When I go and do social things, a lot of the time I will end up meeting somebody and we’ll be talking and at some point they will suggest that we exchange phone numbers or something. Generally in such a case I will offer my number and shortly thereafter they will call it. I will save the number and a few weeks later I will go through my phone and delete all the names I can’t recognize – chiefly the people who I got one call from when they got my number and then never heard from again.

So why is it that all of these number exchanges are ultimately so fruitless? Am I just remembering this incorrectly, and in fact I have called a lot more of these people back than I am admitting here and to myself? I don’t think so, but I guess I’m not really sure.

If somebody asks for my number I’m not about to lie or give some excuse for why I can’t or won’t give it out. I can’t very well suggest “if you need to get in touch with me we obviously have mutual friends, ask them for my number” because that would send a very clear “please only consider getting in touch with me if you really really want to” which they of course will not because we’ve only just met.

I should clarify that all of this idle thought is gender neutral because in cases where I am actively soliciting girls’ numbers I am inevitably faced with the decision to call or not call and that is a decision I am usually comfortable making.

But returning to the general case of numbers of people I am not interested in sleeping with (eg met at a poker game or talked to at some gallery or a friend of a friend while out) – why is there never, or so rarely, a call later?

Of course I must consider for myself, why do I never call them? Presumably whatever reasons I have for not calling are the same as theirs… but maybe not because I am not usually the one initiating number exchanges?

Perhaps it is because it is nice to have the numbers of people if I should come up with a good reason to call later, and it is less troublesome than having to ask a mutual friend how to get in touch later. And there might not even be a mutual friend, I guess.

I don’t know. I don’t take it personally but have no real insight on this, so, I unceremoniously delete another handful of numbers from my phone. Alternatively, I could get a phone that is not older than my duration in China and doesn’t have such a tediously low limit (feels like approximately 4) on how many numbers it can store. On second thought, it’s kind of like people I meet once, add as a friend on facebook, send one message and promptly forget about.

I don’t mean that the songs sound exactly the same, but only that maybe the same sequences of notes are used.

The whole thing reminded me of a Gladwell article I recently read, Something Borrowed, about plagiarism.

The flight I took was on Ethiopian Airlines which runs a route from Beijing to Addis Abeba with a stop in Delhi. On the way back, I was seated next to a group of Chinese dudes from Tangshan.

When I first boarded the plane, I was pretty tired and fell asleep pretty much right away, as I am wont to do during air travel. Later though, when I was awake and eating some chewy chicken thing, the guy sitting next to me struck up a conversation.

In the past I’ve been really unreceptive to striking up random conversations with people because in Beijing the only people I ever encounter who try to strike up random conversation are people trying to sell me something, but during my visit to India I met a lot of people who were really just friendly and wanted to chat.

So anyway, I’m chatting with this guy and he’s trying to figure out what my deal is since I got on in Delhi, am flying to Beijing, and don’t really look that Chinese or Indian. I noticed that on this flight, in contrast with my flight out of China, it’s mostly Chinese (the flight out was much more Indians and Africans) and I asked what they were all doing in Addis Abeba.

He wasn’t sure about most of the people on the plane (and I’m not sure why I assumed he would have any idea) but him and his 3 buddies were all coming back to China from Zambia. Apparently they’d been traveling for something like 17 hours when I got on the plane in Delhi and were closing out 24 hours of continuous travel (final stop was Beijing where they all lived now).

I knew basically nothing about Tangshan and Zambia both (couldn’t locate either on a map either) so I asked these guys about what they were doing and where. First I got that Tangshan was in Hebei, so from this I guessed (correctly) that these guys were working in some heavy industry or mining or something and had been sent out to Zambia since China seems to have invested a lot in lots of African nations lately. That was exactly it, as they all had backgrounds in coal mining and had been sent to Zambia to investigate digging for something else (coal? oil? this got lost in translation a bit). They were coming back at that time because their Visas were up.

It was around this time that our conversation was getting to be too much for our mutual lack of each other’s language, so the guy next to me asked his buddy to switch seats him because the buddy’s English was better. I found out that this was their first ever trip out of China, and that Americans speaking English are much easier to understand than Africans and British and pretty much anybody else. It’s because all the TV and movies that these guys use to practice are American!

He lamented a bit how he wants to get better at English but he has nobody to practice with and not enough time outside of work to do so either. I sympathized though really for him it’s a lot more legitimate considering that I am a foreigner in China learning Chinese while he is not a Chinese dude in America learning English.

About this time the conversation turned as my conversations so often do to basketball. The buddy likes Garnett a lot, and the first guy said he likes the bulls, but also Kobe. The Bulls fan was apparently the best of the four of them, and wanted to know if I was very good at basketball because I am American (so obviously I play basketball all the time!). Compelled by my duty to truth I explained that I am not in fact much of a basketball player.

That’s pretty much all there was to it as by this time we were landing and we exchanged cards and pleasantries out at the luggage carousel and then I headed off.

1. the fattest corgi I have ever seen. It was walking (nay, waddling) along on the sidewalk and it was just so rotund.
2. A line of yelling (in unison), running, hairdressers. I think they were hairdressers at least, because they all had hairstyles that I have come to associate with people who work in hair salons here, and these guys were running around with their giant hair architecture bouncing along. I assume this was just another one of these weird morning exercises that businesses in China do together to foster team unity or something, but unlike the drills and jogs I see security officers doing when I get to work somtimes, it was a bunch of guys who looked like hairdressers.

These were within about a minute of each other and I kind of wished I was the kind of person who owned and carried around a camera so that I could offer amusing visual proof of these experiences.

That said, natto is definitely an acquired taste. When my chef sister first tried it she didn’t think it especially tasty, though allowed that it could have a place in fine Asian cuisine. Another friend of mine on taking her first bite declared that it was “like eating little solid bits of alcohol” (a description I didn’t really understand, though perhaps it was in reference to the somewhat ammoniac taste) along with a facial expression conveying very clear distate.

To what I assume is the typical western palate, natto is unpleasant at best (a funny read, but don’t take it too seriously, it’s not that disgusting). Just today I discovered “The Natto Project” an interesting account of some people who also decided to acquire a taste for natto, and their experience has proven interesting to me to read so far, though I’m only a couple days in at the time of writing.

In the rest of this post I’m going to recount my personal history of acquiring a taste for, as well as where in Beijing one can get, natto.

I think two years ago, maybe even less than that, I had never tried natto before. I had heard of it because it was one of those things that people told me smells bad but tastes good (like some cheeses, or stinky tofu [I like eating those too]). But I had never tried it before because I never even noticed it on a menu at any Japanese restaurants I’d been to up to that point, and having never seen it, didn’t really search for it when going shopping.

A friend of mine was living in Japan for a while and she told me a bit more about natto. I don’t remember anything specific, but she seemed to enjoy it well enough. Maybe she did from her first try? Maybe she too had acquired a taste over time, I don’t know. I think she told me it was supposed to be really healthy (“Natto: the ultimate health food“, it’s even got it’s own funny named enzyme “nattokinase“!), maybe she didn’t but that was the impression I got when I read about it online (mostly that one site and wikipedia probably). Whatever the case, I was curious.

I think about the time I moved to Beijing, I also became really curious about stinky tofu (chou dofu). The first stinky tofu that I can remember eating was at this place next to a market where I used to live in Beijing. Outside the shop stinks, though probably more due to its proximity to a public toilet than the stinky tofu itself. But I tried it, and was in love. That stuff was great. Theirs was pretty mild (I’m told) and the texture was just that of fried tofu, nothing particularly gross about it. I ate a lot of stinky tofu for a while after that and once or twice went and read a bit about it online as well.

After enjoying stinky tofu of a few varieties, and then hearing about some other fermented soy product that was also stinky and supposedly very good for you, I decided that I was going to be a person that likes pretty much whatever fermented soy food I could get my hands on. It occurred to me later that Miso also falls under this categorization, but doesn’t seem to be nearly so off-putting to most people on account of it’s lack of stinkiness. I’m not sure exactly why I was so determined about this, but I had been convinced that eating fermented foods was a really good idea because cultures that ate lots of fermented stuff were healthier or something like that. Eating lots of microbes that were alive and well in my food would give my immune system super powers. Or something. I also noticed that I really like the taste of a lot of things that are the products of fermentation: the sourdough culture I cultivated, kimchi, lots of booze, cheese, and so much more!

That was a long digression, but the essential point is that I decided to like natto, too.

Much time passed and I never really did anything about this because I continued to not notice natto anywhere.

But then one day in Texas of all places, I tried some natto. I was in Austin attending a friend’s wedding and in the days leading up to the big event we went to get lunch at this sushi place near where he lives. Not excellent, but considering our distance from, uh, oceans, not bad. While skimming their menu, I noticed that they had natto rolls, and I remembered my new goals. I ordered some.

It was gross. I don’t know if my memory of this is simply that it was my first time trying natto, I don’t know if it was actually gross Natto at the Japanese restaurant in Texas, I don’t know if it was something else. It was just natto and rice, wrapped up in seaweed, and I did not like it. I ate one, and what I remember thinking was that it tasted weirdly smoky, had a strange texture and that I didn’t want to eat anymore. I forced down the first roll, and later in the meal tried a second, thinking maybe it would be better. It wasn’t. I didn’t actually finish the roll and if you know me, you’ll know that I am not one who takes not finishing what is ordered lightly.

I didn’t give up though. A while later, long enough that I had forgotten the specifics of my first bad encounter with natto, I discovered natto as an appetizer on the menu of my favorite okonomiyaki restaurant in Beijing. I had to get it because maybe it would be better this time, different, palatable even. This time it came in a little bowl, a mound of natto, topped with some pieces of nori, chopped up spring onions, and a raw egg yolk. A bottle of soy sauce (also a fermented soy product!) was brought with it to the table. I wasn’t really sure how to eat this, so I poured in a bit of soy sauce and gave it a vigorous stir with my chopsticks.

This was my first experience with the sticky strands that are part of natto. They looked gross. I touched the sticky mass, and they felt gross. They also stuck to everything. Those strands stretch for a very long time, and they got all over me as I was sitting there playing with my food. I’m sure I looked very silly.

After enough of that though, it was time to give it a try. I worked a bite into my mouth, getting more strands on my face in the process. It was… weird. The texture was still taking some getting used to but this time it didn’t actually taste all that bad. I think having the egg and the soysauce and the onions all together really made a big difference for me because I finished that bowl without a problem.

And since then, I’ve come to really like natto, so much so that at some point I was thinking how I’d really like to have some, but didn’t know where to get it without going out to dinner at a Japanese place. I checked briefly when I went to by groceries a few times but never saw it anywhere, and for a while, I just assumed that it would be too difficult to find so why bother?

Then of course, my want to eat novel foods overtook my inertia and I started actually thinking of where I would get natto in Beijing. After a bit of google handiwork it seemed that my best bet would be to try a grocery store in a Japanese owned mall/building. The places that I found in searching for these were the grocery areas in Scitech plaza, SOGO, and Ito Yokado. I don’t actually know where the latter two are, but I do know where Scitech is (Jianguomen Wai) so I decided to swing by there after work one day.

Success! All sorts of Japanese foodstuffs can be found there, miso paste, natto, a bunch of other weird things I don’t know what they are, and so on.

I read that other places I could try are other big supermarkets such as Carrefour or Walmart and then browse their international foods, and that also the grocery area in Pacific Century Place (on Gongti Beilu) has a lot of Japanese stuff. I’ll have to check out these alternatives as some of them may be a bit more convenient for me. (Update: Sept 20 2009 – Pacific Century Place’s basement does indeed also have Natto, and moreover, there are more different brands there.)
(Update: Dec. 20 2009 – turns out the BHG marketplace supermarket right next to where I work has the cheap brand that I have taken to buying regularly. These supermarkets are all over the place in fancier malls and such! How did I miss this for so long?)

Now I’m curious what other tastes I may decide to try and acquire. Maybe the next thing to try and find is tempeh? I’m also slightly curious to improvise an incubator and make my own natto, but that’s a bit more involved of a project than I think I’m ready to taken on right now.

I’m guessing that for the young educated adults of the sixties and seventies, for whom the ultimate horror was the hypocritical conformity and repression of their own parents’ generation, Updike’s evection of the libidinous self appeared refreshing and even heroic. But young adults of the nineties – many of whom are, of course, the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces Updike wrote about so beautifully, and who got to watch all this brave new individualism and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation – today’s subforties have very different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without having loved something more than yourself. Ben Turnbull, the narrator of Updike’s latest novel, is sixty-six years old and heading for just such a death, and he’s shitlessly scared. Like so many of Updike’s protagonists, though, Turnbull seems scared of all the wrong things.

She flipped open the book and read the blurb about the author aloud “Miranda July is a filmmaker, performing artist, and writer… her first feature film Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)“. (imdb)

I asked if I could borrow the book.

It was a quick read, it’s a collection of short stories and none of them taken individually take a long time to read. A few passages and fragments here and there caught my attention so I’m going to collect those here for my own sake.

The Shared Patio

“What is the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to you? Did it involve a car? Was it on a boat? Did an animal do it? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then I am not surprised. Cars crash, boats sink, and animals are just scary. Why not do yourself a favor and stay away from these things?”

“If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him or her the answer to the question.”

“It’s not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told.”

Ten True Things

“I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.”

The Man on the Stairs

“I also imagined friends who adored me. These friends think I’m a drag. I fantasize about starting over and eliminating the film of dragginess that hangs over me. I think I have a handle on it now; there are three main things that make me a drag:

I never return phone calls.
I am falsely modest.
I have a disproportionate amount of guilt about these two things, which makes me unpleasant to be around.

It wouldn’t be so hard to return calls and be more genuinely modest, but it’s too late for these friends. They wouldn’t be able to see that I’m not a drag anymore. I need clean new people who associate me with fun. This is my number two problem: I am never satisfied with what I have.”

The Sister

“Men alone often have one or two large things wrong with them, but these are things that the brothers think their sisters should be able to live with. An example of such a problem is: still being in love with one’s deceased wife. This wasn’t my problem; I had never been in love with anyone, dead or alive.”

It Was Romance

“… these distinctions are like shackles.”

“I walked down the hall and saw that Theresa was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It’s a slippery slope, and it’s best just to set in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep and rise and work. But we have all been there. Chairs are for people, and you’re not sure if you are one.”

Something that Needs Nothing

“We were anxious to begin our life as people who had no people.”

“It is terrible to have to ask for anything ever. We wish we were something that needed nothing, like paint. But even paint needs repainting.”

“My mind slows down to a rate that would not be considered functional for any other job. I am alive only one out of every four seconds, I register only fifteen minutes out of the hour.”

“There was no way I could ever be in love with her because she was just as pathetic as me.”

“We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which meant we were not alone in this world.”

“It was a scam. There was nothing in the world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost.”

“I had once believed in a precious inner self, but now I didn’t. I had thought that I was fragile, but I wasn’t.”

Making Love in 2003

“I wondered if I would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself, “

It started off feeling kind of upbeat girl pop and while that impression was briefly challenged as I was listening to “It Hurts to See You Dance So Well” ultimately it was a song that I found it difficult to relate to.

This feeling persisted as I continued to listen to the music whilst doing dishes and then after that, idly playing some games and reading a book.

Maybe if I were in a more energetic mood I could get into this but right now, as I’m writing down these notes and listening to “Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me” it seems just too much out of alignment with how I feel, perhaps being neither something I have related to nor something I would even especially want to?

This doesn’t quite make sense to me though. I listen to all sorts of music that I shouldn’t really relate to at all. What is it about gangster rap that I find so fun to listen to? Reckless excess and macho personas? Uhhh… whatever it is, I don’t know, but it’s one quality that evidently creates enjoyment out of music for me in a way that my experience of the Pipettes thus far does not.

I’ll try another listen tomorrow by which time my mood might have changed and I’ll have a different reaction.

For most, the phrase “pretty in pink” probably calls to mind either simply the color, or, the Molly Ringwald vehicle of the same name. When I first heard of this party, however, I knew only that people were thinking up pink outfits to wear, and to me the word pink is most immediately associated with the phrase “tickled pink”.

There’s a line in the first real track on the Re-Up Gang’s excellent mixtape We Got It 4 Cheap Vol 2 titled Re-Up Intro, a running start to an album full of inventive new ways of saying not-much about slinging crack, which makes use of the phrase tickled pink in a way that I have been thus far unable to disassociate with the color.

While in college, I knew a lot of people who shared a love for the same crack-rap that I was listening to far too much of, but now I don’t. They would have, I think, appreciated why I find this amusing but as it is, I can’t share this chuckle with anybody. Maybe I don’t share music in the same way anymore, maybe I don’t advertise as clearly what I’m listening to, maybe I just have a different group of friends, or, perhaps as I’m so often reminded by my old friend Ben’s gchat status message, it was all just too much of that gangsta music.