Blogging on the fly.

• I am always having to rush the blog entries.  Now, it is morning and I blog hastily.  I have overslept, and the time I have before the wife and son wake up is short.
• Why is my Chinese so bad, after all these years?  1) I don't work at it, enough.  2) no teacher   3) I don't like speaking it - damn tones!  4) I prefer to blog  5) Wuxi dialect  6) I prefer to listen to podcasts  7) I have Tony to play with  8) I am old   9) Chinese people can be clingy and so make interactions painful  10) I don't watch Chinese t.v.
• Thankfully, I don't let my lame excuses stop me from trying to learn it.  I do spend a hour every day with my elementary Chinese grammar book trying to learn to read characters.  But when I am on the bus, I am reading it while listening to a podcast so as to block out whatever noise is being made around me.  I don't bother interacting.
• In a conversation class about money that I taught, there was a student named Penny.
• The school has a student named Undertaker -- good guy, actually.
• Several students have I-Pads.  One brings it to class.
• There were four men in a class, I taught, about shopping.  It was traumatically unsuitable to not have any women for that topic.
• My DVD copy of Black Swan has bad English subtitles and a picture that becomes "wavy".
• I have watched Black Swam over two evenings.  It is dark, depressing, and of its time -- modern that is.  If the characters somehow redeem themselves, it would be too sordid a tale for me to have sympathy.  The movie has lesbian scenes, blood, and overdone special effects.  I only watch it to the end because of a strange sense of commitment.  Some scenes scare Tony, but agonizing bore his jaded father.
• The purpose of the Black Swan, I suppose, is to combine a modern girl's psychosis with a classic ballet story.  The result of modern-classical combinations these days is blood, gore, and sex.
• Links:  Parlour games night,  Observing Tony, A WTU video, Prime Minister Mango eats shamefaced Wuxi peaches, and Are Wuxi Expats the world's biggest cheapstakes?