Basi Guangnian is Chinese for Buzz Lightyear

I've cut back severely on my drinking during the past month, which has left me with a lot more time, energy and money for useful, productive things. I have lots more energy, especially in the morning, and the massive amounts of tea I've been drinking have helped my creativity. That being said, it was a pretty bad idea to mix four different liquors (beer "啤酒," red wine "红酒," baijiu "白酒" and the previously uncharted jinjiu "金酒," which tastes kind of like brandy) on the one night I set aside for going out. I paid for it today. No amount of forty-kuai tea could help me get through the still unsolved math problems and I haven't looked up any new graduate programs. Nor could it find the location of the hidden rebel base.

I'm not even going to mention my lack of progress on working out because this week has been hot and humid, and I want to forget that it even happened.

I have spent a lot of time practicing my Chinese, which actually isn't that hard to do. I'm pretty introverted, but all I have to do is A) leave my house and B) start talking to someone I don't know. Chances are they speak Chinese. The people working in North Tea City are the best for this as they aren't servers (I'm pretty ace in a restaurant) and spend most of their days sitting around drinking tea and talking about tea. Renato told me that they like hearing funny stories about our foreigner friends, so we went in and made fun of people we knew for an hour or so. I can tell some mostly coherent stories about foreigners saying or doing funny things. It's a good way check how intelligible I am because Chinese people will laugh at almost anything remotely funny that foreigners do or say. Chinese people practice their English by watching Friends, I practice my Chinese by talking about the time Joe and I went to a massage place and they stole our socks. The bastards.

Here's a list of things that have diverted my attention this week:

-Toy Story 3, in Chinese and 3D. Watching American movies with Chinese dubbing is great; since there's a lot of cultural disconnect between English and Chinese, the language is toned down to the point where I can catch maybe 80% of what's being said (except, strangely, for understanding the motivation of the villains; I had the same problem with Avatar and Up). Also, I lost my shit when Buzz started speaking Spanish and everyone in the theater was staring at me. Same for the awesome Star Wars reference. I got a lot more out of the visual gags as the jokes in the dialogue went right over my head.

-Make a cheap DIY smoker out of ceramic pots. Almost all of my cooking in China is limited by space and lack or expense of common cooking appliances from back home. Every time I see something like this, I add it to my imaginary culinary thunderdome, which I will erect on an ancient Indian garbage pit upon my return.

-Why Chinese is so damn hard by David Moser. Great read. Spoken Chinese is actually kind of easy to pick up once you can understand the phonetics. There are very few English cognates, but the grammar is very logical, especially for constructing tenses and asking questions. But you have to learn characters at some point and the only way to do it is through rote memorization. There are few useful tricks for untangling the phonetics or meanings. Take one of the ways to write "police." It's "治安" or "zhian." The second character is a "女" or "nu," meaning woman, with a roof over her head. So sort of like protection for vulnerable people, I guess. It's pronounced "an," which is close enough to "nan," but nothing in the character suggests how the pronunciation should change with the addition of the radicals. And someone told me that in this case, it's actually read right to left, so "anzhi." The first character is a something with a water radical (the three lines to the left), although now that I'm looking at it it's two lines with a person radical underneath them. 不知道. People have been pushing for years for the adoption of a writing system that makes logical and phonetic sense, but that will never happen. First of all, national pride or something. Second, characters are essential for conveying meaning in a language as linguistically diverse as Chinese. They not only help differentiate between the thousands of words in Mandarin that have similar pronunciations with vastly different meanings, they also make communication possible for people speaking the hundreds of dialects of Chinese.

And in case you're wondering, I suck at reading and writing characters. I get almost all of my characters from Google translate. I'm going to install a pinyin input one of these days, but most of you could do this at home.

-Random quote from Linda, our marketing manager, of the day: "Joe, he can't be a gay. He showed me his dance moves and they were excellent. Also, he dresses very well."

Dirty Tea Towels

I guess Wednesday is as good a day as any to engage in a little self-flagellation and record my progress. Excuses abound for my dismal performance this week.

I've given up on drinking full time and have cut down drastically on my social life, but the quality of my work isn't really something I can sacrifice to accomplish the rest of my goals. Summer teaching started yesterday and I'm still tackling it with tea-fueled fury. I drank four cups of 信阳毛尖 tea before class this morning and unleashed a barrage of devastating Expo English on my unsuspecting second-graders. Oh boy we had fun. Two more hours with them tomorrow, and on top of planning for that lesson I have a Life Club tonight (sort of a "teach whatever to whoever shows up" class). My weekday first-grader class has double for the summer, so I have to write two lesson plans for them a week and I still haven't planned my six classes this weekend. The elephant in the room is the huge pile of ungraded papers (starting from a month or two before I went back to Denver) that I need to burn through with a red pen before my impending parents meetings. Monday I decided I was going to stay in the office and work through lunch on Tuesday. I was hungry on Tuesday so I went home to eat, telling myself I'd get cracking on Wednesday. Today I went to Renato's house and went home for lunch again and I really have no honest idea when all of this is going to get done. Probably Friday, which sucks because it's my only day off and that's when I wanted to get to all of the other stuff I'd been procrastinating.

It's been hot as hell this week, so I haven't lifted or ridden my bike or even done much walking. Just crossing the street turns my head into a sweat hydrant. The lazy fat kid voice inside of me is convinced that there's something fundamentally wrong with working out with the air conditioner on and the human side of me refuses to turn off the air conditioner. It's a nasty little impasse.

I did get to some math on Monday and I spent a lot of yesterday picking up useful Chinese and practicing using my modals, so not all is lost. Tomorrow I do actually need to get ahead on work work so I can spend Friday looking through schools, catching up on some international dev. reading, mathifying (still stuck on that one problem) and drinking borderline unhealthy amounts of tea.

Photo by peruisay

There's a mission statement in here somewhere

Welcome to my blog. Hopefully it's longer lived than the last few I've started and abruptly stopped. One constituted semi-drunken rants about things that pissed me off in China (mostly foreigners). My good friend Renato and I were going to start a blog dedicated to making fun of foreign journalists and their awkward attempts at covering China, but we got stuck on coming up with a good name.

This blog isn't really dedicated to anything specific, which might just give it some legs. I'm going to use it as a way to publicly collect my thoughts and keep track of the projects I've started now that I'm in my second year teaching in China. Among them:

-Researching graduate programs in international development, economics and development economics.

-Reacquainting myself with higher math, specifically what I'll need in an econ grad program.

-Improving my Chinese. I want to become semi-literate (at least reading and typing) and more conversational.

-Working towards a healthy body and healthy mind. Insane amounts of tea and my trusty weight machine are my starting points.

Along the way I'll also be discussing the ups and downs of the newfound more sober me, China, development, teaching, my awesome bike (it's awesome...you'll see), cooking and whatever else crosses my mind. Comments and feedback are way welcome.

Also, anyone interested in ESL teaching in China should check out Renato's awesome blog.

Math Homework of the Day 1

Fifteen to twenty-one year old me hated math. It was a function of me liking things that came easily, like English and French and politics and primate diversity (fuck yeah monkeys!), and I'm sorry to say that it took two or three years working for a living for me to understand the value of hard work. It's pretty embarrassing, but now I've changed. I swear. It's sort of the reason I started this bloggy thing: to keep tabs on myself and my productivity.

It's sort of like the three years in college where I tried to convince myself I was too punk rock to follow any sport other than European futball. Thank FSM the Broncos sucked then, but I missed out on some great sports moments (save for me playing NFL ambassador to a packed pub of British students for Super Bowl XXXIX) in the name of commiserating with my one futbol friend about the (once) awesome blackness of Thierry Henry.

The main difference is that I took a three-year hiatus from following sports (something I loved) because I wanted to be cool, but an eight year break from math (minus a required undergrad algebra module) because I hated it and convinced myself that it was worthless for my future career as a writer. It's the reason that architecture appealed to me when I was younger: I could make cool stuff and not bother with hard math, right? But somewhere along the way I decided that I wanted to go into development studies, and some time after that I decided that an economics PhD was the best route. After some quick research, I realized that I have almost no credentials to get into an econ PhD program, but am pretty well qualified for an MA or MS program in development studies, and can cross-study in econ while there.

Thus, one of my new projects is learning Mathematics for Economists by Carl P. Simon and Lawrence Blume, all nine-hundred or so pages of it. I never made it past trig in high school, so this should be a fun adventure, and I'll be posting any successes and [probably more of my] failures. It's like learning a new language, only with more mental blocks and fewer applications in my (current) daily life.

So, with that lengthy introduction, here's what I'm currently stuck on:

In economic models, it is natural to assume that total cost functions are increasing functions of output since more output requires more input, which must be paid for. Name two more types of functions which arise in economics models and are naturally increasing functions. Name two types of such functions that are naturally decreasing functions. Name one type that would probably change from increasing to decreasing.

(Simon & Blume 15-16)

Hmmm....can't cheat with Google. This isn't economic, but according to my future doctor friend Paul, lifting weights longer than forty minutes to an hour per session can cause your muscles to start breaking down and cannibalizing themselves. So maximum output would increase until forty minutes where it would start to level off and start decreasing after an hour of lifting. I imagine the graph wouldn't be a perfect x^2 asymptote, but something like that. I just tried to write it down and only managed to confuse myself. I'll give this another college try tomorrow, armed with more tea.