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."