Remember The Time?

Since sometime in late spring- around Memorial Day weekend and certain unspeakable events that happened twenty years ago around the first week of June- just about every Western blog has been blocked, leaving me unable to post anything without the help of a good proxy filter. Avoiding China's Great Firewall is not very difficult to do, but it's often a nuisance. I've been using Facebook and Twitter- two other blocked services- with much less frequency than the nearly hourly use to which I was accustomed. Like many other expats here, I was hoping this would all just blow over as the summer passed by notable anniversaries that could be exploited by overzealous internet users. Unfortunately, since then we've seen a steady stream of major blog-worthy events, of which several gave the monitors of the Great Firewall more cause to keep the current bans in place.

I fell ill and was treated at a Chinese hospital, giving me valuable insight into the current American health care clusterf*ck.

Michael Jackson died, which was a bummer but ultimately not world changing. His influence lasts, but them man was essentially irrelevant.

Chaos and violence in Xinjiang Province. The western province home to a substantial ethnic minority has been in a state of unrest due to ethnic and political tensions that spilled over into violence this July. Twitter got blocked again in the wake of this. I spoke to a guy from Xinjiang I know recently about this. He said that things out there are bad, but that his people are treated well in Shanghai. I found this curious, since many Chinese people I've spoken to stereotypically talk about Xinjiang people in racist stereotypes.

Friends and I formed a band and have our first concert scheduled for Novmember 4, the one year anniversary of the election of Barack Obama.

More ethnic tension across China as stabbings involving syringes and ethnic minorities occur.

I started working a second job as I learned the true face of working in China. Don't believe what you've read in the NYT or AP regarding working here. They're aloof.

Soon, we will have a major holiday: the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Things should get ridiculous.

The Yankees made it back to the playoffs.

Keep alive.

Do I Know You?

Chinese New Year is apparently so crazy that it took me just over two months to recover. Whoops?

Notes:

• I got promoted (kind of): I am now no longer an "academic specialist" but rather an "academic supervisor."
• My oldest friend- at least in my recollection- came to visit China while she was teaching in Thailand. During her stopover in Shanghai, I built upon the lessons of my last guest and tried doing almost no touristy stuff at all. Instead, we tried out random restaurants I had always wanted to try, walked around, and went to the brand new Barbie store. The Barbie store was kind of like a girly Niketown, maybe. It's six floors, slathered in pink, and has an overpriced bar up on the top floor. That being said, it's actually really well decorated.
• More rock concerts, including the group Battles all the way from NY and Hedgehog from Beijing. Battles was outrageous, while Hedgehog was spoiled by the crowd of obnoxious Chinese hipsters apparently unfamiliar with deodorant and toothpaste, not to mention standard rock concert protocol.
• Wow, Bush administration, you just make it easier and easier to paint you as awful villains, don't you? Really? You waterboarded the same two dudes over two-hundred fifty times? I don't imagine I'd take too kindly to being tortured, but I suspect somewhere around the fortieth time, I'd start to be a little nonplussed by the whole affair.
• Baseball season is here! Go Yankees! The managers of my company are all from Taiwan, where baseball is much more popular than it is here on the mainland where you're lucky if people even know what baseball is. One of the managers, being from Taiwan, is a big fan of Wang Chien-ming and the Yankees. I don't think I'd ever spoken to him in the nearly one year of time I've been around him (between my intership and my current tenure) until he approached me after Wang bombed again in his second start to say "Wang Chien-ming..." while shaking his head. I took the chance today to approach him and do the same today, following Wang's third blowout.
• The weather's getting nicer, so I'm taking more opportunities to wander around as a pedestrian instead of as a passenger. It makes the city a lot more interesting, and it's amazing how much closer everything is than you might think。
• I'll officially be returning to the States, although only for two weeks, in June. So, start making preparations now.

And, just like that, we're back in business.

Can Bud Selig Get Kicked Out of Office Already?

Bud Selig sucks. I mean, how can he always act so surprised about steroids in baseball when it is so obvious that he and the owners were complicit in all of this? If baseball really wants to move on past the steroid era, Selig has to go. And while we're at it, Don Fehr, the player's union chief, is a weasel, too.

These guys clearly don't really care about the integrity of the game, or the bad example they set by turning a blind eye to this cheating. Their reactions to the pressures from the media in dealing with this are blatantly just affectations, and are nothing short of nauseous. Today he announced that he was considering punishing A-Rod for his failed drug test six years ago. This is the wrong move for two reasons: 1) it was not against the rules to use PEDs when A-Rod failed the test; 2) there are 103 others who failed that year and evidently will not be punished.

Don't get me wrong. I understand the magnitude of the game's biggest star being nailed for this. He plays for my team, so it hits especially close to home. But it's incredibly unfair and unproductive to turn him into a scapegoat.

If they really want to send a message, they should release the other names and start making the rules prohibiting PEDs stricter. The costs of using PEDs has to outweigh the benefits of using them, and "the good of the game" is unfortunately not enough to stop players from juicing; the humiliation and official consequences of being caught need to be more intense to create such disincentive.

Baseball also has to expand the scope of these consequences. Players alone should not be punished. Coaches and owners should be punished, too. Even if they aren't aware that a player is cheating, if the consequences affect more than just the individual, he might think twice about acting inappropriately. Not only that, but baseball should make it a requirement that any player with paid endorsements must have in his contract a clause saying that being caught juicing will lead to an automatic termination of that contract. Again, it's all about taking away the incentive for these guys to cheat.

None of this will happen, though, as long as Bud Selig is in charge because he has no spine for it. He knows exactly how much he gained thanks to players using PEDs and is too reluctant to see it go. This is supposed to be a new era of change upon we as a nation have embarked. And as the American pastime (screw you, football), baseball needs a change in leadership.

Thanksgiving

About a bajillion years ago- relative to my own existence, at least- the Pilgrims and the Indians celebrated the first Thanksgiving. They had yet to become Native Americans at that time, so you can get over it now: I'm calling them Indians.

Anyway, back to the story. Then we went and killed most of them, stole their land, and sold the rest firewater. Which reminds me: the economic downturn means we should spend more time with friends and family, and a nice bottle of wine goes great with that. I recommend a little place called Post Wine and Spirits in Larchmont, NY.

Right, so the story. Somewhere around the time of the War of Northern Aggression, legendary human Abraham Lincoln began the movement to mark the occasion of our first Thanksgiving with annual wildly inaccurate pageants and family dinners. On this day, we count our blessings and take part in our two great American pastimes: forgetting the baseball is our national pastime and eating too much.

This year, because I couldn't bear to spend another cherished holiday watching the Detroit Lions lose, I moved to China. Here, I estimate that 99.9999% of 1.3 billion people don't even know the Detroit Lions exist. For those of Americans living abroad, however, Thanksgiving is still a fairly important occasion, and agree it is totally worth it to go out of our way and order an already cooked turkey from a hotel restaurant or supermarket.

Having set the scene, my holiday begins at 8:15 AM. This might come as a surprise to many of you, but this is an hour at which I am, by and large, unaccustomed to waking. All the same, my neighbors chose to eviscerate all hope of having a nice post-Thanksgiving Eve-revelry sleep by making the bold decision to use a power drill, a power saw, and a hammer for the hour following this wicked wake up call. Throwing up my hands, metaphorically since I'm actually trying to suffocate my ears with the pillows, I lied in bed thinking about how lucky I am to be in China.

Cut to the early evening. It's 6:30 PM and I've just left work early. The subway is crowded, which means it's actually not bad tonight. Usually it is absurdly crowded. I've got the new Guns N' Roses record on my iPod, which is a ridiculous sentence phrase for several reasons. It's illegality here in China is the reason I'll highlight.

I just lost my train of thought imagining how I would look wearing Slash's hat, so I'll just skip to the white meat and mashed potatoes of the story. The holiday was spent nicely at a friend's place, where we had a traditional Thanksgiving feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and curried tofu. (There were a lot of non-Americans there, and they felt compelled to bring something. Silly Canadians.) We did the hokey thing and went around saying what we were thankful for, and we all lied and said our friends. But it got me thinking about what I actually am thankful for, so here it goes:

1. I am thankful for my family, who are wonderful in every way- especially their support and understanding. I am thankful that they are smart, sociable, moral people who have done their damnedest to make me so, too.

2. I am thankful for my friends, who are still really cool and who totally miss me, but would be mad at me if I came back early. I am thankful that they are all doing their thing, too, so that we can compare notes.

3. I am thankful that I found a job. Economic crisis, my left foot. I am also thankful that it is a job I enjoy, working with people I like.

4. I am thankful that I have this opportunity to travel the world and follow my dream.

5. I am thankful for Barack Obama winning. Particularly, I am thankful for Sarah Palin losing.

6. I am thankful for the Internet making most of what I do feasible.

7. I am thankful that I finally finished reading Cryptonomicon. As awesome as it was, 1100 pages is really just too long. Which is why the next book I'm reading will only be around 800 pages.

8. I'm thankful to the peoples of Spain and France for having languages that I found totally abhorrent in seventh grade, forcing me to capriciously choose Chinese as my language of choice. Since hypothetical situations are poor arguments, however, we will not go ahead an imagine the alternate reality in which I spend my adult life on the French Riviera as a successful importer-exporter/secret agent. "Will not," I said.

And that's it. I hope you all had a great holiday, too.

Baseball and Healthcare

Today, the New York Times printed a brilliant op-ed piece, co-written by former Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, Democratic Senator from the state of Massachusetts, John Kerry, and General Manager of the Oakland A's, Billy Beane.

IN the past decade, baseball has experienced a data-driven information revolution. Numbers-crunchers now routinely use statistics to put better teams on the field for less money. Our overpriced, underperforming health care system needs a similar revolution. ("How to take American Health Care from Worst to First")

Americans always pull this BS attitude about how great our healthcare system is, even though it's clearly broken. "Try going to Canada and waiting," they always say. Frankly, I'd rather wait a little bit for a procedure than go into crippling debt in order to pay for it. But maybe that's just me.

Anyway, this piece is about how medical systems could apply sabermetrics in order to dramatically reduce costs and improve efficiency, which explains why Beane is a co-writer in the article. Gingrich and Kerry provide some serious bipartisan gravitas, as two incredibly bright people that come from opposite sides of the political spectrum.

Notes

Over the past few weeks, I've been extremely busy, and there's been a lot to report on. Of course, that meant I didn't bother taking the time to report it.

• Last Tuesday, my dad and I went to one last Yankee game together for a few years, and our last at the legendary Yankee Stadium. Baseball's been a huge part of my life for so long: many of my fondest memories are intertwined with the sport. Yankee Stadium holds a special place in the hearts of many, and I'm proud to be a part of that many. Tuesday, we were blessed to see Derek Jeter become the Yankee-ist Yankee ever when he passed the great Lou Gehrig for the most hits ever at Yankee Stadium, a record that is both impressive and unbreakable. Jeter is one of the few guys left that I can really say I grew up watching, and seeing all those years of following him culminate with the record was really special.

• Over the weekend, I had the chance to head back down to Richmond to visit the girlfriend. I'm not going to get gushy, but it was incredible to spend time with her again. The girlfriend's sister got married, and the ceremony was really beautiful. Weddings are really awesome, all things considered, as long as you're not actually a part of them. Then it's just really stressful. That being said, I hope it's several years before I have many more weddings to attend.

• It's also television time again! Right now, I am following these shows: True Blood, Entourage, How I Met Your Mother. Shortly, NBC comedies return, and I'll be adding 30 Rock and The Office to that list. I've officially abandoned Heroes as of late last season, and I'm waiting on shows like Fringe to develop a little more before I get too involved.

• Finally, the gears are finally turning for China, and it's officially time to start a countdown. I plan to send out emails Thursday to let people know, but I'll leak the info here first: I am officially going to Shanghai on October 10. The visa paperwork came earlier than expected- which is kind of strange since I expected it nearly a month ago- and I've started to really get the planning going. The flight has been booked, a hotel reservation has been made, and tomorrow I'm getting the application in to the consulate. Not only that, but I gave my two weeks to Giant Corporate Retail Chain. Things are moving quickly.

So that's the quick roundup. It ignores a lot of other notable happenings, but that's the way life works, no? I'm getting curious to see how this whole charade John McCain's pulling with the debates will play out. Maybe that's worth a few paragraphs some time...