spring resolution

I’ve gotta stop listening to other people. If you take other people’s words of cautions seriously, I’ve decided (especially in this country), you’ll never do anything. Getting to the yoga place is a perfect excuse to buy a bike – I’m sure I could fly there in half the time it takes the bus at rush hour, and with spring here*, it makes me want to cry to get on a bus when I could be riding.

When I needed a new iPod to PC connecting cord in the fall, I bought it online, with some help from my colleagues . . . and a whole lot more discouragement. They were sure that it would certainly be a fake, if it actually got here at all, and that I was an idiot for marching to the bank and depositing 22 kuai in the account of a "LuckyHarry", who had only assured me online that he'd send the cord as soon as I made the deposit. My students told me, however, that they do almost all their shopping on Taobao, which is the Chinese version of Ebay (with plenty of it's own unique characteristics), so I was determined to give it a try. A few days (and twenty-two kuai later), the little box with my cord arrived at our office, and I was glad I had.

I would have bought a bike long ago if it weren’t for the advice from my colleagues. I saw a decent one just around the corner, that, though a bit overpriced, would have been fine. It was pink, with the swooping up handlebars that are so fun. I would have gone back and bought it in the afternoon but at lunch my bubble was burst.

“You can’t buy a used bike!” they said. “It’s stolen!” (which I knew) . . .“which means that it’s more likely to be stolen again!” (huh?) At least one line of that logic had to do with the old owner stealing it back, which to me seems less likely than just another thief getting the bike. They told me to go to Wal-mart and buy a bike. I went and looked at the prices and wondered how I was supposed to test them out when the tires were all deflated and there was no attendant (for once) to help. I left Wal-mart. I still have no bike.

Next week, after Justin comes, Zhang has promised to take me to the used bike market. I will choose a bike that I like, and I will buy it for a price that I like, and I will not care what anyone else thinks or says. Then I will sail through the traffic (laughing at all the car owners) to yoga class and next week I will tell beautiful dark-skinned girl, the one who said yesterday that she carries a swimsuit in her bag at almost all times, that the next time she goes up to the lake on the mountain, the one that has the name that sounds like “suicide”, where all the locals swim, that I want to go too. And will she please call me, because she looks like the kind of girl that I would like to be friends with.

But the lake is deep. People drown there every year. There are swirling cold water pools that will suck you down. As ominous as this sounds (and it gives me the shivers) I have decided to ignore well-intentioned cautionary advice, and go on living my life, and go swimming at the earliest opportunity.

Tomorrow I’m headed to Shanghai (my first trip ever! scandalous, considering that the fast trains take two hours) to meet Justin. Justin is going to spend a month in China hanging out with me. That still kind of shocks me when I let it roll through my head. How did it come to be that I have a friend that would fly to China to visit me? for a month? Granted, he is escaping cold weather, and I know China itself does pull a bit, but still, I’m pretty humbled by the undeservedness of the gift.

* I said this last week too, about spring being here, and a day later I got a killer headache from the wind and a lecture for taking off too many layers too early)