The Oasis

OMG, did I tell you it was fucking HOT here? Don't believe me? I have lived through both NC, FL, AND Taiwan summers, and I think this is the worst. And I have Sue Lee Bauerbach, a FL native to back me up. Mostly, I've realized that central AC makes all the difference. For example, in FL you are only exposed to the sweltering heat in the few minutes it takes to walk outside, get into your car, and crank up the AC. All buildings are cooled to refrigerator temps. I'm serious. I remember in grad school, I always wore long pants and long sleeved shirts, even during the summer. Though I certainly appreciated the instant relief crossing the temperature threshold, the rest of the day I was a frickin' slab of meat in the fridge. So back to Shanghai... John calls our bedroom the Oasis. We climb into our netted bed, turn on the AC room unit, turn on the mini ceiling fan under our tent, zip ourselves up, and hang out by the campfire with the wild animals (Rem and Martin) pacing around outside. When we leave the oasis to use the bathroom or get something from the kitchen, we get jolted back to our senses. The rest of the house is a goddamn sauna. Yeah, maybe some people pay to relax in the sauna. Well, there ain't no relaxing in ours. It's as if we're part of some insane gameshow where you have to grab the items you need and then hurry back to the safe zone or homebase. Potty, wash hands, back to the room. Shower, towel off back in the room. Grab bread, a can of peanut butter, a spoon, back to the room. I know, pathetic. But feel free to give this a try at home.

In other news, I've been paralyzed since Tuesday. Earlier this week, I was on my laptop. All the sudden, colors started looking funny. On the desktop, all my icons had a trail of red striations going across the screen. At three years old, my laptop has display damage. Mother fucker. I chatted online with my nemeses HP, and they sent me through the hoops-- reinstalling the driver, adjusting display settings, blah, blah. Pain in my ass, those "service" people. In the end, I took it to a local Compaq repair shop. They said it's definitely hardware and will have to send my unit in to the factory for repair. In other words, I'm out of a fucking computer for at least 4 business days. So one would think, "Ok. No big deal. Just a few days. I'm not DEPENDENT on anything. There's no addiction problem here." Wrong. I can't stand being without. For one thing, I rely very heavily on my laptop for work. So here it was Wednesday, and I had my SABIC business writing class in the evening. I still had to edit pieces, write pieces... argh! I ended up waking up at 6 am to bike over to the internet bar. Yeah, so I was there with all the hardcare gamers. It wasn't so bad though, thankfully. There were actually only a handful of people, and each station has headsets. I had a variety of issues accessing my files, which I took in on a USB thumb drive. Then there was the MS Word in Chinese issue. Fortunately, I'm a big fan of shortcut keys, so I was able to get most of the formatting/functions done. Still, the level of efficiency just wasn't the same as with my good 'ol laptop baby. Good news is that the class went fine. I'll likely be heading back to the internet bar many more times this week. It costs about 2 yuan/hour = 24 cents. My ayi thought that was expensive. I didn't tell her how much a laptop costs.

So I'm coming clean. I can't live without my computer. No apologies though. I'm a victim of the technological revolution. So be it.

Oh, you may be wondering why I don't use John's computer. First, he uses it for work. Second, it's a mac and though he always touts the cross compatibility of the two platforms, he's wrong. It's inadequate. And I hate macs. I'm not cool enough for them.