hair A+, attitude "must try harder"

For years I've been convinced that my lack of success with women was due to a single factor. Not my boyfriends, no! My hair. And now I have the proof: last night, while I was checking out post-Britneyite fedoras from a street vendor, this hot, athletic, willowy chick who was totally my type put her arm around me so she could get a photograph with the shaven-headed foreigner.

I bought the hat. Then I cycled home alone to organize my Chinese flashcards in alphabetical order.

death days

On the third-and-a-half floor stairwell in my apartment building were sticks of incense and a metal bowl full of blackened bits of what might once have been paper money, the whole thing emitting thick clouds of smoke. Perhaps someone keeled over of a heart attack in that spot. I thought of dumping water over the stinking mess for the sake of air purity, but that might have been perceived as some kind of bad omen.

It was one of the many days on which the Chinese make offerings to the departed. I have never so much as seen the graves of any of my family members, much less swept them with a broom or thrown them a picnic, as one is wont to do in southern China. (The advantage of having stubbornly atheist Jewish grandparents, now deceased, is that if they were "on the other side", they wouldn't dare make themselves known -- because it would prove them wrong.)

The next day, the ashes and incense were gone; but my apartment on the 4th floor -- the number of death -- was instead filled with a pungent aroma of tobacco without any visible source. A ghost sneaking a quick one on the stairwell? No: they've closed the cheap ethnic restaurant at the end of our street; they've chased the snack vendors away and the shop selling freshly squeezed fruit juice -- but construction is now complete on the new cigarette factory, and they've started roasting the killer weed right below our windows.

If you love the dead: why not make more?