Category: Nebulous Items
-
I’ll See Myself Out: Attempting Shanghai Nightlife (for Burnt Out Recluses)
So I’m leaving Shanghai. Sometime in June, I’ll be handing in my Foreign Expert’s Certificate (actually a booklet, just to muddle matters) and sorting through my accumulated detritus to ship things home or to redistribute them amongst the neighbourhood rag-and-bone dudes. [Random note: Modern day tricycle-riding rag-n-bone pickers in Shanghai mainly seem to deal in…
-
Radio Silence: How to Write Publicly When All of Your Journeys are Private
I’m a surprisingly private person. I’ve only started realizing that recently. This may come as news to you, given that I’m blurting this out in a decidedly public medium and have blurted out all sorts of revealing bits and pieces about myself over the past three years that this blog has been alive, and in…
-
Notes on Getting the Hell Out of Dodge: Oh, Hey, Bali! Nice to See You Again!
On the morning we left Shanghai for Bali, I was sitting on my bed sometime around 8am, huddled under a few layers of duvets, toes numb, feeling quite out of sorts. I was barely recovered from a four day tummy bug in which I failed entirely to eat for two of those days, feeling rather…
-
What The Hell Am I Doing Here: Notes on End of Year Work Festivities in Shanghai
It’s Saturday and I’m at work. I’ve been here since, oh, 8 o’clock this morning and at the rate things are piling up, I doubt I’ll ever leave. Teaching on Saturdays is a new thing, something that was explicitly written into my contract as something that just wouldn’t be done. Not that contracts mean…
-
It’s Beginning to Look Not Even Remotely Like Christmas: Faking Festiveness in Shanghai
Actually I lie. I live in Shanghai (which, if you ask the Shanghairen, is barely even China but rather its own magnificent autonomous kingdom of wealth and awesomeness) and oh, the shiny accoutrements of the festive season are out in a big way. Have you seen the giant tree outside Prada on Nanjing Road West?…
-
A Totally Impractical Guide to a Sudden Jaunt to Liuzhou, Guangxi
Over the past decade or two, I’ve become quite adept at rolling with the punches. Most of my jobs have called for finely tuned improvisational skills and I’ve had plenty of opportunities to hone them. The other night, I dreamed that I was told I had ten minutes to prepare a 4 hour intensive workshop…
-
Notes on Not Running Away Again: Dealing Sensibly With a Shanghai Winter
It was some time midway through my London years that I found myself huddled in a phone box outside the Lords Cricket Grounds, surrounded on three sides by layers of postcards of hot, horny, available women who wanted to do dirty things to me. It was December, or maybe January. It was freezing outside my…
-
Managing Your Plague in China: Brief Notes on my Stupid Cold
So I finally made it in to work today, after two days spent under cover, barking my lungs out at home, destroying entire forests with my nasal detritus. I packed a little baggie with 2 boiled eggs and 2 small oranges (plus a massive coffee) to meet my most basic nutritional needs and dulled appetite.…
-
Dear Language, I Guess I’m Just Not That Into You: Notes on Being the Worst Student Ever
I’ve got a cold and I’m cranky. With my hot, cotton-wool stuffed head expanding outward through my eye sockets and nasal cavity, and my sad little lips fever burnt and ever so slightly frowny, I’m coasting on barely 3 hours of restless sleep. I thought I ought to make that clear before I keep writing.…
-
Strangled Gasps of Creativity (or Why I’ll Probably Never Be a Published Author)
When I was 10, I was already the proud author of approximately a dozen unpublished novels. By unpublished, I mean, read only by myself- or perhaps by anyone who managed to sneak into my bedroom, haul the stacks of notebooks out from their not so well-hidden hiding place, and decipher my drunken spiderlike scrawl.…
-
The Grass is Always Less Hazardous on the Other Side: I’m Cheating on China in my Head Again
For the second Monday in a row, Shanghai’s air has been deemed unfit for human consumption. Yesterday was declared hazardous, but I was in Nanjing, breathing in their particular combination of hazy chemicals. Maybe it was the kids I was testing, or maybe it was the air, but I came away from that weekend…
-
Shanghai is trying to kill me: The self-care edition
About 5 years ago, during my last year in Istanbul, I was living in a lovely old flat in Osmanbey, a neighbourhood at that time populated by old man bars, Armenians, artsy types who couldn’t afford to live in Beyoglu, and very small scale industry. The building next door, above the plumbing and wiring shop,…