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.

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.

Timeline: Nov. 5, 2008

Because I live in Shanghai, I live half a day ahead of the action back at home in the States. Here's the recap of how Election Morning went.

6:45 AM: Alarm goes off. I'm ready to kill my supervisor, Jaret, with whom I'll be heading over to Malone's to watch it all unfold.

8:00 AM: The election party is well underway. Polls start closing as breakfast gets served. I pickup a cool Obama poster that will soon be the first bit of wall decor for my apartment.

9:00 AM: Second round of polls. Obama takes the lead from McCain. The entire bar is pro-Obama and, even this early in the morning, the place goes wild. We're all also totally confused by a) CNN's insistence on using hologram technology, and b) Wolf Blitzer's continual insistence that "these are real votes we're looking at."

9:30 AM: Sonja arrives, soon to be followed by Clemon. The bar is filling up, still rocking for Obama.

10:00 AM: Next round of polls, and Obama's lead becomes commanding. It feels like a Saturday night at Malone's. Soon after, John King more or less proclaims the night over and the place goes ballistic.

11:00 AM: Round four. As this hour goes on, we start really doing the math. It's now just a countdown to noon, when the West Coast will make it all official. We've got two more compatriats that have joined us at our corner of the bar.

12:00 PM: Explosion of jubilation and relief. It's all finally over: eight years of confusion and two years of diligent attention to current events, done in an instant. CNN gets turned down and the PA turns towards Stevie Wonder. It's now actually a party. The gang's now buying rounds of Budweiser to celebrate. I notice everyone in the bar is breathing very, very deeply.

12:30 PM: McCain concession speech is very gracious and the whole bar kind of develops a soft spot for old guy.

1:30 PM: Obama addresses 240,000 people hanging out in a park, not to mention we millions around the world. Malone's totally freaks when he address "those watching from beyond our shores."

2:00 PM: Jaret and I get back to the office, still in total disbelief. Every breath I take sounds like a sigh.

5:00 PM: Work moving very slowly. It's all still surreal.

7:30 PM: Teaching goes really well, but it's clear that I'm totally out of it.

9:30 PM: I'm on the subway, headed towards the Bund to meet up with my high school girlfriend. She's in Shanghai on a trip.

10:15 PM: We're at Glamour Bar for the official Obama victory party. Lots of foreigners, and they're all ecstatic. They're serving "Obama-tinis" and "Change We Can Believe Ins".

Nov. 6, 2008

10:00 AM: Wait, did yesterday really happen? This distance is really making it not feel real.

This has been such an incredible past few days. It's amazing how much support Obama has here among the expat community. I've met exactly one person that supported McCain, but we're pretty sure he's in the CIA, anyway.

I've spoken about my incredible love of country before, but, as of Wednesday morning, I've never loved it more. Feeling the excitement of a whole community rallying behind Obama was really special.

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.

Gettysburg

This weekend, we headed down to Gettysburg to visit my sister. The visit itself was wonderful, but the real notable event was our trip to the Gettysburg National Military Park and its new visitor center. The visitor center- almost certainly a Congressional earmark, by the way- was truly incredible. It's a beautiful museum devoted to the Civil War's most famous, bloodiest battle. Having now been to Gettysburg several times, I've been able to see a great deal. I've taken early morning walks through the battlefields and come across buildings still riddled with bullet holes. These tend to be really powerful experiences. Of course, Gettysburg is also chock full of really corny, touristy stuff, mostly because Civil War nerds appear to be the nerdiest of all nerds.

This weekend, Gettysburg was really booming. One of the reasons is the opening of the fully restored Gettysburg Cyclorama featured at the visitor center. Back in the 19th Century, cycloramas were big attractions- like the IMAX of their era. A cyclorama is a massive, 360 degree painting, typically depicting a major historical occurance. The Gettysburg Cyclorama was originally painted in the 1880s, and replicated for other exhibitions around the country. Over time, most of these duplications were lost or destroyed. For some years, the Cyclorama was exhibited in Gettysburg, but the exhibit was closed recently to restore it and move it the visitor center. There is a cool feature showing the restoration here, and an article about it here.

Accompanying the Cyclorama was a short feature about the Battle of Gettysburg, narrated by Morgan Freeman (of course), and featuring the voices of Sam Watterson, Anthony Chisholm, and Marcia Gay Harden. It sounds absurd, but this short film about a 150 year old battle moved me to tears. The one thing that never ceases to amaze me is the incredible struggle our countrymen have undertaken to achieve the America we live in. Maybe it's because I'm preparing to move abroad, but whenever I think about that struggle, be it the battles fought by ordinary citizens every day for equality or the battles fought by extraordinary citizens on battlefields, I get choked up. That might explain the emotional intensity that I've experienced during this election, too.

Just as the Civil War marked a crossroads in America's history, where our forefathers faced fundemental questions about our nation's future, we face have again reached a crucial point in our nation's journey. Once again, there are weighty questions about our future. Luckily, we are not fighting a civil war. We are, however, fighting other important battles. Then, we dealt with questions of our country's union. Now, we deal with our place in the world. I was glad to have the Gettysburg experience one more time before heading abroad. Over the next month, we Americans have a lot to keep in mind. Over the next two years, remembering the struggle for America will surely help me appreciate everything about home that I'll miss.