China - Week 49 (8/5): Various Updates

Recently I’ve been having a bit of a lull in my feelings of self-determination and motivation.  Today it sort of hit an apex, but I decided to sit down and hash some things out in my journal and now I’m feeling much better about what I’m doing and where I’m going.  Regular self-evaluations can be invaluable at times.

At this exact moment, I am at home and it is 2:00 a.m.  Cameron and Jia Jia are here hanging out.  We met up earlier around 11:00 p.m. at the Coffee Bean in Xintiandi to hang out and converse but after a while decided to come back to my place.  Jia Jia has been doing some work (studying Japanese, I think) on my desktop, I’ve been doing some journaling on my laptop, and Cameron is slowly making his way through my x-box games collection.

I’ve made a promise to myself to work to keep my blog updates more regular over the course of the next year.  Part of the reason is that I think keeping to a regular schedule of updating my blog helps breed consistency in my actions from day to day and week to week, and that, in my case, is a good thing.  So, I will follow Raffi’s example and exercise more determination and committment to the blogging process.  I probably won’t be as committed as he is, but very few people (who don’t get paid to keep a blog) are.

Tomorrow, aside from helping Jia Jia with her computer at their home, I don’t have any specific plans aside from working on my parent’s website.  I was going to try to make it to Zhang Yi’s wushu class in the afternoon, but with the heat these days, and afternoon wushu class doesn’t sound terribly appealing.  In addition, it’s hard to take out 3 hours to do wushu when I feel like there are other more pressing resonsbilities that I need to take care of.  Am I just making excuses not to work out?  I would like to think not, but I suppose it’s possible.

Funny thing happened this afternoon though.  The building management had called me a few days ago to let me know that they were going to show my apartment today.  So Tam was here and had stuck in “Friends” to watch for a while, and I was hanging out waiting for them to come and see my (at the moment) clean apartment.  When the doorbell rang I opened the door and it was a chinese woman and caucasian man.  When the man walked in I heard Tam go “Ross!”, which I thought was a reaction to something on the T.V. since one of the characters is named Ross.  However, the man who was looking at the apartment raised his hand and said “Hey!” which I also thought was weird.

But the weird thing is that it turned out that Tam and him were friends from Tam’s part-time English teaching gig.  The guy was an architect and apparently looking for a place and had brought his friend along to help him out (much like Wendy helping me out the week before).  But I just couldn’t believe that the guy who came to look at my apartment turned out to be a friend of Tam’s.  The world is way too small.  It reminded me of the time I ran into Jimmy at Ya Show in Beijing the day before I was going to see him in Xiamen.  Or the time I was walking around Hou Hai in Beijing and ran into two of Jason’s friends from Shanghai.

Speaking of Japan, I was told by my mom that she might be there around the end of October so I’m going to attempt to take a trip over there.  Too bad Raffi is moving away from Fukuoka or I could have said howdy to him too, but it will still be nice to visit the area.  I’m thinking of doing another Hydrofoil from Pusan trip, but that might just be too much trouble.  A direct flight to Fukuoka is probably easier.  It’s only 2 or 3 hours on the shinkansen from where my mom will be.  Hmm .. that will be my fourth trip to Japan this year.  I think that is a record for me.  I have to start thinking of what things I want to pick up while I’m there now.  Or better yet, spend a night in Fukuoka and see if I can drop by the infamous Regal Beagle. ;-)