When I tried to open my USB drive, Norton discovered a Trojan Horse virus on there, & was unable to fix the file. Not sure if it was among the photos, but I assume so, since the last time i used the drive was to save the photos from the photographer's computer. I quarantined the infected file, but I don't know if this means I can safely use the drive now & open the photos - does anyone understand anything about this?

UPDATE: the photographer said it should be alright to use my USB drive if the virus had been quarantined (he said he knew he had a virus on his computer - 早说了！i've learned it's pointless to ask "why on earth?!" in this type of situation...), but it turns out i can't open this drive at all - when i click on it i get the message "Windows cannot find 'Toy.exe'..." - this is the name of the virus file that Norton quarantined. I guess i could unquarantine it & try to open the drive & delete the file, but i assume this file would automatically open & infect my computer if i did that. So I guess i just have to throw this drive away? Very unfortunate considering it cost like $60 or something contains all my backup files on it. Could be worse - at least i've still got them all on my computer. Just need to buy a new USB drive ASP & save everything again. Unless anyone has any heaven-sent advice...

Well I'm finally here. I think it was in the last entry where I asked something like whether I would ever feel settled or something - well, at this moment, I feel pretty comfortable here. Almost to the point that I'm afraid I won't leave the apartment for a month or so. Well I have to leave tonight to meet someone for dinner. & tomorrow to meet someone else for lunch, & then in the evening there's a show at the New Little Bar by experimental musician Bai Tian (check out his myspace:  http://www.myspace.com/baiii ). But if it weren't for all these other temptations, I could easily stay in my apartment continuously & play on the computer, presumably getting work done in time for deadlines (actually i've already missed on deadline, & another even more important one is tomorrow, i think (better double check - if so, i'll be up all night finishing that)); guess i'll need to get another job to help pay for all this luxury eventually, which may require me to leave (maybe i can have students come to my apartment...) Especially b/c I can't eat most of the food that's sold around here (I've stopped asking for "non-spicy" food - doesn't seem to make much difference), I'll probably end up cooking most of my own meals. Just need to go out for groceries once in a while, & the inevitable dates w/ gorgeous but boring women who really just want to study english or get married - maybe i will learn to abstain from these before long as well.

Thanks again Mara Jade for the suggestions about the computer. I doubled my RAM - the vendors bought my old memory stick or whatever it's called, so I only had to pay 270 yuan (34 USD - pretty good deal, i guess?). I think the funny number was the RAM stick (200 something) plus virtual memory. I'm sure this speeded things up, but it's hard to tell - it seems that both the hotel connection I was using and the wireless network at a nearby cafe have their own firewalls or something that makes everything slow down (not only connecting to websites) when I'm connected to the internet, even without using Tor - maybe Firefox has to use so much memory to deal with the firewall or whatever that everything else is slowed down. I should go back to the cafe one of these days w/ my new RAM to test this hypthothesis; anyway, my new ADSL connection (not sure the difference between ADSL & DSL, but it's also through the phone line & 100 MB per second) is not having this problem. It's wonderful! It's like when you've been tromping through the mud for hours & finally come to some dry land - just walking seems like flying.

Got to be careful, though - just b/c I can get to websites doesn't mean i'm not being monitored... That anonym.OS software works, by the way. You have to burn it to a disk first then restart, go to BIOS page (on my computer you have to press F2 when the computer first starts, before Windows starts loading), then go to boot menu (?) & move anonym.OS so that it's higher (e.g. "0" instead of "1" or "2") than Windows. Save changes & anonym.OS will load.

Also got a pretty good set of Aigo speakers for only 150 yuan (19 USD) - very good bass, actually, & the little hubcap-looking things in the three speaker boxes vibrate when the bass thumbs. Can't wait to throw a party here. Instead of working hard to make my deadline tomorrow, i've spent several hours yesterday & today ripping all my CDs - never occurred to me to do this before, so you can probably imagine how exciting it is to listen to all my favoite songs on random select. I think I still have the willpower to put off downloading more music until I've finished these two projects.

Damn, I'm already hungry - better leave off here for now. In case you're wondering, I finally got in touch w/ people at the ChuanDa School of Literature & Communication office & they're helping me to take care of my paper work, so I probably won't be deported or fined after all. Fingers crossed.

Oh yeah - the modeling photos! I'll go ahead & post this & try to post a couple in a separate message.

PS: When I tried to open the USB drive w/ the photos, which I had saved from the photographer's computer, Norton detected Trojan Horse virus on the drive. I quarantined the virus, but I'm not sure if this means I can safely open the photos - i'll wait to do this until i find out for sure.

This post is dedicated to Mara Jade, aka Sarah J. (as opposed to Sarah H., my beloved sister, to whom every other post is obviously dedicated). Is the new background cool or what? (this refers to my Xanga page)

I am tired as fuck after cleaning my apartment for 7 hours, from 8:30 PM to almost 4:30 AM, w/ a 1 hour break for a couple phone conversations, a 火腿肠 (processed meat - something like boloney or hot dog), & crackers. One of those conversations was w/ the infamous Chacha, who i'll have the pleasure of finally meeting later today. The other was w/ a friend who's coming to visit in a couple weeks - we made plans to go to 九寨沟, the Valley of Nine Stockades, famous for its blue, red, & green lakes & trees that grow sidewise underwater. I went there a couple years ago w/ my dad & had yak butter tea in this little cottage that looked tumbledown and plain on the outside, but the inside looked like a Vajrayana temple, w/ delicate woodwork all painted bright red, blue, yellow & green, elaborate images of various spirits, & an immense sound system for their large-screen TV & karaoke machine. Turns out the natives of Jiuzhaigou, ethnically Tibetan & Qiang, get paid out the wazoo for the government to use their land as a park. In Utah, on the other hand, people are still being forced off their land for that national monument they put there a few years ago.

See this is what happens when I don't sleep - I start writing whatever crosses my mind. I was planning on staying up a couple hours for breakfast at seven, but maybe i should go on to bed. But it's such a great breakfast, & including in price of hotel room - not only do they have the bland rice porridge that has somehow become my favorite food over the past week, but also about 20 different dishes, mainly vegetables, cold & hot, and a few dim sum things like 汤圆 (glutinous rice balls w/ black sesame seed filling in rice wine dregs), silver ear fungus (银耳) w/ watermelon in syrup, Sichuanese pork dumplings (抄手) - you get the picture.

Just wanted to brag about my superhuman housekeeping feet (accidentally misspelled that, perhaps b/c my feet are aching, & i'm a little worried about an open sore i just noticed on one, b/c I've been standing in nasty water for several hours - discovered too late that both floor drains in the kitchen are clogged, so I had to sop up the nasty water w/ a mop, & by that time my rubber gloves had both torn, so i had to wring the nasty water, w/ bleach in it also, w/ bare hands about 50 times - so needless to say my hands are a little puckered & tingly.

Another interesting thing (for me, probably not for you) is that the "bound-foot KGB" (the old lady who watches the gate to the compound) asked for 1 yuan “辛苦费” - something like "a fee for her troubles" - when I left at 4:30 AM. This fee is necessary whenever the gate is locked, between midnight & 6 AM, so I guess this will be another incentive to go to bed by midnight. Actually this is the first night in a week or so I've stayed up past 1 AM - shouldn't have, but I just wanted to go ahead & get all that stuff done. Still not really quite finished, but...

Enough, must sleep. Maybe someone will call & wake me up in time for the yummy breakfast.

Computer question: Does anyone have any idea why it take 5 minutes to load anything, even a word document, even if i'm running only 2 or 3 programs at a time, even though i have plenty of memory (376 MB), plenty of harddrive (40.6 GB), no viruses (according to Norton), no spyware (according to Spybot Search & Destroy), and this is a relatively new, fairly good Dell Inspiron? Would adding memory help, even though i supposedly have at least 100 MB to spare at any given time?(Maybe I don't have that much to spare - my arithmetic is known to be a little sloppy.) I would appreciate any advice anyone can give about this.

Not in the sense of diarrhea exactly - I just mean my intestines are hot. That's why i'm up at 5 (now 5:26) AM, after having gone to bed only 3 hours before. What a stupid melon I am, after that whole GI (gastro-intestinal, I mean) fiasco last week, & my vow to be nice to my system for a month, I had to go and have hotpot. Just goes to show the depths to which my common sense can fall as soon as pretty girl enters the picture. Hence the significance of the "la meizi" - the infamous Sichuan hotties. I wonder if there's a connection between eating hot peppers & good looks, & singing well - both Sichuan & Hunanese girls are called "la meizi" (spicy sisters), & both provinces have monopolized the Super Female Vocalist (超级女声) competitions (one of the Chinese equivalents to American Idol - a student of Yan Hairong wrote a fascinating paper on this phenomenon in relation to discourses of "human quality" (suzhi), capitalism & gender, etc. - google 超 级女声 w/ 肖慧, or check my syllabus (previous post) under the week on "suzhi"). But, according to the hottie in question, this particular competiton has more to do w/ looks than talent, so maybe the singing connection is not so important. & "la meizi" refers to more than looks - i've heard it described in different ways - that these women are more sexually aggressive, or that they're just aggressive (that their men are afraid of them) - but in any case it's more than just about looks. Relates to Mao Zedong's famous contention that Hunan has given birth to so many revolutionaries due to its hot peppers.

The point being that my decision to eat hotpot, against any semblence of common sense, had something to do w/ a certain Sichuan la meizi. Of course I ordered a "mandarin duck" style pot (鸳鸯锅) - on with spicy soup on one side & non-spicy, chicken broth-based soup on the other (the visual effect is very nice - it takes to long to upload the images here, but you can go here or here - the second link is from the infamous mainland China version of Google - i'm curious whether people outside can access it...) so she could have the spicy & i could have the bland, but of course I couldn't resist the temptation to have a few too many bites from her side. Didn't even seem very spicy at the time. Come to think of it, it may have been the sesame oil (used to rinse the food after you boil it in the soup) more than the peppers that upset my belly. Anyway, i'm just grateful that she said no when the server asked if we wanted to drink beer - i know i would have drunk it (vows obviously don't mean much to me, at least in certain contexts, nor do days of intense GI discomfort, evidently).

ZJ (the meizi), helped me go shopping for stuff for my flat & carry it to the compound & up six flights of stairs. Simply due to logistics i had to hold off on a few items, & i took her advice on which things could be bought cheaper elsewhere. Unfortunately these included some things i needed to clean the flat, like a pot to boil water - both for drinking and for mopping & scrubbing. Plus i ended up talking to ZJ until almost 11, when she had to go back to her dorm. Again if i were thinking straight i would have asked her to help me clean the flat (i think i mentioned that all 5 or 6 people i already knew in Chengdu just happen to be out of town or not responding to email, so ZJ's my only ally here now, except possibly Poplar (see below)). It took over an hour just to move the previous tenant's junk out of the place, sweep, & then notice that the hot water heater was broken. Have to call the real estate agent about that to- er, in a few hours (she wants me to go through her rather than directly to the landlord for some reason - anyway she's been very nice & helpful so far, so i'm not complaining). Also need to buy something to boil water. The upshot is that i've got an excuse to dish out another 200 yuan to stay in this comfy hotel another night - b/c i want to mop & scrub the place & let it air out overnight before moving in. OK, maybe it's just b/c I want to stay in a comfy hotel another night...

Stuff is more expensive than I thought - spent almost 800 yuan at the store today, & still lacking a bunch of things. I complained yesterday about a towel costing 50 yuan at a small supermarket - well this department store had them for over 100! But they also had passable ones for only 9 yuan, and, after a good long moment of serious consideration, i decided in favor of the latter.

Which brings me to Poplar (杨树), my sort-of employer. Actually i'm not sure his exact relationship to the Hong Kong-based modeling company that is taking my pictures (& it turns out to be tomorrow, not today - hopefully i won't be broken out in zits from the hotpot - my face is looking kind of waxy right now...) He owns a small "digital photography studio" - all of this started b/c i saw the shirts they had hanging in the doorway, & it said they'd take your photo & put it on a shirt for only 35 yuan. I asked Poplar if he could take other images & words & put them on there for the same price & he said sure. So i got on their computer & looked up one of my favorite posters from the Cultural Revolution - the one about the Paris Commune, produced in Shanghai during the short-lived Shanghai Commune (see here). Turns out they can't do it b/c the picture's too small. But today I had them make me one w/ Sun Wukong (my namesake, the simian anti-hero from the novel Journey to the West) - they couldn't use my favorite picture, the one in the left hand corner of this page by my name, for the same reason. So we searched the web for a few minutes and came upon this picture. The guy helping me said he thought it was from the story of "孙悟空大闹天宫" (Sun Wukong Makes Mischief in the Celestial Palace) - probably my favorite part of the novel, & the ideal image to go w/ the GPCR red guard quotation I wanted on the back ("Revolutionaries are beautiful monkey kings...") (actually it would go even better w/ a longer quotation from Mao, about how Sun Wukong epitomizes "anti-dogmatism" b/c he's willing to "crack open the firmament" in order to get what he wants). But just now when i looked up the image again i noticed that this is actually from the story of "孙悟空三打白骨精" (Sun Wukong Strikes the White-Boned Demon Three Times), which is more of a traditional good vs. evil thing - not the anti-authoritarian, free-spirited essence of the monkey king i'm trying to convey. And actually now I don't like the look of Sun Wukong in that picture - he looks like a conventional hero vanquishing evil in that picture to me, almost like a human in fact. So maybe someone can do me a favor & help me find a good image of Sun Wukong Making Mischief in the Celestial Palace? One place to start might be here.

OK, it's breakfast time - just one more note before I go: the aforementioned HK-based modeling company is called 羊脂球国际, which really freaked me out b/c it could be translated "The Mutton Lard Ball International" (in the sense of "The Communist International"). I had found the Britneyist-Marxist International shocking enough, but, wow, what would this kind of organization be up to? Turns out that it is named after a short story by Guy de Maupassant called "Boule de Suif" (which still means mutton lard ball) - haven't read it yet, but it just happens to be online here. After breakfast, let's read it together & find out why a fashion modeling company would take such inspiration from this exquisite combination of words.

I feel like a Gregor Samsa changed into an "ungeheures Ungeziefer," a monstrous vermin, only this time i've been caught in a spider's web, and she's gradually sucking away every last drop of my life-blood. On an immediate, concrete leve, the web may be this hotel, into which i moved only b/c no cheaper place would take me (it's not really that expensive, as mentioned in last post, but it costs enough relative to available funds to have this metaphorical effect on my dreams...), & b/c I wanted a good night of sleep before cleaning out & moving into new apartment, but which has become a hibernation cave. I've been leaving only a couple times a day for food - apparently to nurture my blood before it gets sucked away again, but really that is just another form of being sucked. Of course life under capital in general is all about being sucked, no matter how frugal you manage to be - whether it's your employer sucking away your time & energy, or all the enticing or in any case unavoidable consumption opportunities sucking away your money, as well as time & energy, come to think of it. But for some reason I'm especially conscious of this now. Perhaps b/c I am so obviously wasting money - on hotel & dining out, for instance, when I've already paid for my apartment & could have moved in several days ago. There's something else that's been keeping me trapped in this coccoon, until I receive a phone call every day around noon asking for another 200 yuan. It's an internal force, an internal set of chains, but I confront them as something alien. Who is this spider anyway?

Obviously I've been reading too much Zizek. Actually I finished The Sublime Object of Ideology several days ago, on the train to Chengdu, & since then I've started Kafka's The Castle, but not gotten too far, despite all my apparent free time, b/c I've been spending a lot of time fucking around on the internet - trying to get through this hotel's ridiculously indiscriminate firewall, learn about anonymization, etc. Also been writing some in my journal - first time in years - grappling w/ some psychological things - sorry I can't share that w/ you. Anyway, today's the day I"m moving out. I might actually sleep here another night (I've only got an 1.5 hour to decide - I think I'll stay here, if nothing else so I can take a nap, but also b/c I want to be well rested before my premier photo shoot tomorrow - more below), but I'll finally clean out & fix up my apartment today. Yesterday finally went back over there, carried most of my stuff over there, wrote down what I have & what I need, went to the nearest supermarket & was aghast at the prices - 50 yuan for a towel (like 7 dollars - that would be expensive even in the states), 80 yuan for a knife, 15 yuan for a fly-swatter! So I asked a middle-aged couple sitting outside (everyone sits outside in wicker chairs in Chengdu - sipping tea & playing majiang in the daytime, drinking beer & eating snails & things at night - I love it!), & they told me about a much larger & cheaper place a couple blocks away which would deliver stuff to my apartment if necessary. But it was already late so I went ahead & had dinner (made the mistake of ordering something called 牛肝菌烩肚 - beef liver thallophyte stew intestine - i was craving liver, & i usually like mushrooms; it has been a while since i had intestines, so i had forgotten how disgusting they can be if not prepared correctly (i.e. spicy, & of course spicy dishes are taboo for at least the next month - the proprietress pointed out this dish specifically b/c i requested non-spicy meat dishes) - well it turned out to be "beef-liver mushrooms & intestine," not "beef liver, mushrooms, and intestines," &, on top of that, it was still spicy (this is, after all, Sichuan), & still, regardless of the spiciness, the intestines still tasted literally like shit. But greatly enjoyed my soup w/ bean curd & "ruan jian ye" - a local green, don't know the characters for it, sort of like spinach, but more flavorful.

But there are so many eateries near my apartment, w/ a pretty big variety, it will be fun trying them all. Including: the all-you-can-eat porridge buffet, w 6 or 7 varieties of rice porridge (i think i mentioned that last post) - unfortunately they have only cold dishes to accompany it (cucumber, smoked duck innards, etc.); a northeastern dumpling place; a Yunnanese "crossing-the-bridge" (过桥) rice noodle place; a place w/ a huge variety of noodles from every part of China; of course the ubiquitous "hot pot" (火锅) fondue & places that specialize in spicy crustaceans (snails, crayfish, etc.); Leshan 钵钵鸡 (some kind of chicken dish - Leshan is a city south of Chengdu famous for the largest seated Buddha image in the world); the place I ate actually specialized in a spicy fish dish called 砣砣鱼 (notice the parallel structure of these two names - cute, eh?)

In addition to cleaning & furnishing my apartment, today i also sign over the rights to a set of photos that will be taken of me tomorrow. i never thought i'd do this - i always scorned the ubiquitous images of (white) foreigners in Chinese advertising. But i seem to have some guiding principle that i must try every new experience that comes my way, especially if it pays. I don't think i could do it more than a few times at most - just like prostitution (which i've come very close to trying), i think i would get bored w/ it, & more importantly, it's very distant from the bigger projects in my life, so it would seem like a waste of time. (Working in restaurants was different for some reason - part of me would be happy to do that full time for the rest of my life...) At least with teaching English i would be cultivating my pedagical skills and having productive interactions w/ Chinese students - at least in theory. Anyway, i've offered to do this once (the contract will be only for this one set of photos) - a five hour shoot for 500 yuan. A Chinese friend said that's ridiculous for the studio to offer so little - she checked online & said the average price for part-time foreign male models is 1000 yuan per hour! But, besides the fact that that's one of the most obscene instantiations of the neo-colonial situation & culture i've encountered (of course Chinese models get paid much less - the meaning of commercial modeling itself, bracketing the colonial dimension, is another interesting question worth exploring in its own right...), i'm uncomfortable (不好意思) asking for that much money, especially b/c i have no experience & don't really consider myself modeling material to begin w/. My friend said it's a matter of dignity, but i replied that selling oneself is inevitably undignified, no matter what the price. Our condition, under capital, is by definition undignified. In any case, my employer was unwilling to budge on the price (the only thing he offered was to give me a set of the prints - as if he wouldn't give them to me to be begin w/?!) So i said i'd do the first set & then decide if i wanted to continue. The people who offered me an English teaching job haven't called back yet - i don't want to appear to eager, but i don't want to lose the chance either. Anyway, i've got a lot of tasks to complete (human subjects application, translations, editing, etc.) before i commit myself to any regular jobs.

Now, out of this coccoon & off to the department store!