Meditations

So I woke up on Day 3,
after having a very uncomfortable night-time bathroom experience
featuring a Chinese squatter toilet (read: hole in the ground) and a receipt I happened to have in my wallet...

So I was thinking bout "missing home."
While I'm here in Xi'an,
I periodically get a pang where I miss my nice home in Shanghai,
where I know where everything is and where to get good food and where I know some people.

But then while I'm in Shanghai,
periodically wonder what it would be like to be home at NYU,
with all my buds and Bobst and Washington Square and the whole deal.

But while I'm there I periodically want to go home,
and sleep in my own bed, see my family, and eat home food.
Except if I spend too much time there, I start to lose my mind.

So, These places are real,
but I also see them almost entirely through the lens of my memory,
as if these places are in my head.

Then which is "home"? Are any of them? Is my sense of comfort and at-ease just so completely fractured that no matter which one I'm at I'll always need something from another place? I always have to keep moving as I get my fill of one place and need what another can offer?

Or maybe the only home is when I'm on the road, with my backpack and my own mind for company?

The Life Chinese at Twenty-something

SO
Why has it been so long since your last post?
have your forgotten about your loyal readership?

Of course I havent!
Ive just been so busy making blog-worthy stories
that I havent had the time to tell them!

WELL!
Where to start?
I bought a bicycle for 150RMB (=20 bucks)...
Traffic laws are almost nonexistent in this country, and anyone can cut off anyone at any time,
regardless of lights or lines or one-way signs,
ANYWAY there are tons of bicycles out and about, old women and young men and people in suits and everyone... SO
I was going up onto a highway when my bike's chain broke and I almost spilled right in front of a bus.

YAY!!!
So I walked my now useless bike back to the store where I was able to argue in chinese until they fixed it. I made it halfway home before my right pedal fell off. Back to the store.
A week later I was brave enough to take my bike out for a spin one more time...this time the chain broke as I was pulling out of my Uni...they laughed at me when I went back to the store, but I still argued a brand new chain out of them (since I purposely broke the old chain extra badly so they couldnt try to fix it.)

GOOD TIMES!!
Bikes get stolen extremely often here,
but I wouldnt wish this one on my worst enemy. Pic coming soon.

Now I'm going to go have dinner with this chinese girl I met at a club Friday. I'm treating her to KFC, which is a very acceptable date restaurant here in china.... Soooooo more news later!

Doodles from class

Well classes have begun.
I've started drawing again.

Here are my latest doodles.

This is what I learned today in Intro to Marketing
And this is what I learned today in Intro to Global Negotiations.
Stern Classes are retarded.


And this is a dream I had where I'm in an aquarium and Chinese people came to watch me.

In other news:
Batman the animated Series is currently blowing my mind.
Its been a while since I've purposely held off on watching episodes
for the first time
just to savor the awesomeness of a series.

And may have found a nice girl who likes me too.
Time will tell...

TWO POSTS IN TWO DAYS?!!? CRAZY!!!

So I'm drunk,
and its 3 am shanghai time.

I just got back from a club.

I. Hate. Clubs.

They're like every bar mitzvah I never enjoyed.
Why can't one person go up to another in the street and say
"hey, you're cute, and if you're interested I would like to have sex with you."
What would be so wrong with that?

Instead, we have a multi-billion dollar a year industry called "clubbing"
which involves very loud, bad music, seizure inducing colored light craziness,
and evil sex dancing
which isn't dancing,
and isn't sex.

Fuck. that. Shit.

I just got back from a club.
A girl I thought was way into me but wasn't that pretty,
but was cute, and tres cool, and I was worried I'd hook up with,
turns out to be a full-fledged lesbian,
complete with long distance gal-friend.

I danced with some girl from my progrm who lives in off campus housing,
who we on-campusers dont see that often,
but she seemed a little too interested in taking those crazy
ridiculous
self-held digital camera photos,
and I just didn't have the energy to invest in
2 more hours dancing to maybe get a number,
maybe get invited back to her place,
so I said I'd be right back and
never was.

Then when I came back to see if maybe it wasn't so bad this time,
I was hailed by this group of too good to be true
gorgeous brasilian women.
They were really, really, beautiful,
very tan with very blue eyes.

Within 40 seconds of sitting down,
one of them put my hand on another one's breast.
They both looked at me.
The one I was sitting next to started making out with me,
and then squeezed my crotch.
So we were all making out, and I was getting felt up.
And thought, drunk as I was: This cannot be real.

So then we start making out.
"What are you doing here in Shanghai?"
"I'm a student at __University! What are you doing here?"
"I'm an escort."
"...oh.......uh...I'm a student, I have no money." and I make to get up.
She holds me down literally by my crotch,
makes out with me,
and says
" you dont need money to have a girl"

Maybe she was not lying,
maybe I could have just gone with the flow,
and made it happen tonight.

Instead, I went home.

Right? Wrong?
I dont think I'll ever know.

Travel Blog China: GO!

This is Shanghai.
Tomorrow Evening I am getting on a plane,
and will see this out my window by early Friday morning.

I am in Shanghai technically to study and be all awesome future ambition man.
But the grades are supposed to be easy,
everything is ridiculously cheap,
and you get attention just for being white.

So I get the inkling that I'll be having crazy adventures.
And since the chance to re-live them is a quarter the reason you had them in the first place,
I've decided to record my thoughts and impressions of my adventure abroad.

Also I just listed "Travel Blogging" as a hobby on a scholarship app,
so I think I'm morally bound to blog now anyway...

And it'd be the coolest thing to have a personal peanut gallery,
so comments are very welcome.

Hope you enjoy it!

~A Twentysomething

STONER MONOLOGUES CH. 2

The Stoner Monologues Ch.2
Nature in My Own Backyard:
This is the view from a footbridge where I smoke all the time with the ducks.
I just watch them, they don't care about me.
Every now and then one of them quacks, but in vibrato
a drawn out quack-quack-quaaaaaaack

It always reminds me of someone laughing.
So the ducks are having a good time too.



The bottom picture is a drawing I did from memory at home of the mental snapshot I had meant to take. Clearly, 10 megapixel cameras have the advantage.

Why go to the wild?
Well I just saw Into the Wild which,
despite its horrid length and unbearably Vedder soundtrack,
had an affect on me.

The beautiful nature shown in the movie is inspirational,
set so closely to contrast with man's
individual struggle for survival.
Helps you feel how you were made.
Viewing the behavior of modern humans
can be much more meaningful if one remembers
how we are all hard-wired,
what evolution has taught us over the years.
Our own psychology.

I got to China on Wednesday!

~the Twentysomething

Space Ballet

A Space Ballet

STONER MONOLOGUES Ch. 1

THE STONER MONLOGUES

CH. 1

"But there are no missions. Once you realize there are no missions you feel wonderful."
-Tomas, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Life the RPG.

I decided today to add plus 2 cancer points and -.01% total brain processing power loss. Listened to the radio for +12 to Jazz listening, +3 to average Jazz enjoyment level.

CANCER 2194
JAZZ LIK 10489
JAZZ LIS 30823
Brain Speed: 937400 -.01 = 937399.99 neurons/milisecond

Good stuff.

So I had ideas.

Big'uns. And lil'uns.

Mugs.

I won't drink at any Cafe that doesn't offer me a mug that was washed and will be washed again.

Old School solid earth tones ceramic, preferably.

Thank you.

There must be an imprint,

somewhere in my brain,

when I visualize something. Or when

I hold a song,

thats been stuck in my head all day,

paused, at a certain point,

If I am a determinist,

which I am,

then I must believe there is some physical,

and reliably intelligble mental picture

of something seen, or a mental aural note.

You cannot sing a chord.

But you can think one.

Only.

It's kinda cool.

Try to reproduce the sound of a chord in your own voice.

So,

Me and my siblings unionized today.

Under the tyranny of my OCD, overprotective, Jewish parents,

me, my 16 yr old sister and my 8 yr old brother

realized we held majority stake in the family,

and instituted a hostile takeover.

Suspecting our plot,

my father texts the lot of us,

"Are you guys planning a coup."

and we look at each other,

agree on what to say,

and text back, in unison

On two Blackberrys and a Nokia Candy Bar:

"It's too late. We already changed the locks."

Though becca sent "...the lucks." instead. by accident.

All this while we're out to dinner with his money.

And my sis says:

"You know, all we have to do,

is say we're doing something together,

and we can get Dad to pay for it."

OMFG.

OMFG.

My sister! She figured it out.

And make no question about it sometimes I

feel so strongly

trapped between two lives,

and I'm fast forgetting which one is real life,

and which is just all the bullshit.

I can't see how my lfie is gonna end up.

I guess my general life plan is to be so incredibly successful that they won't even be able to hate me for marrying a convert.

Hopefully...

And thats my life.

And I could ditch all that. My whole family,

since, if you have one life,

and only one life,

you HAVE to do what you think is best ALL the time.

Returnability.

Just finished the Unberable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

"Continental"

was the first review I heard of it,

before reading.

Kind of, yeah.

We are the Luckiest human beings who ever lived.

Really.

I would not rather live in any historical but the teeming tomorrow.

I live now. Now is ideal.

Humans like me have never lived this well.

and thats a fact.

We are in the Upper quartile of the

richest

and most

powerful,

society,

in the history of Man.

MANKIND.

Countries are IN OUR MINDS!

THERE ARE NO LINES ON THE GROUND!

WE MADE THOSE OURSELVES!!!
REALLLLY!!!!

NObody put that there.

Natural boundaries are natural.

That should be all.

Why hate?

~The Twentysomething

**************************************

"I found nature in my own backyard..."

next time,

on THE STONER MONOLOGUE Ch. 2

Love in Manhattan

Just saw Manhattan By Woody Allen.
Woke me up.
Saw people just living, trying to make the social thing work in a tough city.

Well, now I believe Manhattan is a liveable city.
So I'm being friendly. And making friends.
And its working.
I can feel my hard cold image of the city thaw all around me.

So my friend drags me to the Blue Note for some jazz. Its some fun stuff. In a good mood I notice the waitress is the same one from New Years. And I mention it and she thinks I'm hitting on her, and I was really just trying to sound like a regular so she would accept my ID. It says I'm 25. Yeah right.

Anyway, she believes Im 25 and hits on me the whole show.
I suspected she did it wth everyone.
But not so. Just me.

So after the show she told me to come back in a half hour for her number.
I did,
and she turned around while just getting off work,
at the end of her shift,
putting her coat on, making for the door,
and she sees me waiting by the entrance,
eye contact, smiles,
very romantic.

After I find out I wont be wisked immediately by her to her apartment,
I admit that I am only 20. She is extremely surprised.
I guess I do look older.

I find out later she, L, is 26 yrs old.
She is black and waitressing while waiting for her big break as
an actress, her true career path.
and from Baltimore.

I am a White Jewish Male who goes to NYU,
Aged 20 years to perfection.
From Long Island.

We start talking, and I'm the academic and she's the one whose about feelings
and she brings up religion talk right away
and listen
for a kid my age I have dealt with a tremendous amount of existential philosophy.
And I have seriously thought out most any God question thrown my way.
So I impress. And I can laugh. Thank you Woody.

So she drives me to the station.
I invent a train I need to catch,
my excuse to not spend any more money on this evening
if it wasnt ending at her place.
She offered to drive me to Penn,
but we got there one minute after the imaginary time,
so I had to invent ANOTHER train,
a half hour later,
so for 25 minutes we chatted in her car. And I won her over.
We have a date tomorrow...
Good stuff.

And now I love Rhapsody in Blue.

The World Lately

So I think I may not feel
so damn lonely anymore.

I think I know I can make friends now.
Even in the city.

All your feelings,
your thoughts and perceptions...
everything you are,
is a series of binary neurons with two positions,
on or off. Firing in tandem and in an observable way,
Create a fabric, an OS, a Windows program,
on which you run your body, using your brain's impulses as commands.
Constantly receiving and exchanging information with the body as well.
It is just electricity. Pleasure is just electrical stimulation of the right part of the brain.
We know how to do that.
We can hook you up with a pleasure button directly to your head.
For science. We've done it on monkeys.
They will push the pleasure button,
and ignore food,
until they starve to death.
Brain pleasure center stimulation is what its allllll about for them.

I'm recently coming to terms with the fact,
that I live towards the upper end,
of one of the richest countries
in the history... of.... the... world.

I am one of the luckiest human beings ever to exist,
out of all the homo sapiens to ever walk the Earth!

Just lucky I was born in a year further along
in the development of my species!

Nature has created us.
It is really the Mother,
something sensed by Man since time immemorial.

Evolution shaped us,
and evolution is about adaptations to the environment.
Evolution is about growing into the Earth,
reconnecting, and yet,
it is also about growth.

We have grown out of the Earth,
We are dark haired for hunting reasons.
Our Brains are ye big for survival purposes.
One day a brain was born and realized it could remember and transfer ideas,
using a newly developed communication system,
and our modern society was born.

All products of our society,
our art, our media, our music, our literature,
our time off, the fact that we like swimming,
and hamburgers, and berries and whipped cream,
Its all because the Earth shaped us that way. And so
Sonic the Hedgehog, a lightning fast blue hedgehog (?)
who looks nothing like a hedgehog,
fighting robotic impersonations of nature,
a clear illustration of the uncanny barrier and fear,
built deep into the psychology of modern man.

The Earth also bore a creature like us
who like horror films. Roller Coasters,
skydiving, football, the church,
could the church not just be a gut reaction
to the seemingly perfect cradle
the Earth affords to all life, an attempt to praise nature,
deify it. All religions start with the same problem.
How did I get here.
This is just too perfect.
And it is.
Because we don't have the memories of the 1.7 million years of homo erectus pain and suffering in the name of evolution to give rise to us, modern man. A species all its own.


With Love,
~The Twentysomething

Welcome to my room

So this is basically what my room looks like while I'm looking at my reflection in the mirror/TV.
I spend way too much time here.
And my skin is not really that color. I don't have that many colors.
Oh, and I can't draw.