unpurposed

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

There are designated smoking rooms in the terminals, but they don't allow lighters in the terminals. How does that work?

Sitting in Beijing airport, a few hours left. Continuous loop of Beethoven music.

can't sleep. seems like my body has adjusted back to american time? that is weird.

The United Nations initiated a poll with the request, "Please tell us your honest opinion about the lack of food in the rest of the world." The poll was a total failure. The Russians did not understand "Please". The Italians did not know the word "honest". The Chinese did not know what an "opinion" was. The Europeans did not know "lack", while the Africans did not know "food". Finally, the Americans didn't know anything about the "rest of the world".

found this on the german humor page on wikipedia. it's so good.

almost leaving china. it's been 6 long weeks. i am ready to go home. the air has a lot of irritants and it makes it hard to breathe. pizza hut is really amazing here. also 85 C. nanjing specialty foods are duck, duck, more duck. duck blood noodle soup, salt water duck, some other ducks. they also have this lotus root stuff with rice and it is very sweet with honey or something. amazing. things in china aren't that cheap. well, the decent quality stuff is probably more expensive than the stuff in america. they still have cheap stuff on the streets. but it is all low quality.

china is always under construction. it must be the way they keep the economy rolling. dig up holes, fill in holes, dig up holes, fill in holes, repeat. always working, but not getting much of anywhere. dig up the roads, install electrical wires, fill in. dig up the roads, install plumbing, fill in. dig up the roads, install telephone wires, fill in. never doing anything together at the same time. though they do finish things pretty quickly. but seems like they don't build things to last, because they know things will be dug up. is that why things are low quality? nothing is meant to last here. just rebuild it later if needed. i saw a shop across the street destroyed and rebuilt in a week. it became a perfume shop. they also tore down some old houses at the intersection and built a wall within a week. everything happens so quickly. but things fall apart so quickly also.

one of the most amazing things i have learned on this trip to china is how to unclog a toilet with a mop. it works a lot better than a regular plunger. the mop can take the form of any toilet and form a seal! amazing!

"There are more interesting things in the world than banal perfection."

i gave a presentation today to the traditional chinese medicine department today. it was regarding some possible interactions between chemotherapy and some herbal components. one of them was the bortezomib and green tea combination. the polyphenols in green tea bind to bortezomib and inactivate it, so that sucks when you have multiple myeloma or lymphoma. anyway, they were semi-interested. they just had issues with the herb as a whole vs mono-compound being used. for example, maybe that one component in green tea that was isolated binds to bortezomib and inactivates it, but if you take green tea as a whole, there might be compounds that binds to the polyphenol that binds to bortezomib, so there really is not interaction. very interesting way of thinking. of course, science can only handle one variable at a time, so how can we figure this out in the future?

anyway, today was my last day in the traditional chinese medicine department and the director gave me a box of green tea as a present. so good. nanjing yu hua tea. mmm

Pardon the appropriate capitalization, i am typing this on my phone. Looks like "i" doesn't get automatically capitalized. Anyway, awkward situation today. One of the directors of foreign affairs department wanted to talk to us. He felt we don't understand Chinese culture at all even though my classmate and i are both Chinese. I guess they feel once one becomes American, they lose all culture. Seems to be a common belief."what!?!? You can speak Chinese!?" "you can eat Chinese food in the US!?" "you can buy vegetables in America!?!?" Yes, we only eat steak for breakfast and all own guns. Anyway, my classmate asked him what he thinks is the difference between America and China, which is a perfectly innocent question. He answered that Chinese and Americans are very similar, except Americans still have a Cold War mentality regarding................. Taiwan, and this is preventing China and America from being friends. As i thought "oh shit" in my head, he proudly proclaimed he was a member of the communist party. Anyway he gave a quite propaganda-ish talk about Taiwan independence and how this makes China angry and blahbalhbalhalbh. apparently there's a lot of freedom here, can freely criticize the government... within reason. Whatever that means. Anyway there was a dinner later with other high-up people. Those people knew my family is from Taiwan and were asking me about it. The look on the first director's face when he realized i am Taiwanese. Awkward event of the day.

Anyway, i wish China would realize that something is wrong when no one wants to be part of it. Taiwan, Tibet, Uighur, Hong Kong, Macau. We can't deny we are different people (well, i guess Tibet and Uighur can), but if the same people can't get along, there must be some differences in ethics or values or morals or something. It's best to fix that disagreement rather than force them to be "friends" politically, economically, or through the military. He was also hating on Japan saying Japan and China will always have this issue of Nanjing massacre, but Japan is good "friends" with China now, "possibly due to [economic] necessity". Ya great friends. Best friends forever. And Chinese people are so good at victimizing themselves. oh, those harsh days, all that suffering. Fuck.