"Great Clod"? I Thought He Said "Great Clog"!

A bit of Daoist humor to start us off (read Zhuangzi if you don't get it).

Carina has been helping me with my anger management. So far, it's going phenomenally. In fact, it's going so well that I was able to control myself when I encountered the latest abomination of hygiene in the flat.

As you all know by now (all four of you), we have a flat that we share with two other parties who I have code-named "Beanpole" and "Leetleman" for the sake of anonymity (and my own amusement). Leetleman has not posed any real problem for our living conditions in the almost 1.5 years I've been in Hong Kong. He's polite, unintrusive, and leaves a relatively small footprint (figuratively and literally) in this apartment.

Beanpole is another story.

As his name suggests, Beanpole is rather thin and, by Asian standards, rather tall. Despite being almost half of a head higher than I am, he still reacts bizarrely to my presence, almost as if I'm some lumbering demon. Unfortunately, this seeming fear is not accompanied by any kind of deference. Rather, it seems to be accompanied by a considerable amount of defecation.

Aside from hogging most of the apartment resources (bandwidth, water use, pots, etc) he has a tendency to leave things far filthier than they were before he so much as touched them without any consideration for the rest of us. Aside from leaving the kitchen a burnt mess he also tends to leave the bathroom in a state worthy of being condemned for health violations. He was clearly the one who left feces on the bathroom floor last (Leetleman was not even in the apartment at the time), and today he has added a new chapter to what I have started thinking of as the "Poop Saga": a clogged toilet.

Now, ordinarily a clogged toilet would be an easy fix. You just buckle down, grit your teeth, and plunge the damn thing. There are several problems with this approach: 1) we have no toilet plunger, 2) there isn't so much a clog as an inability to flush due to the sheer amount of toilet paper that was used. It's as if he used half of a roll of toilet paper just to wipe himself a few times. So much for saving the forests. The least he could do is help save the human immune system.

Of course, I figured that I might be able to solve the problem by just using something to hold the toilet paper back and flush it in increments. The problem with this approach is that there's just too much TP to contend with and, of course, there is still the poop in the bowl to contend with. Since we have a non-modern toilet, it's only equipped to flush about every fifteen minutes. I estimate that, even if my plan were feasible, it would take several hours to get rid of all the waste. So much for that idea.

I guess that tears it. I'll have to go somewhere else to use the bathroom, at least for today. I really don't know what to do about this problem, but I find it physically revolting. It's like mummy poop or something. It's really gross, and I get sick to my stomach just thinking about it. The problem is I have nowhere to throw up!

I guess I'm off to the university. I can use a clean bathroom there.

Smell ya' later,

Colin

Like a Phoenix

Okay, first of all I'm sorry for the late blog post. I usually try to keep these things going weekly, usually over the weekend, but we got a bit caught-up in personal projects over the reading week and I lapsed in getting this out to you guys. I have self-reprimanded and putting this up now that I have both time and focus.

So, yeah, it has been a crazy busy week and there weren't even any classes to attend. HKU gives its students a week off for midterm preparation. That sounds like a nice vacation, but since there is always work to be done Carina and I took the time to pick up the pace on some back-burner projects, first and foremost of which was cleaning the apartment. I cannot tell you how much better the kitchen and bathroom look now that I have sterilized, sanitized, and scrubbed them as much as I could bear (which, for the record, is a lot). Gone are the muck-covered floors, ant-riddled counters, burnt stove tops, and foul-smelling commode. Well, I mean, the physical objects are still there, but they're clean now. So, yay, go me. The only problem that we can't seem to get rid of is a clogged kitchen sink. We took a plunger to it the other day and that helped the water flow, but it still isn't doing a terrific job of draining. On the bright side, Beanpole seems to be gone for the week. That means keeping things clean should be less difficult. On the other hand, the less-dirty but bathroom-intensive Leetleman (that's his new nickname) has returned. That means strategy will be required when waiting to use the toilet.

Oh, speaking of which: Yes, I am feeling better. If you don't know what I'm talking about be thankful.

Blah blah blah, cleaning has kept us very busy. What else has been going on? Oh, right, I gave my first presentation on my thesis material. Granted, it was really just a trial run and only three people attended, but it was an appreciated opportunity to give a lecture on the material I've been working out for several years and I received a positive response with some really helpful feedback on how to clarify a few points for the next presentation. That's right, I'll be giving a department-wide seminar on part of my thesis at the end of November (Thanksgiving, in fact). I realize that this may upset some people who have strong beliefs about how T-day should be spent, but I hope everyone can understand that (1) Thanksgiving isn't recognized as a holiday in HK, and (2) that there is a schedule I need to help fill-out and fit into for the sake of everyone else. I'm really looking forward to it. I just hope I don't go too far over or under time.

Carina has been really busy with her own projects. She'll be taking her second exam today (hopefully another smashing job) and has spent the past few days going through the required readings and lecture recordings. I don't know how she deals with all of it, considering how dull the material is. A lot of it just seems like common sense, too. Then again, I suppose there are people out there who are not of sufficient intuitive capacity to be teachers, hence the rote learning. Still, she's been putting in a lot of time and effort and you have to respect that. I've also been helping her along with her behavior-change project, mostly by trying not to get angry and recording when I get annoyed/angry/RAWR. I'm not typically an angry person, but I am very passionate about a lot of issues that are neglected or trounced upon here in Hong Kong. As a result, I sometimes feel perpetually annoyed and this can make me a real pain to deal with. Carina has been helping me manage my anger with this project, though, and I think the results will be pretty good. I have for certain felt better as of late and been less angry, finding constructive outlets for my vexation. I hope I can still give her enough data to work with.

I imagine it has been nice for her having a week off from being dumped-on by her boss, too. Since HKU has been out of session, her boss has been on a bit of a break which means less work. In my opinion, this has been a blessing since it lets Carina get around to doing her classwork. Granted, said work is terribly boring, but it does need to get done.

All right, I feel like I'm rambling now. I started writing a story again this morning and I might be all written-out for the day. Yet, as with the cleaning, my thesis, my running, and all other projects, after some downtime I'll be up and raring to go again; from the ashes, folks. For now, though, I'm going to pass out before class.

Hugs and kisses,

Colin

Disgusting.

Hey, sports fans! Ready for your weekly-ish blog post? I bet you are! Who's a good audience? Yes you are, yes you are!

Okay, sorry, just had to get that out of my system.

Oh, before I forget, for those of you keeping tabs Carina has started another solo-project blog that's really awesome at http://makeofmyself.blogspot.com/. It's a really well-done layout that she put together herself (including the favicon). Right now she's doing a series of fall-related posts, including lots of fall-themed recipes, crafts, imagery, stories and, my favorite, Halloween stuffs. Go and give it a look, it's much more interesting than my posts!

All right, I guess I do owe everyone a post as well as an explanation for the title. For the folks who have been keeping track of the game, you know that I'm not exactly thrilled about the living conditions in Hong Kong. Usually I kvetch about the quality of life (cage-dwelling, pollution, overcrowding) that is present throughout the city. Although I usually do this through my own lens, I don't always talk about what I have to deal with personally and uniquely. Well, here it goes: poop on the floor.

Yes, you read correctly. Today I walked into the bathroom to wash my hands after attempting to clean off the communal stove (an impossibly sticky task), when I noticed an extremely offensive odor. At first, I assumed it was coming from the commode. I flushed it, assuming it would remove the stench. As I looked down, however, I noticed a brown smear around the base of the toilet. I started to kneel down to take a whiff and make sure it was what I thought it was, but I only needed to lower my head slightly to confirm my intuition. Gross.

Now, poop on the floor is probably something that everyone has dealt with. You have all probably known a small child, (un)domesticated animal, or geriatric relative who has "accidentally" defecated on the floor. I get it, that kind of thing happens. It should be tolerable. Unfortunately, none of those excuses apply here. Our flatmates are both adult students in university. Someone is probably thinking, "Well, college kids do crap on the floor, you know." Yes, yes I do know that. That behavior can usually be explained by stupid partying, however, and neither of our flatmates is exactly the party-going type. So...excuses? Yeah, none.

This, by the way, is not the first of a long line of offenses. Since I moved into this flat over a year ago I've had to deal with a filthy, bug-infested, half-broken kitchen, a washing machine that floods said kitchen half of the time, and a bathroom that constantly smells of urine. They never clean any of the communal areas themselves and I frequently find myself doing all of the sweeping, swabbing, and disinfecting. Just call me Jeeves. If I lived with a crazy cat lady, this might make sense. I expect more out of university students living on their own, though. Maybe they should go back to their mothers and suckle at the breast and have their diapers changed. I could have been sent locusts, floods, or earthquakes...but, no, I was given these flatmates. Good God, sir, was that fair?

Oh, that may be going too far. First of all, I'm an agnostic. More importantly, I really only think it's the one guy (the other is rarely ever here). Still, to cover all of my bases I sent an e-mail to the flat owners today, requesting that they forward an attached message to the other tenants as neither has given me his contact information. I suppose they could excuse themselves by saying that we are rarely ever around at the same time. That's a good excuse, although I wish that I never had to encounter them or their feces...or their leftovers strewn across the kitchen and bathroom. What does he have, seizures? In that case, why is he living on his own!?

Okay, enough with the frightening flatmate stories (for now), I can give some positive news, too. Carina and I had a pretty busy week. Carina was swamped with work, and I've been heavily researching my future projects and preparing for my lecture. Oh, did I not mention that? I'll be giving a mini-lecture this Friday on the first half of my master's thesis. I'm limited to thirty minutes for this first presentation, but I'm going to try to get as much in as I can. I'll be presenting the full version on Thanksgiving (gobble gobble), so I can have up to an hour for that. That'll let me wax poetic but, for now, I need to keep it nice and tight. I've been rehearsing with Carina, who's been really nice to let me bore her to death, and she has been giving me suggestions for how to be more concise without cutting content. Let's hope it goes well!

Much love,

Colin

Gearing Up for Getting On

Quite an interesting week. With the passage of all the typhoons and monsoons Hong Kong has returned to its normal, boiling climate that pushes us to the brink of exhaustion. Yes, the combination of heat, humidity, and rampant pollution are often incentive enough to stay indoors and shun the world outside. That's right, Hong Kong streets! We shun you! ...Well, except for my morning workout, but that's to be expected.

Speaking of morning workouts, the city will be hosting several races in the not-too-distant future and, although I have no intention of paying the exorbitant entry fees, I have seen more people out and about in the early hours training. Mind you, this amounts to all of three people that I see only occasionally, but that's three more than I usually see. It's amusing to me, since I go out and run circles around these guys and I'm not even interested in doing these race events. I sometimes think that this is the difference between my motivation to run and other people: for most, the goal of running is to run the race; for me, running is living. I can forsake the race event, but I can never turn away from life.

Still, I admit that I can be very competitive. Like I said, I do run circles around these guys and, frankly, I get a bit of a kick out of it. In their defense, they're probably marathoners who would easily outlast me. Respect.

So what else has been going on? October began without much fanfare. Halloween is acknowledged in Hong Kong and some places use it as a publicity tool but even the US, wherein there is sometimes fierce opposition to referring to Halloween as a "holiday", treats the event with more prestige. All right, Carina and I will make our own Halloween, then...we just have to figure out what we'd like to do.

I ran my first "graded" tutorial sessions this week and, to my relief, they went pretty well. It's a very rewarding experience to teach others, especially since I feel like I'm really challenging and educating rather than simply droning on about my own ideas for hours on end. Most of my students are more than happy to participate and very candid in their responses. I have a few that I wish would be less reserved, but I don't want to dock points based on personality. I have the whole semester to evaluate them, so I'll see how they progress and then judge them from that vantage point.

This Thursday was also a great time for us. We had a "spirited" seminar concerning cosmopolitanism and liberal egalitarianism that gave us some interesting ideas about the current socio-political discourse that the world has engaged. It seems that equality is often cited as the core value of our discourse, but seldom is practiced. Capitalism is a wonderful example of this: ideally, everyone is on equal footing and then benefits based on his or her merit; any benefit coming from chance is somehow justified in this system as it could have just as easily befallen anyone else. Realists toward capitalism will dismiss this as rubbish, and probably rightfully so: it is hardly an egalitarian doctrine; simply claiming that all people theoretically have equal footing at the beginning is neither sufficient nor accurate. The same can likely be said for most institutions.

Mind you, this is not to suggest that egalitarianism is a total farce. On the contrary, it is something for which we can and probably should strive. At the same time, this should not preclude the real benefit that we do gain from inegalitarian treatment of others. I do not treat a rude person the same way that I treat a polite person; I do not, indeed cannot, love a complete stranger in the same way I do my wife. We are primates, limited in our ability to show concern and acknowledgement of others beyond a particular pool on some significant levels. Even if we could, it does not follow that we necessarily would or should. Should I love a murderer in the same way I love my brother?

Perhaps what we should offer to all humans is a kind of treatment in virtue of their being human; I would call this humaneness, as I suspect many would. I will treat humans humanely (perhaps humanly) and use this as the basis of my love and respect for all, while giving differentiated levels of love and respect based on particularities. I will hire the person best-suited to the job; I will love my family more than strangers. It seems inevitable, and it also does not preclude kindness toward those "outside" these special circles.

Some might suggest that this is evidence of a real egalitarianism, as I am treating all humans with a baseline of love and respect, but I would say that even this is inaccurate. I am simply treating all humans consistently, just as I would treat all horses consistently, or all trapezoids consistently. I may have a stable full of horses, but only a select few are of a temperament that is pleasing to me, and so I spend most of my time riding and caring for them. Nonetheless, I know that there is a particular way to treat horses, and so with this in mind I treat all of the horses similarly in this capacity. Even more basically, I treat all squares and squares and never as circles; to do otherwise is not only inconsistent, but geometrically wrong.

The point is that you can talk about things like human rights and policy without any reference to equality. As with justice, it's another one of those buzzword virtues that we constructed for political discourse. Of course it has great value, but that value does rest on something more basic.

Sorry for the mid-blog rant, but I've been very philosophical lately. With my thesis tightening up, I've decided to give a presentation on my research. I'll be doing a practice run in two weeks and I already have a presentation put-together. I still need to practice and make it look nice, but I think it's going to go well. After the dry run, I'll be giving a department seminar sometime in November. Wish me luck!

Today we've been mostly just resting and catching our breath. Like I said, it was a busy week and Carina has been smothered with work proofing and revising grant and visiting professor applications, as well as working on her behavior change project. With any luck I'll be getting much better at managing my temper over the next month. I'll let her add more description about that if she wants.

All right, we're off to destroy zombies with flaming peas and defeat golems with magic rings.

Much love,

Colin