"Beijing Snowstorms and Housebound Productivity"

Earlier this week, Beijing was hit with a rather rare snowstorm. As a result, we were all motivated to trek down to Hou Hai for a family outing. My uncle and cousins decided to rent ice skates and go out on the lake for a couple of hours, while my aunt and I thawed our fingers around a hot cup of coffee. After the thaw and being reminded that my fingers do not easily - or painlessly - thaw, I haven't spent too much time outside since that excursion.

But before I excused myself from the frostbitten fun, I spent a few minutes slipping and sliding around in my boots and took a few choice photos of the gang, gearing up for their time on the ice, as well as the strange skating-bicycles that seem to be the popular thing for young Chinese children on the ice. The lake hadn’t been entirely cleared yet, but uniformed officers pushed the snow into piles on the ice and made paths for all the skaters.

Productive days can only be called such because of my renewed devotion to poetry. And my belief is that the most recent troubadour fever is a result of not wanting to go out in the bitter cold and trudge through the dirty snow, left over from the blizzard because there is no such thing as a snowplow in Beijing. So, now, after a few days of being pent up in the apartment, a new poem has been added to the mix and I believe, after deleting lines, adding stanzas, finding the right words, reacquainting myself with the thesaurus, and doing a tiny bit of research on the Southwest (a new fascination), it is finally ready to be submitted to a few places.

In other news, the job hunt is at a current stand-still. I was offered a position at an international school just outside Beijing. It’s a lovely campus and I’d have a great schedule, a good salary, and would be living there during the working week, spending weekends in the city with my aunt, uncle, and cousin. Perfect. However, as often happens when dealing with Chinese employment, the terms have been altered last-minute, and I don’t know where I stand at this point. We’ll see. There are also possible editing jobs in the wings. Still, I am not a patient person and I hate not having a job in the meantime.

I should also mention that last weekend I went to see Avatar in 3-D. I must say, it exceeded my expectations. It still annoys me that Chinese audiences talk through movies and don’t bother to switch off their phones, but at least the theatres in Beijing are cleaner and warmer than the ones in Hangzhou.

Between times when I’m writing or spending time with my family, I’ve been reading as much as I can get my hands on. Yesterday I read a short novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, called Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Toward the beginning of the book, I had to stop and write this quote down:

“I have never done anything except write, but I don’t possess the vocation for talents of a narrator, I have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life. In plain language, I am the end of a line, without merit or brilliance, who would have nothing to leave his descendants if not for the events I am prepared to recount, to the best of my ability, in these memories of my great love.”