BLURT 10: It’s always good to try new things. Openness. Discovery. Antidotes to fear and complacency and sloth. But. What but? Lay’s Chinese potato chip flavour “Lobster Cheese”. Now trembling about “Refreshing Cucumber” and “Green Tea” as well.
BLURT 9: Reveille plays from the sports field next door: it’s megaphones, and marching, and martial music, and hundreds of young college students in uniform by 6:00 am. Yi! Er! San! Se! It’s frosh week in China.
BLURT 8: Returns and returns: this modest collection retrieved from electronic limbo, this Canadian family walking the now-familiar paths of a Chinese life.
BLURT 7: Days and nights hiking Banff, Lake Louise, and on into British Columbia is a jaw-slackening reminder: this here Canada, it’s big and beyond beautiful. And almost nobody lives here, according to my China Eye. Happy day(s).
Intellectually, I believe in moderation, and I have proved for myself that “moderation in all things” — at least for many of the things life has brought to me — is among the most valuable of principles and a guide to right living. But I enjoy blizzards and heat waves, and some tunes just have to be played loud. And my goodness, I love and wish to echo the passion for justice in Garrison’s defiant eloquence. Listen:
“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; – but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest – I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.”
William Lloyd Garrison (December 13, 1805 – May 24, 1879) was a prominent American journalist, and social reformer. He edited the radical abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and in the first edition — published in 1831, when Garrison was only 26! — he wrote the above challenge/threat/promise/vow. He was one of America’s greatest voices for justice, not only a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society but also a campaigner for women’s suffrage.
BLURT5: Vietnam remains in my mind a mythical land of napalm apocalypse, while I lounge by a pool near Hoi An.
BLURT6: Son the Second celebrates his birth, far from mother, farther from dad. (No great mischief for the son.) Imagine. 27.
BLURT4: Haven’t read Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom, but delighted to learn How To Be Alone, meditations upon writing, justice, much else.
BLURT5: Transcontinental Skype: disjointed, blurry, blurty, inaudible, peevish. But OH, the loveliness of family-ar faces, even metallic voices.
BLURT3: My name is Jay, and I am addicted to Snickers® bars. They are everywhere. Other favourite sweeties aren’t. I blame China.
I challenge grad students: why do Chinese (grand)parents carry kids’ backpacks on the walk to school? Outrageous! Most are blank with incomprehension. Everyone does that, Jay.
BLURT 2: What do you do when you’re brilliant, anxious, Chinese, introverted, and a city dweller who doesn’t much like people? Books. Cigarettes. Wondering.
China is a very civilized place, I tell my wife.
No Twitter.
No Facebook.
There may be other reasons for that, besides simple national good taste and refined judgement, but there you go. She rolls her eyes. She yeah yeah yeahs. And she reminds me how Facebook has been useful to her, a mature professional woman with no time for silliness but a considerable desire to connect. Okay. I make a grudging concession, and she goes back to the VPN (Virtual Private Network) that allows her access. Apparently, all the cool ex-pats do it. But not Jay Cool.
Long story short: you can’t follow me on Twitter
(And for the life of me, why would anyone want to? Right now I am typing. A moment ago I was eating. I plan to read. In an hour or so, I’ll turn in early. Several hours later, I will wake up to pee. Several hours after that, repeat. And tomorrow will be another gripping day of doing.)
But I AM considering doing some Twitter-esque blurting on here, mostly things that I wonder about, notice, or remember. This, mind you, is not out of any sense that the world needs my thoughts on this or that, but just as an excuse to record what is usually quite fleeting (by the nearest thing I have to Tweeting). Just for the sake of an external challenge — playing tennis with a net, as Robert Frost might have suggested — I may even observe the 140-character limit that Twitter imposes. But I AM NOT A TWIT.
Blurt the First is coming. Warn your children. Guard your pets.