote notes to thank a couple of persons also responsible for improving the quality of The Shadow Parliament — that’s the novel ms. in question — and for putting me in touch with S., the agent. Then I ran across the hallway to snag the other English teacher here for a celebratory birthday dinner at Pizza Hut.
It tasted like winning.
Although I don’t want to reveal too many details (I wish I could more openly thank the person who made an introduction for me, but I think that would expose said person to unwelcome attention) I’ll just say that this chain of events can be traced to the MFA program I attended, both in terms of writing and improving the novel and in terms of getting it out there. I think it helped that I went in with just one expectation: that I would have a solid two years in which to write, and some valuable input from some pretty smart cookies about what I was writing.
I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I’m damn jazzed up about it.
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I’ve come to a fork in the blog.
Part of the difficulty I’ve always had with this particular vehicle for my voice is that it’s attached to my real name; which is attached to my resume, my past, and my future, and to the stories I write, and the places they are, were, and will be printed.
And the thing is, I have no problem letting my ideological views out into the open, or certain quirks of my life with them: these are things people are going to find out anyway, and ones pretty central to my life. Other aspects are a little more problematic. I don’t want every last little detail of my experiences to become so public. And that’s been nagging at me lately. There are things I’d like to have spoken that I didn’t because my name was in the way.
Furthermore, in connection with an exciting announcement I’m going to make soon, my public life might begin to get more attention than it used to.
When I first sat down to write this thing, I sat down to write a blog that’s primarily about microcosms and macrocosms; about personal lives and grand sweeping theories. A captured train of thought, a sort of meta-calling-card — something people could click on when they saw my name in a comment, and visit to find out a little bit more about the author of that comment.
But different areas of interest are pulling my posts in different directions, and I don’t want to give either side short shrift. So, from here on out — my participation in Ye Blogospheric Pub Brawls is going to take another form. The name and nature of that form is confidential, because that’s part of the point, but if you’re someone I’ve participated with in said pub brawls, it won’t be too hard for you to figure out.
So what’s going to be happening along this side of the fork? Basically, a serious change of subject. My first posts were about writing. I’m going to be focusing back in on that. It’s the core of my reason for being here. I’ll be de-linking a lot of people who will then get linked on the other blog, and linking others who haven’t been listed before.
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We are having this English problem.
I’m pretty well attuned to English problems, I think, from being an EFL teacher. Anyway, there is one. It is hanging out on the ceiling like a spider and I want to put a glass over it before it drops.
Unfortunately, “feminism” refers to a group and also to a belief.
I think everyone I’m willing to talk to holds the belief in women’s equality. I’m not even gonna question it. It just strikes me as obvious. I frankly think that if someone didn’t believe in women’s equality, they wouldn’t be reading my blog.
In politics, it’s easy to separate word from group because you usually have a proprietary term for the group. So, if you’re a liberal, you say “I’m a liberal,” and if you’re a liberal in America, you might say “I’m a Democrat,” or you might say, “I’m a liberal, voting Democrat,” “I’m a liberal but I’m sick of the Democratic Party and their bullshit.” Easy-peasy. “Liberal” is the belief word, so you don’t have to toss the baby out with the bathwater.
I imagine that if we had a Liberal Party which passed something over-the-top insane, there’d be a mass exodus from the word, and people wouldn’t know what the hell to call themselves but not that.
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“Feminism” unfortunately has come to mean several things which are mutually imcompatible. For example: That sex workers should have more rights vs. that sex workers should not be allowed to speak up for themselves.
This goes way, way further than the “People’s Front of Judea!” “Judean People’s Front!” problem, I’ve come to realize.
It’s a lexical battle. The word has reached a point in its history where it means two very seriously opposed things, things which can’t be reconciled to each other. (This happens with words sometimes! An afternoon with the OED will uncover some interesting examples. The one everyone always drags out is “nice.”)
Some of us who are deciding whether to keep or abandon the word are essentially laying wagers on what the word will mean in the future. I choose to believe it’ll mean “the idea that women are people”, and identify myself accordingly. If I thought the other way, though, I sure wouldn’t. Just some food for thought.
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