Gratitude:
Thank God for holidays. I will have one on May 1st.
Acknowledgment:
I acknowledge
something in this section of this weekly blog entry; or I maybe I
should say, I make a confession. This week, I acknowledge, or
confess, that I am getting lazy. I am not lazy in the sense of
descending to sitting on the sofa and playing computer games all the
time, but I really don't do much useful work these days. Playing
with Chinese flashcards and the Python computer programming language
doesn't help anyone else or expand my skill set.
Request:
I pray for the recovery of my
Aunt Dzidra who lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Dzidra, my mother's
oldest sister, has been diagnosed with cancer.
The
AKIC Week in Brief. I
lived this week in anticipation of the May Day holiday that is coming
up in the next week. My Saturday was
brilliant because everyone in China had to either go to work or go to
school so they could get April 29(Monday), April 30 (Tuesday) and May
1 (Wednesday) off. I wrote my first long program in the python
computer language – the first time I had written a program in
thirty years.
About
Me (Andis) I am a guy who hates the wild-card in
Major League Baseball. One of the things I liked about MLB was
its pennant races – I could think of nothing better than two teams
dueling for months on end for first place – the only time you could
cruise was when you had clinched first place, not just a playoff
spot. When the Montreal Expos were actually in a pennant race
in 1979, it was the most engrossing thing I had ever followed in
sports -- and it happened but a year after the great '78 race between
the Yankees and the Red Sox. I suppose the idea of
the wild-card was to try to increase those moments of drama
-- it instead cheapened them. Those pennant race moments
require buildups that are much longer than a playoff series. [Now
what does this rant tell you about me? I am in a stick-in-the-mud
about some things.]
I
in in China! 对！我现在在中国！我很喜欢看书和写在因特网。我不喜欢中国的开车人。
我喜欢中国的菜。但是，我觉得无锡的菜是很甜的。
I
am Canadian! I decided to do something that I never would
have thought possible while I was living in Canada: download a
Gordon Lightfoot song. Having not had to be subjected to him for
over eight years, I decided to try to listen to Rainy Day People with
an open mind – a mind not polluted by an aversion to him brought on
by CRTC regulations. The song wasn't so bad. I also downloaded “You
Ain't Seen Nothing Yet” by Bachman Turner Overdrive.
I
like to Read!
Here
is what I am reading this week:
Don
Colacho's Aphorisms: There are 2,988 of them in this book
that I compiled 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 done his last
ReJoyce Podcast in about 22 years. Now that I have caught up to
Delaney's podcast (he completed episode #150 this week), I am getting
ahead him as far as reading the book. I will be finished
reading it, I figure, in a year.
The
Holy Bible King James Version: I am reading a chapter a day.
Now I am in the Gospel According to Saint John.
University
Economics: Elements of Inquiry Third Edition by Armen A.
Alchian and William R. Allen: A great Economics
textbook.
The
Hills & The Sea by Hilaire Belloc. Finished. The
sort of book I wish I could write but I haven't had the experiences
and haven't the talent.
Put
out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh. Finished. My wife got
annoyed at me when the novel made me giggle in bed.
A
Midsummer-Night's Dream by William Shakespeare. What can one
say? It is a total classic; and because I am reading it for
enjoyment and not for school, it is actually quite enjoyable.
The
Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods by A.G.
Sertillanges. How did I go
almost fifty years without having heard of this book? Well. I
didn't start reading Father
Schall till three months
ago. It could make my top ten list of my favorite books.
I
like to make videos
I
teach English Or do I just talk to the Chinese so they can
practice their English? Either way, I will disclose a little of my
teaching philosophy that I do have: Chances are that in a fifty five
minute class, you aren't going to teach the students more than four
or five words, so you have to drill those into them.
I
like to cut and paste quotes that I found interesting:
The
following are from Don Colacho:
- 1945 The necessary and sufficient condition of despotism is the disappearance of every kind of social authority not conferred by the State.
- 1949 The people wants what it is told it should want.
- 1960 Error almost always walks more elegantly than the truth.
- 1964 The only man saved from intellectual vulgarity is the man who ignores what it is fashionable to know.
- 903 Reading the newspaper degrades whomever it does not make into a brute. [I would even say following the news turns one into a brute. Thinking of the people who are running the US government now, puts me into a nasty mood. Hearing that Justin Trudeau, who may or not be the son of Pierre Trudeau, makes my feel brutish as well.]
- 1985 Conflicts rarely break out over the true disagreements.
- 2000 The compassion we display to some helps us to justify the envy which others awaken in us. [An accurate observation of human nature. It is certainly true in my case.]
- 2030 The left never attributes its failure to a mistaken diagnosis but to the perversity of events.
- 2035 Theoretical affability toward vice is not a proof of liberality and elegance, but of vulgarity.
- 2040 To the petulant subjectivism of the man who believes he is the measure [of all things] is opposed the humble subjectivism of the man who refuses to be an echo.
Here
are some GK Chesterton quotes:
- The greatest of all illusions is the illusion of familiarity.
- A moderate is a man who wants his children to be moderately clean, houses to be moderately sanitary, and their inhabitants to be moderately sober.
- The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind. [I stopped worrying about the look of my body – thirty years ago. The best decision I ever made.]
- The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.
- The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing the air of locality. . . . The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men—hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky. [I am no globe-trotter. I am a mover. I really haven't done that much traveling.]
- We must make up our minds to be ignorant of much, if we would know anything.
- Tolerance is the virtue of people who don‘t believe anything.
From
Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh:
- That’s as may be, but this isn’t Spain. We can’t go arresting people for what they say in a private conversation in a café. I’ve no doubt we shall come to that eventually, but at the present stage of our struggle for freedom, it just can’t be done.”
- …Invasions swept over China; the Empire split up into warring kingdoms. The scholars lived their frugal and idyllic lives undisturbed, occasionally making exquisite private jokes which they wrote on leaves and floated downstream… [Are there such scholars in China now? Or were they all hunted down?]
Politically,
I am Conservative: In
my mid-twenties,
I ceased to be a left-winger. For this you can blame Rush Limbaugh
and F.A. Hayek, among others. My road away from Leftism really began
when at the Union Center in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The UC , on
Portage Avenue, was, and perhaps still is, close to the University of
Winnipeg and was a popular spot for students to go have a beer and
play pool. The Union Center's walls were bestrewn with images of
“laboring people.” I remember once, while there on a Friday
afternoon, playing devil's advocate, – I was still a leftie and
trying to be intellectually honest – with a student who was so
left-wing that he got a job working with the NDP (Canada's Labour
Party) in the Manitoba provincial legislature. The subject was the
Americans. The NDPer was so over-the-top with his criticisms of the
Americans – I think he said that they weren't good at anything –
that I found that I, who was then proud to say he was a Socialist,
was having to stand up for the Americans. Moral of the story: being
intellectually honest and being a Leftie is incompatible. I
eventually choose, after some prideful obstinance, to stop being a
left-winger.
I
like to keep a diary
Here
is the list of its characters:
- Andis
- LECTOR: really Andis pretending to criticize himself.
- Jenny: Andis's wife
- Students
- My Handler
- Andis's Mom
- Chinese Flashcards
- My Home Laptop
- My School Laptop
- My Ipad Mini
Monday
[April 22nd]
[Home
Laptop]
I
don't work today.
I
made a
video with music
and special effects.
I
phoned my Mom last night. She tells me that it is still snowing
and cold in Brandon, Manitoba. I hate to tell her that temperatures
are in the mid-twenties here in Wuxi.
Tuesday
[April 23rd]
[Ipad]
Tony
sits on my lap and giggles for some unknown reason.
I
must put money on my bus card. I have less than 10 rmb on it.
[Home
Laptop]
I
just looked at 400 Chinese flashcards. I identified about 90 percent
of them correctly.
[School
Laptop]
On
the way downtown, the bus, I was riding, broke down. I had to
walk to the next stop to get to the place where I did top up my bus
card with money with 100 rmb. There is irony in that. [LECTOR: Are
you sure?]
I
work 1300-2100.
How
to become a high Testosterone ____ Wonder Being (what are the two
words I had in the middle?)
One
of the students I talked to today was this young girl who works seven
days a week at a restaurant. She has down time during her work
day which lasts from 900 in the morning to 800 in the evening, but
really her schedule is brutal, and I feel very sorry for her. I
also feel guilty because I don't think we are doing enough for her to
with the investment she has made to improve her English.
[Ipad]
Had
an awful headache during my VIP class.
I
watched the first 30 minutes of Jesus of Nazareth series that I
watched before Easter. For whatever reason, I got it into my
head to watch it a second time.
As
of now, I have had 22 views of my
last weekly blog entry – not very good. However, On
Youku, I have had 150 views of Trains,
Toys & Tony.
Wednesday
[April 24th]
[School
Laptop]
I
work 1300 to 2100 today. I have five classes and I have to go
to the police station in order to renew my Visa. So, I have
spent the morning at home doing my daily flashcard practice and
Chinese typing practice.
Oh
the humanity! I think to myself as I go to school. I can never
take for granted how there are so many people in China.
I
wear my Winnipeg Jets cap today. [LECTOR: What do you tell you
very few readers this? I do have a reputation to live up to as Wuxi's
most boring expatriate.]
I
have a student, in 2000 class tonight, whose name is Eileen. I
have downloaded a song by Dexy's Midnight Runners titled Come On
Eileen! I might play if for her; I might not. Listening
to the song, most of the lyrics are incomprehensible: Come on
Eileen blah blah blah blah! But the music and rhythm are quite
catchy.
As
I said last night, or rather, as I typed into my Ipad last
night, I had a headache during my VIP class and it was an ordeal to
make it to the end. I also had a pains in my right leg from my
hip to my knees and then further down to my ankle. The only
thing, I can do for it is to massage it.
What's
new? I am thinking about the earthquake in China. Why?
I'm Chinese.
Thursday
[April 25th]
[School
Laptop]
I
work 1000 to 2100 today. My long day. Not necessarily my
busiest day. What I mean is that this is the day of the week
that I spend most of my time away from Casa Kaulins.
Last
night, as the class came to an end and I needed to say something, I
asked a woman student what she was now going to do and she told me
that she was going to pick up her dog which was having a bath at some
pet spa. Thinking of someone I knew who had a dog, I thought to
mention it to the woman but didn't. Instead, I giggled at the
thought of somehow saying that it wasn't the person who needed the
bath, but the person's dog who did, although it wasn't a stretch to
think that this particular individual needed a bath as much as his
dog.
Slow
moving old types descending the stairs of the double-decker bus as it
is about to pull into my stop. Annoying!!
I
went to the police office yesterday to have my visa renewed. While
there, I saw another foreigner having to do the same thing done I
assumed. I overheard him say that he was from a small town in
the Canadian province of Quebec. I lived in Quebec from 1971-1976.
At
one of the two areas we went to in the police station, one of the
uniformed clerks told my handler that he recognized me -- from the
Bus TV, of course. "Do you want his signature!" said
my handler to him. My handler told me the clerk turned
red-faced at the suggestion.
I
found these two interesting reactions to the Boston Marathon Bombings
by David
Warren and Steve
Sailer.
Tony
will have to go to school this Saturday and Sunday so he can get
Monday, Tuesday, & Wednesday off next week for the May Day
holiday.
I
am working on an email to be sent to my brother Ron who lives in
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. I have to talk to him more than I
have done. I think the last time I talked him was at Christmas
time. Writing to my sister and now my brother, I have decided
that it is best to take my time sending emails. That is, I
should write them, save them, look at them again, add, edit, and
repeat doing so until I think it is time finally to send it -- either
that or say to myself: "Enough already, you diddly dandy do,
press the "send" button, why don't ya?"
Friday
[April 26th]
I
work 1100-2100 but I am already at school at 900. [Lector:
God! Why so early?] I come early not out of some
strange zealous devotion to duty, but because I have to get Tony to
his Kindergarten bus/van pickup at 745. I figure that I might
as well just go to work instead of return to the apartment and then
leave if half-an-hour later. The things I would have done at
home, like Chinese flashcard study, I could just as well do at school
on the school laptop. [Which reminds me! I am writing on the
School Laptop]
I
am wasting my time. [LECTOR: You just figured that
out?!?] Here's the proof. I took the 602支 to
work today. (I could have taken the 602, 610 or 25, but I
choose to take the 602支.
Why? This is another story which I won't bore you with now.) I
took that particular bus to a stop where I then waited for the 81 bus
(I could get on the 79 or 85 if I wanted to at that stop, but I
prefer the romance of a double-decker bus.) While waiting for
the 81, I saw another 602支 pull
into the stop, much to my bemusement. If I had only
known, I could have taken my time back by Casa K! I could have
lingered in the small shop, for instance, where I buy my gum.
[LECTOR: You waste time, you know, by not getting the 79
or 85 buses. Andis: True enough. But I would not have
soaked in the romantic atmosphere of the 81 bus. Life should be
a proper mixture of efficiency and romance.]
Playing
with the Python programming language, I will soon be able to write a
program that will do most of my tournament work for me.
I
have just written a program that can play a round-robin tournament
game.
Saturday
[April 27th]
[School
Laptop]
Students
are going to school and workers are going to work, and so they aren't
coming to the school to take English classes. So, an easy day
for me – just two classes.
I
will challenge myself by spending lots of time on the flashcard
practice.
[Home
Laptop]
I
took Tony out of the apartment this evening. I wanted to go for an
e-bike ride around the area, maybe even go to Yanqiao; Tony wanted to
go to Tesco to look at toys. Tony's will prevailed but I got angry
and vowed to never take Tony to a toy store on our next outing
together. I was at least able to get Tony out of the store as
quickly as possible. All I spent on him was 2 rmb at the arcade.
But then Tony further annoyed me by asking to go home as soon as we
got on the e-bike. “I don't want to go to Yanqiao! I want to go
home!” moaned Tony when I told my desire. Tony is getting lame.
He is not at all adventurous and is always begging to go home –
something he has never done before.
I
got sad news in an email from my mother. Her oldest sister – Mom
was the youngest of four daughters – has been diagnosed with
pancreatic cancer. Auntie Dzirdra! My God! I pray Dzidra doesn't
suffer and can live for a few more years yet! [Dzidra lives in
Winnipeg – a street over from my brother Ron.]
I
spend the evening at Casa K working on my weekly blog entry. [Only 29
people have read my last blog entry as I type this.] During the
week, I write the entry in Evernote. On Saturday, I import the entry
to my home laptop where I put it into a text file that I can edit
with Open Office.
Sunday
[April 28]
[Home
Laptop]
I
don't work today, but Tony has to go to school. So I was up early
this morning to send him off'.
David
Warren, my favorite presence on the Internet, has written a
blog entry about the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential
Library. Warren's assessment of Bush is, as are of some of the
entry's commentators, bang-on. Bush was a decent man who tried to do
the right things for the right reasons, who loved his country (unlike
the current President), who meant well and was lacking in any sort of
cynicism. His failures, and I admit there were a few, could be
attributed to the fact that he lived in a post-1965 America that had
become spoiled and self-hating. Like Sarah Palin, you can say that
Bush had to have been doing something right because he was hated the
people one should be hated by if one is to, in fact, be a decent
human being. [LECTOR: split infinitive!]
[Ipad]
Sights
& Sounds as I walk to the bus stop:
- Woman wears t-shirt that says "The Resurrection Will Be Truculent.”
- A flat bed truck passes and I hear its passenger grunt. I look up to see a man spit out of the cab. His face goes momentarily cross-eyed and his projectile darts out swift and true from just below the middle of his upper lip.
On
the bus:
- The sidewalks around the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza, which is under construction, have been completed. They seemed to have appeared overnight.
- It is not a good idea to fly Iranian jetliners if they are Boeings. A student told me that because of a trade embargo, the Iranians can't get parts of their Boeings. Recalling when he had once flown by an Iranian-owned Boeing, he told me that the plane felt like it was falling apart and that its engine didn't sound right.
[Home
Laptop]
This
has to be my lamest weekly blog entry ever. Trying to edit it, I get
this sinking feeling that the prose is just utterly awful.
For
lunch, Jenny & I went to the Jinling Hotel for a lunch buffet.
It was not great, but not bad.
I
took Tony for an E-bike ride after he came back from school. We
rode to a nearby town that is just across the border that divides
Wuxi and Jiangying districts. Like a Western movie set, the town had
buildings along its main drag and not much behind them – at least
on the southern side. Going in a southerly direction, we found a
nice
narrow paved road that was tree-lined and took us over
many narrow bridges. We felt like we were in the countryside for
we saw people, with the appearance of peasants, engaged in
subsistence farming, using hoes to scrape the land and bearing pails,
two-at-a-time, by tying them to a long and narrow board that could be
carried on their shoulders. The whole scene was lovely and because
the weather was perfect, this e-bike trip brought me the best moments
of the week.
