Monday, November 30, 2009

Eek!

I submitted my application to Berkeley! I am now terrified, in spite of having a couple people read it and looking over it again myself, that it is full of typos and unfinished sentences. I ain't gonna look, though, because no matter what I'll find something I wish I could change, and I can't fix it now!

Hopefully, now that I have an SOP I like, revisions for other schools will go much faster.

It is past midnight and I have classes tomorrow, however, so further updates will have to wait a while.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

i'm just a little bug who tries real hard

I am not in Wuxi! But I have a ticket for tomorrow morning, so I will have to stop sitting around and being a lame-o by 9:06am or I will have wasted 54 yuan.

I have been having trouble getting myself going, and kind of letting little things pile up. I am currently trying to figure out how to get a package from Fedex, but so far have been unable to find anyone who know their number, or where I might look for it. I have sent an email to a member of our super helpful administrative staff, and hopefully that works out. I just finally added money to the sim card on my cell phone, so I can keep making phone calls without worrying about it. I am going to do one final revision of my SOP and then finish Berkeley's application- it's due Tuesday! Ahh!

A friend knocked on my door an hour or so ago and said that through a professor's student she was being interviewed in Chinese about Thanksgiving and wondered if I would join her. I did, I told them that I generally eat food and hang out with family on Thanksgiving, and that what I am most thankful for are all the wonderful people in my life. Then they took some footage of Anna and I reading and writing Chinese, to make their segment more impressive.

And here I am, back again! I am gonna do some homework. For serious.

(oh, and my title refers to Morris)

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

"Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower?"

I have been delighted to discover over this Thanksgiving break that there is a cornucopia of English-language literature on the internet. I read The Little Prince again today, and am seven chapters into On Human Bondage by W. S. Maugham. I also read (mostly) a Chinese article on globalization for International Politics. I intended to get some writing done on my Anthropology essay; I listened to a lot of music and have greatly improved by sudoku-solving-time.

I took a walk the other day, and am going to finally upload a few photos of our corner of Nanjing:














Whose dog is this, you might want to ask?
I have no idea, so it would probably be better not to.

This is Beijing West Road- 北京西路- the street our dorm window looks out on (though we're up at tree-top level on the third floor).


Looking the other way! There is a bike/motorcycle/scooter lane on each side of most roads here, separating smaller, more vulnerable vehicles from the car traffic in the middle.








This one is cool! There are these strips in the sidewalks all over China, ostensibly for blind people to follow with their canes. The dots in the distance signal a change of direction or material. Sadly, every Chinese I have asked about them assures me they have never actually see a blind person use them. Good try, though, guys.
... I spend a lot of my time thinking about these as I walk around town.

So, uploading photos is ridiculously slow, and I am afraid that I am giving up. Those three just took the better part of an hour of clicking "upload" and fiddling on the internet and waiting...

Love!

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Allow me to add some "-spection" to that "-version"

I have taken the Myers-Briggs personality test a few times and my result is always the same: INFJ, for Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging, though not on the end of the spectrum for any of the traits they try to measure (this time I was "moderate" in three of the traits, and "distinctively intuitive").

The website I just took this test on (yes, there are other better things I could be doing with my time... pthbthh) links to a description of INFJ's as "Idealist Counselors" which describes me, among other things, as "difficult to get to know" because so much of what matters to me goes on beneath the surface.

I do not think that personality typing like this provides any ultimate answers in self-understanding, but it is both interesting and reassuring that my answers to different sets of questions all lead objective outsiders to a number of true conclusions about me, basically because it shows that the 'me' I'm getting to know is real.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Sometimes it's like Charades or Pictionary

But most often attending classes in Chinese is like a long game of Telephone. We read, looking at characters and sometimes understanding a whole sentence or a (glorious, wondrous!) paragraph. Then our professor presents, asking us questions of which we understand words and sometimes a whole (glorious, wondrous!) concept. We answer, based on our mishearing, and he attempts to bring our answer back into the realm of What He Was Trying To Discuss.

I guess it would be more exactly like telephone if he left us to discuss on our own and then tried to recognize where our confused conversation had left us by the end of the hour, but I stand by my analogy.

It's tiring.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

I'm not sure how I got so lucky

I will try to tell you about my last week. No, it’s too much, I will sum up :P

Okay, so last Wednesday began more or less normally. I walked around the city a bit in the morning running errands, went to International Politics and learned a lot (the unusual item in that class being the announcement of a test next week of which we internationals, at least, had been completely unaware). I spent my two-hour afternoon break online doing nothing in particular. I went to Anthropology and learned some, and had some trouble following my professor’s train of thought. Class ended, a classmate asked me if I was hungry, I told her I sure was, and we started towards the cafeteria.

Normal so far, yes? We switch to the present tense, the better to keep up with the events.

Halfway down the stairs from our classroom, I glance ahead to the lobby area, where I see Christian Yetter. But this is impossible, so I stop and stare. (I am told for about ten seconds. I am told with a rather hostile expression.) The apparation continues to smile at me and look exactly like Christian Yetter, so I continue walking down the stairs. Slowly. (I am told that the hostile expression accompanies me). This cannot actually be real. I have accepted that after the last time I saw Christian Yetter -at the end of July- I will not see him again until I fly to Korea in January. I begin to wonder if I am asleep. However, attempts to pull myself out of dreaming come to nothing, and I can clearly remember a whole normal day before this point. I keep walking. Zero seems to equal one no matter how I turn the facts around.

About halfway down the stairs the 服务员 at the desk enters my field of vision. She looks at me quizzically and points at Christian. She can see him too. I start to walk a little faster, I think. I end up in front of what I have almost accepted is, in fact, Christian Yetter. I repeat the word "How?" a number of times. My friend (I realized later) says she'll see me later.

Christian Yetter is a jerk.

(I was considering going a different direction in that last sentence, but I'm pretty sure I'm gonna stick with the "jerk" line.)

He accompanied me as I fumbled around in confusion back to my dorm room, then most of the way to the cafeteria, then off campus to a dumpling restaurant instead.

He flew back to Korea this afternoon. I am hopeful that he landed almost an hour ago. I got him on the way to the airport a couple of hours before his flight, but he hasn't been able to get online or had a cell phone he could use to call and tell me if he made it okay.

It was a good five days. You're a good'un, Christian Yetter.

Friday, November 6, 2009

"But everything looks perfect from far away..."

You all may notice that my posts here get more frequent in proportion to the number of other things I should be doing. I am trying to just let myself be productive in whatever way I can, however, so I've decided that's ok. My courses are honestly far less demanding (at least so far, you can ask me again when term papers are due) than most years at U of Iowa, so it will probably work out.

I am still stressing about my presentation on Monday, but I have more or less convinced myself that the stress + my worn-out state from the rest of today make it not worth working too hard tonight. I am instead trying to regain my emotional and intellectual strength for tomorrow. I am doing so by drinking tea, reading fiction, and journaling.

I helped out teaching 5-6 year old boys again this morning, probably for the last time. Getting up very early on a Saturday morning, on top of the discrepancy between my energy wavelength and that of kindergarteners, leaves me ill-equipped to be much use to them. I have found other venues for out-of-school productivity though, so don't be too unhappy for me.

I climbed a mountain today! I was an awfully small mountain- when we first got off the bus Xiaoxuan turned to me and said "山在哪里" (where's the mountain?)- but I still give myself a lot of credit for climbing it.

Xiaoxuan told me the other day that she had been worried about living with an American, she wasn't sure what cultural problems might arise, but that her fears were misplaced because I am more like her than most people. She, and independently a number of other Chinese classmates both male and female, has told me that I am more like a Chinese student than an American. I am too 文静 (gentle), too 安静 (quiet, peaceful). This is perhaps in large part due to stereotyping, but also to the fact that Americans can be of ridiculous when they travel abroad. Perhaps especially in China, where the first impression people have of foreigners is: FOREIGN, and one quickly realizes that it will be impossible not to stand out.

One thought this repeated observation about myself has led to is that I must be a very odd (perhaps eerie?) presence a lot of the time. I try to let people know I approve of them. I don't sit in silence out of spite or frustration, though perhaps occasionally out of self-doubt. Mostly, I just find a lot to think about in the spaces between the lines on a highway, or the different ways houses seem to greet the world with the lines of their eaves and the sizes of their windows, or the sentences people choose to say when they don't want everyone to know what they are thinking. I am not sure I would not call this wisdom; I seldom reach meaningful conclusions. I just see a lot of interesting paths for my thoughts to travel and generally feel it's better to take them.

Can I tell you a secret? I don't really like to travel that much. I am not very good at transitions. They leave me feeling tilted and worn-out, and it can take a long time for me to recover. I think it took more than a month for me to be okay with Nanjing, and I think I probably won't really have anything solid to say about how I feel about this city until I leave in January and come back in February. But I think that the patchwork quilt of places spread across our planet is one of the greatest gifts we have as residents here. If one dimension of the universe can be described with math and physics, in describing the shapes of the lines that connect all its points, another can be described with biology and ecology, in all of the incredible diversity that those elegant essential truths can combine to create. Another more complex dimension is human, sometimes messier to sort out but all the more poignant for its layers. And all of these are woven in and around and through one another all over our beautiful planet so that whole worlds exist in any one place, and even beginning to draw a line between two of them is magic.

If I chose each day what I would most like to do, I would almost always end up sitting someplace sunny, drinking tea, reading, writing, twirling my hair absent-mindedly, rambling in mutter-y and introverted kind of way, and looking out of windows.

I cannot promise that after next summer I will have seen all the sights in Nanjing, or sought out all of the worthwhile people I could have. I am so grateful for my chance to just be here for a year and let the reality of the place sink in to my consciousness.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Academia!

I just took my only exam of the semester. It was in English, for Environmental Economics. I think I did alright, though essay exams can be deceptive. I had long answers for everything that seemed quite complete to me! We'll see how my professor feels.

I have had one (5 minute) presentation so far in a Chinese class and have another (15-20 minute) presentation in International Politics in Chinese on Monday. After that, the rest of my semester will be composed entirely of reading, attending classes, and writing papers.

I got through my short anthro presentation alright. I wasn't terribly happy with the level of thoughts I presented, but I was (and remain) quite certain that the professor wasn't actually grading the presentations on more than completion, so that is okay.

On Monday I will be presenting about the changing nature of military alliances. This should not suggest to you that I am in any way qualified to act as an authority on military relationships, but everyone had to sign up for a topic and that's what I picked from the list. A student or two present at the beginning of each class, and the the professor takes over and leads discussion for the rest of the time. In talking about alliances and collective security I am planning on discussing the Nile Basin Capacity Building Network that I learned about at the conference in Egypt last winter. It is pretty cool. Though it is not an institution with authority, it is a network of scientists and managers in the ten countries whose land includes part of the Nile watershed who work together to research discuss issues of river geomorphology and management. It is not a military institution, but I think that the existence of groups like this greatly reduce the role of military alliances. Hopefully there will at least be some good discussion.

Xiaoxuan and I are going on an HNC-arranged trip to Qixia Mountain on Saturday. Hopefully I will remember my camera :)

It is November already! I am making progress on my graduate school applications. Here are the places I am applying: University of California-Berkeley, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Minnesota-Minneapolis, Clark University, University of Texas-Austin, and University of Colorado-Boulder (in the order in which their applications are due, if you were wondering). What's-His-Face is also applying to schools in Ohio and North Carolina, and since I'm planning on deferring for a year to work before I would actually start any of these PhD programs (er, Austin is just a Masters, I guess) (if, you know, I get in) I may end up living in one of those places for a while. It's a big country, folks! But it is smaller than the Pacific Ocean.

Good news is that as I have been working on my grad school apps I have been getting more and more excited about Geography and the questions it would allow me to professionally investigate about the world.
... I just had an excited conversation about it in my head but it all happened too fast for me to write down...MAN and then I tried to find a good summary on one of the department websites and they're all too exciting and I couldn't pick one...
Okay: Geographer study a wide range of questions, from physical environmental sciences to more or less anthropology. Geography is "the study of spatial relationships," which can be put to a lot of uses.
...Yeah, I'm gonna need to think about this and make it another post. Or possibly try to write about it when I am less caffeinated.

Happy Thursday!

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Shameless, shameless

If any of you would care to read and critique an SOP with which I hope to apply to Geography PhD programs, I will add another star by your name on my List of Favorite People.

That is all for today.

Love from Nanjing!

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Put heart, I'm coming on a horse

There are so many levels of comprehension that I am struggling with. When doing readings for class I struggle with the vocabulary, I struggle with the implications of the basic information being presented, and I struggle with the implications of authors' choices to use some words and not others. I am beginning to appreciate the common vocabulary used by Chinese authors and how it is different from Western ones- 'radical' and 'revolutionary' are the same word, for example- but really only beginning. I'm still getting up to 20 new vocab words per page of reading (less if I decide to just read for an overview and not try to understand everything, or it is a Civil Law reading which repeats the words "civil rights and liberties" and "civil responsibilities" enough to account for half of the vocab on their own).

The language is fascinating enough that I really can't complain. I am simply certain that by the end of the year I might be fluent in Chinese compared to most Americans, but I will still be a far cry from fluent compared to the average Chinese.

My title is a choppy translation of a sentence in Chinese: "放心,我马上来" which should be translated as "don't worry, I'll be right there."

Hmm. More later. I'm trying to post at least once a week, so here you go for now!

Also! Please feel free to leave comments or email meeeee! and tell me about your life. I am so grateful to be able to share my thoughts and experiences with you through this blog, but I feel a little full of myself doing all the talking :)

Love to you all!