A post to make up for a missed week. Last 2 paragraphs (at least) are worth reading twice.
This past week I had a week long holiday: Chinese Spring Festival is like Christmas + New Years at the same time. Everyone goes home to their families/friends, and has a huge party over the whole week. The first day was my last day before the holidays:
Wake up to explosions and trudge to work at 10:20am. No one there cuz friends & colleagues say that no one comes on the Friday. Looks like it'll be an unsocial 7 days. Lights off, thought I had to check in because it's basically the holidays, but the security guard points me away. Maybe it's because... wateva.
I'm feeling superproductive today. Glory/Horror of software is that one good day ~= a week of bad days... My one day is today. Finish work with zeal. Odd feeling that I'm still the lone light in a spacious void. Hopstep to go buy fireworks at the special stall. Arrive at the special stall wondering how I knew it was here... don't remember seeing it before... don't remember getting directions... I'd been passively looking; I guess I guessed it would be in this direction. Sounds good to me. Oo. Big stall full of cheap and awesome fireworks. Candilicious as a booth of kool tech gadgets to my early adult palate. Bag a bag full enough to prick my hotttooth. Skip to the blue and blow some bombs to the black. Mostly little sparkly ones. Supplies extinguished, I scramble 1k back to the stall. Hotooth grown to a fangofire, my inhibitions devolve proportionately. Visions of grandeur taunt me with a Rube Goldberg firework machine. Appropriate bombs appropriated, I gather some 1000m of toilet paper and tape. My devious setup set up, I take more moments to revel in excitement.
A special stall.
Fire it up. Naturally. Tweaking childhood gaming memories... BOUM! Ouch... now I'm shellshocked. Ringing and I'm back online, giggling. Caught that on video - will check out later. Lights are out. Stupid little bomb turns off the fire. Hmmm there's a whole box of those distributed about the whole firemachine. Try lighting it up again: BOUM! Frown. These things are cockroaches in my cake. Try many agains with the same result. Looks like I will have to light the fireworks individually in normalcy. A pair light up and one explodes, launching the other in my direction for a nice, close BOUM! Trying not to commit personification with a vendetta, I decide to put a bunch of the loud annoying ones in a box. Light the box on fire and one explosion kills the flame. Now that the little ones have driven me to recklessness, I get a big firework that shoots …lots… from its plaster encasing, I put the firework upsidedown inside the box, I light it on fire, and I run away 20m. Fireworks start blasting. BOUM! A single little loud one flips the big firework to face me. It continues to rail out missiles, now parallel to the ground and arcing at my bomb-irresistant flesh. Soundly defeated, I flee the area terrorized, embarrassed, and glad I didn't lose any body parts. Not touching those for another year, but next year’s glee is far from compromised.
To the hotel room! Pack up a soccer ball, camera, and my laptop in case my camera runs out of memory. Subway to where I'm going. Back out to the dark and I can see huge Olympic buildings in the distance. They look awesome - I want pictures. I start walking on the long path towards them... 15 minutes later it doesn't look like I'm any closer than before. Buildings are still just as huge. Turn around and head back to a place I spotted to watch the midnight fireworks. Small explosions were used in ancient China to scare away evil spirits. The method has evolved into the popular use of fireworks during the Chinese New Year. [cit? :P]
A random Chinese guy approaches me:
"hey, I'm lonely cuz all my friends left Beijing for the spring festival. you look lonely. want to be friends?"
"ok."
We chat for a while and start freezing. Light a cardboard box on fire for warmth. Then he suggests,
"wanna go to my place - it's warm and has a great view of the fireworks"
"no."
Continue sitting around until midnight arrives. I take out my camera and watch the fireworks. These aren't comparable to anything I've seen before. Thousands of people simultaneously set off their massive displays. The sky lights up with fire in every direction for miles. It's raining flares and the tumult doesn't dissipate. The bombs are continuous. Thousands more turn the nightfall, and the bright deafening only slows after 20 minutes.
Freestyling amidst fireworks is epic.
Unfortunately, the new batteries gave my camera 90 seconds. Twenty minutes up: time to go. Then the guy is like,
“so... you wanna come to my place and stay over?”
Either he's really lonely and wants company or he's really lonely and wants a date for Valentine's Day tomorrow. I'm not interested in either option... except no - it's Valentine's Day the day after tomorrow. Point still holds. Intent lost in translation and cultural differences, goodbye and go. Start my 1hr walk home, then snag a taxi cuz I'm awesome.
Go to sleep to some bombs. Wake up to some bombs 12 hours later. Thas weird: my watch says it's the 11th, but my brain says its the 13th. Zits calendar agrees; watch says it's the 13th. Not much opportunity for memories - nothing done but feed and laze... Sleep for another 12 hours.
Wake to more bombs - love the smell of firecracker in the morning. I decided that I would go to all the temple fairs I could find. It’s traditional for temples to have fairs in Beijing. I found/went to three over the course of the holiday. Head to the White Cloud Taoist Temple. It’s pretty kool, appears to have architecture similar to the Forbidden City. There’s some bells under a bridge that everyone throws tokens at for good luck in the new year. There’s lots of altars where people place sticks and pray - presumably for good luck in the new year. Not really my thing… I wonder if there’re any special stalls nearby?
Hard for unlucky ppl to hit.
Whenever I talk to Chinese people about practices like (above), they say ‘it’s for good luck’ or ‘it’s lucky’. I’m sensing their word for ‘luck’ is not directly translatable to English. It seems like a religious term that is prevalent and accepted everywhere in Chinese culture.
Head back to the hotel and sit in bed waiting for an online meeting with friends about a project. No one shows. Call mum to say happy Valentine’s Day:
“hey”
”it must be late there”
”yup”
”it’s Family Day here”
”no its not. it’s Sunday today. Family Day’s on Monday.”
wait what.....
Look for the real time. Can’t trust my computer – one OS is in Ottawa time, other’s a Dubliner. The internet says today is Monday the 15th. But I know today is the 14th. Watch says 14th; thought I changed it to the right date…? I was keeping track of the date so closely! How did I know the correct new year’s eve two nights ago?…assuming I was there the right night… definitely was.
Thoughts racing. Trying to rationalize the situation. I trust my experiential memories, but they appear to have logical conflicts. The reality forged by my brain’s rationalizations over the last five days has been shattered. I’m experiencing shock.
Some Psych courses + Greg House have taught me that my brain constructs my reality. My brain can ignore stimuli that don’t make sense (a thing that declares the date to be different than I ‘know’) or rationalize conflicting stimuli (that thing’s date is probably in a different time zone, ignore it). This selective construction of reality can be wrong. When an accepted fact is suddenly and unquestionably disproven, the part of my brain that produced the incorrect reality has to figure out what’s up. The conflicts are usually so minute that they are rationalized in a thought, but when a big one comes up, my realities hang in limbo.
Having Matrix apnea. Revisiting places, sights, feelings catatonically. Faulted brainpiece beginning to rationalize. I’ve been sleeping lots. did I sleep for 36 hours? noway. I’ve had headaches in the last 3 days and have been sleeping excessively…hit head->brain problem? Mental disorder? It’s verdict: over the last five days, I have been ignoring clues that don’t fit my perceived reality. An untrustworthy answer - how do I know that I didn’t hit my head? that I don’t have a mental illness? it’s because I don’t remember enough symptoms. That’s hardly fair. The part of my brain that decides what went wrong and what symptoms to remember was the one that screwed up. It appears I am at the mercy of that part of my brain; that decides what was, what is, and has convinced me it doesn’t know what will be. The dictator has its way; now I know that I went to work on a Saturday.
-dough
Freestyling amidst fireworks is epic.
Hard for unlucky ppl to hit.