Currently Reading The Road to Serfdom By F. A. Hayek see related

Dispatch from the Irony Department

Much Belated Update

Yes, I am still alive.  Unfortunately, my computer is not.  On Wednesday night, the IBM Thinkpad that served me faithfully for the greater part of seven years entered into a deep sleep from which it never awoke.  I can't say that its passing caught me completely by surprise, but somehow I just thought it would always be there for me.  Alas, I never even got the chance to say goodbye.  I understand now that electronic life is here and gone like a vapor and we ought never to take our hardware for granted.  We should cherish every moment we spend together, for someday soon those days will be over forever.  My friends tell me to upgrade, but they don't understand.  No computer could take the place of my beloved Thinkpad.  We have so many memories together: photos, word documents, pronunciation inventory spreadsheets that Danny Yu will never see, and a record winning streak of 282 games of Free Cell.  I've never been good at letting go, but perhaps it is time I moved on with my life and pursued a new relationship.  Then again, I was the one who refused to give up hope when my cell phone was kidnapped and eventually we were tearfully reunited.  Perhaps this story will also have a miraculously happy ending.  At this time of year, I naturally place my hope in the resurrection, but somehow I doubt that the gift of rebirth offered at Easter extends to laptops.  So it goes.  Rats.

On a lighter note, here's a picture of me getting blood drawn.

I have unusually small veins that make blood extraction an excruciatingly difficult process.  For some reason, my blood work is always successfully completed much more quickly in China than it is in the States.  I prefer to get my physicals done on this side of the pond.  The only downside is that this year they didn't give me an ultrasound.  True story.

My Dirty Laundry

Living, as I do, in the former Chang Ping campus clinic, I do not have immediate access to laundry facilities.  The girls' dorm does have two functioning washing machines and so I decided to borrow Joy's laundry card in order to wash my clothes.  TIP teachers are a busy lot and are kept occupied with duties and errands throughout the day, so coordination of efforts can become difficult.  I took a duffel bag full of dirty laundry over to the girls' dorm during the lunch hour but Joy wasn't around, nor anyone else.  I didn't feel like carrying the bag of clothes all the way back to the clinic so I just left it on the floor between the washing machines and the sink, figuring that nobody would try to steal my dirty, filthy, stinky laundry.  Sometimes, I do not exercise the best judgment.

Not surprisingly, I didn't make it back to the girls' dorm until that night.  By then, Joy was there but my clothes were not.  I realized that the wastebasket was also on the floor between the washing machines and the sink and feared that someone had mistaken my duffel bag for garbage and thrown it away.  This was a possibility that had not occurred to me.  I felt stupid.  However, what had actually happened was a possibility that could not possibly have occurred to me.

Jessie tracked down the cleaning lady, who had been in the dorm when I left my clothes there and must have known that they belonged to me.  She directed me to the laundry room closet, where I had already searched for my clothes in vain.  It turns out that a large, grey mass that I had mistaken for a cloth bag was actually a pair of my athletic shorts with all of my dirty socks and underwear stuffed inside.  Underneath that was a black plastic garbage bag which contained my duffel bag and the rest of my clothes.  A plastic shopping bag was hanging from one of the water pipes in the closet; this contained four of my shirts.  Disappointment at my own airheadedness quickly changed to outright disgust at the actions of the cleaning lady.  She had taken it upon herself to go through my dirty laundry, separating out all the socks and underwear and stuffing them inside my shorts (for some inscrutable reason that I don't care to analyze) and disposing of the rest in a garbage bag in the closet.  True story.  I think next time I will go to the laundromat.

Of Mice and Men

The following anecdote lends new meaning to the term "rodent problem".

Okay, so I'm walking down the street in downtown Chang Ping with my fellow TIPsters.  Hee Sung is out in front as we make our way to the internet cafe (but not the one I'm in right now).  Something small rolls across the sidewalk in front of him.  No big deal, right?  Probably just a piece of trash, which is nothing out of the ordinary in a Chinese city.  But no, this is no ordinary piece of refuse.  It's a dead mouse.  Obviously, dead rodents don't do much moving on their own (except in Louis Sachar books) so this one must have had a little help.  Sure enough, we look over to our right and find a group of men standing behind the bushes and laughing at us.  We're not talking about some teenage punks here; these were middle-aged men who somehow decided that there would be nothing funnier in the world than to toss a dead mouse at a group of foreigners.  True story.

Now, the dead rodent was bad enough.  Seriously, don't they know that that's how the plague spreads?  Why were they even carrying around a dead mouse in the first place?  But what really makes me seethe is that they didn't even have the sense of mind to turn tail and run away as soon as we saw them.  They just stood there laughing their heads off.  Honestly, it's the lack of respect that hurts the most.

A word to the wise (and the foolish, if they'll listen):  Don't welcome visitors to your city by chucking dead mice at them.  It's just common courtesy.

Hello, Cruel World