What? Snow? No way.

Hello to everyone.

I know that its been a few days since i last hopped over here and posted, but now that i'm well I've been rather busy. You know, working, trying to find jobs, trying not to freeze, trying not to run away to the airport and fly myself on home...the usual.

Beijing is becoming progressively colder, and as such, progressively greyer. I'm knackered tonight from running around teaching and shopping for all the grains and seeds that i require for happy living. It's lucky for me I live a five minute walk from the largest Lama temple in Beijing, so in addition to living near lots of really interesting buddhist shops, I happen to live near one of the few purveyors of organic grains and legumes. It's an adorable little shop, lined with bins and jars of grains, flours, seeds, and beans- when I get my camera I'll be sure to snap some pictures. It's always bustling and has a small bakery in the back, a bakery whose goods i hope to sample. In addition to the Buddhist shops and organic grain store I also live a stones throw from quite a few vegetarian restuarants- again, thank you to the Lama temple. In case youre wondering what it looks like, the pictures flashing on the side of this page were taken there.

I'd like to type up a little more, but the Norwegian is leaving tomorrow to go travel, so we're all going out to dinner. That, and the pipes in our kitchen have cracked and there is water spraying all over everything. I think I might need to help with that...as its supposed to snow tomorrow, and we dont want to start running a small ice skating rink, we need to water to stop gushing onto our frigid floor. Sigh.

love&luz

Mrrr.

I'm listening right now to a few tracks off the new John Legend CD. How thatll affect the tone of the post, I dont know. If, in the middle of reading this, you feel the urge to push away all the worries of the day and admit that you love me, and only me, will love me for the rest of our lives and want to spend everynight slow dancing in the middle of our apartment in candlelight, chalk it up to John and not to my writing skills. And put the roses away, I'm not into that romantic stuff.

If, on the contrary, you feel the urge to make banana pancakes and pretend like it's the weekend now (we could pretend it all the time!), I'm down for that. Cause, we all know things fall apart and tend to shatter, but I'm like that shit dont matter.

Ok, enough of this tomfoolery. No more song quotes. I'm not perfect, but I'm this that and this.

So Beijing is a beautiful city. Beautiful in the way that everything is beautiful, so long as you push yourself to see it. I'm becoming masterful at this. I thought that i was before, but 'before' i lived in Hawaii...not hard to see beauty in everything you see there. Beijing in the winter when you miss your family, miss not freezing, miss sunsets and sunrises and clear skies and clean air and beach runs with your friends...this can test even the most seasoned beauty seeker. It can seem a little, *gasp*, bleak. Luckily there are things that like hot sweet potatoes roasted fresh and whole over burning coals in little concrete drums on wagons in the streets. There are similarly roasted chestnuts in shops set up against the dower buildings, warm sweet finger thawing. There are fresh mandarin oranges in the mornings, peeled under a warm comforter in a cozy room, hiding from the hazy sunny gnawing frost. There are the dolled up girls, prancing in high heels short skirts thick leggings and fat fat waist length winter coats. They spit in the streets, the subways, and they make me stare when they walk past. Me in my knit hat, thick scarf, and long baggy dark blue coat. I make no one stare, save for the color of my skin and texture of my hair.

There is a crescent moon, pale orange through the haze, gracing the sky tonight. I look at it and i remember all the places i've looked at it before. LA streets lined up in the cold, Frisco pavement on the way home, Oahu park with a blanket and a bottle, Big Island beaches chilly and desolate. So beautiful, all. When I add to that list my current dark beijing hutong, icy dark and bustling, nothing seems quite so bad.

Tally for today:
2 kaui 3 mao for a bag of 6 mandarin oranges.
I think that puts me at 95.6 kuai spent so far.
Not bad.

love&luz

A little rest, A little movement.

So, as i mentioned in the last post, things have not been the easiest in China. I've been sick since I arrived and experiencing the kind of shock only someone who was raised in a LA and made their home in Hawaii can experience upon their first introduction to a real winter. Much to my dismay, the changing of the seasons involves something more than a 20 degree shift in temperature...

But all that aside, all that in stride, I've had things pretty easy. I have somewhere to stay, I have good friends who I am fortunate enough to also live with, and I have food to eat. My health may not be the best, but its still much better than it could be. I've got electricity and I've got internet access (though both are a little tempermental...). Right now is just about shifting my proverbial weight until i hit the comfy spot on the couch that is Beijing. It'll come. At the moment I'm looking to move into a different spot, something a little less expensive than what I have right now. In addition to being a tad pricey, my current locale has me speaking English, and lots of it, on a daily basis- as such my Mandarin is rapidly deteriorating. I also need to get over the BeiHai park and enroll in their Taiji Chuan courses- 2400 rmb for the first 76 postures, as many classes for as long you want until you get them all down. I am stoked on this. I also need to either get a private tutor or enroll in some Mandarin courses. Since I can get a visa extension through a school, I'm leaning towards taking that path, but depending on price and convenience we'll see. I might have to take a jaunt down to Hong Kong come February to sort out visa business.

Still, Beijing is lovely. I've got a fresh produce market right around the corner, and a nut hut a few yards beyond that. I love the nut hut. Partially because when i see it i think 'Nut hut!' and partially because, well, i can get lots of raw nuts and seeds for cheap. Yay cheap!

How is the 200 kuai per week going, you ask? Heres a break down of the past two days.

Bag Oatmeal, bag each dried apricots, dried dates, dried something-tangy: 40 kuai
Bag Carrots, Spinach, Cucumber, Parsely, Oranges, Bananas; 9 kuai
Bag Raw Walnuts, Roasted Peanuts: 43 Kuai

So far I'm at 92 kuai. Not too bad, as the oatmeal will be food for at least the whole week. I'll keep you guys posted.

Jess

In memory.

My family is not a very religious one, nor are we beholden to many traditions. Holidays pass by with maybe a phone call or two, a dinner with the family members living closest, but no reunions or trans-America flights. We have never, in my remembering, had a large Thanksgiving dinner or a house piled high with relatives on Christmas morning. Most of us prefer a quiet celebration with those closest to us to a large, raucous party. In this respect, we are all remarkably similar. Reclusive and private though this may seem, in my mind it has always belied the fact that we are always in each others hearts, and no distance can separate us.

My mother has 5 brothers, and my father also 5 and 2 sisters, most of whom lived within a half an hour of each other in my childhood. There is no lack of family to go around- my life abounds with uncles in particular and two loving aunts. Visits to Portland (where mother and father met and married) were always full of rushing around trying to see all the family before I had to go home to LA. 10 uncles, 2 aunts, a great aunt and two grandmothers that you see twice a year will do that to your vacation. Even though we don't get together on holidays or birthdays, though all of our family members are not physically present, we all know we're together in spirit.

Now, as I mentioned in the above paragraph both of my parents come from large families. My grandmother on my mother's side came from Oklahoma, then moved to Portland with her four sisters and brother. I'm not sure what growing up with that many siblings would be like, let alone that many sisters, but I can only imagine that it would have been both difficult and rewarding. For her part, my grandmother came out of it with a fighting spirit, one that she passed on in a lesser portion to all of her children, and if i'm any indication, her grandchildren as well. I say in a lesser portion not to play down the saucy boldness we all seem to share, but rather out of reverence to my grandmother's unflinching, insurmountable moxy. The woman made things happen, she made things work. With 6 mouths to feed and husbands that were in and out of the picture, I suppose she had to. My grandmother was a woman you didn't cross, if you knew what was good for you. That being said, she made sure all of my uncles and my mother had what they needed growing up- they may have been poor, but had food, they had clothes. They had someone to drive down to the station and bail them out of jail after a failed underage cross country attempt or a fight with a police dog (see what i meant about fighting spirit?). She was a strong, tough woman. With 6 children and a constantly moving Aleutian lumberjack husband, she would have had to be.

I loved my grandmother. She would sass me, she would tease me and joke, and she was an ornery old lady. Wiley and belligerent, not to mention a reputed fox in her youth, she was a force to be reckoned with. I remember visiting her as a little girl, being subjected to the usual cheek cupping and hugging. My grandmother loved jewelry, and what most stands out in my memory, like many people's memories about their grandmothers, is her hands. Soft, wrinkled and covered in rings. Emerald rings were her favorite, and she had them in spades.

This post is for my grandmother. It's for my mother, it's for my uncles. I'm in China right now, and when i called home last night and the first thing my brother said was 'Mom's flown to Portland', i knew something was wrong. I wish i could be with all of you, but I can't. I wish I could be with you all to celebrate her life, but I'll be having my own celebration for her in China. I don't think there is any more appropriate way to honor my Grandmother's spirit than to keep on the way she would have- making things work in the best of times and the worst of times. Things are far from easy right now in China, but if I learned anything from my Grandmother, it was that you can make things work by sheer force of will. She may not have been an apple pie style grandmother at home in the kitchen all day, but she was her own woman, strong and resilient, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

My family doesn't celebrate the way most families do. We don't do large holidays, we don't like memorials either. We live in the vein of celebrating the life, not mourning the passing. I love you grandma. I'll miss you. You were beautiful, and you were strong. I hope that I can always be as strong and capable as you were. I know when things are difficult for me, I can think back to you, and know that you, like my own mother, knew how to make things work. This part of my spirit i can trace back to you.

All my love to all my family,

Jess

Oh, no.

I saw it yesterday.

My first "Merry Christmas" sign in Beijing. It was disturbing. It was 12 feet high. It was glowing.

I'm not sure I can handle this.

Mmm, sleep.

I need to update, and thusly, I am updating.

See, I do this thing whenever a thought occurs to me that I want to blog about, or whenever I see something that I want to make mention of- I make up a little outline in my head of how the blog post is going to go. The problem with this is it makes me feel as though I've already blogged for the day. And I haven't. But I think i have. It's a vicious cycle, especially when I start to do little blog outlines in my head that detail how I haven't been blogging lately. I've done this for the past two days.

In the past week or so since I've blogged I've gotten better (Sicksies no more!) And gotten a little more work. A lot of things that I've wanted to comment on have also happened (like Transgender Victims of Violence Day, Thanksgiving, and finding out that I make more in a month than the Chinese girls i work with make in a year), and I haven't commented on any of them. But I'm going to. At least, the last one. And there is a new J.Filth Challenge. By new, I also mean first.

I just wrote a long paragraph talking about why it is that I'm doing the challenge I'm doing, but then i read it over and realized that I'm too tired right now to write it in the proper, analytical way it needs to written. If you don't believe me, read over that sentence I just wrote and then imagine an entire explanative paragraph full of ones just like it. No good. So I'm going to settle for telling you the challenge and then giving you one sentence on why, with more to come tomorrow or the next day. Probably the next day. I have a lot of classes to teach tomorrow.

I'm going to be living, for the next month at least, on 200 kaui per week. Relatively speaking it should be easy, since every trip to the market costs between 4 and 7 kuai (for a bag full of veggies) and the oatmeal i make every morning (including the dried fruit i buy to go into it) costs about 40 kuai per supermarket trip. It's easy to get into this habit on converting prices to dollars in your head, but thats no good. I want to start counting a kuai as a kuai and not as a fraction of a dollar. This also means little (or at least price concious) going out, no frivolous taxi rides, and no spending anything without thinking about it. I'm going to update on here, everyday, about what got spent on what.

Why? Cause I know it's possible and i'm looking to both simplify and be more concious of exactly what it is i need to get by (i have a sneaking suspicion it's not much, and much less than what I currently consume). I want to cut back my consumption to things I actually need.

Now I'm going to do something else I actually need, like sleep. I'll be cool and analytical on my next post. Swear!

love&luz

tiredjessie

sicksies

It's bloody cold.

It's nice to know, from things like the comments on the last post, that there are people out there in reader land. I assume that some of you are lurkers, but commenting to say hi makes me want to keep on posting to say hi back :)

This post is going to be short and sweet cause it's rather late here and i'm rather sickly and tired. My fingers are in the process of defrosting. For those of you who have never lived in a cold climate (those of you like myself, spoiled and privileged to have only ever lived in sweet sweet seasonless bliss), let me give you a small window into the trials and tribulations of an LA bred, Honolulu relocated winter-that-is-actually-cold newb like me.

I washed my clothes today. In China, people have come to realize that if you wash your clothes and then you hang them or lay them outside, they will dry. Because of this, people in China do not use clothing driers (people in places like America would do well to take note of this Eastern ingenuity). Now, sloven and lazy being that i am i only washed my clothes because of a lack of both clean underwear and clean second pants ('second pants' being what the norwegian has got us what in the States we call 'thermals'). As such, tonight at 1:30am on my way to bed, I realized that tomorow i would be hard up indeed if my clothes were not dry by daybreak. This is how the 1:30am freezing cold hanging up of freezing cold wet clothing in the freezing cold courtyard came about. My fingers have never been so cold. You cannot wear mittens or gloves to hang up wet clothing. You can only use your poor, warm blood, unprotected fingers. They will never forgive you. You will type funny for a few days.

I feel like now that my readership has blossomed (kind of, sort of, a little) i should do things like follow through on my promises, go over my posts before i post them, and maybe hit spellcheck.

Instead I'm going to do things like say 'trials and tribulations' and then only give you one story, not look over my post at all with sincere conviction that i am always flawless, and shrug off spellcheck just cause i can.

love you.
jess