Gratitude:
I should be thankful for the
same things I was last week. I have a wife and a son.
Acknowledgment:
I am not a generous
person with my time and my money. Tony only ameliorates this
tendency somewhat. Also, my belief is but luke-warm.
Requests:
Visit the newest Views
of China from Casa Kaulins blog.
The
AKIC Week in Brief: It was
sunny and hot all week, but unfortunately, it was a Wuxi summer heat
combined with a humidity and so the week was an ordeal. All I did
this week was work and sweat, and yet strangely, I felt serene. The
students only momentarily annoyed me – none brought out my usual
feelings of loathing.
About
AKIC: If you want to learn
what Andis & AKIC are
all about, you
can visit here.
If
there are things you don't know about, like places and people I
mention, you can go
here to find out what they are all about.
AKIC
Weekly Features:
I
in in China! 这个星期的天气是太热了。我不喜欢无锡的夏天。
Politically
I am Conservative/Reactionary!
A week of not having to think about Obama is bliss for
me! Palin in 2016! The only political thing that annoyed me this
week was the latest
econtalk podcast.
(A previous
one
annoyed me as well.)
I
am Canadian!
I
have lived in Quebec, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and British Columbia.
My sister lives in Chilliwack; my brother lives in Winnipeg; and my
mother lives in Brandon. I spend a few moments this week
contemplating the Montreal Expos not winning the 1980 National League
East pennant.
I
am Latvian (sort of)! My
mother has been able to make a return trip to Latvia – one since
she and her family had to flee the Soviets.
I
teach English! At my
school, we are at our busy time of the year as students, on vacation
from their schools, lounge around in our A/C.
I
am not a freak! But then again
maybe I am. I have my uniqueness and my eccentricities of genius
I
like to Read! Here
is what I had been working my way through the past week:
Don
Colacho's Aphorisms. There are 2,988 of them in this book
that I compiled for myself. I read ten aphorisms at a time.
I cut and paste the better ones -- they are all profound actually --
and I put them in my weekly blog entry. (See below)
Ulysses
by James Joyce. I am following along with Frank
Delaney as he slowly guides podcast listeners through
Joyce's hard-to-read novel. Delaney figures he will have the
whole novel covered in about 22 years. Delaney completed
episode #161 this week and is working his way through the chapter
that introduces Leopold Bloom. I am getting ahead Delaney as far as
reading the book. I will be finished reading it, I figure, in a
year. I read the novel despite its many blasphemies. It is best to
be aware of this stuff because the world is full of it, and the world
will always find a way of slapping you in the face with it
The
Holy Bible King James Version. I am reading a
chapter a day of the greatest book of all-time. I have
finished the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, and have just
started to read the Second.
Columns
by Father Schall. I have been
able to take all
his archived writings and place them on the Dotdotdot app.
The
Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Like Father Schall's writings, I have been able to place them on the
Dotdotdot app.
Pickwick
Papers by Charles Dickens. I like Pickwick's servant Samuel
Weller, and I like this novel. For as the Pope said after reading
the Bible cover-to-cover for the first time, the novel is one good
book!
The
first encyclical from Pope Francis.
I
like to take photos
I
publish them in the following blogs: AKIC
wordpress , TKIC
blogspot,
TKIC
wordpress, Views
of China from Casa Kaulins Blogspot and Views
of China from Casa Kaulins Wordpress.
I
like to make videos
Here
is my
Youtube Channel and my
Youku Channel.
Here are three videos I uploaded this week: Views of China of Casa
Kaulins #7; 17
Short Videos of Life in Wuxi, China; and 20
Short Videos of Life in Wuxi, China.
I
like to cut and paste quotations:
This
week's Don Colacho quotes. I wasn't able to pare the list down to
eight:
2591
The relativity of taste is an excuse adopted by ages that have bad
taste. [This explains
tattoos.]
2603
A decision that is not a little crazy does not deserve respect.
[This is an age that
doesn't go in for boldness, which thinks to be classified as a
moderate is a virtue.]
2610
“To belong to a generation,” rather than necessity, is
a decision made by gregarious minds.
2613
The common man lives among phantasms; only the recluse lives among
realities.
2615
Only the unexpected fully satisfies. {Three on Tuesday!}
2629
Nothing makes clearer the limits of science than the scientist's
opinions about any topics that is not strictly related to his
profession. [Einstein was a Socialist.]
2632
A valiant and daring thought is one that does not avoid the
commonplace.
2634
Our neighbor irritates us because he seems to us like a parody of
our own defects. [That can explain some aspects of
anti-Americanism. American culture being so visible, many can't
resist the temptation to mock it. But in doing so, these people mock
themselves.]
2637
Modern man is ignorant of the positive quality of silence. He
does know that there are many things of which one cannot speak
without automatically disfiguring him.
2641
The most notorious thing about every modern undertaking is the
discrepancy between the immensity and complexity of the technical
apparatus and the insignificance of the final product.
2642
When it finishes its “ascent,” humanity will find tedium waiting
for it, seated on the highest peak.
2655
There is something definitively vile about the man who only admits
equals, who does not tirelessly seek out his betters. [Does this
apply to me, or doesn't it? That is the question I have to ask
myself. Keeping to myself on the pretense of seeking solitude, I
don't seek to deal with people who are really my equals; but I also
don't tirelessly seek out my betters out of shame.]
2661
Few ideas do not turn pale
before a fixed glare. [So true!]
…Eccentricities
of genius…EXCERPT FROM Dickens, Charles. “The Pickwick
Papers.” [I can use that phrase to justify all the strange things
I do..... like this blog and my other blogs!!!]
From
Heretics by GK Chesterton and his essay about Rudyard Kipling:
There
is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing
that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly
required than a defence of bores.
The
globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. [Why
is it that I like to take photos of the peasants I see in Wuxi and
never of the Expats who get to travel all the time? And do you
notice that travelers have to go to localities to see things? They
figure by looking at the local they are bigger. But as GKC says,
they have to be part of it, to be bigger than what they are.]
The
man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the
gate, is the man with large ideas. His mind creates distance; the
motor-car stupidly destroys it. [The
Chinese had a genius for
building walled little properties, but they appear to be losing it as
more and more of them have cars so they can visit tourist sites which
are nothing but walled properties of notables from their past.]
I
like to keep a journal of my daily activities and of any
worthy thoughts that occur to me.
[This
journal records the events that I can talk about. In fact, a lot
happens that I can't talk about, though I try to allude to these
happenings with my thoughts which I will record in this journal. As
well, I don't blog about people I happen to know. I scrupulously try
to avoid mentioning names, except if I happen to have something good
to say about them. [LECTOR: You rarely have anything good to say
about people, I notice. ANDIS: Uh-huh!]]
Monday
[July 8]
[Home
Laptop]
I
don't work today.
I
uploaded two videos to Youtube: Views
of China from Casa Kaulins #6, and Ten
Short Videos about the Kaulins Family China.
It
is going to be another slow day. The heat is already too much I feel
as I type in this sentence in the morning.
Tuesday
[July 9]
[School
Laptop]
I
will say it again. It was a slow day yesterday. Because
it was so hot, I and the rest of the Kaulins crew stayed in
doors. Tony watched Youtube videos on the Home Laptop. I read
Pickwick Papers and other articles on the Ipad.
In
the evening, I took Tony, via E-bike, to the Wanda Plaza. There, I
went to the Bread Talk and bought myself a loaf of bread. Tony asked
for a cheesecake, and we bought and then ate it in the shop. I then
took Tony to the KFC to buy a drink – the McDonald’s already
having closed. The lineup at the KFC was long enough that Tony could
play at the restaurant's playground. I then went to the Xinjiang
Restaurant to buy some bread – three rmb for a 10 inch round
pizza-crust-like piece – I bought two. Tony had hoped to go to the
Toy section of the Wanda department store to look at the 129 rmb fire
engine but, thankfully, the store was closing its doors.
Our
appearance was noted by the many other shoppers in the mall. We were
the only pair of foreigners and we stood out like sore thumbs –
Tony was a particular source of interest.
Two
men on a E-bike noticed and I could clearly hear them speak of the
Laowai.
I
work 13:00 to 21:00 today. I arrive at the school at 11:00. First
thing, I do is GAR; then I write this blog entry.
I
took the 25 bus, sitting on the side of the bus that wasn't shaded.
The other side, the passenger side, was where everyone else sat. I
didn't suffer so much when the bus was moving. It was just when the
bus stopped, to pick up passengers and the like, that I could feel
the heat.
When
the 25 was by the Baoli Mall, I saw an older man, of peasant stock,
standing in front of a car that had been stopped at the light. Out
of the corner of my eye, the man had caught my attention by pushing
against the car and then striking the car's hood with open palms. As
I passed close to him, I wanted to take a photo of him defiantly
standing in front of the car and not letting it move forward, but the
camera app on my Ipod didn't open fast enough as the bus drove away.
I can only speculate what it was that the driver had done to anger
the man, and how it was that the situation was resolved. I suppose
the driver could have backed up and tried to speed around the man,
but there were probably too many other cars around for the driver to
try this. Had the driver hit the man with his car?
I
moved my Views of Casa
Kaulins Blog from blogspot
to wordpress
yesterday. You can visit both blogs. I will use the blogspot blog
to publicize the Youtube videos. If you explore both sights, you
will see a lot of how China is developing. You can see BMW cars,
peasants on bicycles, and machines from the 1950s still being used.
Wednesday
[July 10]
[School
Laptop]
I
work 13:00 to 21:00 today. I arrive at school at 11:30.
I
haven't called in sick for a day of work since I moved in Wuxi in
September 2004. No drunken nights, no hangovers, no stomach problems
have kept me from my duty! Knock on wood.
Tony
borrowed
a toy last night that really got him excited.
Econtalk
had an
interview with a self-described moderate middle-of-the-road
political scientist who claims that what he called radicals,
wingnuts, and activists kept Parties from winning elections. “If
all the people with unacceptable opinions would go away, we would
have government that was satisfying!” was his basic lament.
Doesn't he realize that people with opinions can influence what
happens. The squishes become putty in the hands of Stalinists who
slowly mold what accepted opinion should be.
Another
hot day.
July
11 [Thursday]
[School
Laptop]
I
work 10:00 to 21:00 today.
Last
night I was on the bus, witnessed something, and then typed the
following about it into my Ipod:
E-bike
on fire! I am on the bus. Bystanders take out
cameras to record images. No time to take out my camera.
The bus passes too quickly. No need. The bike is
completely engulfed in flame. That image will be sheered in my
brain. I shudder at the thought of my wife & son riding our
e-bike. [When I arrived home, I
told Jenny. She told me that
this sort of thing has been in the news almost everyday. The hot
weather is causing cheaply built E-bikes to burst aflame. Riders on
the bikes don't notice till the flames come.]
It
was uncomfortably humid at the bus stop this morning. I could feel
the sweat beading all over my body. Shade was no relief – I should
have had a hand fan. I suppose it is the hottest day of the year.
Last
night, a student talked of temperatures as high as 39 Celsius.
This
morning, I took the 602支 bus,
transferring, after a ten minute wait, to an 81 bus that was so
crowded that I couldn't make my way to its second deck. The ten
minute wait was an ordeal, as was standing on the 81 bus where a
short old woman kept elbowing me in the crotch.
The
McDonald’s near the school had closed off the room where I used to
always eat my big breakfast. The room seems to have been taken over
by the next door Gome Appliance store. This changes my morning
breakfast routine. No longer will I be having the big breakfast –
at least not in Summer while the place is so crowded with children.
Two
birthdays coming for which I must make preparations. My late
father's birthday is on July 23rd.
My son's birthday is on August 23rd
(sadly, Tony was born on a dark day in Latvian history for it was on
that date the Molotov and Ribbentrop signed the infamous pact that
doomed the Baltic States to subjugation.) For my father's birthday,
I will publish a good photo of him – in fact there are many to
choose from. (After seeing my father's photos there are none of
myself of which I can be proud.) I also hope to do a good write-up
about him. God! How I miss him! His voice which I took for granted
while he lived, would be sweet poetry to hear now. As for my son's
birthday, I will look for a suitable fire engine toy. I had been
hoping to buy him some kind of fire station. Having just gone to the
Ba Bai Ban toy store, I didn't see anything that quite fit the bill,
though if worse come to worse, there are a few toys there that would
please him.
Walking
out of the school at noon, was like, to use the over-used expression,
walking into a furnace.
For
supper, I have just gone to Dico's: a KFC like chicken restaurant,
from Taiwan, that is next door to the school. The place always give
me strange service. My orders always seem to be a problem for them.
Their staff also look to have no clue about what they are supposed to
be doing. What takes one worker to do at McDonald’s, takes three
at Dico's. Today, the service was alright, however the floor by the
counter was sticky and was enough to pull my slip-on shoes. “While
you are stuck here, perhaps I could interest you in our newest
dish....”
July
12 [Friday]
[School Laptop]
I work 11:00 to 21:00 today. I
arrive at school at 9:15. Boy oh boy! Am I a keen worker!
Last night, my 635 companion was
asking me the following questions: Does this last for two months?
Why would you choose to live here? She was talking about Wuxi's
unbearable summer heat. Her questions threw me off because I am
usually the one who is asking the Chinese person about local
conditions. After she asked me these questions and I regained my
sense of balance, I asked her if this was her first summer in Wuxi.
[Asking a question that I know the answer to is my way of saying I
have regained my balance. Yes!] She confirmed my suspicion. She is
from Shandong, and she told me that she wanted to get back to there
now that she had spent a summer in Wuxi. She mentioned a detail that
I hadn't thought of. Sitting on the bus seats, she said, she had to
sit straight because they were much dirtier in Summer due to.....
sweat. I didn't ask her if she meant sweat, but it got me to
thinking about a bad aspect of public transportation.
There had been a battery factory
fire in Wuxi I learned from a student who I teach Tuesday and
Thursday and is an engineer. The conversation came up after I told
him about the E-Bike fire I had seen on Wednesday night. He told me
that the fire at the battery factory was so all-engulfing that the
firemen had no choice but to let it burn itself out. Water wasn't
sprayed on the factory but on the buildings next to it. He also told
me about a forest fire in Sichuan where the authorities decided to
burn a two kilometer wide swath of woods in front of the fire's path.
There was no way they could put out the fire. The only thing they
could do was to stop feeding it by burning wood in front of it –
sounded like Russia's scorched earth way of dealing with invading
armies.
This morning, Tony was up early.
Seven AM! It would have been nice but Tony got it into his head to
ask me to let him use the laptop. To coax me to do this, he showed
me a photo I had taken with my Ipod where he
was playing on the computer. He then tried emotional blackmail
on me – crying and whining as maudlinly as he could . I refused
him, and then had to ask him to go back to bed. Maybe, there was a
method to Tony's madness. I want to sleep in, thinks Tony, so
I will make my parents want me to go back to bed.
It isn't the hottest day of the
year. Yesterday seemed hotter to me.
Saturday
[July 13]
I didn't sleep well last night on
account of the heat, there only being a fan on, and Tony doing
gymnastics while sleeping. How I was able to be up at six AM is a
mystery to me.
I work 10:00 to 18:00. Regular
AKIC readers may have noticed that I am inserting colons into my
times. I think it looks nicer.
I just listened to the
latest episode of Radio Derb. He mentioned that a woman in
France had married a bridge: The Pont du Diable or something to that
effect. AKIC devotees, if there are any, may remember that I liked
to publish stories of Wuxi Expats marrying inanimate objects in my
satirical Wuxi China
Expatdom blog. I had a German marry his long underwear, an
English Teacher marry his Thesaurus, a woman marry the Ling Shan
Buddha, a male expat marry the Taihu tunnel, two expats experience
overlap as they felt in love with overlapping sections of the Wuxi
Metro line near the Boston Glory apartment complex, and an American
marry a box of ball-bearings. One of my favorite WCE headlines was
Wuxi Expat Marries Battleship. And of course, I had expats marry the
Moresky360 and Hongduo buildings – two of Wuxi's many skyscrapers.
Anyway, the point of my telling you this, beside getting you to visit
the WCE blog, is to show how prescient I was in making the Wuxi China
Expatdom the first jurisdiction in the world to grant licenses to
human – inanimate object marriages. It was a great take on the
current gay marriage silliness.
I do get these email updates from
MLB that tell me the score of the previous day's baseball games. Not
really having skin in the game – that is, I don't have a team to
cheer for, I do like to try to answer their trivia question of the
day. I am proud to say that I answered two questions right. I knew
that Fred Lynn was the only player to hit a grand slam home run in an
All-Star game, and that Gary Carter was the last player to hit two
home runs in an All-Star game. Knowing the last fact made me
emotional as I recalled Carter's recent premature death.
I waited twenty minutes for the
bus this morning, and still got to work at 9:00.
When I arrived home last night,
Tony continued to ask me to let him use my laptop so he could watch
computer game firetrucks – firetruck simulator.
As I left the apartment this
morning, I saw a frail old man climbing the stairs to get to an
apartment that was above ours. He had a cane, was bow-legged,
hunched-over, with an expression of exertion on his face. He was
accompanied by two middle-aged men who I could hear blurt waiguoren
as they got a floor above me.
No gay pride parades in Wuxi.
What does that tell you?
Our school also doesn't run
sexual harassment seminars. The foreign males don't need this sort
of training because they already know how to sexually harass the
pretty young things that work here. We would have to run these
seminars for the males who seem like dead stolid stiffs when it comes
to women. Or do I have the wrong idea about the objectives of sexual
harassment seminars.
They were lining up properly at
the McDonald's this morning, and so they were lined up right out the
door. Good on this Chinese lineup and this group of Chinese.
Sunday
[July 14]
[Home Laptop]
I don't work today. My wife
talked of going to the Xinjiang Restaurant at the Wanda Plaza for
dinner.
It is hot again and I have turned
on the A/C in the study where I am working on this blog entry.
I finished watching the first
episode of season five of the Wire last night.
The K family went to the Wanda
Plaza last night. Andis saw a male foreigner in the Mall and may
have been seen by him, but the foreigner went on his way. He had a
fat head, was accompanied by a tall Chinese woman, and wore blue
jeans. Andis notices that foreigners more often than not try to not
notice the other foreigner if they happen to run into each other.
Andis has seen two foreigners in
Wanda. The other was a woman who he sometimes sees walking down the
road that runs in front of Casa Kaulins and is often shown on Views
of China from Casa Kaulins.
Andis was in the H&M store in
the Wanda. (It wasn't his idea to go there.) A boy saw him, walked
by and screamed laowai twice to his father. Andis got annoyed
and screamed laowai back at the pair. If he could have spoken
more Chinese, he would have said something along the line of “That
was f***ing rude, you DBs!”
Tony got out of bed, looked out
the window, and saw a police motorcycle. He has just run into the
office to tell me this.
Tony, I notice, says thank you
with a Wuxi accent.
This afternoon, I watched the
film Reality Bites on my Ipad. I had originally seen it in the
cinema in Winnipeg, Manitoba when it was released some twenty years
ago. I remember not being impressed with it at the time – it was
trying too hard to be iconic, for the so-called generation X. I also
found Ethan Hawke's performance to be off-putting. His cleverness
didn't seem to be very clever to me at all. Watching the film again
didn't change my view of it. I had to wonder how it could be said
that the movie was iconic, and yet it was said to have been by
someone from National Review! Wiona Ryder falling for the Ethan
Hawke character in the end seemed to prove the adage that women
prefer bad boys to good boys. Ben Stiller's character, despite being
so corporate, was the good guy of the story. Ethan Hawke would have
been a character worth cheering for if he was like Don Colacho.
Colacho was a bookworm who looked down on the modern world with real
intelligence and from a medieval viewpoint – not from Hawke's
character's anarchistic and fashionable pose.
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