A Fantastic Weekend Behind Me, Massage and All

Hey y’all,

I had a great two days this weekend cramming all sorts of funness and enjoyment into the 48 hours available. Oh, scratch that. I actually slept a lot — basically 24 hours with gaps in between — from Friday night until Saturday at 9pm, trying to clock in to the local timezone in a very badly planned way. However, once the somnambulatory haze wore off, I showered and headed on a five-minute exploratory walk down my very dark street to find the closest “wangba”, or Internet Bar. But first, I’ll try to describe in a bit more detail my living situation at the moment.

I live with this really nice old dude whose name is Zuo Yu Jing. I just try to call him “Zuo”, but I’m pretty sure I’m still, if not mutilating it, at least sucking all the Chinese goodness out of it. He’s an extremely warm person, with these kind old eyes set into a worn, wrinkled face. He used to be a gardener at the Temple of Heaven, and it shows. Another thing that shows, and makes noise to boot, is the wear and tear of a long indentured servitude at the hands of Mr. Marlboro. Or Mr. Marlboro’s Chinese Cousin. Whichever. Dude LOVES to smoke. I guesstimate that the guy goes through maybe half a pack in 90 minutes? I’m no expert on tobacc-y, but however you pro-rate that shit, I’m thinking he gets it done. An artifact of this decades-old habit is that about every 5 or 10 minutes or so, my man Zuo begins hacking his lungs to death to get a nice, solid smoke-loogie out of his throat. I sort of cringe every time I hear him start, because I just feel terrible for the guy.

Other than the smells and sounds, Zuo has about every knicknack and pet-knack that you could imagine just straight-up littering his apartment, in a really cherished and loved way. Packrat might be a suitable term. Next to my bed on the right are located two separate fish containers, one a tank holding one quite large snail and no fish and the other a shallow bowl atop a conga-shaped porcelain object with a small very dead fish inside. “Si le”, I told him, chuckling. “Dead.” It might be gone now, but I’ll have to check later tonight.

My bed is in the living room. It’s very, very nice of Zuo to let me stay with him in the first place, because there honestly isn’t much room even for him to get around. I’ll have to snake out my camera at some point and capture some photographic niceness of the place, so you can see what I see, but until then I’ll have to make do, ’cause I’ve been lazy. Speaking of lazy. I’m at work, so I feel like I should start working on my PowerPoint presentation that I need to prepare for Thursday. I’m gonna tell my colleagues a little about myself and Princeton. Zai Jian!