lumps of meat

In the last 2 weeks I've taken 2 separate spills on my skateboard. Each time, my whole body weight landed square on my left elbow and knee, which are both still swollen up like a grapefruit. It's been a bit less than a week since the most recent spill, and the arm is starting to feel a bit better.

The pain in my upper arm isn't a throbbing bruise pain. It's a deep, dull bone pain. Most of the time, just walking around and at work, it's easy to forget about. At the gym and playing hockey, making certain torquing motions with my fingers or wrists sets flashbulbs firing behind my eyes. I try to duplicate these special movement to make sure I avoid it next time, but something about the way I'm doing it doesn't register the same pain response.

It's strange the way the pieces of our bodies are connected together, and when the system gets disturbed how it responds to a trauma. The tendons and fibers that make us up, and how they play with one another. You forget how much has to be going right for all of these things to work in concert. The only time you remember how delicate you are is when you lose abilities you take for granted.

As a coda, I was just at the supermarket (where I couldn't believe I heard Wilco being played over the loudspeaker, how this place has changed in 6 years). At the meat counter a lady in a pink velour tracksuit was buying what had to be half of an adult cow's ribcage. Still all attached together like something you would see in the meat locker of a Rocky movie, she hoists up the ribs to the meat chopper across the counter. "Throw it to me," the chopper says. With a second of hesitation, the lady launches the ribs across the counter for a direct hit onto the cutting board. She had a smile on her face from ear to ear.

Angry Birds soda

If you would have told me 10 years ago that I'd be drinking a soda in Beijing that's part of a branding campaign for a Scandinavia-based company that makes video games played by people from Tikrit to Thailand on their pocket-sized computers--a company whose flagship product features sling-shotted birds and radioactive pigs, and which is currently contemplating an IPO with a $9 billion valuation--I would have said you were a total nutbag. And here we find ourselves...

Hustle and bustle

Every Sunday morning cars pile up along curbs in front of the farmer's market around the corner from our apartment. Despite having 2 malls right next to the Taiyanggong subway shop, tons of people choose instead to buy their weekly groceries outdoors, at the old-fashioned, dirty and disheveled stalls and carts, even in the cold of late wintertime. Throngs of people bouncing off one another, not apologizing but just accepting the bounces, with leafy tops of spring onions sticking out of canvas bags. People are smiling, today they were enjoying the sunshine and what the local gov't refers to as a "blue sky day."

A friend returning to Beijing from studying over in the Bay Area mentioned over dinner how one of the biggest things he missed was Chinese restaurants--not for the food, which he missed, but more for the "busy atmosphere." People having overloud conversations with one another, glasses clinking, chaunr sticks all over the ground, fuwuyuan hurrying between crowded tables, barking orders to one another--in other words, a chaotic mess. The locals, as well as out-of-towners who spend more than just a 60-day tourist visa's worth of time in Beijing, know this scene. At first, you might like the city despite it, but eventually those who stick around, or tourists who want to come back, like China because of the mess.

Costner: Company food

A long ride through a harsh Chinese winter day had us hard up for some chow come lunchtime at noon today. Once again the cook made off like a Sioux bandit at our expense: some type of soya sauce-flavored dou fu, no meat to speak of and some cold vegetables. When there is meat to be had, from the texture of it one might think it is either the dou fu or one of the tabby cats that sometimes wanders through our yard. Cookie is a kind man, quick to laugh, but I am not reassured about his personal hygiene and subsequently the carry-over there may be to the makeup of our meals. I cannot complain, as cold, bad, free chow is better than no chow at all. I can only imagine the people in this land who pass their days with much less on their table than I.

Food odor

Getting into cabs in Beijing you're sometimes overwhelmed by what Meagan calls "the odor of hot wet foot cheese." To me, one is reminded more of dried sausages and cigarettes, but to each their own. The food here is so pungent and flavorful that it's typical you're carrying it around with you for a while afterward. In particular, the smell of Sichuan peppercorns, 花椒 huajiao, mixed with garlic is one that you're constantly smelling. It was surprising to see a cabdriver wince as I got into the cab and told him where to go, as he asked me rhetorically, "So you've just eaten, no? Man, you got a food smell to you!" I had just had soba noodles soaked in huajiao and garlic for lunch. Apparently growing more and more like a Chinese cab driver every day here, eating habits and otherwise...