Swing Swing

I realize that the biking video did not properly load, and that is unfortunate. Also unfortunate is my utter lack of patience to wait for it to upload again at this moment. I promise you will live.

I know I've been somewhat distant lately. This is not really a conscious decision so much as the way the dice have rolled. In two weeks my address will change into something with only squiggly lines and numbers instead of something that can be written in letters recognizable. Just ask my parents about that. My view will also change into something entirely more urban and less... slummy. I'll miss seeing the mountains once in a while, though. I'm moving a couple miles to the southwest, and it seems like a different world altogether.

I had a very strange mood shift on Saturday. I went out to breakfast with my normal cohorts plus my roommate-to-be, and I called my parents while I was there. So I was separated from those guys because it was too loud at the table. While I was talking on the phone, some other guy came in, sat in my place at the table, and drank my cup of twice refillable coffee. Who even knows why this made me mad, but it certainly did. I don't know the guy. I think it crossed some sort of personal boundaries that made me really upset. This spoiled my mood, and so I decided that I did not want to accompany the Professor and Cowboy to their daytrip out to see some Buddhist temples. I just didn't want to be crammed into a subway with a billion Chinese people pressed up against me for an hour in order to transfer to a likewise cramped bus for 20 minutes to see temples to not-God. So I abandoned those guys and walked around south-west Beijing until I found something I could navigate from. Then I got onto the subway again (I know, it's self-defeating) and rode to Jianguomen, because there is a Starbucks I like there.

I noticed in this directionless walking that when I'm upset things become very geometric. I noticed that the cheap tiles in the underground street crossings were rising to hit my feet like the L-shaped pieces in a game of Tetris or the allowable moves of a knight in chess. I noticed the iron star shape inside a circular ventilation opening in that same underground. I thought about the irony of this, and then I let it pass. Perhaps I noticed so much because I walked through this crossing twice in three minutes. I either decided that the woman with a headset and guitar was singing incredibly well that moment, or that I needed to uncross the street. Most likely it was the latter.

I walked across a bridge on Saturday, and I pulled a withered petal off a rose and let it fall off an overpass. Why roses are blooming in the middle of cold weather in China I shall never know.

After I walked into the Starbucks, I ordered my Caramel Macchiato and then noticed my friends Jeff and Steph (or Jeffanie, as we like to call them). I spent the subsequent couple hours commiserating with them about life in Beijing and the craziness of taxi drivers. It was a nice coincidence that we would be in the southeast of the city at the same Starbucks when we all live in the northwest. Those two are Americans, one from Norther California, the other from Southern California. They claim there is a difference. I find this dubious at very best. California is California, and that's it.

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I've been reminding myself that sacrifice and offering are related. That I cannot offer a sacrifice that costs me nothing. That there's pain in the offering. That sometimes stuff sucks, but it's for the best in the long run, essentially.

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Today I got to hold Butterbean and sing Christmas songs with a couple thousand of my brothers and sisters. Beat that.

T