Hangzhou Lovin’

oh yeah I got gmail, google’s new email service, it kicks ass so my new address is ahickey@gmail.com, please update accordingly

A cliche about any exotic country is that it is “a land of many paradoxs,” but I think it does apply to china quite well. There are countless times when I’m in china, I see some crazy shit, the what the fuck look comes on my face and I leave the scene totally baffled. So I’m figured I’d start a little series called, Paradoxs of China, here is a prelimary list of some of the ones that have caught me unexpectedly, (and yes I know that these aren’t all strictly paradoxs, but they provoke some short of cognitive dissonance in me (I also know that these are gross generalizations but if you have a blog and aren’t making gross generalizations you are missing the point*);

China is the only country i know of were a simple “Hello,” can lead to violent action in the most peaceful laowai around.

Chinese people are incredably friendly but aren’t considerate. This leads to things like people with fish allergy’s being invited to gigantic seafood feasts, or constant sitting the foriegner in bitch just so he gets the honor of sitting in the car first. (in my short stint in japan, it seemed like they were somewhat the opposite, at least when not drunk, very considerate but not that friendly)

I spend an hour at lesat every other day studying chinese, (ok maybe everythree days), but I can’t even get a proper haircut, let alone talk about the metaphysics of malthusian discontent like I want to, but every chinese person I know can speak the language! How they do it baffles me. It must be an instinct or something.

Chinese people can’t speak english for shit, even though many of them spend upwards of ten years studying it in school. If you’ve spent any time in America, you know that over there even the most dull witted Jeff Gordon fan’s can mumble for hours about the metaphysics of engine modifications required at Daytona, yet the chinese can’t even answer a simple “how are you doing?”.**

Chinese people are supposedly “Very shy” and don’t like to “show off in front of crowds,” yet even if helen keller was chinese, if she passed in front of a Karoke parlor, she wouldn’t be able to stop running up to the mike and grunting out the latest ” A mei” single that’s on the top of the charts.***

Chinese people go to bars pay 50 kuai for a shitty warm carona, when they could just buy a 5 kuai bottle of qingdao twice as big for 4 kuai at the corner store just down the street, and the wierdest thing is that the Laowai do it too!

What’s up with chinese characters? I thought hieroglyphics went out with the pharohs.

Chinese people don’t have sex, but there are fucking 1.4 billion of them!

Chinese people drink water and beer warm, (ok I’m stretching here…)

China is one of the safest countries I’ve ever lived in, but people are always scared about my safety. I’ve been told to always stay awake on trains for fear of having my stuff stolen. I have these crazy for prong triple deadbolt locks on my door that could keep sasquatch out of my house. Shit, I want to go where the bad part of town, if only someone would tell me where it is.

chinese people drive as slow as possible on their bikes but as fast as possible in cars or trucks.

Chinese people don’t know shit about china. Ask a chinese person where something is in there city 50% chance you will get a wrong direction. I was in an airport in japan and there was a sign for a departure to haikou, now hai kou is a very chinese sounding name, so I asked the well dressed chinese business man next to me where it was, he said there wasn’t any such city in china. But I’ve actually met someone who lived in haikou, I guess it’s on this magic island with monkeys next to the spratlys, (which everyone knowns are part of china, malaysia get your hands off!).

The bigger the fingernail, the better the sex.

Even though china stole all these jobs from america, there still are all these people doing all these shitty jobs like digging ditches and working in smelly factories and massaging sweatly old taxi drivers. I mean get with the picture losers, there are stil like a billion stock brokers in america, that’s a way better job, so why don’t you get with it and steal it!.

allright, I’m tired and not coherent, so tomorrow I’ll tell you the central paradox of china!

*the greeks are all incompetent and have goat cheese breath

**most common answer, “to my dorm.”

***Ok I know that sentence is really convuluted but I really wanted to get the Helen Keller reference in.

sinosplice, where hath you gone?

An article about John Kerry’s service in vietnam and his anitwar efforts after he got home in the NY times

I’m mainly a Kerry supporter because I detest G.W. bush, but the one thing that makes me have hope that he is actually an honest and stand-up guy is his record in vietnam and his record as a war protester.

first of all, he volunteered to go to namm when he could have used his connections to take an easy way out, (e.g. GW Bush), He seems to have done his job there, even if it meant doing things that he didn’t like.

After he served honourbly in the war, he was independant enough to reflect on his experiance and come to the conclusion that the war was the wrong thing to do (which in hindsight was clearly the case). Think about how hard it must have been to have given up two years of your life and then conclude that those years were given up to an unjust cause…

After that Kerry seemed to be a rare sane voice in the antiwar movement (I have zero respect for SLA fuckers who wanted to kills cops and take over the goverment, Kerry clearly wasn’t one of them). His message was the same one we should be hearing more these days “How do you ask a man to be last man to die for a mistake?”

It sickens me to see supposedly “patriotic” rightwingers attack Kerry’s past in Vietnam. Like any vietnam vetern he sacrificed a tremndous amount for his country. Just because you don’t agree with his politics dosn’t change any of that.

It shows the shalowness of bush supporters, they will pick up any bloody shirt they need for support and will spit on the grave of anyone who might contridict their grand vision.

Well, John told me to do this, and since I can’t say no to peer pressure

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

decartes error by Antonio Damasio

“The uncertainties of this conjecture were obvious”

hmmmm

ummm 我要用中文，因为我没有想法用英文。我夏天的计划时回国在六月28号回来中国七月20好。（我学习些子的意思是“初的月，”“中的月”“低的月”，不过我玩了怎么说。。。） yi后回来中国我干什么都不知道。（这个句子是不准，但不肯告诉你们。）

我要去见我的朋友elffuzz。他去北京工作在一个法鲁公司。我没看到北京的夏天。我也要去中国西边，可是天气很热。

我也需要找工作。我觉得当老师一点无聊。我bu知道在那里找到别的工作，你们可以告诉我如果你就找到工作对我合适。

哦，上个星期日时我的生日。我不要特别舞会。星期六我们去一个酒吧。我们的朋友都很好人。他们买我很多酒。我们去个酒吧叫”U2″里面有一个音乐队。他们表演石和滚。他们的努力是很高,很多人桌子上面跳舞.

没有人给我里屋…你们知道我喜欢吃东西,我会很高兴如果你就给我好吃的东西…

哎哟,我的中文太差的.我不会说,我的声特别不对,怎么办?

?

America should just abandon this whole democracy thing and let google run the country.

Page rank can make our decisions for us

Free Porn For Everyone!

If there is something that really pisses me off it’s how The U.S. treats foriegners trying to work in our country. Here is an article about the backlog at the INS. In it there is a story about a swedish Vice President at some banking firm had to wait 7 monthes to get her reentry visa for the states. In china I had to wait 2 weeks. It really makes me ashamed of our country. But it makes us safer blah blah blah. Hire the extra people to get it done. As the story makes it clear, this hurts our economy and fucks peoples lives up.

I knew this girl in Henan who wanted to go to america to go to unvirsity. She had the money to go to the University. She got accepted by the University, her English was excellent, she was close friends with several professors from the University who had visited China, but when she went to the american embassy they turned her down. Why? They thought she was too young, not serious enough about her studies and one of them had the audacity to tell her that maybe she was just going to america to get an American boyfriend.

I hope that none of those arbitary and insulting reasons were the real reason why they didn’t let her in. I suspect that it was because the state and immigration department are underfunded and understaffed and don’t have the time to deal with all the applications. This is no excuse however as it seems that countries like Canada and Australia do a fine job of it. The whole thing makes me ashamed to be an american.

OK so I spend way to much time online, (note time stamp), and this is the kind of shit I do: Listen to old 8 bit nintendo midis. It is amazing how well I remember these songs, but I probably did spend a year of my life playing varoius games on that list. My favoriters are Dr. mario, Double Dragon I and II and Dragon warrior. (Though the midi remix of the dragon warrior theme song sucks, in the original game it was a lot faster, it sounds like funeral music instead of the slime ass kicking music it origanlly was.)

In other news, The housing bubble in america is about to burst!. This article is pretty convincing. This phenomon dosn’t make me too sanguine about the future.

“home buyers camping out overnight for the chance to be the first in the next morning’s open house, ready to buy $700,000 houses in built-out, lush-lawned suburbs like Arlington. The phenomenon has created temporary, yuppie tent cities. The story’s authors interviewed several buyers in the tented line who planned to sell their purchases back into a steadily rising market, and concluded, dryly: “There is an element of speculation to the lines.”"

So where should I put my money? Fixed rate bond fund thingy’s, noregian sheckls, cowerie shells?