Spring Illness

Howdy, all. I've been having a pretty slow-moving month. I finally got that "travelers' diarrhea" the doctors all warn you about, and spent a lot of time sleeping for about a week (I'll spare the details to those of you I've not already burdened... I love you, Mom!). Then I had a long enough reprieve to have an excellent trip to Shanghai for the HNC Career Day, where I listened to panels of people working in Legal Services, Consulting, and Green Business in China. I learned some things- to begin with, what "consulting" is- and made a cool connection. I spent the rest of the weekend at a Baha'i friend's house, doing homework, taking advantage of her FANTASTIC speakers (my iPod earbuds are seriously making me sad now), and at the Naw Ruz party with the Shanghai foreign Baha'is association. All good times.

I got up early Sunday to get to the train station and buy a ticket back to Nanjing. Got home around 12:30 and at 2pm met a lovely young couple I'm going to start tutoring in English.

Kind of read (have I mentioned that I have more reading than is humanly possible? Have I mentioned I spend a lot of time doing other things? heh) for a while, hung out with friends, went to bed, went to a couple days of classes, thought about papers and jobs and worried about what I'm doing next year. Caught a cold, and have spent much of the last two days lazing around my room. It got cold and rainy again this week, which is I'm pretty sure why I got sick (I tell the most exciting stories about China!). On Sunday and Monday the weather forecast was "widespread dust," Christian actually made me realize this when he said there was a huge dust cloud/storm/something over Korea. I looked out the window, thought, well, the pollution and low clouds are awfully brown today and checked the weather. Widespread dust! I thought these things only happened in Beijing (where the weather forecast is sometimes "Sand," which blows over from the Gobi Desert).

I have been meaning to make phone calls to the US, but need to get up early (ish) in the morning to do so, and with all morning classes and being sick and just lazy, I haven't in quite a while (besides, y'know, Skype contact more or less daily with Christian and every few days with my mother. One can generally assume that I have long-windedly pondered my path and purpose for my mother's benefit in the past couple of weeks.)

I'm still thinkin' real hard about what I should do next year. I will let you know when I have a decision, but honestly I will probably be going back and forth about it for at least another week or two, so don't get too anxious.

Um, so no title song today, but Christian linked me to this cool video of Massive Attack's Splitting the Atom earlier today, which you might enjoy.

Oh man! And to help you appreciate better how awesome AND nerdy (if those terms can be separately, really) my awesome nerdy boyfriend is, read this post about the card game he invented to teach English to his students: Sorcery: a Collecting