Click and Wait

Posted on September 3, 2015 by Meg

Hello friends, and welcome to another exciting adventure in Meg Complains About Online Classes. If you’ve missed my previous updates, mostly I think that textbooks are inefficient, prereqs are inefficient, threats are inefficient, and discussion boards are everything that sucks about internet commenting. Education doesn’t have to suck, you guys. At least exams are awesome.

I’ve continued to do really well on my exams and continued to find the discussions a drag, so I was excited to take stats, because I figured math would be solving problems and not miserable discussion board assignments. (By the way, I got a B in my last session. I’m trying to see it as managing a B while moving to China and starting a new job and having spotty wifi and not as a way I’ve screwed up in the classes I’m taking in order to improve my candidacy for the masters program I want. But my view depends on the day.)  My math class requires a math lab account, for an additional $100, where students can log in and do homework and take quizzes. I’m slightly resentful of the $100 fee, since I’ve done homework and taken quizzes in the college’s Blackboard system already, so I’m not entirely sure what I got for the extra $100. Fortunately, students get infinite tries on homework questions, which is pretty great, especially when my wifi hiccups and I get logged out of the system or I lose connection entirely.

Unfortunately, there is also a discussion component. We’re given a problem and we have to solve it in the discussion board. This confuses me, isn’t the whole thing about math that the answers aren’t really up for discussion or debate? It’s not like we can read the same equation through a different critical lens to interpret the narrative in new ways.

The amount of work seems quite reasonable, although it ends up taking a very long time. See, there are so many steps of clicking and waiting that I spend most of my time clicking and waiting and then getting a popup and then clicking ok on it and waiting again. I haven’t watched TV since I’ve been in China, except for a couple background episodes while I was writing my last paper, but I’m pretty sure the click, wait, click, wait, click, will require some background viewing. What shows go well the repetitive frustration? I also spend a certain amount of my homework time rereading the question because the answer is so obvious I must be missing something important. Probably just for the beginning of the semester, but it’s also possible that I underestimated my stats skills and this class will be a repeat of my college statistics course. That’s cool, I haven’t complained about my classes in a while.

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‘American Housewife’ in Yangzhou

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Meg

I reviewed American Housewife over on (The) Absolute, but the short version is that I pretty much think this book was written for me, with such terribly accurate descriptions of southerners, Manhattanites, contented wives and discontented writers in these short stories.

Descriptions of Southern manners and Manhattan evenings are both pitch-perfect, which is probably what makes the murder, kidnapping and revenge all seem perfectly realistic.

My favorite tells the story of a has-been writer and a Playboy bunny on a dumpster diving reality show, and my least favorite about a housewarming gift basket that leads to murder. But even my least favorite short was still perfectly relatable, because in other stories the narrators snarked about the e-epistolary format.

via The Dark and Hilarious Stories of Helen Ellis’ “American Housewife” on (The) Absolute.

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Revealer

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Meg

A few months ago, there was a challenge going around on social media, in which women who were frequently told they’re naturally beautiful and shouldn’t wear so much makeup quit wearing makeup completely. Predictably, the reaction they got wasn’t praise for natural beauty, it was questions about being tired or ill. It’s almost like we’re all conditioned to expect flaw-hiding natural-looking makeup on all women!

Anyway, I thought of this because when I first arrived in Yangzhou, it was too hot to wear makeup. Actually, it was too hot to wear clothes, or to leave the house during sunlit hours, but apparently those things are nonnegotiable parts of adult life. The thought of something unnecessary like concealer touching my skin was unappealing (also, sweating off pools of concealer was unappealing), so I’d slap on some lipgloss and put my hair in a knot on top of my head. I mean, I’d put on pants, too. But definitely no eye makeup.

The weather has recently turned from constant misery to North Carolina summer, and I’ve started putting on a little concealer under my eyes. No one has commented on it or told me I no longer look exhausted, but I’m pretty sure it’s working because ever since I started wearing concealer, the girls in my office started mentioning how cute my lipgloss is or how nice my hair looks.

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Essential Chinese: Get Online

Posted on August 25, 2015 by Meg

shang wangMost people in the bars and coffeeshops of Yangzhou have been able to understand combinations of internet, password, and various question-words and point me to the wifi password. (Special thanks to the lady at Sir Coffee who understood my extra-awful Wang lu zai nar?, and didn’t laugh at me. You are my favorite. I realized what I’d said as soon as I said it. Ugh. ) But my goal with my Chinese is to be able to handle my daily life interactions, especially conversations I have repeatedly, with proper Mandarin sentences and not my awkward laowei hua. The proper way to ask about the internet is shang wang.

Shang means up. The line is on the bottom, not the top, and the tone is falling, not rising, just to screw with Westerners who want to apply logic to memorizing characters. You can see this character in the word Shanghai. It’s used more poetically as parts of other words, we up-work when we go into the office, and down-work at the end of the day. This is a three-stroke character, easy to recognize, but one of the perculiarities of Yangzhou accent is pronouncing the sh sound as s, so it can be hard for me to pick it out of an unfamiliar sentence (See previous re: screwing with foreigners).

Wang means internet. It’s one of the first characters I could recognize, partly because it’s two Xs in a net, and partly because finding internet bars was a large part of my first year in Yantai.

Internet me up, basically. I wanted to confirm that shang wang means connect to the internet, so I typed shang wang into my dictionary app. and, yeah, 上网, connect to the internet,  was the second option for that pin yin. Number one was 伤亡, deaths and casualties. Tones are rubbish, you guys.

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Ma La Tong

Posted on August 23, 2015 by Meg

Went out last night for a leaving party, one of our students is going to university and one of the teachers is finishing his contract and leaving for a new job. I’d forgotten how much of expat life is leaving parties for people moving away. I was slightly disappointed, because the teacher who’s moving on seems like a great guy, I feel like we just got past how-was-your-class office chitchat, and started getting to know each other, and I enjoyed his company.  And our student, Sean, is a sweet kid who’s not shy about his love for James Franco and geography. Sometimes conversational classes turn into groupthink, so having Sean in a class is always a delight.

Anyway, I was glad my coworkers didn’t hold my drinking game analysis against me. Coworker James, who’s come to China to work on his novel, said he knows a good Florida drinking game called Shots in The Kitchen. To play, go in the kitchen and do a shot. I did not overanalyze that one.

Ma la tong is a make-your-own hot soup. Each person grabsingredients from a fridge, most of them are on skewers that might be mistaken for barbecue, and then it’s cooked into individual soups bowls. Prices are between 5 jiao and 1.5 kwai (that’s 8-23 cents, for everyone playing along at home) per stick. I didn’t choose any of the raw meats, but let’s be realistic about these baskets and the cross contamination going on. Actually, let’s not think too much about that. Everything’s getting boiled, it’ll be fine. (James: That C from the health inspection? It just stands for Cool With Me!)

I’d tried ma la tong with coworker Rob a couple weeks ago, but our student, Sean, says the place we went to last night is the best ma la tong in Yangzhou. I did enjoy last night’s more, but I also knew a bit more about what I was putting in my soup this time. That’s basically the summary of this trip to China. Is something in Yangzhou 2015 objectively nicer? Or do I just know myself better, have more Chinese vocab, more reasonable expectations, and I’m actually making it better? Life pondering for another night. For now there’s beer in paper cups.

We walked from the soup place to have drinks, a small crowd of laowei men attracting a certain amount of stares on the way, and wound up drinking wine at a cafe. Walking across town, I had a good moment. This is where I am supposed to be, this is what I am supposed to be doing. It was the wonderful familiarity when another old China hand joked about sitting on stools in the street, throwing back warm beer, and the wonderful strangeness of a long-term expat’s story of scorpion bites in foreign countries. Living in Chapel Hill, I spent a certain amount of time pretending an interest in things other people talked about, and it was really nice not to pretend.

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A Retrospective of My Chinese Bathrooms

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Meg

Remember my Yantai bathroom with no hot water? Remember my Beijing bathroom with the electrical outlet in the shower? Yeah, I haven’t exactly had the greatest luck with Chinese bathrooms.

Two nights ago, I had a little trouble sleeping and heard a small drip from the bathroom. In a city of fireworks and a hotel of carousing, a tiny drip wasn’t going to keep me awake, but I have some experience with Chinese plumbing, so I mentioned this little drip to my contact at my school and asked her to let the hotel know. She said had a lot of the other things to do but if I got her the number of the hotel, she would call. I felt sort of weird about this: I live in the housing provided by the school, and several other teachers and staff members live here too, so it seems really odd that the school has no way to contact them and no ability to look this number up…  I kind of get the feeling my problem wasn’t really a priority. But, whatever, I got the number, and  really hoped that my contact would call.

Last night, I heard the dripping again, but I rolled over and went back to sleep. Aaah sleep. I love you, sleep. This morning, though, I swung my feet out of bed, onto the carpet, and it squelched. My tiny leak had covered the bathroom floor, with an inch or two of water (the floor isn’t really flat in there), and some of it had even spilled out over the doorsill into my room, soaking the carpet. This is no time for politely using the correct channels and maybe getting help from my school, this is time for taking matters into my own (toneless-Mandarin) hands.

I went to the cleaning staff on my floor, and explained my problem in my broken Mandarin (Jin tian wo xing. Wo can shui. Da shui. Qing ni can shui! Today I wake. I see water. Big water. Please you look water.)  I usually like to practice a new conversation a bit and look up vocab words, but see previous re: flood. The housekeepers came in to look, I’m still unsure whether I actually communicated well or they just wanted to know what the foreign lady was so agitated about (By the way, in this story, I was wearing my yoga pants and yesterday’s t-shirt because I just woke up to a flood), and then they got the maintenance guy.

Of course, the maintenance staff doesn’t speak much Mandarin, they speak Yangzhou local dialect. This is quite different from Mandarin, and even when Yangzhouhua speakers switch to Mandarin, their vocab and their falling-rising tone sounds really different to me. Several hundred years ago, the Yangzhou locals consciously stopped speaking Mandarin and switched to speaking their own language when they felt they weren’t getting enough support from the central government, who’d been pretty quick to claim Yangzhou when it was a prosperous shipping port and pretty quick to drop Yangzhou when the economy shifted and it was less significant. Which is really fascinating, but not when I am trying to explain about a flood happening in my room.

So everyone came into my room to try to sort it out. and by the way, I have pictures of Harold all over my room, like I am 16 and he is a pop star, which is a totally mature and reasonable thing to do, and I am not at all embarrassed about it. I don’t have the Mandarin vocab to describe a plumbing issue, let alone Yangzhouhua, so I did a certain amount of pointing and je ge, and the maintenance guy had a look at where the water was coming from, and somehow figured it out, which I can only assume means he is the greatest plumber in all of China. He explained what he needed to do to fix it, not like I would have understood that in the Queen’s English, and ended with mei shi, no problem.

I wanted to tell him not to worry, my last Chinese plumbing adventure ended up in a coffeetable book, so I’m sure this will turn out OK too.

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“Call The Midwife” Memoir Trilogy Offers More Poplar Details For TV Fans

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Meg

call the midwife trilogyI wrote some more about how great Call The Midwife is, specifically about the memoir this time.

The popular BBC show Call The Midwife tells the story of a young nurse, Jenny Lee, and her fellow midwives at Nonnatus House. If you’re not already in love with this program, check it out for a binge-watchable character-driven drama, including historical detail, snarky nuns, medical complications, and female friendships, plus loads of adorable babies.

…

In her memoirs, Worth is matter-of-fact in her descriptions, with a dry wit for commentary. (My favorite is a quiet suggestion that the lack of televisions in Poplar homes may have contributed to the large size of the families.) She is able to describe harsh conditions, from both medically complicated pregnancies to  life in poverty, in a way that’s readable and realistic, not romanticized. Worth keeps both her youthful optimism and her experienced reflection, making the entire book feel like a long visit with the show’s mature Jenny (voiced by Vanessa Redgraves).

Via “Call The Midwife” Memoir Trilogy Offers More Poplar Details For TV Fans | (The) Absolute

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And Another Reason Your Drinking Game Is Statistically Flawed

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Meg

Went out for beers with my coworkers tonight. I like the guys I’m working with, and we went to a lovely bar by the river, where I ruined everyone’s enjoyment of bu shi (the Chinese drinking game where you guess the dice combinations hidden under the cups) by explaining the probabilities of each bid.

I am so great at socializing. You should totally hang out with me.

Related: I continue to be great at talking to coworkers. 

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Book Tour: The Zombie Truth

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Meg

the zimbie truthIn The Zombie Truth, by Vincent St. Vincent, students in Florida start to notice that some kind of evil is spreading, whether it’s random violence on the news, or a strangely aggressive ex-boyfriend.

The Zombie Truth was a rare book where I cared much, much more about the plot than the characters.  Neither Robert or Tara really stood out to me. (They are the protagonists, really, and I had to doublecheck their names for this post) But by the time I realized that Dude and Girlfriend weren’t really my cup of tea, enough strange things had happened that I kept reading to find out what was going on with all these unusual sightings. All these pieces have to be connected, but how?

I don’t want to reveal too much of the story, because discovering how the strange events are connected is enjoyable, and I don’t want to give spoilers. I will say, though, that every time I thought to myself, huh, that’s odd. Wonder why that piece of information was included, that bit always became significant later.

Although the publisher warns that the novel could be “too jarring, disturbing, uncomfortable or perplexing”, I didn’t find the novel gross, and I usually have a low tolerance for blood. (I’ve tried to watch a couple scary movies with my horror-writer husband, and it doesn’t usually go well. It’s entirely possible that Harold is bingewatching all the haunted horror movies while I’m away.) Some of the first violence takes place over a hot Florida Christmas, a really telling image that sets the tone of the rest of the book.

I received a copy of The Zombie Truth to read and review. As always, all opinions on my blog are my own, and ARCs have never stopped me from snarking about a bad book.

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Yeah, But Just Wait ‘Til We Raise Our Legions

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Meg

We got a new guy at work today and we were in the office chatting about what we did before coming to Yangzhou.  I’d forgotten this part about expat life, how it’s already time to say goodbye to one person and meet a new arrival.

“First, I got my degree in a truly terrible subject for finding a job,” my new coworker told me.

“Oh really? What was that?” I asked. As a classics major, I’m always so happy to hear about others who studied what they really liked, especially if that rambling career path leads to China.

“Classical studies.” he said.

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