As I’ve touched on once or twice, China is still a very much developing country. A hyperactive developing country, but a developing country all the same. Nowhere is this more apparent than Bejing’s animal control policy.

There are no shelters. Strays, when rounded up, are usually euthanized. Pets are usually set lose to seek their own fortunes when families move. Discarded domesticated animals usually lodge in groups ranging from small to astonishingly large.

For example, the Embassy district north of Sanlitun is renowned city-wide for being a mecca for stray cats.

(In case you’re looking to adopt — the Kenyan Embassy and the Saudi Arabian Defense Attaché office are the primary hot spots for freelancing cats. I’ve seen up to thirty at a time cowering behind the fences.)

Dogs are something of a different deal. With the One Child Policy, older couples who have dogs treat them something akin to children. Usually these are smaller “barky” dogs whose names and breeds elude me, and, frankly, are of little interest.

They are also not discarded as frequently as cats are when people move.

One reality of city life is that the government prohibits larger dogs from living within 4th Ring. However, the law was recently amended to allow pets to visit the inner city. Now Saint Bernards can be seen marching their owners proudly down the urban streets of Beijing drawing crowds and curious gazes.

My friend Li, who lives beyond 4th Ring, recently “adopted” two girls — Lumie, a Spitz, and (my personal favorite) an Alaskan Huskie named Nena. They’re both 5 months old.

And, of course, we brought them down to the Liang Ma river to play where I couldn’t help but take a dozen overly redundant photos which I now present to you for your viewing pleasure.

Word coming out of Chengdu of a 7.9 magnitude earthquake.

Initial reports had a few dead. Hours later the number exploded.

The number is just going to get higher.

Here in Beijing we felt only a brief tremor — rattling. I thought it was the crazy old woman who lives beneath me banging on the pipes again.

The only damage I’ve seen in Beijing was a small pedestrian bridge in South Third Ring. The government was quick to block it off and a day later the affected segments — pure concrete mind you — have been completely removed and carted away to wherever it is that pedestrian bridges go to die.

The rest of the nation’s capital remains largely isolated, or really insulated, from the tragedy out west.

No matter how far away we are we are always a world away.

Apartment hunting in Beijing has been an intriguing experience.

For the last month, I’ve split my time between staying with friends who out of the goodness of their hearts can tolerate my presence in their homes. Being something of a prideful individual, this unadulterated exploiting of their generosity has been hard for me to swallow. So much that I’m now embracing my bum-bastic life.

…except that I’ve sorta signed a signed a contract promising to sign a contract for a lease.

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Given that learning Chinese is my primary focus while studying abroad, I felt keen to comment on my progression.

Simply put, Mandarin is a completely new way of communicating. Unlike English, vowels receive the most enunciation focus. The basic A-E-I-O-U sounds are different requiring tongue to be strategically place in the middle of the mouth or touching the upper or lower teeth ridge line. Once the four tones come into play the sounds become even more problematic.

Thankfully, my mind is slowly adapting. In another couple of weeks and I feel confident that I’ll have this aspect — along with the “initials” and “finals” combinations — down.

My personal goals of keeping up with homework assignments have been met so far. My teachers are praising my progression whether by merit or their desire to maintain my 200RMB an hour clientèle.

What’s been forefront on my mind is how deep down the rabbit hole I wish to go. I’m living in a bubble — all my friends are Westerners and I’m still primarily communicating in English. If this train of thought is followed to its logical conclusion, I’ll know the technical aspects of the Chinese language by the time I leave but I won’t be natural or comfortable speaking it.

Where and with whom to speak is therefore the quandary I need to resolve.

Do I downgrade my apartment plans and find local flatmates?
Do I find a housemate for my current apartment plan?
Do I just launch myself into communicating with every street vendor and person who seems inclined to listen to me?

(I have Faye, but I hate burdening her when her life is busy enough as is.)

Between work, school, life and church my hands have been busy and this precarious juggling act I’ve been pulling off is taking its natural toll. I can handle it, but with little things like this apartment snafu and church responsibilities, my breathing has become decisively more pinched.

For this week, I intend to maintain the status quo. The brief reprieve will do nothing to hide the reality that there is a significant number of decisions rapidly approaching that will in great part determine the integrity of my China experience.

I was trying to think of the most stereotypical way to open this post and was mulling either “Ni Hao” or “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto” or even maybe “Holy *$%ing *&^% I’m in China!!!!” (note the use of 3 exclamation marks).

Ultimately, I went with “Ni Hao” because the latter phrase has already been beaten to death on various trips to California, Hawaii, Utah, Thailand, Cambodia and who knows where else and that other one contains too many self-censored words for my taste.

But I digress, the underlying point here is that I now claim home as Beijing, China.

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I’ve been struggling lately trying to fully understand why women get themselves into “bad” relationships and get severely burned in the process. By “bad” I mean intentionally doomed — incompatible personalities, differences in values, opposing ideas of what they want to do with their lives.

Guys seem much more isolated from this tendency. And if not, don’t seem to suffer nearly as much in the end as women do.

I spent three hours talking to an old girlfriend tonight about the end of her doomed relationship.

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My body is truly a peculiar thing. It’s been a struggle for me at times to understand it.

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MySpace is just an odd place for random encounters these days.

The tally so far:

• 5 porn stars (sorry, I mean “aspiring” models)
  
• 1 crazy psychopath from the past
  
• 2 people thinking I was someone else
  
• 1 person trying to gain access for blackmail purposes (like there’s anything blackmail-able in my profile)

Add to that: Two people from my 5th grade elementary class who literally found me out of the blue. After talking with each of them a bit, it’s amazing how people turn out after embarking down radically different paths.

Not “wrong” paths or “bad” paths — just different.

One has been married, divorced, had a child and lost the child due to an alleged murder and is now crusading for child rights.

Stranger than that sounds, I’m actually enjoying catching up with people from “the past.” My 5th grade year was my last in public school before my parents started homeschooling me. At my own request.

Suffice to say, there’s not many warm fuzzies from that era.

In talking with them, it’s interesting to note how for many of us the social divides and barriers that once separated us are now utterly meaningless. It’s as if they never even existed. Now, Walnut Elementary school is no longer that place where a lot of things happened, but something we survived and shared together.

So now the question is, seeing as these things happen in threes, who else from the past is going to emerge from the shadows?

June is my favorite month of the year. It lays just past the border edge of summer that May ushers in while not being as extreme as August. The world always looks its best in June.

And, like always, I utterly squander it away.

A brief review of history:

2003: Stuck in Kansas doing who knows what. I don’t remember? Do you? I didn’t think so.
2004: Freakin’ Dr. Kimzey’s Economic 201 class during Spring Semester. ‘Nuff said.
2005: Economic Development with Dr. Hanes. More students use four letter words to describe this class than any other.
2006: Just had quit my first post-college job and went camping in the Ozarks. For a week. Not a total loss, but seizing only 1 out of 4 weeks is still a failing grade.
2007: Springfield Freakin’ Missouri. A sense of limbo gives way to stagnation. Work is work, nothing particularly meaningful. Nothing really eye catching in the local scene either. Housemate drama out the wazoo.

So, like every past June that I can remember, I get into an overly introspective mood that compels me to go into overdrive to salvage what’s left of the summer.

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So I was going through Facebook and stumbled upon this little gem written in the wake of the Virgina-Tech massacre:

I have spent the past two days just reading, re-reading, watching the videos, and listening about the tragedy. But it’s not enough. I still feel so much confusion, frustration, anger, hurt, and grief. Where’s the catharsis?? I have so many questions still and the answers just aren’t available. I have this overwhelming ache to know: Why did this happen? Is it possible it will happen again? Why are some people so troubled and is there ANYTHING that I can do?? What if it had happened here? Does everyone know that I LOVE them?? I can’t help but cry just thinking about it. But thinking is ALL I can do!

9-11 didn’t hit me this hard. Maybe because I was so much younger. Maybe because of the blatant brutality of these shootings. Maybe because I fit the profile of the victims, and so do you. Maybe because now it seems so much closer, all the more personal. All I know is that now I’m feeling the vulnerability of someone just “going about their day”…but waiting for the ax to fall. Where next? When will it end? This is such a scary time…Please pray, folks.

I think this has struck a nerve in me that’s been festering since Thailand.

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