Wisdom to Live by in This Competitive World of Competition

• Never check on what your competitors are doing. In this competitive world of competition, that is a distraction, a way of causing you to lose a precious moment of striving. Assume your competition is doing infinity, and you will have to do infinity times infinity to the power of infinity.

• Never be a leader. In this competitive world of competition, it makes no sense to be a leader. Leaders have followers, some of whom will want to overtake you.

• Don't be successful. In this competitive world of competition, merely contemplating that you might actually be a success is akin to resting on your laurels. The competition is too intense to be doing that for even an instant.

• Be still. In this competitive world of competition, movement only draws attention to yourself. You don't want your competition to know you even exist or even that you are competing.

• Be stupid. In this competitive world of competition, it makes no sense to employ common sense. Common sense places limits. And even if it isn't as common as it should be, there are still too many using it for anyone to get a real competitive edge from it. The real strivers, the leading competitors are always counter-intuitive. And there is nothing more counter-intuitive than doing things in an idiotic way.

• Don't have competitors. You must strive to be in a class by yourself.

• Strive not be a manager. Managers are merely the head sheep. In this competitive world of competition you don't want to be any sort of sheep.

• Walk into an office and tell them you have an appointment ten years from now. They'll will be very impressed with your promptness. In this competitive world of competition, you can never be too prompt.

• Fail. Success, as just stated, has a way of distracting you from your ultimate goals.

• Don't plan. In this competitive world of competition, those who are planning are merely delaying the moment when they start to compete. It's akin to freezing at the starting block when the gun sounds.

• Don't double-check your work. In this competitive world of competition, everyone must move forward and never be looking back. Double-checking is back-tracking.

• Don't dress well. In fact, don't wear clothes. There is a chance that clothing can be the uniform of success. Recall, that in this competitive world of competition, there is no time to be successful. Success merely courts failure.

• Don't have goals. Goals are merely ways of limiting oneself. You must be beyond having goals. You must be striving to achieve infinity times infinity to the power of infinity.

• Don't practice people skills. In fact, try not to have any. In this competitive world of competition, everyone is a rival. No point in being nice to them.

• Don't focus. In this competitive world of competition, focusing can cause you to miss the necessary distractions. You must be open to what is necessary.

• Don't play to your strengths. In this competitive world of competition, your strengths are not enough, you must have strengths that you don't have.

• Sleep late. In this competitive world of competition, you can't be losing the edge that sleep gives you.

• Try not to be happy. Happiness is an offshoot of success which as previously stated is an unnecessary distraction in this competitive world of competition.

• Procrastinate. This competitive world of competition is causing a lot of the competition to start when they aren't ready. That is why, it is best to bide your time.

• Shirk your duties. In this competitive world of competition, the duties imposed on you by others are in fact distractions placed on your by rivals trying to put your off your game.

• Kill yourself. In this competitive world of competition, one should never be pleased with oneself. And what better way to show how unattainable your standards of competition are than by killing yourself?

• Go to extremes. In this competitive world of competition, it makes no sense to be conventional. Strive to be so abnormal that you end up, conversely, being the normal standard that others strive to be.

My Podcasting Listening Habits; James Delingpole Interviews an Old China Hand; Scott Arthur and Me; My Being Amongst the Chinese Conceit; Can the Chinese Take a Step Back?; What about the Lowest of the Low?

• My podcasting listening habits have changed in a slight way. I still listen to them but there aren't any podcasts I listen to on a daily basis. The ones I am loyal to don't put out so many episodes, and at best, they put them out once a week. I like listening to those that have views that challenge my previously held neo-liberal views but aren't progressive. (More than ever, I hate progressivism.) But be that as it may, I listen to all of James Delingpole's podcasts. He certainly is a conservative libertarian type and sometimes when he rants in those ways, I just to think myself that I have heard this all before. Not that he is wrong in what he says, but he is flawed in his degree of emphasis when he talks about how great Capitalism is and how bad government is, and doesn't say much about Logos. Still, I listen to him because he is like comfort food for the ears. And he does have interesting guests.

• Just this past week, Delingpole put out a podcast with a man who has been living in Mainland China since 2001: Scott Arthur (maybe an alias). Arthur reported that horrors had taken place in Wuhan, that he suspected that virus did come from a Wuhan lab in a mishap that could be attributed to the Chinese habit of being lax and cutting corners on necessary procedures, and that the powers to be in Mainland China have sinister intentions.

• What I found personally interesting about the Scott Arthur podcast was what he had to say about why he had been in China so long. Most foreigners don't last in China, he said, very long. Eighty percent of them don't stay in China for more than a year. (I took it that people, like me and him, who have spent a long time in China, are in the 99^th percentile.) China he said was a very tough place to live in, because it is the most alien place on Earth. It is so alien that you might as well be living on another planet, he added. He then attributed his having been there so long in China to having had a upbringing where he was often alone. This struck a chord with me because I have been alone for many long stretches in my life. I remember that in my middle school (or junior high days as I would have said then) that I had no friends and much as well have been an untouchable with my age-cohorts. As well, I moved a lot and never stayed in any community for long. (In China, I was loosely part of the local expat community, but now can say I am part of no community. My wife Jenny complains that I live in my own world.) So, it made sense to me, for Arthur to say what he did, as well as satisfying my conceit about being strong. (However, he did talk about having an 8 year old son in the public school system of China, and I wonder if he is still in China because he is married to it, and can't get away from it, which I would have by now if I hadn't been married.)

• What else can I say to satisfy my conceit about being in China? In China, I can be a misanthrope. That is someone for whom Misanthropy is a sort of ideology that can satisfy one by coming upon examples of it being true and thus making one feel clever for holding its views. There is so much going on in China to convince oneself of the wickedness and weakness of human nature. In China, Ias well, I can literally not care what everyone else thinks. The Chinese are not my people, and it doesn't phase me that I can't conform to them. Thousands of them I see everyday and I have no desire to be like them.

• Are the Chinese capable of taking a step back from a situation? When I wait for an elevator, they will all be impatient to get on it. When I wait for an elevator, I always take a step back to avoid colliding with the person trying to get off the lift. When the Chinese are driving, they are so reactive to any traffic situations. When a car slows down, they immediately start to weave to get around it even when it would be impractical to do so because they have other cars beside them. When a Chinese parent gets angry about yet another poor test result from their child, I don't think any of them think that in the future, none of this will matter in the least. The Chinese, as an author of a book called What is Wrong with China, says, and I can confirm from observation, go through their day focused solely on what they are doing without regard for others.

• Nothing gets my wife angrier than when I say, on the topic of Tony's poor school performance, that someone has to be last, and that not everyone can be above average. She says that Tony's poor performance is bad for her "face." When I ask her if the family with the last place kid should kill themselves, she says that she didn't care and that that family probably had at least one parent who wasn't focused enough on their child's schooling. Because of my wife's anger, I don't ask the next question: But what if every parent was focused the proper amount on schooling? There would still be the last place student. Either my wife is being illogical or very un-Christian. This Chinese logic is materialistic and cruel.

E-Mail from the Derb; Tony Goes to School on a Sunday; Small Acts of Kindness; Starbucks Back to Business; The Sending of Face Masks; Sometimes You Got to Wait; My Other Blog

• I sent a email to John Derbyshire who is the host of my favorite podcast, a bit of a sino-observer and who like me has China for an in-law; and I got a reply in two days. My email had to do with the travails of being married to a Chinese wife slash tiger mother. I asked whether Derb's wife was a tiger mother. He response made me feel better. While I didn't get any advice about how to deal with my tiger mother wife, I did learn of his experiences, and it was good it know that I was not alone.

• My son Tony has to go to school on Sunday because of the labour day (May Day) holiday.

• Based on my meme posting, you would think I am not but a person of dark and sick thoughts. But I am capable of small acts of kindness as long as they aren't sentimental.

• Saturday (the day before Tony goes back to school), I mule it to Jenny's office building. (By "mule it" I mean pick up delivery packages for my Chinese wife Jenny). There is a mall near Jenny's building so I decided to walk about it and see what I could see and report. The Mall was back to business with no evidence of a lock down. I walked past it's Starbucks and saw people happily seat at tables, san masks, in groups, and felt annoyance. If people can sit at tables at Starbucks, why can't we open our school!?!?

• Sunday evening, Jenny asked me how it was that when the "pandemic" started in China that overseas Chinese were sending face masks to China and then when the "pandemic" spread to overseas, you didn't hear stories of Chinese expats sending face masks to their home countries. I suppose the intent of the question was to show how the overseas Chinese or the Chinese in general were more caring than foreigners. My first response was that to say it would never have crossed any of our minds for it would have been like being in Africa and sending food to the first world. My second response would have been how no one abroad wants Chinese-made crap.

• Sometimes when you impart some wisdom to your child, it is wise to not expect the lesson to set in right away, but to give it some time, maybe even years. Immediate learning is not possible if the person is not receptive to what is being taught.

• Here is my photoblog: www.wuxiandis.wordpress.com. I have just published some photos on it.

Is China Asshole?; Hate Coming Home; Not a Good Sign; No Talking to Angry Jenny; Domestic Drama; Tony wants to move; Email Me! Please!

• There was some Hong Kong person who has been praised for saying "China is Asshole!" To be honest, it is a sentiment that in my angry moments, I am fully in agreement with. But that is a horrible thing to say about a in-law, for China is my in-law. So, I am going to have to fair and sympathetic to China as I can. But far as I can tell, the Chinese authorities screwed up big time with this virus. (Note, I say the authorities.) The reason the authorities screw up is the political system that is in place in China. This has to be changed. If it could change from within the system, this would be a nice thing and a way for the Chinese authorities to redeem themselves. But I'm afraid it ain't going to happen. The Chinese authorities don't want to lose face. And this losing face thing is a Chinese thing as far as I can tell.

• Coming home is not a pleasant thing for me. Because my wife Jenny is tiger-mother hell-bent on Tony's schooling, she can be in a foul mood when I get home. Sometimes, I arrive home and my wife will have a scowl on her face which means she is frustrated by Tony's schooling. Sometimes, if the door is open, I will walk into the apartment and be hit by a eerily dead silence. If I do say something, I will be growled at by either Jenny, who is frustrated by Tony's schooling, or Tony who is frustrated by being reemed out for hours on end by Jenny.

• And I just witnessed how it can be bad for Tony when he arrives home. Upon arriving home with Tony on the evening of the 22^nd, I saw Jenny ask Tony what his marks had been on some tests he had just written. He told her and she became very angry. "Oh no!" I muttered. "This is not a good sign!" For it appeared that I was going to have to listen to three hours of Jenny scream-tutoring Tony. You can just imagine how Tony must feel. Anyway, this was never my idea of a happy home. Never, once I have come home and asked how my day was in a pleasant manner. Why do Chinese women (or women in general) think vile bile is the way to make things better?

• There is no point in asking Jenny why she is angry. She will say that I am not a good father and blah, blah, blah... I can't argue with someone who only responds in ad hominem arguments.

• In turned out, on the 22^nd, that Jenny did scream-tutor Tony for three hours. During this, Jenny & I had an argument. It started when Tony couldn't take Jenny's reeming him out, and he started waving his fists at her. I had to go to the study and get between them. Jenny then decided to attack me. She pushed me into the living room. Meanwhile, Tony put a set of dog tags on his neck found a hook on the wall and acted out trying to hang himself. I stopped him and then I tried to appeal to Jenny to do something about her temper. She just complained about how bad I was and how Tony's poor performance at school was making her look bad and how everyone was looking down on Tony. (Alas, Jenny's Chinese Face was the reason for this insanity.) She then said she wanted a divorce. She even offered to give all the money she had saved up if Tony & I moved to Canada. It wasn't worth responding to that. The only comfort I can take from this is that these sorts of domestic dramas are happening a lot in China and all over the world.

• Tony tells me that he wants to move to Canada. I can blame him for wanting to because I couldn't handle my mother screaming at me for three hours every night in a desperate attempt to save her face.

• Comments? Email me at andiskaulins@hotmail.com.

04/20 Morning Traffic; A Trump Meme; My Driving Juju; Patton & Trump & Me; I have failed the Lockdown/Quarantine Character Test; Three Hours of Tiger-Mothering; My Future;

• Monday, April 20, I drove my son Tony to school. I noticed that traffic was busier than it had been the week before. One of the reasons may have had to do with the Grade Three Primary School students going back to school.

• I love posting memes onto WeChat. Recently, I have been posting lots of memes related to the virus and lots of memes related to American politics. I have resisted the urge to post those critical of China and Mister Eleven. On Sunday, I posted a meme that said that the only thing that had gotten worse in the years of Trump's presidency had been the Democrats. Someone thought they were very clever and reposted the meme with the words "the Democrats" changed to "Democracy." I know many anti-Trumpers believe this and so that is why the person who changed the meme's wording thought it might be a clever riposte. But it is a bit of mystery as to how they think they going to convince Trump-supporters to change their views with that. Has Trump made himself president-for-life like a certain Chinese leader who I am scared to mention? Does Trump ever not hold press conferences where he doesn't have to confront members of the opposition media like any Mainland Chinese leaders? Does Trump live in a country where leaders from opposition parties don't hold important positions in other levels of government? The answers to all these questions are of course no, so one has to wonder why the person even bothered trying to respond to the meme in the way he did. It could be because he couldn't argue with the substance of the meme which was the that behavior of the Democrats has been shameful.

• I admit when I am driving in China, I have a conceit about being a better and more reasonable and more proficient driver than the locals. That is, I have better driving juju than these just-gotten-off-their-bicycle hayseeds. The local drivers however can rattle my conceit when they do some clever maneuvers and are able to foresee an opening in traffic that I didn't. I assuage my wounded conceit by thinking what assholes those local drivers were. And I think I can make a case that many of these local drivers are assholes. Because I, having superior driving juju to the locals, I know when to pick my moments. When traffic is heavy, I stick to my lane and am patient. When traffic is lighter, I strut my stuff.

• Interesting to listen to a podcast where VDH said that Trump had some General George S Patton qualities. (Or did he say Patton had Trumpian qualities?) Patton was considered by many of his colleagues to be gross, obnoxious and thus a deplorable, and yet Patton was admired by many a common man because he had the right set of skills for the moment. Ditto Trump. I have only one thing I can think of in common with Patton and that is that we both got in trouble for slapping people. In Patton's defense, you can say he didn't shot them like many German officers did to their soldiers in the same war. The only thing I can say in my defense is that the people I slapped deserved it more than the soldiers Patton slapped.

• This lockdown has been a test of my character and probably one that I have failed. While I can say I have endured my wife's moods very well, I can't escape this feeling of being useless and impotent. I am faced with the question of what I am going to do after this, and I am nothing but indecisive. Right now, my actions are that of someone who just wants to stay in China and hopes that things can carry on as they did before; while my thoughts are of someone who knows that it can't carry on, but can't muster the resolve to do anything about it. My quandary is that I have to keep my marriage but I have no loyalty to or interest in China. Jenny is staying loyal to China. Tony wants to go to Canada. Choice is stay in China, stay married, but wish I was in Canada; or go to Canada and put my marriage in jeopardy. My stomach sours when I contemplate this.

• My son Tony got 62 on some test and my wife spent three hours tutoring and screaming at him. All I did in the meanwhile, was sit nearby and try to calm my nerves. I have been putting up with this for six years. How this is supposed to make for a better future (which is how this tiger-mothering has been justified to me) is beyond me. All that are being created are bitter memories and regrets at the time wasted. I would like to see a future where kids are free in the evenings and parents don't feel a need to tutor their them.

• When my wife says it is for the future, I think what about my future? My future is now? I never envisaged a future where my wife would spend three hours of her life being angry over something so ephemeral as a grade six school test.

I Contain Solitudes

I Contain Solitudes

Inspired by Dylan's I Contain Multitudes

I don't know about multitudes but I contain solitudes.

I lived in Canada where they had at least two.

I am descended from Latvian Diaspora and so there was three.

I lived in NB, PQ, MB & BC which makes four.

And now the five-starred pariah PRC where

I'm just a laowai who minds his own business

and wants nothing more than to be a poet fly on the wall.

Now that I think about it some more, I see that like Dylan,

I contain multitudes by the score.

I have multitudes of interests in my solitudes.

But I don't want to bore with a litany of things I like.

There is only one thing that I should tell you I love and that is Christ.

Whats on the litany, I love too, of course, but that love was unrequited,

but deservedly so for I had multitudinous ways of thinking only of myself.

I Should Have Taken a Picture; Protests! Yes!; My Favorite Blogger Says; Back to Work in May?; I Contain Solitudes; A Trip to the Livat Mall;

• On a Thursday just past, I went to downtown Wuxi to pick my passport. The visa had to be renewed. On the way, I walked pass the Xin Kai Hu Xiao Xue apartments which I had lived in many years ago when I first came to Wuxi. I saw that, to accommodate the virus crisis lockdown, a new and bigger gate had be put up at the entrance. As well, I saw that they had put up two five star PRC flags. I should have taken a photo of this because what I was beholding was iconic and symbolic of all that has taken place the last three months.

• I am glad to see that some Americans are protesting the lockdowns in their country. (And some Germans are too, in theirs)

• My favorite blogger wrote another entry about the PRC. He thinks that its politburo has been making many, many mistakes lately, and the world will hopefully not put up with it anymore. We'll have to see. If my Chinese wife is anything to go by, they have an irateness coming from their instinctual need to save face, and many will be intimidated.

• Latest rumor, I heard, is that our school will open after the May holiday. I had hoped that I would go to work now that my son Tony has gone back to school, but the lower primary grade and kindergarten students have not gone back yet. Training centers, like the one I work at, will be the last to be allowed to re-open.

• Bob Dylan just released a song called I Contain Multitudes. It has inspired me to start a poem called I Contain Solitudes. It is and will be a work in progress and I will publish it over and over again. until I get sick of trying to improve it.

• Saturday, my wife Jenny wanted all three of us to go out. So we went to the Hui Ju (Livat) Mall, the biggest mall in Wuxi. On the drive there, we had to go through the area where, in the before times, there had been an overpass. It took us forty minutes to get through it, when with a fully functioning overpass, it would have taken but thirty seconds. The congestion took place at an area where five lanes of traffic, of vehicles of all sizes, had to merge into two lanes. So, our little Citroën was stuck behind and between some long flat-decks and trailers. But at least we didn't have trouble getting a parking spot at the Mall. For a Saturday, it wasn't very busy. We stayed in the Mall enough to look around, become bored, get some sandwiches at Subway, and buy frozen hot dogs at Ikea. In the Mall, everyone was wearing masks and the atmosphere was subdued.

Tony Shaves; Back to Work in May; A History of Maoism; TDS Trying to Justify Itself; It's Hard to Be Patient; Nixon Made a Huge Mistake?

• My son Tony shaved hair off his face for the first time. Yes, my little man had a peach fuzz mustache that was dark enough to give him the teenager-with-cheesy-mustache look. I tried first to get him to remove the mustache with my electric razor; but I ended up finishing off the job with shaving cream and a cheap disposable razor. With the latter, Tony did manage to nick himself and draw blood. It didn't hurt he said, but his mother (my wife Jenny) thought it was a medical emergency, and so she applied alcohol to it which did cause Tony discomfort. I had to be insistent and tell her that all was needed a bit of tissue paper and some patience before I could get her to stop.

• Maybe, our school will open up again in May!!! Aaaaggghhhh!!

• Reading a book about the history of Maoism, I am. The author is a leftie and tries when she can to stick to the Americans, but it is impossible for her to try to make Maoism anything other than it was: a complete failure anytime and anywhere it was tried. Interesting aspects of Maoism were that it appealed to educated people in privileged societal positions. This is eerily similar to what is going out with Trump-haters. Supposedly, they are more educated than Trump-voters, and yet they advocate idiotic policies. Another aspect of Maoism was how it was never clear on the globalist-nationalist question. If, anything it sought to achieve a globalism with Chinese characteristics. Another thing I am gleaming from the book is that the Chinese will never take over the world because they are Chinese. At best, the Chinese are tolerated by others; but eventually they end up rubbing people the wrong way in a very big way. The Koreans, the Japanese, the Indians, and the Vietnamese all hate Chinese.

• So Trump is blaming everyone but himself? This is from the people who are trying to blame him for what they see as having gone wrong. This is from the sort of people who thought Obama deserved a Nobel Peace Prize or that Donald Trump was a fascist. Please!!

• I see more and more locals are not bothering to weak masks as they walk outside.

• Oh Lord! I still can't keep my temper in check when it comes to the locals' driving. I tell myself, I tell myself and I tell myself to be calm about it! I tell myself to expect the provocations and so to just be cool. I tell myself to be thankful you are not them, and love them anyway. I tell myself that you know Christ and that is superior to anything they have. That's just the way they drive, and there is nothing you can do about that. They don't seem to have problems with the lack of courtesy on the road, and why should you? All this I tell myself. And yet, some local driver suddenly does something that raises the level of thoughtfulness to an previously unexpected high that it is hard for me to not get in a rage about. Just yesterday morning as I was driving Tony to school, I was cut off but two cars, in the left lane, that decided to suddenly go two lanes over to the right to stop. I had to come to a full stop (I was in the right lane). What the hell were they thinking?

• My favorite blogger just wrote that Nixon's trip to China in '72 and the subsequent opening up to Red China was a big mistake.

Thoughts

• Life gives you oranges. It's up to you to peel them.

• No one makes their life longer by being bored. It only seems like it.

• You have to toast bread before it becomes toast.

• Some people look at a revolution and see nothing but senseless death and violence. Others see it as the setup for a delicious egg dish.

• I say you can't have a revolution without fluffy pancakes and freshly squeezed orange juice.

• There are more people dead today than there were yesterday. Some would want to blame Trump for this.

• Many of the people who were somebodies sometime ago are dead nobodies now.

• Just think: a hundred years ago, today was thought of as the wondrous future.

• Make funerals funky. Call them funkerals.

• So much for the dream of human extinction. For it looks as if not as many people will die of the Wuhan Virus as the Democrats hoped.

• We make a better future by creating great memories today.

• The three stages of funky: 1) Funky Birth 2) Funky Life 3) Funky Death

Be Still My Heart; Still Waiting: Three Easter Films; Chinese Navy Propaganda; WHO Complaining about Politics; Trump;

• I drove my son Tony to school for his second day back. It has become annoyingly routine already and so I hate I as much as I ever have. However this second morning, I saw something that made me a little happy. Way back in the before times, I had changed my morning route back home from Tony's school to avoid annoying traffic and meatheads at a particular corner. I decided to make a left turn by the corner instead of trying to turn right. Two things drove me crazy about waiting in line to make the right turn: first, the drivers trying to cut in line; and second, the drivers going into the bicycle lane instead of sticking to the car lane. The latter were trying to make a right turn. This morning, I was passing the corner, turning left and saw that a car that had gotten into the bicycle lane had had a fender bender with a car in the driving lane. I was happy to see there was some justice in the universe. I did feel sorry for the car in the driving lane but lord knows, that car probably didn't use its turn signals or was trying to make a premature right turn. (I define a premature turn as a turn made too early. That is, the driver doesn't wait hr id past the end of the lane before turning. Usually this is a bigger problem when the local drivers make left turns. At my apartment complex entrance, I have seen drivers so prematurely make left turns that they block cars trying to turn right towards the complex entrance.)

• Sadly, two days after Tony's school has opened, there has been no word yet about when my school will re-open.

• For Easter, I watched three films about Christ's life: 2004's The Passion of the Christ, 1965's The Greatest Story Ever Told, and 1964's The Gospel According to St. Matthew. All had something to be said for them, and I will be sure to watch them all again in the future. The best of the three in my opinion was The Passion of the Christ. It's use of flashbacks made its depictions of Christ's Passion exceedingly poignant. And it also made a point of giving Mary a prominent role in the story. The other two did their stories in straight narrative time and Mary did not make as many appearances. The Gospel According to St. Matthew was made without cinematic flurries and one can't help but wonder if its pacing was more ultimately more realistic than The Passion's. The Gospel's best moments were its depictions of Jesus teaching. The Greatest, though having a flawed epic feel to it, had wonderful settings and the great performance of Charlton Heston as John the Baptist.

• My wife Jenny was watching some video about the Chinese Navy on her phone, and trying to make me watch it. The video, from the seconds I saw of it, was full of Hollywood blockbuster effects. When I told her I wasn't interested in watching propaganda, she wasn't pleased.

• I think it was the WHO director who I heard making a plead for getting politics out of the Wuhan Virus proceedings. What he was basically asking for was for critics to keep quiet and to let those in power do as they please, which is tyranny.

• Those who don't like Trump are saying he has done, is doing and will do a bad job. Those who like him or voted for him have, I think, been more realistic. Not of them many praise his oratory skills but have praised him getting things done.

What I Have Been Watching; Keeping a Low Profile; Watching The Passion of the Christ; Good Friday WeChat Moments; Tony Back to School; A Challenge for Me; What to Do about the Chicoms?

• I watched the Making of a Murderer Season One. Very Interesting. I found myself sympathizing with the Avery family as I watch it. I had watched a Series about Ted Bundy called Falling for a Killer that made a strange attempt to deal with the Bundy story by looking at it from a feminist angle. When I saw this was to be its approach, I was tempted to not bothering watching it, but the Bundy story is interesting and gradually the attempts at making it a feminist account floundered. This account of the Bundy story (I have watched a few now) featured interviews with Bundy's girl friend, associates of Bundy and Bundy's brother. (The feminist account of the Bundy killings ultimately flounders on the realization that women, even empowered women, need the protection of good men.)

• Even though things seem to be getting back to normal where I am with the lockdown minimized, with people congregating without concern for social distancing, and with traffic getting heavier and more annoying, I have made no contact with anyone other than my wife and my son. When I walk pass others, I avert my gaze, or look down at the ground so that the brim of the cap I always wear covers my face. I feel it is better to keep a low profile as I can.

• Maundy Thursday evening, I watched Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. My son Tony watched the end of it with me. When they nailed Jesus to the Cross, Tony had to cover his eyes. "Why did they do that to him? What did Jesus do wrong?" he asked. I told him that there were not easy questions to answer and that hopefully he would learn through his life what happened and why. At the film's closing moments, where Jesus dies and there are earthquakes, Tony said that God was mad.

• Good Friday, I posted the fourteen stations of the Cross to WeChat moments. What effect did it have? Probably none, but it had to be done. I have decided that the only thing worth declaring allegiance to is Christ.

• At McDonalds, later that Friday, I had to enter information on a form to get Chicken Nuggets. I had to because I wanted to pay cash for the Nuggets. If I had used my phone to pay, the tracking information that, I assume, was wanted by the authorities would have been easily had. So, I had to write down my name, my phone number and my ID number (passport in my case) on a register list. So, things aren't quite back to normal.

• "Myself, find it challenging to make friends, my rather poor social skills, as well as my taste in people, narrow things down a lot." I have copied this sentence from a comment made on a blog that I peruse on a regular basis. It would seem to encapsulate my experience in my friendships. Only aspect on which I have to differ with it is that the taste of others in friends makes it a challenge for me as well – I am not to the taste of others I have discovered over the years. And thus I have always felt held back in my relations with others.

• Tony is officially back to school. I drove him in Monday morning. There was a temperature tent at the school entrance.

• Speaking of challenging things. I find it a challenge to rid myself of the desire to wring the necks of the local drivers. What's with these unthinking locals who decide to change lanes after cars have bunched together? Why didn't they get in the proper lane earlier? What's with these selfish locals who instead of yielding, honk their horns at pedestrians trying to cross at actual crosswalks? What with these impatient idiots who impatiently honk their horns the instance a light turns green? What with these inconsiderate locals who cut off cyclists when turning? (I saw a particularly grievous example of this on Monday. A driver making a right turn instead of waiting for an e-biker to go on his way (which was straight ahead) decided to instead honk her horn at the e-biker and then proceed to cut him off, thereby forcing him to come to a very quick stop. The e-biker did seem a little put out by this. A westerner would have said something colorfully profane.)

• What to do about the Chinese Communists? As I read in a blog entry by a Catholic, I say we have to pray for their conversion. (And I have said this before, myself, but it is good to see that wiser people than me are also saying it.) As long as it never happens, there is no hope for the Chinese.

Wow; Tony Back to School on April 13th; What's Happening in Pinawa; Stuck in Germany; Aaawwwww!; Elevator Line of Scrimmage

• One of the bloggers whose blog is in my favorites folder of my RSS reader is following my blog. That be my wordpress blog. His blog is Carlos Caso-Rosendi. This is a blessed thing, I hope.

• My son Tony goes back to school on April 13^th. My fingers are crossed. Hopefully, I will go back to work soon after. I enjoyed being quarantined with my son. We had a lot of fun and rarely got on each other's nerves.

• A cousin in Pinawa, Manitoba, which is a small town about a hour's drive from Winnipeg and is in the bush for all practical purposes, tells me that they closed the nature trails in his area. Talk about an overreaction. I was able to visit the area last summer. And I found it devoid of people and pollution. One of the cool things Tony & I saw there were deer running in the streets and on the lawns of people's properties. So, I couldn't see the need for the lockdown procedures that have enacted in China, there.

• An Expat I know from Shanghai is stuck in Germany because of the ban on foreigners entering the PRC His company is not operating and he is having to foot the bill for a hotel. He is not pleased.

• Aaaawwwww! The locals don't drive like Christians, is all I can say. I was driving into the Hui Shan Wanda Mall parking garage. There was a vehicle moving in front of me, I could tell the driver was looking for a spot to park, and so I was patient, kept my distance and waited for the vehicle to be parked. I then continued on my way and started looking for my own place to park. I saw one, came to a stop to back into it, looked in my mirror and saw that there was a vehicle right on my bumper. Once the driver of the black sedan realized I was trying to park, he backed up a bit to give me some room to park. I had a bit of a narrow spot to back into because I had to park between a column and another car which was parked a little too close to the line on my side, and so there was no way I was going to be able to back in without do a bit of forward and reverse. So I backed in as far as I could and put the car into drive so I go ahead a bit, and then saw that the black sedan was practically right beside my car. We were in a narrow lane and the driver was trying to impatiently drive around me instead of backing off and letting me finish my parking. I had to do another drive forward adjustment and the driver just kept trying to wedge his way around me. I stared at him at one point and made a back up gesture at him. I was annoyed but only cursed to myself. The black sedan when it was able to, drove off in what could be interpreted as a sudden huff. Talk about impatience. (That is one of the worse examples I seen of it since I got off an elevator the week before in an episode that I documented in this blog.) I parked so I could do some shopping. I then drove to another part of the parking garage so I could go to my wife Jenny's office. I again had a car right on my bumper as I was about to park. I stopped to let this vehicle go by, but it instead honked at me. "Fine!" I said to myself and went ahead and parked. I suppose this driver wasn't used to other drivers trying to give her a break.

• After going to Jenny's office, I had to take an elevator to get down to my parked car. As I approached the elevator, I saw that there were what appeared to be four other people waiting to get on the elevator. I stood back. When the elevator door opened, it was like the line of scrimmage at the instant of a ball snapping in an American football game. The people heading into the elevator crashed into the people trying to get off the elevator. A young man getting off the elevator banged shoulders with one the people getting on the elevator. He regained his balance and found some daylight so he could break free and be on his way. After seeing this and that all who were going to get off had gotten off, I then tried to get on but was blocked by a delivery driver who had been standing in front of the elevator door but must have suddenly decided he wasn't going to get on. This latter person was an example of the locals' lack of self-awareness. When he got out of my way, the elevator doors almost closed on me. They automatically opened but I wondered if perhaps if someone in the elevator had pressed the close door button as the locals are impatiently wont to do when they get on elevators.

Eleven Grabs a Shovel and Pours a Pail; UpDates from the West Countries; Avoiding Controversy Up to a Point;

• During the Qing Ming Weekend, I saw, on my wife's phone, videos and photos of the Chairman holding shovels and pouring a pail into a ditch. Clearly propaganda, were these images, to show the Chairman in action and being heroic. I immediately thought of those pictures I had seen of Chairman Mao and his sidekick holding shovels at the beginning the Great Leap Forward... Let's hope millions of Chinese don't die this time.

• I have been getting updates from family and friends in Canada. There have been a few deaths in Manitoba. Maybe one in Brandon, but the authorities aren't giving out exact locations in their reporting. My brother is still working. My mother, who is in her 80s, is phoning in grocery orders. My mother told me that lots of people are getting laid off.

• My wife warned me to not say anything controversial (or in her words: silly) on Chinese social media. As I said in the previous entry, I am staying away from controversies involving China on WeChat. I am only posting controversial things about the the cold civil war going on in the West. So, lots of unflattering memes about Biden, Clinton and Pelosi.

• What do I want to do after this thing is over? Do I want to go back to Canada? Do I want to stay in China? It may well be that I will have to go back.

• I really need to start corresponding with people who are of a like mind. If you want to a Catholic, you don't need to talk to only people who say that all priests are pathological.

• I went to buy bread at the bakery in my area that I always go to, and I heard the clerk serving me tell her co-workers that she was dealing with a laowei (foreigner). (I know it is trite of me to make a note of this after so many years of living in China, but I am thinking hard about my relationship with it these days.)

Qing Ming Festival; Tony's Return to School Postponed; Air Raid Sirens; My Social Media Activity, My Favorite Websites; Has It Been an Overreaction?

• On a Friday evening, my wife Jenny asked me if we wanted to go anywhere during the next three days. "The next three days?" I asked. She responded that it was a holiday and I then realized that I had forgotten about Qing Ming day, which is also known as Tomb Sweeping Day, a day to honour ancestors in China. Holiday doesn't mean anything in this time of quarantine and lockdown. However I am aware of Easter and Lent.

• Tony is not going back to school on April 7^th as I may have been said previously in this blog. With him going back to school, I could expect to later go back to work. But now everything is up in the air as no date was given for when Tony could actually expect to go back to school. But Tony is at least happy that he doesn't have to go back to school for which I can't blame him. I hate the time I am at his school waiting to take him home. His school is ugly and the atmosphere of the place is communist-barbaric.

• April 4^th, 10:00 AM, air raid sirens blared. It was to honour heroes, Jenny told me. Whatever.

• What have I been doing on Social Media? I have been sending to some and posting a lot of Memes and Gifs. Sadly, I learned the hard way that Gifs have to be of a certain size to be effective. The memes I have been getting from the Feral Irishman, Daily Timewaster, Bookworm and Stately McDaniel Manor. I also have been posting comments on others' moments if the whim strikes or if the moment poster is a person I really like. The cruder memes I post on a chat group call Shitposters Unlimited. I avoid criticizing the Chicoms...

• My favorite websites currently are Essays in Idleness, Bookworm, the Z Blog, Amerika, Rotten Chestnuts, Peter Hitchens, Clusterfuck Nation, the American Sun, According to Hoyt, Daily Timewaster, Duff and Nonsense, Splendid Isolation, Taki's Magazine and Liberty's Torch. (The best site on China is mine. Actually, I couldn't tell you even one site I would recommend about China. I never make a point of visiting any. I am here and so I don't need to, could be a defence of this negligent practice of mine.)

• Has the crisis of this crisis been the virus itself or an overreaction? I am certain it is the latter because we are living in the age of snowflakes and safe spaces, and because the measures that have been taken during this crisis are a logical extension (in a perverse way) of the security features we already have in airports and of the steadily increasing requirements for protective gear in all sporting and outdoor activities. In other words, we have become more and more wussified. We are in the age of Wussie. (which is close in pronunciation to Wuxi) We are also living in more illiberal times. I overheard my wife Jenny listening to someone singing a song that was denouncing people who were going outside. And its tone was surely that of a zealot: "F off and stay indoors. F off and stay indoors." was how the lyrics went. Hearing that confirmed for me the mindset of the people who think this reaction is somehow prudent. (Do people who write songs like that even know the meaning of the word prudent?)

Got Butter; The Detour; The Before Times; Current Daily Routine; Sociopaths and Psychopaths; the Church Scandals; What to Do When Caught Off Guard.

• In my previous entry, I reported that we were running out of butter and that the stores in our area, where we could expect to buy it, had run out. I can now report that I was able to go to Metro, a wholesale-retail supermarket, and buy six bars of a New Zealand brand butter. I noticed, however, there certain brands of cheese and bacon that we liked to purchase were not available. 

• I drove to the Metro on a truck route where, in the before-times, there had been an overpass collapse. Now, it has a detour which can be perilous to get through because there can be traffic jams and the left turn lanes had to be put in the most right hand lanes. This time, there were a lot of trucks going through the detour and I wasn't sure that I was in a right hand lane to make a u-turn and then left turn to get back on the truck route (thankfully, I was).

• Yes. The before-times. I am using that term. I think things are going to change for China (and the world) if and when this virus crisis comes to an end. Whether the before times ended with the start of the virus crisis or when Chairman Eleven assumed lifetime powers will be one for the historians to decide.

• My days now have a definite routine. I have the alarm set for 6:30 AM. When it awakes me, I first stay in bed and I do some daily readings, on my phone, which are religious and philosophical. (I read books of daily thoughts from the Church fathers and thoughts about Mary, I read some aphorisms from Nicolás Gómez Dávila. This crisis and Lent, I have as well been reading daily passages from the Liturgical Year by Abbot Prosper Gueranger.) With this done, I get out of bed and prepare to wake Tony who has some video classes from his school to watch. I put on the kettle and heat some water for tea. I then get Tony up. He doesn't wake easily and I have to start dressing him until he is awake enough to finish. He then goes to the bathroom to do his ablutions while I set up thecomputer and the Apple TV so he can watch the classes. Tony starts the classes himself and sits on the easy chair in the living room to watch them. I sit beside him on a couch and do daily Spanish, French Chinese lessons on the Duo phone app. Once that is done, I make Tony tea and some breakfast; I maybe do a load of laundry; continue doing some daily readings – this time of a book I am reading (novel or non-fiction work), then some language book readings (Spanish, French, Latvian and Chinese) and then some poetry (The Metaphysical Poets, Gerard Hopkins, an English Poetry Anthology and the german poet Friedrich Hölderlin); I maybe listen to a podcast, I read articles from the Internet using my Feedly RSS app and some other tidying-up that I notice I have to do. Tony meanwhile, having finished watching the video classes, does homework. The assignment are sent, via WeChat, to Jenny who forwards them to me on my WeChat. I air-drop them from my Iphone onto my Ipad. Eventually, Jenny gets out of bed and our relaxed time is finished. When she has finished her ablutions, she will bark at Tony & me for whatever reason, and maybe make us lunch if helping Tony do her homework is not her priority. After lunch, I may go out to pick up deliveries or do some shopping or do a little reading or watch some video or continue reading the novel or non-fiction book I am reading. (anything to get away from Jenny "helping" Tony with his homework) About 4:00 PM, if the weather is good, Tony & I will get out of the house and play catch. When we get back, it is supper time. After supper, Tony will do some more homework, and I will occupy myself (with reading or a video or a podcast) until we can start our 8:00 PM English class. Once this is done, everyone will relax until bedtime. We will shower, watch video, play video games and read till about 11:00 PM, at which time we try to fall asleep and do the same thing the next day....

• I was talking on WeChat with a local acquaintance about video I had been recently watching. I mentioned the Tiger King series that I had just seen and some series that I had been watching from the Investigation Discovery network like Homicide Hunter and one I just discovered: Living with Evil. The latter series has acquaintances and relatives of Murderers describe their relationships with the criminals. Of the six episodes I watched, three of the criminals were husbands to the narraters, one was a brother, one was a step-son, and one was a friend. There were certainly signs that something was not right with these murderers and one could almost wonder why the narraters didn't catch on quicker than they did, until you realized that the signs were incidents that were quickly out of one's mind when things returned to normal. The person I was talking with about this brought up the terms sociopath and psychopath. I had to ask what was the difference between these types of individuals; and from what my acqaintance told me and what I later gleamed from some Internet research that I did that, there wasn't a clear distinction. Both types were certainly evil. I thought psychopaths, compared to sociopaths, were more wild and untamed like predatory animals but it turns out they aren't. Anyway, my chat partner then, out of the blue, brought up Catholic priests and said they were a group with a pathology all their own, and that the priests who did the molesting, or maybe he meant all priests, couldn't be classified homosexuals but as perverse power seekers. All I had to say in response was that that Church scandal was sad. I didn't want to debate the topic because I was caught off guard, and wasn't in a mood for these confrontations that our politicized age has caused. (I wish I asked if Obama was a sociopath, which I thought that narcissists were, earlier but that what's you get for trying not to step on minefields.) 

• Anyway, what are my thoughts on the Church scandals? They were a tragedy. Lots and lots and lots of sincere Catholics were let down. If you believe that what is taught by the Church is true, than the world was been let down. Do I think Priests as a group are bad through and through, as my chat-mate suggested? Of course not. What were the causes of the scandals? Infiltration of the Church by homosexuals and progressives, and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. The cover-ups were caused by a combination of a bureaucratic need to shuffle the problem off, and in many cases a desire to be merciful to the offending priest. The desire to be merciful was a mistake and should have been dealt with like a criminal manner and thus handed over to the state. And of course, the devil played a part. 

• I hate being caught off guard like I was about the priest thing. As I said, I don't like these sorts of debates because they can get my blood boiling. I also have discovered that many progressives often throw so-called "facts" at you that you haven't heard of and need to confirm. For example, there have been so many documented cases of people saying things that aren't true about Trump that you have to take all they, the anti-Trumpers, say about him with a grain of salt. (I had someone telling me that Trump and Rush Limbaugh said that the virus was a hoax, which turned out to be a case of they taking what Rush and the Donald had said out of context.) And these progressives, when they do try to argue with you ,only reveal their prejudices and not so much the logic of what they are saying. You can't argue with people like that. And being good at debating does not mean one is good at discerning truth. The latter skill takes a lot of time and doesn't look good in the age of sound bites. Best response (for me) to these progressive verbiage assaults:  yeah, yeah, whatever you say, and hope they shut up.

No Butter; USA-PRC War?; Snoring Videos; Revenge; Three of the Usual; Later, a Bonus

• The two supermarkets in my area of Wuxi don't have butter. We're down to our last bar of it. Now, it's going to become a real ordeal. I decided to look for butter on a Tuesday, and thus it was that I went to the two supermarkets. At the first one I went to, I chanced to observe a car parked/stopped in an inconsiderate manner. It was parked at the end of a narrow two-lane-wide road that had had fences put on the center line. (The fences had been put in the center of the road to stop people from parking on the side and thus leaving effectively one lane for traffic going to both directions. The fencing wasn't put right to the end of the road so as to not block pedestrian traffic. And it was in that space that the car had parked.) The car had effectively blocked one of the lanes and thus traffic was snarled. I then saw the driver of the car running to the car. He was easy to spot because he was going quickly in a panicky way towards his car. He had just picked up some food from a nearby KFC. I looked at his direction and then looked at his car a few times, and he looked at me sheepishly as locals are wont to do when they are caught doing selfish actions. It was the only satisfaction that I was to get in my fruitless search for butter.

• From the reading I have been doing on the Internet and the Chinese media I have seen my wife Jenny looking at, you would think the Chicoms and the USA were going to go to war over this virus. Accusations are flying as to who is responsible and who has been incompetent in dealing with pandemic. Well. I wonder where exactly the two sides would fight a war. There is no place that they are close to each other. I suppose they could fight in the ocean off the coast of China. But probably they would just lob ICBMs at each other. And if they did, I wish the Chicoms would do this: Nuke Seattle, Portland, California, Austin (Texas), and New York City. That would be helping Trump make America great again. (If the Americans asked me where to bomb in China, I'd tell them not to bother. The sheer ugliness of Modern China is punishment enough. Why help them by bombing it to the ground?)

• Jenny has taken two videos of me snoring. The first one, she took while I was taking an afternoon nap. I was on our bed, my head and back were propped up against a rolled-up quilt, fast asleep, snoring through my mouth. The funny thing was that my lower lip was bobbing up and down like it was made of wood. The second video was taken late at night and co-starred my son Tony. We were both snoring so loud. Our snores sounded like loud farts. Tony & I couldn't help but giggle saw it the next morning.

• Tony & I got Jenny back a day later. In the morning, we were up and she was still asleep and snoring. We took a video. She laughed, thankfully, when we showed it to her. To be fair, her snoring did not pack the wallop that ours did.

• Trouble comes in threes. The day after my search for butter, I was driving to do some mule duties for Jenny. Driving to the bakery to pick up some bread (we haven't run out of butter yet!), I ran into my first idiot just as I was exiting the apartment complex. I was making a left turn but stopped for a black SUV that was coming from my right. I was indecisive as to whether to go or not because the SUV wasn't going so fast, but ultimately I decided that it was better to stop. When the SUV finally passed by and the the coast was clear, I made my turn and quickly found myself on the ass of the SUV. It was going very slowly. I was debating whether to pass when it suddenly swerved to the left which led me to think it was going to make a u-turn. I thought to pass it on the right, but as quickly as I thought this, the SUV then made a right turn without a turn signal. Moron #1! Proceeding on my way, I encountered my second moron. I was behind him in the same lane and had a feeling he trying to change into the left lane because his car was slowing down and he seemed to be slowly swerving to the left. But because he was going slow and he was probably being an idiot, I passed around him. I then looked into my rearview mirror and saw the driver make the lane change, I suspected he was going to make, without a turn signal. Nothing to me is more proof positive than this that Chinese drivers are stupid because I have seen them do this all time. Then, after picking up the bread and driving to the mall where I parked our car in the basement so I could pick up packages for Jenny, I got on an elevator and encountered my third case of bad local manners. When it arrived at my floor, I was blocked from getting off from a family of locals trying to get on. I stood at the elevator entrance and waited for them to let me get off, which they finally did. This is one of the first things that people coming to China complain about: Why do the Chinese rush onto elevators without letting people get off first? (I didn't swear at the family who was blocking me. I was able to check myself this time.)

• Later that same day, I drove Tony to this park when we can play catch and Tony can use our bat to hit balls. When we parked, we saw workers were putting up these six foot tall sections of fence to stop park goers from sneaking through woods to get into the park. I was disappointed to see this because we had been sneaking through the woods and it was a bit of a pain to have to walk through the park entrance and go around to get to the field where we did our baseball thing, but what could I do? It really wasn't that far. And the park entrance had a security guard shack. When we got to the field, there were people who were dismantling the BBQ equipment they had been using. We then saw them walking through the woods. And we then heard these people yelling. Looking at what was going on, we saw that the people who had the BBQ were trying to climb over the fences, which must have been put up just after they had snuck through the woods to get to the field where they had had their BBQ. The workers and other park staff were the ones who were screaming. Typical.