The Unthinkable

This picture was not taken in my basement.

I am breaking precedent.

A couple of years ago on these pages, I swore up and down that I had no further interest in any political issue, that I was "dropping out" of the American political system, never again intended to vote, and frankly just didn't care who was "running" the country. You can all go kill each other, I as much as said. Leave me out of it.

By and large I'm sticking to that.

But a nationwide brouhaha has a way of sucking you in, so to speak, and the current fuss-'n-feathers over gun control, only the latest installment in a national scream-fest which began more than forty years ago when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan, has intruded itself into my peace and quiet. So I am going to break precedent and speak up on this issue. Those who know me just might be surprised at what I have to say.

For the record, I do not own a gun. My father, a Border Patrolman, taught me to shoot when I was a boy. I had my first bolt-action .22 rifle at age eight. I was out bird-hunting in Mexico with my dad and his friends, bringing down dove with a Winchester pump-action 12 guage shotgun, when I was ten. My dad took me to the Border Patrol pistol range and taught me to shoot a Smith and Wesson .38 when I was 12. So I am no stranger to guns, but haven't fired one in nearly a decade, the last time being when I was out skeet-shooting with my brother-in-law in Reno, Nevada in 2003. If I had the $400-plus that a quality handgun would cost, I would spend it on something I need more, like a decent sound system or a leather-bound set of Faulkner.

These days a lot of my Facebook friends are yelling and screaming at each other over gun control. My loudmouth former editor from my newspaper days here in Chula Vista, Michael Burgess, is nearly apoplectic over the issue, or so it would seem to people who don't know Michael as well as I do. His fondness for hollering is something with which I became intimately acquainted when I worked for him. Michael is British, and a dyed-in-the-wool left-winger, so naturally he favors more and stiffer gun control. He's been yelling at me about this on Facebook even though I have disavowed any particular interest in the issue.

On the other side of the debate, I've been hearing from another former newspaper colleague, my friend J.D. Hawk.  J.D. opposes an assault-weapons ban, and he recently sent me a link to a mini-debate on the issue between Piers Morgan and former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura. Morgan is a Brit like Michael, and favors a national tightening of U.S. gun laws. (Why do the British think it's their natural purview to constantly badger the Americans about the quality of life? England has been a third-class country since the end of World War II. But that's a discussion for another day.)

Ventura, the first Libertarian ever to be elected to a governorship, opposes tighter gun laws. I watched the two of them argue about it for a few minutes on YouTube yesterday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ENcfdAoWkU.

Both men made valid points. But as much I have always despised the cant, the hypocrisy and the muddy --yea, often nonexistent -- thinking of the Left, and as much as I bridle at Brits telling Americans what to do, I found that it was Morgan, not Ventura, who expressed an opinion similar to my own, although I was also in agreement with Ventura on some points.

Morgan stated, as gun-control advocates always do these days, that he has nothing against the idea of private citizens owning firearms. He and his ilk simply want to clamp down on easy access to assault weapons and countless rounds of ammunition. Morgan pointed to recent tragedies in Connecticut and Colorado involving assault weapons in support of his argument that a ban on assault weapons would reduce such mass-shootings.

Well, I don't know. The nut-case who shot up Virginia Tech a few years ago, killing 32 people and wounding 15 before killing himself, used handguns to do the deed, not a Kalashnikov. I offer this not as an argument in favor of banning handguns, but as a counter-argument to those who think banning assault weapons would solve the problem. There will always be Travis Bickles out there, and all the federal legislation in the world won't keep them from getting guns if they want them. Morgan's comparison of the gun situations in England and France with that of the U.S. does not hold water: neither England nor France has the vast size and demographic variety of the United States, nor do either of those countries have the American tradition of civil libertarianism.

But I also found a flaw in Ventura's argument. He went to the Second Amendment, as gun advocates usually do. He pointed out, correctly, that the framers of the United States Constitution, when they adopted the Second Amendment, were not thinking, as we moderns do, of hunters and gun collectors. Their idea was to maintain the possibility of a strong citizen militia, which could resist the incursions of a tyrannical government. Ventura pointed this out, and he was right.

The situation in 1789 strongly merited such a concern. The American colonies had just thrown off the yoke of the British tyrant George III, and well-armed citizen militias had played no small role in that. George Washington's Continental Army might not have prevailed had it not been for its "grassroots" support in the countryside, the rabble-in-arms depicted in Mel Gibson's film The Patriot, which harassed the British forces with guerrilla tactics throughout the war; the same citizen militias who became legendary American myth-heroes in such places as Lexington and Concord.

True, very true. But a lot has changed since 1789, when warfare was a question of soldiers banging away at each other with muskets and staging bayonet charges. When everyone was using muskets and squirrel guns, the idea of a citizen militia posing a serious threat to a professional army was a tenable one. That's no longer the case, not in 2013. No matter how much firepower a private citizen might stockpile in his or her basement, the idea of a handful of miltia fighting off, say, the American military, is a fantasy at best. Remember Waco? That wasn't a militia in that compound, but it serves as an illustration of what happens to zealots who take on the government.

Does this mean that I'm defending federal power? By no means, as St Paul says in his Letter to the Romans. Janet Reno should have been prosecuted for what she did at Waco  in 1993. Suspicion of government power is one of the oldest, and finest, of American traditions. Our forefathers had it. The Second Amendment was an expression of it.

In fact much of the U.S. Constitution, not just the Second Amendment, was an expression of that American suspicion of government power. The framers of the Constitution, for example, divided the new government into three sections, Executive, Judicial and Legislative, precisely for the purpose of creating a balance of power, preventing any one sector from consolidating too much power, which in turn could lead to tyranny. The framers had just thrown off foreign tyranny; now they sought to prevent domestic tyranny.

History seems to indicate that they did a good job. "The Constitution will stop 'em every time," as Harry Truman once said. Now, some may point and snigger at that statement, seeing as it was Harry Truman who created the CIA and the modern Security State, but the sentiment, Truman's record notwithstanding, is an American one, reflecting a very American attitude. Richard Nixon could not stand up against the Constitution, (with a little help from a couple of reporters) nor could Huey Long or any other would-be tinpot dictator in American history that I can think of.

This, along with the realities of the modern world, makes the idea of a "well-armed citizen militia" rather quaint. When the nascent United States was small and everyone shared a common goal, the removal of British power from these shores, armed citizen militias were vital. Today, with no common enemy to fight except their own government, self-formed militias tend to become the stuff of comedy, well-armed paranoiacs hiding in holes and attracting the attention of the FBI, which, while surely guilty of its own share of power-abuse, has more important jobs to do than try and keep track of a bunch of nutjobs with Uzis running around in the woods looking to pick a fight with their own government, as opposed to that of George III.

For these and other reasons, I favor an assault-weapons ban. I wholeheartedly support the right of any American citizen to own as many pistols, rifles and shotguns as he or she wants, but while insisting that I do not think an assault weapons ban is going to prevent gun tragedies, I also do not see any reason for anyone other than the military and the police to have assault weapons. No one else really needs them, unless you really believe that a citizen militia hiding in the hills of some western state is going to put an end to the abuse of power in Washington. Such challenges should and must be mounted, but by other means than those of the street gang or the drug cartel, both of which are going to have assault weapons no matter what Barack Obama or anyone else might choose to mandate.


A Postcard from Seneca

Behold one smart dude.

Greetings, my fellow aging baby boomers.

It's a commonplace, even the stuff of standup comedy, that we are not aging well. Our generation has been in denial of the aging process since the first of us began to hit our thirties, thirty years ago. Our obsessive jogging, iron-pumping, power-walking and ingestion of anti-aging substances and vitamin supplements has made us the butt of ridicule.

It's partly our own, narcissistic fault, but not entirely our fault. I've been pointing out for years how, when we were kids, the American mass media made a cult of youth, and we all got swept up in that. Our parents and their parents accepted aging as part of life. We, on the other hand, were told that young was good and old was bad, and naturally, when we ourselves began aging, we fought the idea tooth and nail, with every resource available to us. We have not, so far anyway, gone gentle into that good night.

But now that many of us are past sixty, (I'm 57 as I write this) we're gradually cooling into acceptance, realizing that diet and exercise are not going to make death go away. I have noticed a tendency among my contemporaries now to echo the twilight grumbling we have heard over the past decade or so from the generation that preceded us: "Old age is not for the faint-hearted," "Youth is wasted on the young," "Getting old sucks." Yes, with our increasingly bad knees, fallen arches and stiff necks, we're becoming geezers, despite the fact that our generation made the station wagon obsolete, replacing it with the minivan, because we didn't want to be seen driving around in Mom and Dad's car.

So I think the time is right for a word of, well yes, consolation. Grumbling about old age is nothing new. Since death is part of the human experience and always has been, the ages have had much to say about it. You all know the most famous passage in Ecclesiastes, the one about to everything there is a season, etc. The Bible is full of things like that, and so are many other ancient writings.

Which brings me to Seneca. Many of you have never heard of him, many of you have. For those who have not, he was a Roman philosopher of the Stoic school, born about the same time as Christ, c. 4 B.C. He died in A.D. 65, and was a major player in the Roman politics of his day despite ill health, exile and the danger which was never far from politics in the age of Augustus.

The Stoics were characterized by their attitude toward life, their root idea being one of acceptance. If you desire nothing, nothing can be taken away from you, and so forth. Early Christian thinking owes much to the Stoics, although they of course had no belief in the redemptive death or a transcendent God -- what obeisance they paid to the gods of Rome was a question of duty to the state, not allegiance to a personal deity. But how much like Bible verses the following Stoic declarations sound! "What fortune has made yours is not your own;" "The boon that could be given can be withdrawn."

The Stoics' acceptance of what life dishes out, with an ix-nay on kicking and screaming, still echoes for us today. (I will NOT use the currently-fashionable word "resonates;" -- journalists, who imitate each other like parrots, have beaten that word to death.)

I was reading some of Seneca's letters the other day over my morning coffee, and found something he said about old age worthy of jotting down. Jot it down, boomers:

"...We should cherish old age and enjoy it. It is full of pleasure if you know how to use it. Fruit tastes most delicious when its season is ending. The charms of youth are greatest at the joy of its passing. It is the final glass which pleases the inveterate drinker, the one that sets the crowning touch to his intoxication and sends him off into oblivion. Every pleasure defers until its last its greatest delights. The time of life which offers the greatest delight is the age that sees the downward movement -- not the steep decline -- already begun; in my opinion even the age that stands on the brink has pleasures of its own -- or else the fact of not experiencing the want of any pleasures takes their place. How nice it is to have outworn one's desires and left them behind!" -- Letters From A Stoic. (London: Penguin Books, 1969, 2004). pp. 58.

And now, on to a breakfast of fresh fruit, whole wheat toast and cereal, rather than our parents' familiar bacon and eggs.

But this in full knowledge that there remain 986 days until I turn 60, and tomorrow it will be 985, and not all the fresh fruit and whole wheat toast in the world will stop that.
 

When We Were Guinea Pigs

I was reading a book on geometry not long ago. I never took geometry in school, and it's a good thing I didn't, because I am hopeless at math. Hopeless. Tell me to add up a column of figures three times and I'll give you three different answers.


If only it had been this simple!

A mediocre student in all of my subjects except English, (I was a champion speller, for what little that was worth)  I nevertheless received only two "Fs" on my report card in all my years between first grade and high school graduation.

Both of those "Fs" were in math classes. In elementary school I was amongst a bunch of kids who did well on the IQ tests the shrinks were always giving kids in the mid-1960s, and as a result I got shuffled into a number of so-called "enrichment" classes.

Unfortunately for me, these classes included "enrichment math," in which I sank like the Titanic. Just because you're good at one thing doesn't mean you're good at everything. I flunked enrichment math in the seventh grade and had to be transferred to "dummy" math, a roomful of snickering little hoodlums whose loftiest aspiration was Juvenile Hall. I just barely squeaked by in "dummy math," and got invited to after-school fights by a number of up-and-coming bullies.

Four years later, in the 11th grade, I flunked basic algebra. I simply could not make sense of all those letters-that-were-supposed-to-stand-for-numbers multiplied and divided by other letters-that-were-supposed-to-stand-for-numbers.  I spent the fall semester of my junior year sitting in the back of the room, silent and hopelessly confused. Beneath my "F" the following January, my algebra teacher (who was also our school's varsity wrestling coach) checked the box marked "Apparent difficulty with subject." Duh. I transferred at midyear to Humanities, which was more my speed: all we had to do was look at paintings, read poems and essays, watch films of people like Toscanini and Jascha Heifetz and then write about what we saw and heard. Easy.

So why, this late in life, was I trying to swot up geometry all of a sudden?  Believe it or not, it was because of an interest in another discipline, namely, philosophy. I never took a philosophy course in college, and decided not long ago that this was a gap in my learning which I might be able to plug with a little self-discipline. I've been reading through Frederick Copleston's nine-volume History of Philosophy.  I'm up to Volume 5. Among the things I learned in Volume 1 was that the Greeks set a great deal of store by a knowledge of geometry. So I went to the public library and checked out a book entitled Geometry Civilized by J.L. Heilbron.

"Civilized" or not, I got as far as Chapter Three before I crashed and burned. Geometry as taught in the modern world involves algebra:

∆ABC≈DEF/HOL (XQG) (CBS/NBC)= (1+1/n)^n ( ≥ A™ C©) (PDQ) = B.S. See ya.

But perusing the early chapters of this popular book on managing triangles, rectangles, etc. I came across an abbreviation which gave me a chill followed by a flood of bad memories:


The slide-rule, obsolete now that everyone
has a calculator built into their iPhone, struck
terror into my heart when I was ten.

SMSG.

It stood for School Mathematics Study Group.

SMSG was the brainchild of 1950s educational do-gooders, in response to the federal government's panic over a perceived dropping-off of technical and scientific skills among American students in the period following World War II. The Cold War was underway now, and the Russians had launched Sputnik, getting into space before we did. Terrified that the Communist bloc was about to outstrip the United States in science and technology, the U.S. government launched an all-out offensive to "catch up."

Naturally, this began with the schools, and suddenly we elementary-school children of the mid-sixties, whose chief tortures until then had been multiplication tables and long division, (bad enough in themselves) were bombarded with what was dubbed the "new math." Each of us was handed a new math textbook, and an arcane, mysterious sliding ruler with tiny numbers and Greek symbols all over it, (of which I could never make head nor tail) and our teachers began hectoring us with things like Base Eight and the binomial system (upon which modern computer programs are based.) You know, the nuts n' bolts, everyday information that everyone needs to know.

Kids who already had a bent for such stuff took to the "new math" like flies to rotten food. The rest of us sat and tuned it out, as bewildered as we were bored. I don't need to tell you that I became hopelessly lost after the new textbook's title page.

Looking back, it was all so stupid. Life and history shake themselves out, and the kids who were destined to be engineers for Boeing or software developers for Bill Gates did well with this junk. The rest of us foundered, and it could have been predicted. Trying to teach abstract mathematical theory to a pack of eleven year-olds who can just manage eight times eight is 64 and have trouble remembering where to put a decimal point is a waste of time.

But that was the sixties for you. There was a general belief that the solutions to many of society's problems were to be found in government, which would issue fiats to school boards, which dumped them on teachers, who in turn had to deal with us little clock-watching scholars, who were waiting only for recess, lunch and 3:15, when we could all go home.

Then there was sex. With the war-baby generation (those born 1939-1945) inventing Free Love on college campuses all over the country, plus the growing popularity of Playboy magazine, the explosion of frank sexuality in literature which followed the lifting of the ban on Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in 1962 and a flood of suddenly-liberated sexual candor in Hollywood, the do-gooders panicked again. Children should be told the facts of life early enough to prepare them for our newly sex-soaked culture. Once again, this being the sixties, it was decided that schools were the best place for children to learn about such things. Parents couldn't be trusted with these delicate matters, only the pros could.

Needless to say, this touched off a nationwide firestorm of hissy-fits on both sides. Some parents did not agree that their children should be learning about sex in the classroom. They should be learning about it the way their parents did: from their peers in the street.

It's been almost 50 years since all this brouhaha blew up, and no doubt educators have become more sophisticated in their methods. But we were on the front lines, we ten-year-olds of 1966, and let me tell you, our teachers and administrators were, to put it mildly, all at sea.

They had been told to teach this stuff to us, but given minimal direction as to how to go about it. And remember, in those days our teachers and administrators were people born between World War I and the Depression, when girls who kissed on the second date were considered loose women, and writers like Hemingway and Norman Mailer were forbidden to use the word "fuck." As those playing cat-and-mouse with the censor will, they came up with an expedient: spelling the word wrong. Hemingway writes of "the mucking tanks" in For Whom The Bell Tolls; 20 years later, in The Naked and the Dead, Mailer did his own end-run by simply foreshortening the word: "Fug you." But by 1963 writers no longer had to resort to such half-measures, and educators soon had themselves a mucking problem: they had to teach us about the birds and the bees and at the same time cope with their own squeamishness about the subject.

Right away they decided that segregation was in order. Little boys and little girls must not be taught about such delicate things in one group. My school was issued two separate and distinct sex education pamphlets: the girls got one called A Girl And Her Body. We boys got one called A Boy And His Physique. The girls were lectured about things such as menstruation in one room; we boys were harangued -- in very vague terms, as I'm sure the girls were too -- in another room. We were strictly enjoined not to discuss with the girls anything we had been told, and the girls were told the same. In other words, our school had been instructed to teach us about sex, but allowing us to talk about it amongst ourselves was where our teachers could draw the line. No guidelines had been issued regarding any such hanky-panky, so it was forbidden.

And of course the prohibition was ignored. By the end of the day some of my playground pals had acquired copies of the "girls' book" and were flashing it around privately, sniggering.

Yes, unfortunately for our teachers, all of this came a bit too late. By 1966 Hollywood had been bombarding the country with push-the-envelope films for several years. The popular James Bond movies, then starring Sean Connery, were notorious for their "sexy" content, and by the time we sat down in "sex ed" class, four entries in the Bond series of films had already hit the silver screen, not to mention then-racy fare like Tom Jones starring Albert Finney and Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. There was no movie rating system then (it wouldn't come along until 1968) and many of my friends had seen these films, although my own mother was very prudish about such things; I wouldn't see my first Bond film for another year.

But the truth is, we kids may not have known about chromosomes and egg cells and sperm cells and DNA and all that jazz, but we were more savvy than our teachers gave us credit for, and the very popular culture for the shock of which they were trying to prepare us was responsible. For us boys of that era, slipping across the street to "the canyon" to hide behind a bush and take peeks at a copy of Playboy that one of us had swiped from his father's den was already a rite of passage.  Dirty talk on schoolyards was as old as schoolyards, and given the prevailing climate, it should have surprised no one that we youngsters already knew a bit about what penises and vaginas were used for besides urination.

To this day I pity the school nurse who had to get up and address us. We sensed how nervous she was with the same acuity that barricuda have for smelling blood. One of my particularly nasty classmates, a freckle-faced, leering little smartass named Dick Shumacher, (think Eddie Haskel) decided to give her a hard time. After she had mumbled her little speech about sperms and eggs, Dick raised his hand and asked, "How is the sperm transferred to where the egg is?" He grinned as he asked this, of course.

And he got the reaction he wanted: the poor old lady nearly choked with embarrassment. "Well, ummm, it comes with mating," she managed to stammer, then changed the subject as quickly as she could. Kids can be so rotten.

Whatever it was that school boards, administrators and teachers were trying to accomplish with all of this, their efforts ultimately served little purpose. What good is teaching ten-year-olds about chromosomes and egg cells? None of us believed that babies came from a vegetable garden; we all knew, even at our tender age, that fucking had something to do with it, and that was the only part of it, at that stage of life anyway, in which we were interested at all. Genetics could wait until college biology class.

Ironically, the only part of the whole deal which aroused (no pun intended) our genuine interest was the one part that our teachers were determined to avoid talking about. Instead, they lectured us on the physical changes in your body which attend puberty (already being experienced by some of us.) Yawn.

Yes, it's true: when we sixth-graders of Kellogg Elementary School in Chula Vista, California, circa 1966, took our seats in the cafeteria to face our first sex-education lectures, we watched our teachers and our school nurse, following the guidelines of our intrepid principal, Mr. Larry P. Blocker, accomplish the impossible.

They managed to make sex as boring as algebra.

I Was Just A Pawn In Your Game of FAT!

The title of this post is taken from an episode of the old Bob Newhart Show.

Newhart, as those old enough to remember will know, played a Chicago psychologist on this program. As psychologists do, he had groups that met weekly to discuss special behavioral problems. In one episode his group consisted of overweight people seeking to confront that particular problem. In an attempt to help one of his patients, a particularly obnoxious fat man played by Cliff Osmond, Bob persuades his secretary Carol, played by Marcia Wallace, to go out on a date with this guy. Osmond's character shows Carol such a cruelly rotten time that the next day she upbraids Newhart with one of my favorite lines in all of TV-dom:

"You USED me, Bob! I was just a pawn in your game of fat!"

Now, I will be the first one to declare that Morgan Spurlock, who made the film Super Size Me  a few years ago, was so full of shit his eyes were brown. Spurlock's thesis was that there is some gigantic corporate conspiracy among companies like McDonald's and KFC to make people fat by selling them fattening food.

Stuff n' nonsense, I say. If I offer you a double cheeseburger with whipped cream, you have the choice of accepting it or not. Nobody FORCES anyone to eat fast food. People who dine at Burger King every day are on their own lookout; if you're dumb enough to live on Whoppers, fries and take-out pizza, that's your problem, not Pizza Hut's. Sensible people eat fast food occasionally, you know, like myself. I eat fast food maybe two or three times a year at most. If I go and stuff myself with Taco Bell burritos every day at lunchtime, my weight is my fault, not Taco Bell's, or the government's, or the Book-of-the-Month Club's or anyone else's. Period.

But there is no getting around one immutable fact: America IS collectively overweight. I've been hearing about it for years, and the point was driven home to me rather forcefully last weekend when I went to the Target store with my sister. No, it wasn't the shock troops of the Adipose Army waddling about the store that made the point; I'm so used to seeing people with beer guts and big butts that I more or less pay no heed anymore. I just don't look at them. If you want to see some particularly grotesque examples, which, by the way, have been making their way around the Internet for quite some time now, just Google "Walmartians." Some person or persons have been going around taking clandestine photos of Wal Mart shoppers and then circulating them on the 'net for laughs. Most have to do with the outlandish clothing you often see on people who shop at Wal Mart, but a great many combine the accoutrements with the sometimes-unbelievable bulk that fills and often overflows them.

 

The American consumer, 2013?

No, my moment of revelation (and my sister's as well) came when she and I were looking for sweats for ourselves. Even here in southern California, winter nights can get chilly, especially when the vaunted Santa Ana condition sets in, which forces dry air from the desert over to the coastal areas. In summer the Santa Ana brings often-record high temperatures. (San Diego's all-time high, 113 F., was reached in 1963, when I was in the fourth grade here. It was so hot our principal gave us a day off from school.) In winter, the Santa Ana brings delightful days, dry, clear and cool, with unlimited visibility. The obverse of that is at night, when temperatures sometimes get down into the 40s. To southern Californians, that's cold. When I stay at my sister's house during the summer, I sleep in
my underwear beneath a sheet. In January I bundle up in sweatshirts and sweatpants and sleep under a quilt.

So we were looking for these accessories, but immediately we encountered a problem: almost everything we looked at was either extra large, double extra-large or even triple extra-large.

I recently returned from overseas, and had been out of the mainstream for a while. "Are people really getting this FAT?" I asked.

"Look around."

Yup. pus-guts and broad beams, every which way, from the women's section to hardware.

Now, I used to have a few extra pounds on me, I'll admit. Spare tire. Love handles. I'm 6' 1" and when I was at my heaviest, about six years back, I weighed in 213. I went to a doctor, who put me on a special diet -- liquid meal substitutes combined with medication to reduce my appetite, and yes, I did drop a few pounds then. A couple of years later I quit drinking liquor, and the change was even more noticeable. (Booze is loaded with calories because it's loaded with sugar.) In about three months I dropped 25 pounds. My weight dropped down to 172, just seven pounds more than I weighed in high school. My sister thought I looked unhealthy. "Eat a damn Snickers!" she urged me.

I prefer Payday bars, so I ate a few of those. Cookies, too. My body, deprived of the sugar in alcohol, had decided it wanted to get it from somewhere else.

Anyway, Carla and I searched high, low and sideways at Target for sweatpants marked "M," my current size, but in vain. Target's clothing section could be renamed The Blimp Barn ("Where The Lardos Land!") Finally I settled for "L," the smallest thing I could find. They're a little baggy on me, but what the hell? I only wear them as pajamas.

Whose fault is all of this? Spurlock's insipid movie was obviously grinding a political axe, displaying the Culture of Victimhood in full flower: "You are all fat because the evil corporations have conspired to make you that way! Government! Regulate McDonald's!"

Horseshit. This has nothing to do with corporate conspiracy and everything to do with one of the most potent forces in the universe: human stupidity. You know, the same spirit I see displayed when I see some cretin riding a bicycle down the street, steering with one hand and blabbering into a cellphone with the other. Anyone who learned to ride a bike as a child knows that when you're steering a bike with only one hand you have no control over it. If that idiot hits a pothole or even a speed-bump, he's going right over the handlebars for a busted head.

And yet, they do it. Take some comfort in the fact that Americans aren't alone in this. The Chinese, for example, are as stupid as we are. I just got back from China last month, and everywhere I looked in that country I saw people not only riding bikes with one hand and yakking with the other, but even motor scooters. It would seem that the tendency to live life as a coma-in-motion is not an exclusively American invention.

Of course what really lies behind all of this is the principle of the route of least resistance. Or as one critic of cell phone jabber in automobiles put it, "People do stupid things because they can." If you empower people to do something insane-but-convenient, they'll do it because it's convenient. Because it's the easiest way. And they won't think much about it until they go over the handlebars. Maybe not even then.

That's why America is a prize-winnning hog at the state fair. Packing yourself a reasonably-healthy lunch to take to work with you is a chore you can avoid by popping down to the corner Arco station for a frozen burrito and a soda. Why bother wasting 20 minutes cooking yourself a couple of scrambled eggs and a piece of toast after your coffee in the morning, and washing them down with some orange juice, when it's easier to pull into McDonald's and order a sausage Egg McMuffin (with potatoes on the side, and maybe a cinnamon roll?) Why, after a long day at work, knock yourself out making dinner for yourself and your two kids when it's easier to pick up the phone and order a Four-Meat pizza from Dominos?

The route of least resistance. It has made the fast-food chains into billionaires, but unlike Spurlock I insist that it's not their fault. They only supply what the public demands. Remember a little thing called the marketplace? Supply-and-demand? Nobody's going to sell something that people don't want. Plenty have tried. Products have failed by the millions because the public didn't want them. I can even cite an example from -- yes! -- the fast-food industry. Years ago KFC, still called Kentucky Fried Chicken at the time, decided to offer ribs. A big advertising campaign started, ("The colonel's got RIBS?") but the company quickly learned that the public wanted chicken from KFC, not ribs, and ribs were discontinued.

The market only offers what people demand. Anything else isn't profitable and doesn't last.

Then there is the separate subject of child obesity. It's an offshoot of the first. Children eat what their parents make available to them, and if they would rather eat pizza and then sit down in front of a screen and play computer games like Mega-Homicide and Splatter Man than go outside and work the calories off playing sports or chasing each other up trees, well, that's their parents' responsibility, not the government's or Wendy's.

And so to breakfast, as Pepys might have said. I don't know what Pepys had for breakfast on Sept. 24, 1662 (although he might let me know were I to check -- he kept one hell of a diary), but it wasn't a Big Mac, and he probably looked at his food and noted what it was before digging in. Diarists notice things. And think about them. We need more of that. Thinking, that is, rather than blaming. Also, Pepys didn't die overweight, and we also need more of that.  

"Hi There. My name is Monkey Wrench."




Okay, you tell me: does this say "No Smoking,"
"Keep Off The Grass," or "Will You Marry Me?"
I have no clue.

 I wish people would stop sending me text messages in Chinese. I can't read them. To me, Chinese looks like the footprints of a chicken.

Speaking of which, in the Chinese grocery stores you can buy packages of chicken feet. I don't know what the Chinese use them for, but I ain't noshing on chicken feet.

And I'm not going to learn Chinese. For one thing I'm too old, and for another, I couldn't if I wanted to. Not only does printed Chinese looks like chicken footprints to me, but spoken Chinese sounds like somebody gargling. Forget it.

Which brings me to the subject of names. The Chinese have to deal with "foreigners"
all the time these days, and they've had to make accommodations. I suspect that other so-called "foreigners" here in China besides me have had problems with the language.

By the way, "foreigner" is a racist term if you ask me -- to the Chinese a "foreigner" is anybody who doesn't look Chinese, and where I come from, that's racism.

Also, discrimination based on age and sex are permitted here. I've been a victim of Chinese age discrimination: one school turned me down because I wanted to teach kindergarten and they decided I was "too old" for that. (Without even having met me.) Another teacher I know was a victim of sex discrimination. He applied to a school and was told that the school didn't want him: they wanted a woman instead. You pull that shit in the USA and you'll be in court.

But the Chinese, at least many of the ones I work with, often have two names. They have their Chinese name, and they have an English name. Their Chinese name is always the same: it's "Oogleaggleoohsookieoigledoo." At least that's what it sounds like to me. I can't remember a Chinese name for ten seconds. Like I said, to me Chinese sounds like somebody undergoing the Heimlich maneuver after choking on a burrito.

So they give themselves other names for dealing with dummies like me, who can't, or won't, learn Chinese. For example, the little gal in Beijing who recruited me last summer to come to China calls herself "Linda." That's not her Chinese name; that's her English name. She has a Chinese name, but I couldn't remember it to save my butt.

When I told her that "Linda" means "pretty" in Spanish, she liked that.

My Chinese colleagues down here in Guangdong Province, near the South China Sea, have mostly also adopted English monikers for dealing with the local American moron. My male coworkers here have given themselves names such as "Steve" and "Tracy." My female coworkers go by names such as "Amanda," "Sabrina," "Laura" and "Michelle."

"Michelle" is a little doll, by the way. She's only 24, maybe five feet two inches tall. She's very pretty and she's as sweet as the day is long. I told her just the other day, "I'm glad I'm not 25 anymore, because if I were I'd be in love with you." She laughed and smiled. She has a boyfriend. He goes by "Jason." He's good with computers, and recently tried to help me get mine to work, which it doesn't like to. (The Chinese are my friends. Computers, on the other hand, are my deadliest enemies. Don't you try to tell me computers don't have a will. They do, and their will is to do Evil.)

Not all of my Chinese friends and acquaintances give themselves names as conventional as "Laura" or "Michelle." I've heard some English names here in China that are fairly "off the wall," as we used to say. (Get it? "The Wall?" Never mind.)

When I was on the southbound train from Xingtai to Guangzhou a few weeks ago, I met a nice Chinese girl who called herself "Nature." That was her English name: Nature. (If you're my age, that sounds like something off of Haight-Ashbury, but nobody under 55 remembers Haight-Ashbury anymore.) Nature spoke good English, and she and I had a pleasant chat in the train's dining car. It was Nature who came back to my compartment, which I was sharing with three other adults and three children, and began chatting with one of my Chinese fellow-passengers, who in turn had her baby boy with her. The baby was eating sunflower seeds or some damn thing, (that kid was either crying or eating the whole trip), and he spilled them on the bunk where he and I were sitting. Nature was on the other bunk talking with his mom.

I started cleaning up the seeds, putting them back in their bag. The baby said something to me in Chinese, which of course I didn't understand because to me, Chinese sounds like recorded English played backwards.

But Nature understood him, and she turned to me. "He just called you 'Yeh-yeh," she said. "That means 'Grandpa.'"

They had to mop my melted body off the floor.

I have Chinese friends here in Zhongshan City with similarly weird "English" names.

There is one young woman here named "Beautiful." She is not. Well, she's not ugly, but she's not beautiful either. She has a small mole on one side of her nose. Beautiful doesn't speak one word of English, but she always has a smile for me. Even though we don't understand each other, she seems to find me amusing for some reason, maybe just because I'm big by Chinese standards, and usually look a little bewildered.

I have a Chinese teaching colleague who goes by the name "Small." Now, this time it fits: Small is Small. She's taller than Amanda, who only comes up to my chest, and taller than Michelle (my chin), but she is thin. I don't think Small would weigh 100 pounds soaking wet after eating 12 pizzas. She's darling, and actually quite pretty, but like many Chinese she has terrible taste in shoes. We had a teacher staff meeting a couple of days ago, and Small was wearing a pair of sneakers that would have looked good on Bozo the Clown. They had soles about four inches thick. Chinese women wear some of the most bizarre shoes I've ever seen. Perhaps they've been surfing the web and think Lady Gaga is the cutting edge of chic. Don't ask me.

Yesterday I was teaching at the school and was impressed with one of my middle-school girls. Some of my kids are never going to learn English. I ask them a question and they just stare at me: "Huh?" But this little girl was obviously sharp. I was asking questions about the weather. "What do you do on a rainy day?" Things like that. This kid was giving me answers in English, and they were good answers.

So I paused at one point and asked her name. And of course she replied,
"Aeoitndhsfdjgflkjgghftgfs!?@+#$%&*," like all Chinese do when I ask that question. Then she added that did not have an English name.

"Would you like one?" I asked. "I'll give you an English name."

Her classmates laughed, and she choked with embarassment, which is the standard Chinese reaction to being asked anything remotely resembling a personal question.

I was having fun with this -- embarrassing the Chinese is my hobby -- "I'll tell you what," I said. "I'll call you 'Robert.'"

"No!" she shouted. Then she grabbed her dictionary.

As she was thumbing through her Chinese-English dictionary, I explained softly that I understood why she did not want to be called "Robert." It's a boy's name, and she's a girl.

Well, she came up with her own English name: "Nikki," she said.

"Nikki's a nice name," I said. "I like 'Nikki.'"

And Nikki's a wonderful girl.

A Letter From China

I hear that it has become a commonplace among western diplomatic and military circles to talk about something called "emerging China."

Beijing's Forbidden City is eternal. So is the waiting line
in a Chinese bank.

The prevailing wisdom now is that China is going to eclipse the United States in the 21st century. The so-called "American Century," which began in 1945 with Hitler's suicide and then the Marshall Plan, is already over. Look out, world: here come the Chinese.

All I can say is, don't hold your breath.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that the Chinese are not going to dominate the globe in the 21st century, and maybe not even in the 22nd, when I'm among the grateful dead.

I've been living in China for only three months now. I teach school here. On the whole I think the Chinese are nice people, although we have had one or two cultural misunderstandings, my hosts and I. Not to load the dice in my favor or anything like that, but the problem is that they have sticks up their asses. And they have no sense of humor. I'm always offending these people without meaning to. But I think I've found a solution to that problem: I stay home.

But back to my subject. I honestly do not think that the Chinese are going to take over the world, and I'll tell you why.

They'll never get around to it.

I have never seen people take so long to do anything. It takes a Chinese about an hour to buy a pack of cigarettes. (And by the way, the Chinese smoke the way the Americans used to, -- meaning of course, too much -- which is also going to impede world conquest.) I'm serious. They go into a store to buy cigarettes, and they have to stand there and bullshit with the sales clerk until sundown.

I went to my Chinese bank yesterday to get some cash out of the ATM. I do my Chinese banking at China Construction Bank here in Zhongshan. I've figured out the ATM, even though it doesn't "do" English. The agency that brought me here to teach school this fall does "direct deposit" with my teacher salary -- it goes right into CCB.

Well, I was in kind of a hurry, if only because my Chinese cab driver was standing there waiting for me to come back and pay him. He was a good sport about it, but patience is frankly not one of my own virtues, and there was a line in front of the machine. Waiting is not something I do well.

And there was a Chinese lady at the head of the line who proceeded to drive me bananas. She was trying to get money out of the machine, and I still don't know what her damned problem was, but it took her, oh, maybe a week. I just stood there and stood and stood there while this woman fiddled and fiddled and fiddled. What was she doing? Making dinner?

This is a typical Chinese story. You can die of old age waiting for these people to finish doing anything.

I've been here for three months and I still don't still don't have a work visa. Technically, I'm working illegally -- I'm still on a tourist visa. When I was preparing to pack for China back in August, the agency in Beijing which brought me over here told me not to bother applying for a Chinese work visa in the U.S. Get this: they thought it would take too long. Yeah, well, let me tell you, taking too long is something the Chinese are experts at. The agency told me, "Just get a tourist visa, and when you get to China, your school will help you get a work visa."

As the Three Stooges used to say, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. My work visa is still out there somewhere, floating around in a sewer of red tape. It will probably come through when I'm packing to leave next summer.

Folks, face it: Asians have a different sense of time than we do. They have NO sense of time. (They also have no sense of which side of the street they're supposed to drive on, but that's another story.)

Proponents of the "emerging China" theory maintain that the Chinese version of Manifest Destiny is inherent in the population here. America has 330 million people. China has 1.3 billion people. This makes China the inevitable leader of the world.

Baloney, I say. If you want something done really slowly, tell a crowd to do it. The Chinese can barely manage their own population, let alone conquer the planet. 1.3 billion people means 1.3 billion little problems. The Chinese Communist Party is a monolith that allows no political freedom, but believe me, people have a million ways of getting around the CCP. I did it myself last week when I loaded Astrill, a software program that allows you to access the Internet web sites that the Chinese government blocks.

Again I repeat, I like the Chinese. They're nice people. They've been good to me. But they can't find their asses with both hands. If you're waiting for them to conquer the world, don't watch the clock.

And as my father used to say, "That's my rulin'."

Along Came China Jones



A night view of Zhongshan City, where I live
and teach now.



ZHONGSHAN CITY, GUANGDONG PROVINCE, CHINA -- Do you remember that Daffy Duck cartoon, China Jones? Daffy does an Irish brogue as he plays a detective roaming around Hong Kong. It was one of those great film-genre spoofs that Warner Brothers used to do.

Well, just call me China Jones. I'm not a detective, and I'm not in Hong Kong, (although it's not that far from here), but I'm an American expat, and glad to be, and for the record, I am part Irish on my mother's side. I can do a brogue.

When you last heard from me, last winter, I was in North Africa with a colleague named Jason. He and I were teaching English to schoolchildren in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and we left Tbilisi for a few days to visit Tunisia. On a four-day blitz tour, Jason dragged me all over Tunisia, and I got virtually no sleep. When we got back to Tbilisi, I went to bed and stayed there for 19 hours.

The countryside around Zhongshan has mountains
and there are also palm trees, which remind me
of my native California.

I finished my teaching contract in Georgia last June, flew back to the United States and spent most of the summer at my sister's house in California. It was a much-needed hiatus, and a good vacation. Good food, good coffee, (in Georgia all I could get was Nescafe); a much-needed rest. I rode my bicycle all over the place, swam in my sister's pool a lot, played with my great-niece Lucy, and best of all, got to watch lots of baseball on TV.

But while I was doing all of that, I was also trying to line up another overseas teaching job. A plan for South Korea fell through, but then I checked on the Internet and learned that plenty of schools in China were looking to hire foreign English teachers. Before the summer was over, I was talking to four different schools and agencies in China. I finally signed on with an agency that needed someone sooner than the others did, and at the end of August I flew from San Diego to Seattle, then boarded a flight for Beijing.

I didn't get to see much of Beijing. I was only there for one night. All I saw were the airport, a taxicab, a whole lot of buildings, a seedy motel and then the next day, the train station. My school was three hours southwest of Beijing in a city called Xingtai.

I'm doing pretty well. I've already been kicked out of Xingtai. I have a tendency to rub certain people the wrong way, especially the Chinese. Don't get me wrong; the Chinese are nice people, but I would never accuse them of being a million laughs.

After a little more than a month in Xingtai, I got booted out of my school. I was angry of course, and ready to bag it, go back to California and start poking around the Internet for another teaching job in some other country, preferably one where the people possess a sense of humor, something with which China doesn't exactly brim.

But my agency in Beijing found me another Chinese school. And I promptly packed up my troubles in my old kit bag (right after some asshole stole my brand-new bicycle in Xingtai), and got on another train, this time for a 24-hour jog across China in a southeasterly direction. I'm now in Zhongshan, way down in southeastern China, about an hour from Guangzhou, China's third-largest city, and about two hours northwest of Hong Kong.

By the way, the Chinese block certain Internet web sites, such as Facebook and You Tube, and they don't permit blogging. Basically they don't like any place on the Internet where someone might be able to express an opinion. So how am I managing to write this posting? I'm coming to you courtesy of a software program called Astrill. The Chinese block some websites, and they don't allow blogging, but Astrill gets around that. How it works is, it fools the Internet into thinking you're somewhere else. I'm in China, but running Astrill, the Internet thinks I'm in Seattle. So I can go anywhere, and blog. It costs nine bucks a month, but it's worth it. Not only can I get to sites the Chinese block, but I can also access web sites and services that are not available outside the U.S., such as Netflix and Pandora. Pretty cool.


One of the things I like about living in China
is that because I can't read Chinese, I can't
read the advertising. Yes!



This move to southern China was actually a good break for me. Xingtai isn't much of a place. It's a city of maybe two million people, and it does have a lovely, large park which was across the street from my apartment building. I used to go for walks there. The Chinese and I would wave and smile at each other; that part of it was okay. But Xingtai is kind of in the middle of nowhere, and once you pass the city limits, that's where you are: the middle of nowhere. And it's flat. Completely flat. The countryside around Xingtai looks like Nebraska.

Guangdong Province is more interesting topographically. There are mountains here. And palm trees. And as mentioned, it's not as isolated; there are big cities nearby, and Zhongshan itself is a fairly large city. America is in evidence: we have KFC, Pizza Hut, McDonald's, Wal Mart ... I even saw a 7-Eleven store here. They don't have Baskin-Robbins here yet, although BR has been in Russia for years, but the Chinese, like almost everybody else in the world, love ice cream. Last week I was teaching a unit on food, and when I asked my kids, "Do you like ice cream?" They shouted back "YES!" with one voice. Don't be surprised if Baskin-Robbins shows up here sometime soon. There are 1,336,718,016 people in China (that's counting me.) "31 Flavors" is missing the boat. Get over here, guys.



My school is large. In some of my classes, my
students outnumber me 50 to one.

 The only thing I don't like about Guangdong is the climate. If I stay here long enough, I'm going to have webbed feet. I have never lived in such a wet place. When it isn't actually raining, which it often is, the humidity is about 9,000 percent. I'm sweating all the time, even when it isn't very hot. It's just so sticky. I don't know how the locals put up with it, but I have yet to see a sweaty Chinese. It doesn't seem to bother them. I've traveled a lot, and this is one of the reasons I've steered clear of Asia up until now: I had a prejudice that most of Asia was just like it is here: hot and sticky. It isn't, really; in northeastern China it actually snows. But Guangdong fits my old prejudice perfectly with respect to the weather. And when I see the Chinese wearing jackets, my jaw just drops. If I put on anything heavier than a T-shirt, I'm going to die.

I must confess that I don't understand some of the things the Chinese do. Of course I suppose I could say that about anybody. My father has been dead for seven years and I still don't understand some of the things he did, such as going around wearing white loafers all the time and putting deodorant on the top of his head.

Item: we have these little three-wheeled contraptions here in China; they're sort of a low-rent taxi. There are millions of them; they're all over the place. I don't know what the Chinese call them. I've heard foreigners refer to them as "tuk-tuks." The front end of this thing is basically an electric motorcycle. It has a canopy on it, and the passenger sits in back on a straw seat. They can be a bit bone-jarring,  especially given the condition of most Chinese streets, but they do get you where you want to go, just not very quickly.

I climbed into one of these things today to go to the grocery store, and looking at the back of the driver's head, the first thing I noticed was that he was wearing a motorcycle helmet. I hadn't seen that before. I thought, "Why is this guy wearing a helmet? We're cruising at about 12 mph; this is not the Indianapolis 500." Then again, given the way some of the Chinese drive, maybe he had a good idea there. For example, there seems to be no set rule here about which side of the street you're supposed to use; everybody just kind of drives where they want. This can make things dicey, especially when the street is shared by these three-wheeled do-hickeys, regular cars, motorcycles, scooters, mopeds and foot traffic.

I thought my school in Xingtai was large: it had about 2,300 kids. My school here in Zhongshan is more than three times that size. We have nearly 8,000 kids, and they all live at the school -- it's a boarding school. Classes are Monday through Friday, with some classes on Saturday morning. The kids all go home on Saturday afternoon, but they have to be back on Sunday afternoon to be in class Monday morning. I teach English in middle school: 12, 13 and 14 year-olds. Now, in the U.S. I wouldn't teach middle school for a lifetime supply of peppermint ice cream. No, no, no. American middle school kids are unmanageable little monsters. But the Chinese kids are remarkably well-behaved. Oh, they're kids: they run around, giggle, twitch, play basketball and punch each other just like kids do everywhere. Kids is kids. But I haven't had any serious discipline problems.

Speaking of sports, two sports that are extremely popular in China are ping-pong (natch) and badminton. The Chinese love badminton. I used to wander into the park in Xingtai very early in the morning, and as early as 6:30 a.m. I would see people out there playing badminton and ping-pong. The Chinese think nothing of going to the park at dawn. They start their day early here.

Hardly had I arrived in Guangdong than I came down with pneumonia. I think the sudden change of climate had something to do with it. I was going back and forth between the hot, sticky outdoors and my dry, air-conditioned apartment here, and a chest cold that I had developed before I left Hebei Province promptly worsened into pneumonia. I waited too long to go to the doctor, which was stupid, and for about three weeks I was a very sick puppy. My Chinese hosts were very concerned about me (I don't think they wanted a dead American on their hands), and they took very good care of me. A hospital stay would have been prohibitively expensive as I don't have health insurance here, so my Chinese friends ran me back and forth to the hospital every day for more I.V. injections. This went on for more than two weeks. I sat on "the drip" in the hospital for sometimes more than an hour each day, and my Chinese hosts never left my side. They had some TV monitors on the wall there, including one showing Tom and Jerry cartoons for the children. I think I saw every Tom and Jerry cartoon ever made.

And speaking of children, there is nothing in the world cuter than a roomful of Chinese little kids. They are just precious. You want to take a big spoon and scoop them up like a chocolate sundae. I got to teach a couple of kindergarten classes in Xingtai, and I never had so much fun.

I've learned one word of Chinese: I know how to say "hello." It's "Nihao." Everywhere I go, people have babies and little children with them (despite a Chinese government regulation that each family is only entitled to one child, or should I say one pregnancy. If you have twins, that's okay. But if a Chinese woman has a second pregnancy, there's a stiff fine for that. Some of the better-off Chinese just go ahead, have a second child and pay the fine.) I'm always waving at these adorable little ones and saying "Nihao." Sometimes they wave back, or their mothers and grandmothers take their little hands and make them wave back. But more often they gawk at me with their big brown eyes as if I had just gotten off the interplanetary space bus from the Planet Zork. These kids don't see many Americans, and compared to most Chinese people, I'm kind of big, which must also make me look strange to small children here.

I'm feeling better now. But for more than two weeks I couldn't teach. I was too sick.

After almost three months here, I can safely say that by and large I like China. It is by anyone's definition a "developing country." It's kind of a hybrid place: the Communist Party runs the show, but capitalism is encouraged. Go figure. Still, prosperous businesses exist cheek-by-jowl with appalling poverty. Right in front of my apartment building there is an enormous vacant lot in which Chinese people grow vegetables and burn trash, and a few seem to live in makeshift shelters. Within view of this shantytown are buildings busily under construction and some nice-looking apartments. You can get almost anything you want in the stores here (although I can't read the labels on the products, so I buy a lot of fresh produce because at least I can see what it is), but there are some things I have simply not been able to find here. There's plenty of milk, but no butter or cheese. There's ketchup, but in Zhongshan, no mayonnaise and no mustard. Not a good place for sandwiches. I eat a lot of eggs, potatoes, fruit, vegetables, Chinese noodles, a little meat now and then, and of course rice. Fortunately I know how to cook, and I do have a two-burner gas stove in my kitchen.

By the way, I have found that I really enjoy eating with chopsticks. It's a socially-acceptable way of playing with your food.

China and the U.S. are almost exactly the
same size. The U.S. is bigger, but only slightly.

I can see my school from my living room, and it's huge. And by the way, a better school than where I was before. At my school in Xingtai, the so-called "foreign teacher office" was an empty room. It had four desks in it, and some chairs. No computer. Not even drinking water. You had to go somewhere else for that. Here at my school in Zhongshan, I have my own computer in the teacher staff office, and water coolers are everywhere. It's a better deal all around.

I just might stay a while. If they'll put up with me. They wouldn't in Xingtai, and I've had one or two minor problems here, but I think that we, my Chinese hosts and I, have amicably worked them out. Last week, for example. The Chinese teachers have been sitting in on my classes, "observing." I have my own word for it: "spying." And when I found out that they were criticizing my teaching methods behind my back, that was the Saturday end. I started throwing the Chinese teachers out of my classroom. Oh, I was polite about it: "Don't you have something else to do? I don't need any help." But if there's one thing I don't need in my life, it's a Chinese stoolpigeon. Well, the admin office found out about this and we had some words about it. I think we've reached a compromise. I told them that the Chinese teachers can sit in on my classes, but if I catch them taking notes, I'm going to raise more hell than Dante.

Still, if we can learn to live with each other, I might do another year in China. The thing is, if you go to www.tefl.com ("TEFL" stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language), there are always more jobs available in China than in any other country. Well, China's a big country and it has many, many schools. In fact I checked on the Internet: China and the U.S. are almost exactly the same size. The U.S. is a little bit bigger. China has 9.5 million square miles; the U.S. has 9.8. It took me five days to drive across the U.S. (I've done it three times), and it would probably take the same amount of time to drive across China.

Now, if I can just figure out a way for my sister back in California to send me some of the things I need that I can't get here. Well, she can't mail butter and cheese, but China is like Georgia in a couple of respects, one of which is, I can't get "real" coffee here, either. They only have instant. It's back to Nescafe. Perhaps Carla can send me some real coffee. But she might have to put it on "a slow boat to China."

Updates as they occur.