Me: “At least Smooch’s wife will get a lot of money.” Tutor: “Wouldn’t he have made her sign something beforehand?” Me: “I guess, but I think the judge won’t like him.”
I can’t listen to music or podcasts while biking (I’d get run over) so my new thing is to learn how to freestyle by rapping about the random shit that’s happening, confident in the fact that no-one has any clue what I’m saying.
I went to a ‘foreign-y’ bar with all these Dutch and Belgian beers. Half of them had fake labels. I asked the bartender for her favorite beer, and she pointed to the Corona.
My new tutor’s name is Helen, and she had no idea who Helen of Troy was, so for two hours I was the Chinese Homer and told the first chunk of the Iliad to her.
Chinese Things
I used the food delivery app for the first time. I such a hard time talking over the phone with the delivery guy that I eventually ran down five stories and found someone on the street to talk to him. He turned out to be around the corner.
In the Chinese government article criticizing Trump’s tweets about North Korea, they didn’t refer to him by name but instead kept saying “some people….” They also used a ton of idioms. My favorite was instead of calling him a liar saying that he was 颠倒黑白 or turning “upside down black white.”
It rains every day in Guilin. When it rains, the sidewalks get incredibly slippery. I asked someone why they chose this material, and got an answer, obvious in retrospect, “because it’s cheap!”
Eating at lunch one day at a nice-ish restaurant (an $8 meal) they put this hourglass on my table that said 35 minutes. I was pissed, thinking that this was the time limit for me to finish my food, but after all my dishes had come, they took it away. Later my tutor explained that any food that came after the timer expired would be free.
I coined my first Chinese word. 单身狗 is a “single dog” or single person. I was messing around trying to do this trick shot where you do a forehand around your body. I called it the 单身狗球 or “single person’s shot” because you’re kind of hugging yourself while you hit it.
See here if you’re curious about Chinese Pop. The mere-exposure effect is powerful–after trashing this last week I gave some of these songs another shot and after a few listens it’s tolerable. The rotation is small enough that now I’m starting to recognize some cafes’ playlists.
There’s an air force base nearby whose fighters make sonic booms all the time.
China as Prison is China as Concussion?
When I was describing my life to my sister said it sounded a lot like concussion living. While that’s not quite accurate, I would say that the recovery arc more than anything else prepared me for this summer. Before I couldn’t go a day without seeing people, and now I’m much more comfortable with extended periods of being alone. Further, over the course of my recovery, I had to spend 4+ hours a day doing boring therapies. Through that process, I developed a higher tolerance for boring stuff and learned how to build routines. This has proven especially important in the beginner phase of language learning when I have to learn boring but essential things I’m not particularly interested in.
A Personal Best
After I had lost my first job after college, I started lifting to kill time. I stuck with it because it was fun to push myself to my physical limit and have one part of my life where progress was so concretely defined. I’ve been using an app to track my lifts and by the end of 2015 was halfway decent. The day before I had my concussion, I set personal bests in the squat and deadlift.
In May 2016, five months after I hit my head, I made it back into a gym and fainted trying to lift half of what I could before. My nervous system, overloaded just by walking down the street, couldn’t come close to handling the strain of weights. So, I didn’t start training again until this year. Progress was much slower than back in 2013-5, as I had to rebuild my neurons as much as my muscles.
Many of my concussion symptoms were infuriatingly hard to measure. No matter how many times doctors asked me to, putting a 1-10 number on ‘fatigue,’ ‘nausea’ or ‘mood’ was a fool’s errand. Those December 2015 max lifts were the most tangible benchmarks I had of pre-concussion Jordan.
In January, still too susceptible to nausea to jog for more than a minute at a time, I started lifting again (first deadlift: 40lbs x 10). And this Thursday, eight months and fifty workouts after I made it back to a gym, feeling like Vinny Paz in his basement, I finally bested one of those December 2015 lifts.
My Guilin
went to a brewery…
I spend alot of time studying in cafes saying random Chinese words aloud. When I see someone else playing the big iphone game (a mobile League of Legends clone), to take breaks I ask them if they want to play with me. In this cafe, two sisters started telling secrets about me. Way more polite than just most adults who speak openly to each other about me!
I survived the grumpy face C safety grade restaurant. 
Bootleg Donald Kagan
Bob Dylan lyrics books sold in potato chip bags.
Converse soles as wall decor.
The clubs have no dancefloors, just these tables where it’s apparently cool to play a billiards game at 1:00am.