Yesterday after class, I went to my favourite noodle joint. I call it “the Muslim place” because one of my friends identified it that way, and a nodding salaam alaikum is received with appreciation, and because I can’t read the blue and white sign in either Hanzi or Arabic. A wall poster for the city of Lanzhou, capital of China’s central-western Gansu province and an ancestral home of noodliciousness, makes me think that the owning family must come from there. It’s fairly clean (but don’t use the washroom), there is a posted No Smoking request (but don’t ask them to enforce it), the noodles are hand-made, old-fashioned, in-house (free and easy to watch, from the back tables, the one-eyed maker throw the dough),
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).
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.