Latest Possible May Entry

And the oldest profession is....

Thursday, I asked this question and the students guessed... Teacher, Priest, Hunter, Farmer, and Butcher!  among other things.  But none of them said prostitute.  Maybe it never dawned on them, or the topic was taboo.  When they asked me why this was so, that is, that "they" say that "it" is the oldest profession, I didn't have any ready explanation.  I had never questioned the cliche till then.

 

And so now, I wonder...  This idea that prostitution is the oldest profession--  has it been confirmed by some branch of study?  Or is the statement, simply a clever aphorism, that has been naturally and cynically assumed to be true?  I assume that a profession must earn exchange or money, not just survival, before its activities can permit it to truly be called a profession.  I guess that in the age of barter, the service in question  was provided by wives or mates.  Once monetary exchange was possible, the services of a prostitute could earn cash and be separated from the wifely  position.  A mate was attached to a hunter or gatherer who could provide protection.  And so if money had to be used as a means for professions to earn income, the earliest profession may well be the minter of money or provider of credit.

 

Lady Ga Ga

Hearing so much about Lady Ga Ga, I went to youku to view some of her videos.  I was underwhelmed.  I just couldn't see anything about her that would put her above the other pop artists that are out there now.  I do confess I approached the videos with the prejudicial attitude of disdain, but nothing I saw even gave me moment for pause and for questioning of my assumptions.  She afforded me no guilty pleasure.  She was awful, and the product of a marketing phenomenon that I know much better than to be seduced by.

 

Stagecoach

John Wayne's birthday is in May, late May exactly.  And I just so happened to watch the movie Stagecoach before I heard about it being his birthday.  Nice coincidence.  Anyway, in Stagecoach, his first appearance on the screen had him looking like an Adonis.

 

Why my wife married me.

I heard my wife saying that when she meet me, I was a terrible customer for her -- she was a hostess for a beer company at the time.  I only drank a beer a night at the pub and she earned income from selling as many beers as possible. 

 

But this showed to her that I had the attributes to make a good husband -- economy, and discipline.

A visit from a reader

I can say, with pride and truth, that this blog has caused me to meet people I wouldn't otherwise have crossed paths with.  These people have wished me well with this endeavor, and I feel ashamed in that I can't fully repay their kindness.  I hope though that in the future, somehow, some way, I will be able to be as kind to others as they have been to me.

Friday, I had lunch with an Englishman and his Wuxiren wife  They live in England but come back often to see the woman's parents. This time back to China, they went to Tibet where the scenery was wonderful but the cities seem tense as soldiers could be seen everywhere.  

Not with a bang but a whimper

The King of Wuxi will be moving to Winnipeg where he will henceforth be known as the King of Winnipeg.  I wish him all the best.  Wuxi Expatdom's loss is Winnipeg's gain.

His departure has been one without pomp and fanfare, from me anyway, and really unbefitting for a  monarch. But so much goes on in Wuxi, on a personal level, that is so typical of the human condition and banal that you can't report it in a blog  -- that is, you can't talk of the divisions, all that much.   

It seems that when you leave a small community, you are ultimately escaping it.  (Although, it wouldn't be fair to say that about all small communities.)  The Wuxi Expat community is one where people don't come to live or have community -- they are often here for reasons nefarious.  And so I find myself disillusioned by so many human relationships and even more by how I have dealt with them - mea culpa.  

 

Time to move on for the King.

 

My time has yet to come.

Sight I Saw

In a field, sat an old man on a manhole cover -- his head in his hands, he looked like a broken depressed man.  Meanwhile, behind him stood a woman doing some calisthenic exercise -- she looked to be miming a pushing action.  What she was pushing in her imagination was hard for me to determine -- but the thing being pushed was conceived by her as being very springy.

Insert clever observation here:  Well, obviously there was a contrast but what it had to say, I don't know other than the proximity of the moods is not something you would see in Canada -- Canadians would not be so ebullient close to someone so depressed.

 

When's your mother's birthday?

This simple question earned some interesting answers from some students Monday evening.  I learned that one student's mother's birthday was on April 5 which was a day after his  birthday on April 4 -- an interesting coincidence.  As well, April 5 is Tomb Sweeping Day in China and also my sister's birthday -- two more mind blowing coincidences. 

 

Another student said she didn't know her mother's exact birthday.  This was because her grandmother couldn't remember the exact date the birth had happened, other than it was in July.  This is not the first time I have heard of this inexactitude about birthdays.