A Karmic Lychee @ rah-kun.net

[Written at 11:30 PM, May 15th]

This is pretty much the earliest I’ve been to bed in… a long time. Let’s just say that I’ve been living a life of excess and sloth these past couple months without a job. Sure, it’s been nice and relaxing, but too much so. I’m bored, listless, wander around my apartment all day. I’m definitely a little malaised at current.

But, then again, when again in my life will I ever be able to sit on my ass for three months straight and not have to worry about money or employment?

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I’ve got a pretty serious backlog of photos from my phone. They stretch back to the winter and end with a crop of photos of “The General,” a beautiful, white, 4 year old Samoyed I walked around the city (at times, he walked me, to be honest). Here’s a dump.

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It has been a pretty quiet month, punctuated by random instances and occasions. Little to report on other than the occasional party with the girls from work, or my trip to Wuhan to see a friend, or the flood in my apartment last night.

Actually, that last one was pretty good. I went to go wash some clothes and, next thing I know, my cheap linoleum floor in my bedroom is floating on an inch of water. Luckily, I store nothing on the ground. Now there’s the remnants of a cascade of water from us sweeping it out of the apartment all running down the stairs.

I’m looking forward to heading home. Life in China is far too easy. I could live like this, with no job, on my savings for a little over a year, even with my student loans taken into account. It’s a little boring and I kinda want to get “started,” whatever that means, back home.

The plan is to meet Kelly when she arrives in Shanghai (ah, right, Kelly’s coming to China), bring her here to see the city and meet my people, then get to Hong Kong where we’ll eventually fly out for Anchorage.

After that is anyone’s guess. I’ve been plying job listings in Brattleboro. I need something that’ll cover me for at least a year. I’ve been thinking about going back to school, either for Illustration or Animation. The only problem there is putting together a portfolio when I have little to show beyond my graphic novel. Still, after becoming the well-rounded, well-read, and well-knowledged human being I am at Marlboro, I think I’m ready to actually start making art. Rather than, of course, pulling stuff out of my ass as I was back when I was 18.

For now… that’s all. I’ll be closing this site when I get back, switching to a fun pre-built blog-something. I plan to switch my domain to www.karmiclychee.net or somesuch for an actual portfolio and sketchblog, and keep the personal blogging elsewhere, private. I realize I’ve been giving out my site on my resume and it’s full of these half-assed blog postings… not the most professional choice, I feel.

If I keep to my pattern of posting every 30 days, the next time I write might be from Hong Kong. Go figure…

Fire Pits and Mud Bricks from Jayml Mistry on Vimeo.

And, as an addendum to the scant list of my daily activities, I do have a shortlist of stuff I’m working on for before I come home.

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Almost a full month since my last update. There’s a good reason for that – life’s pretty relaxed and uneventful lately. My days consist of some variation on the following:

Wake up.
Shower (must shower).
Game/Eat/Draw (in a variety of combinations, configurations, and amounts).
Dinner.
Game/Draw (mostly game, admittedly).
Sleep.

It’s utterly slothful and wasteful, I know, but in the seams I do find myself steeping more and more in this city. I’ve come to really like it, it’s the kind of place I’d like to find in the States for when I make my eventual return (considerations to expatriate to Canada aside). The easiest way I can describe Xiangfan is that it’s an “honest” city, somehow. It’s not trying to be anything, it’s got no pretensions, it’s just a place that’s got people and stuff for those people to do. It’s not proud of itself (except on the subject of Beef Noodles, but that’s a different story entirely), but it’s not down on itself either. There’s that inescapable disbelief that locals express when they see foreigners, utterly mystified that we’d ever come to this little backwater in favor of somewhere larger and more interesting such as Wuhan or Shanghai, but that’s exactly what I like about it. Of course, as a foreigner, I find the city exciting as a baseline simply because it’s in China – all of China is exciting, frankly – so that’d be something to keep in mind in the future.

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So here I am, finally in China. Sounds like a strange sentiment for someone who’s been living in the country for, already, the better part of a year, but it’s finally happened, along with much else since my last post.

The last stretch of my employment at Aston were a bit of a rush. The last week of classes strained itself through my malaise attitude, one born of waiting on the edge of an abrupt, yet planned change. With thoughts of a new apartment and the various possibilities it held, I couldn’t get my head in the game. My classes were lackluster and I was seriously distracted – detached, even.

Throughout my semester, I had kinda been offered only the short, dirty end of the stick – low level classes with students of questionable aptitude (and a notable handful of questionable character). While Mark and Alex raved about their genius mid to high levels, I found myself like Mengzi’s idiot farmer – trying futilely to make plants grow by tugging at their roots. I was granted a slight reprieve in the form of a short “Oral” class in the style of my one awesome Oral session from the summer – just, instead of 20 students of extremely high level who were willing to talk, I walked into a room with 7 students who’s entrance had been based more on “will you pay?” rather than aptitude.

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I get listless at the end of things. I enter into a state of fugue a little earlier than I’d wish for, otherwise. I find myself with an overriding sense of there being little point to starting new projects on account of time or logistics; as far as I can see, I’ll just be packing things up in a day or two.

But that doesn’t stop me from dreaming about what’s to come. And that makes me listless with an impending sense of futile excitement – I WANT, but I can’t have, so I must wait, but in waiting there is frustration, so I daydream… it’s a brutal cycle, really.

Listless. Le sigh.

It’s been warm lately. Real warm. My understanding with the weather is that the cold snap over the Spring Festival was the last gasp of winter – the coldest gasp, indeed, but the last one nevertheless. In the past three days, my right hand has shrunk to only about 110% of its normal girth, compared to the estimated 300% increase in size I managed to accrue in stages over the course of a couple months stretching from mid November to now. I’ve shed layers, though I’m still wearing three (again, due to the fact that my apartment is still pretty cold, and that most of the heat is from the sun, which I never see indoors).

It’s also become warm enough that the city has started to smell again. This was a bit of a surprise, since I had (somehow) managed to forget that Xiangfan has a special odor at all. Yesterday’s stroll through the back-alleys (another wonderful gift of the warmth is the ability to hang out outdoors again) confirmed that – yes, Xiangfan smells.

And my apartment smells. I woke up yesterday with a huge blast of nostalgia for last Fall. A strange fact of my stay here was that my adjustment period took place during a change in a season. It seems that once you attain that local mindset, the one you arrived with – and all sights, sounds, and experiences you ingested with said mindset – gets shelved somewhere far away, like a dusty photo-album on a top shelf somewhere. That’s how, I think, it’s possible to feel such strong, life bending nostalgia for something that only really happened about three months ago. Contexts shift and change, life weirds itself out.

But back to my apartment. The smell, upon waking up yesterday, was a pleasant sign of warmth returning. Fruit peels, a leaky toilet, laundry, over-used bed covers, and dirty dishes from early January (my tap water is ice cold – washing dishes has not been a priority) arrayed as a legion of aroma. The streets were alive with the stench of sewage, old food stuck in clogged drainage, and exhaust – both man and machine-made.

It is an odd feeling to be enthusiastic about something you’re not really enthusiastic about.*

*Someday, I would like a psychologist to tell me why my most memorable travel experiences, specifically the ones I enjoy recalling the most, involve things that others would term “TMI” (for those of you less savvy on the lingo – “too much information”).

Just got back from something that was simultaneously the coolest and coldest things I’ve ever done – Spring Festival out in the boonies, a few hours outside of Xiangfan. During one of the coldest weeks of the season thus far.

There’s a lot to digest – both literally and figuratively – though I will say this: there are no pictures. Not on my side of the lens, anyways. I read someone having said that “photography is the ultimate act of non-intervention” in regards to wartime photo journalism. While my situation may not precisely be of a wartime nature, it nevertheless causes me to amend the statement for my own purposes – that photography is the ultimate act of non-engagement.

Anyways. Later.

Ain’t never been so drunk that I’ve neededt ohug a toilet, but rigt now, I’m higging a toilet. rock on

sprong festival is nutty.

Editor’s Comments

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It’s been a bit difficult to fire off entries lately, or at all, really. Things happen so fast here – on a daily basis, for the most part – that stopping to ruminate upon just one thing means I’m probably simultaneously leaving out three or four other things I could be writing about, or I’m actively excluding myself from something that’s happening at that moment. One thing that’s clear is that, a) my brainspace is limited when trying to be experience and digest simultaneously (thinking, constantly, about how much I’d love to write and relate that really cool thing that just happened, and simultaneously trying to figure out when I’ll have the time AND energy to do so).

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