Hangzhou Lovin’

Quick post of a stream of consiouness I had on the way home.

FIrst I was thinking about this post by elfuzz, it’s about the general ennui that post graduates in america feel. I definitly feel the same as him, and it would suck to have people calling me immature, (though of caurse I am). I made this comment about the situation in China and my feelings on the situation.

“five year plans are for communists. Seriously, you don’t often hear chinese people complaining that they don’t know what they want to do with their lives, but you hear americans doing it all the time (i guess that makes fan an american). It’s a good thing though, the chinese don’t complain cuase they don’t have that many options and they are brainwashed into thinkig that a whitecollar job where you have enough money to buy your parents a house is nirvana. I just wish I had a skill I could fall back on if I needed a job, what the fuck did I learn in school? So I know about the interaction of the Neucleus Accumbens and the sertonergic systems, what good does that do me?”

Now that I think about it, in CHina it’s a little more complex. i think a lot of people do feel coflicted over their futures but I don’t think that bitching about it has reached the artform it has in america. i alos think that a lot of people in college feel like they will get a good job, but then get disenchanted with it later on. All in all, it’s not a completly disimilar situation to america for a chinese graduate, but an american has many more choices and the white collar corporate job that I reject my students would kill to have.

Now for some reason that got me thinking about “on the road,” by Keruous and this post at Bokane, which is a wonderful little slice of ex-pat life in china. Someone in the comments section compared the post to “on the road,” but then they had to add the disclaimer that “on the road” is overrated. This is bullshit, I could write a whole nother post on the irony that our ironic generation needs to call a book that practically defined it’s attitude overrated.

Keuroc is our generations Dostoyevky (spelling? I’ll just call him the big D). The Big D’s brilliance was that he he portrayed the imporatance of ideas on society. In russia of his time those were philosophies about politics, utopian politics. The Big D thought that young men’s obbsession with these ideas was very dangerous for society. And with the Bolsheviek revolution and societ union he was proven correct.

Now Keuroc should be read the same way. It should be read as a study of young man reacting to the pressures of ideas. The mistake in analysing keuroc is to analis the philosphy, you need to analyse the interaction of the charecters with philosophy. The philosophy of that time was extientional longing, a feeling that modern life lacked something. This cuased the charecters to become self desturctive in their search for meaning, and if you look at the history of drug abuse and the way that modern youth bitch about how they don’t know what to do when they grom up, Keuroc was right.

Ok so that’s all bullshit, but at least I didn’t use the word “semiotics”.

Syria is likely to have some american military presence in the future, cause f Hez Bollah and guys like this(spelling?). But I doubt there will be a full scale invasion. I wouldn’t comptly rule it out though….

This though thas been bouncing around my mind and tonight was just an exemplery ecample of it so why not share it with you:

Chinese people are incredible nice, but they are not thoughtful.

Tonight I tought an english clas and afterwords I went and had some beers with one of the students. Some dude in his thirties. He was very nice. He wanted to be my friend very much. He paid for everything, and was constantly asking if I was ok. The problem was he was incredably fucking annoying. When he first sw me I was talking to some other friends and he came up and tried to pull me away, I’m talkin gto my friends don’t interuppt me and don’t fucking touch me! All throughout the night he kept trying to force beers and food on me. To him, “help yourself” means “you must eat and drink until you puke.” I tried to give signs that he was pissing me off, for example, when he shoved some chopsticks in my face and told me to “eat, eat” and wouldn’t take them away after I ignored them. I grabbed them quickly and slammed them down angrily on the table. But he just luahged when he did this.

In fact he was always staring at me with this stupid grin on his facce. It’s the same stupid grin onthe faces of all the dumbass’s who say “Halooo” to me every day. I hate that grin.

I don’t want to sound bitter, and it the above statements don’t apply to all chinese people, but the people who it does apply to can ruin your whole night. This guy’s wife is very nice. I wouldn’t mind talking to her for a bit, but it is impossible when the fucker is always shoving his beer in my face saying “cheers, cheers.” One of my german friends was there and he was being even more annoyed, he said he wouldn’t come back to the bar we were at if this guy was there too.

This is what I mean when I say Chinese people aren’t thoughtful (yes I know what a gross generalization that is). A;; this guy wanted to do was to make some foreign friends and have us feel happy in his country, but by his actions he accomplished the opposite. I would be intersted to know if chinese people felt this annoyed with certain american customs. Cause if they are I am going to try my best to educate americans to stop being annoying. I’m not really sure what I can help the Chinese.

This is intersting, I guess China dosn’t want peopel to know about the crazy asian flew going around. Last i heard it is a rabid version of the common cold. It’s kind of strange that normal chinese people know nothing about it and that you never see anything on the news about it. Ahhh the joys of communism.

I’m addicted to this site

I had a littel talk with my class abou the war today, I said that I didn’t like Saddam or Bush. They were shocked, they wanted to know why I didn’t like Saddam. The Chinese people scare the shit out of me sometimes.

As for the war, I have no idea what’s going on. I can’t peice the news reports together as easily as I could yesterday. As I see it our heavy division is waitng it out to fight in Karbala, and maybe the 101st will go around to the west to attack baghdad. I don’t understand what is taking so lon gin Basra? I bet that most of the division there is moving north while a they left a small contigent there to keep the Iraqi contenders in Check. Rumsfield (and Cheney even more) are sneaky bastards and I suspect they are spreading a lot of disinformation right now.

While that’s all utter ninsense.

Goddamit, I’m addicted to this damn war.

“MORE than 15,000 Indonesians have signed up to travel to Iraq and fight the US, the militant Islam Defenders� Front claimed yesterday”

What are these guys gonna do after the war?

Something’s going down in the west of Iraq

postwar Iraq is gonna be FUN!

I’ve basically spent all today checking up on the war news and nursing my black eye (from a “bike accident”… yeah, my story), so I’ve got some thoughts about the war. First of all militarily the US is winning. Things aren’t going perfectly and it would be a lot better if we could have had another heavy division come down from turkey instead of sitting in the meditarianian right now. But the real fight won’t happen until we get to Baghdad. Still militarily we will probagly win pretty easily.

Yet I’m not optimistic for two reasons. First, we are not winning the political battles. Find any newspaper site anywhere in the world outside of the US and it is likely to protray the US as not doing that well, and is likely to emphasize civilian casualties and refugees. Even the US media sources are spinning a pessimistic view after the minor casualties we suffered today. There where about 30-100 casualties today, and there are probably gonna be about the same amountr tommorow and more when we get to Baghdad. What is the Media and the people gonna do when the numbers go up?

Second is how the Iraqi’s are resisting. I’m begining to think that Saddam may be dead or wounded. But that makes the resitance more scary because it means that these people are resisting without orders from above and that even if we capture Baghdad the rest of the country might be a lot harder to pacify than the army has calculated.

Get your war news here

Other shit going on in the world 1. Kashmir 2. Nigeria 3. San Fransico

Unrelated but here is a Great article about philosophy of Alqueda

Here’s the best map I have found of Iraq

Been watching a bit of the chinese news coverage of Iraq and I’d say that Iraq is definitly winning the propagansa war here. The skirmishes that we’ve been seeing today are described as a major setback and all the questions the reporters ask the “experts” that visit are ridicoulosly slanted, like these

“Why havn’t the americans been able to make singnificant advances into Baghdad yet?”
“The chinese media has been focusing on the redugee situation, why dosn’t the american media tell the people about that?”

I fucking hate the chinese media.