I had quite an interesting weekend, in most of the ways Beijing could fulfill what I would take as interesting. 

Friday night was a wild card; I had been invited by a friend to one of his friend's birthday parties, so after my class I hopped into a cab and went to what turned out to be the one Mexican restaurant in Beijing.  Imagine, having tacos and fajitas in China.  When they turned out to be surprisingly decent, I was ecstatic, although wondering how such fare would relate to the Beijinger's palate left me at a loss (refried beans don't exactly show up anywhere on the typical zhongguo cai spectrum).  The folks seemed friendly enough; mostly American ex-pats working at various companies, and living various metaphorical existences in this place.  Included was an unusually large representation (and most probably the entire population) of Conneticutonians (uh, sic?).  Of course, we would be remiss in our wild ex-pat responsibilities if we were to go anywhere but a salsa club afterwards.  Good wholesome fun.

Saturday ended up being a shopping day, so not much going on there.  It never ceases to amaze me just how much shopping that is available in a country that professes to be anything but capitalist.  But then, China has never been a country of simple definition, at least not to me.

Sunday night touched off a great weekend for me.  I had dinner with a couple Chinese friends, during which they taught me how a few choice Beijing curses (wo kao, zhun ta ma de yu man!!!); I always enjoy my time with them, I always get a new insight on what it means to be Chinese and young from them.  Afterwards, I retired to a football bar with my Kansas friend Chris and a girl from Manchester, whom I've met before but always managed to forget her name (much to my chagrin).  We talked of things real and surreal, political and emotional, noble and depravated.  Vietnam was rolled in somewhere, and of course the war in Iraq came up.  Then Chris left and the Manchester girl and I talked about love and government, identity and morality, all while struggling to keep our heads above the copious mugs of beer. 

One memorable topic: we talked of the status of the Chinese government, and how the world viewed it as a government that enforced great power in censorship, holding the country's media and freedom of speech in their puppeteer's strings.  It is a wonder, then, that so many Chinese that we have both encountered have little or no trust in the government and their media lackeys; that news is not a flow of information, but treated rather like the National Enquirer.  This brought to my mind a great many things; the Chinese people are aware of it, yet make no moves to change it.  Why is that?  Then it hit me.  There is no move to change because they have learned to live within this sort of system; they have adapted to something that the Western world would never understand.  The corruption, the containment, all that is done in an unspoken agreement that rules can be broken with the right word in the right ear with the right style. 

Can we in the Western world fairly rebuke such a system?  I agree that it is morally at fault, but realistically, can we guarantee that our own systems do not suffer, if not from the same evils, but their seedling cousins?  Which is more morally evil; to understand and give in to the Fear, or to ignore it? 

Tried a new homework assignment with my class today; I think I'm getting a bit philosophical with them, which is a bit experimental for a bunch with a grade 7 English level.  The question is: If you were to become immortal, what would you do?  What accomplishments would you strive to achieve, what wishes would you bring alive, and what would be the elements of life that would be most important to you?  Halfway through assigning this question, I realized that I would have a difficult time answering my own inquiry.

I honestly don't know what I would do for eternity; I guess the easiest answer is to find that which is most worth living for, but it seems such a cop-out.  To live for love is a noble quest, but one that wouldn't outlive immortality.  I once believed in true, unwavering love, but one can only be stupid and naive once in their lives. 

Perhaps immortality is something that cannot exist because we simply do not deserve it; the race against the inevitable is what has allowed the human race to achieve such heights to begin with.  To eliminate the need to saturate the world with our genius within the short time allotted to us is to enslave our minds to indifference, to doom us to an everlasting existence of baseness.  Or perhaps I'm just drunk and in a mood to type out meaningless sentences for your wonderful perusal.  As Chloe loves to say, chop me, although I still can't for the life of me figure out what the fuck that means.  Okay, I'll stop now.

Perhaps finding love was supposed to be our heavenly crusade after all.

During Moses' trek through the desert, God reached down and gave him and his followers hope in the hopeless wastes, the sustaining manna.  Deliverance from suffering, indeed.  Imagine, 40 days struggling through the dry heat with nothing; a physical trial by fire.

Are we stuck in the moral desert now?  And can we hope for deliverance once more?

Is love the modern manna? Perhaps.

Love certainly delivers us from suffering, a hot knife through buttery sludge.  But doesn't it also cause suffering, along with those age old Pandoric goodies, jealousy and pride?

Love is an uroburos, forever eating itself in the feeding of our hearts.  That which giveth, taketh away, and all that.  Joy begets addiction, begets fear, begets doubt, begets jealousy, begets self-loathing.  How heavenly love becomes the fruit from the Garden so easily.  After all, the most ancient and powerful skill man possesses is how to fall.

We've hit the glitch in our systems, the nested loop that evades notice, dooming us to repeat the same stupid mistakes until some miraculous power from above releases its grip on our programming.  Do we ever change, or do we merely hit some mystical condition, some preset notion of salvation to allow us to move beyond?  This acidic cycle may not be able to sustain us without destroying us in the end.

The Economists

The economy of souls
a trade of balances
the cursed Midas
molding ink-paper struggles
with nefarious alchemy

With high caliber voices
flashing hollowpoint words
pledging allegiance to his hate
in pillared stone castles

Behind ivory walls
a frenzy of echoes
speak perversions of truth
to the ears of the willing

Duty becomes monstrosity
in taking unseen shadows
as philosopher kings

The economists mourn
the crusade of policy,
the bottom line
blood-slick with red.

The Busker

On the stairs to the Metro
home to forgotten society
her beauty faded
to waves of jaded strangers

The tide at her back
She opens her mouth,
calling spirits
from lonely hollow corners

The voice trembles
of secret scars, pleasures
as old as its ancient tongue

The song dies and with it
remembered beauty,
stripped from her aged face
wrinkled hair.

This and all I hear
the howling wind,
slap of footsteps.