sushipanda

For the past three autumns, Monday morning has served as an extention of the just finished weekend, rather than the birthing of an arduous new workweek. The reason for the recreational nature of a time slot that would otherwise be a weekly banality can be summed up in two words: fantasy football.

This is the 8th or 9th year our Yahoo league has been in existence, and aside from one glorious Week 16 way the hell back in 1999 (and the reason why I will always have a soft spot in my fantasy football heart for the now washed-up Marcus Robinson), I’ve done little in the way of winning anything. And yet Monday mornings still enchant me, to the point where I wake up 10 minutes earlier than usual on Monday (6:20 am, egads!) just so I can get a perfunctory glance at the scores before I head off to work, either in glee or in utter despondence.

Fantasy football, however relishing it is, is only one of several fantasies in which I and perhaps many other rogues indulge ourselves. These are fantasy times, gentle men and gentle women, as defined by the fact that occurences and patterns in my life often weave themselves in and out of the fabric of reality.

Case in point: I’ve been working in this office for nearly 11 months now, and I’d say that I average about 12 trips to the bathroom each day (with a standard deviation of about 1.7). I’d say half of those are due to coffee/diet coke consumption, and the other half out of sheer distraction. Normal, you say? Well, how do I account for the fact that out of all those visits to the bathroom, I’d say about 60% of them are met with the sight of the same co-worker, either zipping up or whipping out. That’s quite a large sample size to work with. It’s one thing to find a slacker with the same penchant for utilizing company resources to avoid work; it’s another to do it near simultaneously, over half of the time. And of course, as all such awkward office moments go, I’ve never spoken to him. Not once. You see, I’ve concluded that there are two reasons why I always see him in the bathroom: a) he actually finds a way to be in there 72% of the work-day (I’m in finance so trust me on the math) and makes it impossible for me to avoid him, or b) like Joey Tribiani and his black-jack dealing hand-twin, he and I are fated to be each other’s toilet Doppelgängers. Can either of these frightening conclusions possibly be real? These are fantasy times, my friends.

The thought struck me again last Friday, as we decided to make an impromptu after-dinner appearance at the new club Attica out on the Bund. After a very dispiriting jaunt through Glamour Bar (”Welcome to your mid-thirties” was Jamie’s well-timed chime as we swiftly moved through the middle-aged and predominantly white crowd), we walked down the Bund toward the new hotspot, only to be greeted by an aggressive throng of clubbers waiting to pay 100 RMB to get in. It was shortly thereafter that both Jamie and I recognized the pair of party promoters, and after the usual greet and kiss, we found ourselves quickly escorted in without any cover and into the elevator with a gaggle of models and actresses…one of the best elevator rides ever.

On the prominent deck of the club overlooking the Huangpu river, surrounded by beautiful people everywhere, I thought about the VIP treatment I so fortunately receive in this magnificent city that seems to exist only in a hazy dream. In what kind of reality does someone like me, a dude with a seriously misproportioned head whose only noticeable skill is to fill out a Super Mario costume once a year during Halloween, get to sit amongst Shanghai’s elite with nary a discerning glance? Perhaps it was my beautiful date. sipping her Sex on the Beach next to me and and waiting for me to show her to the dancefloor, that showed that having the most beautiful creature in the entire place on your arm can go a long way towards acceptance. Perhaps it was our veteran status in Shanghai’s night-life, having become accepted in the weekly throng of transient faces that moved effortlessly from Fuxing Park to The Bund to the trendy new place with delirious ease.

Whatever it was, it is still an ongoing fantasy. After three Shanghai years, life is as good as ever…and the fact that reality is even more promising shows how wonderful these fantasy times can be.

In many ways, I represent the exact opposite of how someone is supposed to lead a life. I’ve already reached certified “Public Service Announcement (PSA)” status when it comes to what happens when you drink too much (vomit on other people’s shoes), drink too much and sleep too little (vomit on your own shoes), and eat too many deep-fried chili peppers (I’ll leave that to your imagination). And last night, I reminded myself again why I’m the worst kind of cautionary tale: the kind that doesn’t caution me to change anything at al.

Here’s rule number one: when you buy an external hard drive for your computer and decide to put every visual and aural artifact from the past 12 years of your life into one location, make sure you don’t pound on the hard drive when you get annoyed when reading the Dodgers’ box score, slam your palm down on the hard drive when YouTube freezes in the middle of a Conan O’Brien skit, and never EVER drop the hard drive on the floor because you got distracted by the pretty girl walking in and out of your new apartment.

Faced with the potential of losing all my photos and documents and emails and porn artwork from the past decade, I’ve spent much time this morning re-assessing my life and my imprint on this planet so far in my 20 odd years of meaning existence…and then I concluded that it’s really been only about 2 years of meaningful existence…and then I got really depressed.

Those are teardrops you can’t see on my keyboard right now.

After three weeks of living in my new apartment, the dust has begun to settle and for the most part, I’ve returned to my old ways of doing things. It’s the famed “Eric Hu 95% rule.” Basically, it means that at most, I tend to complete up to 95% of a taste before stopping, either too lazy or too satisfied to finish up the remaining 5%. I make this observation because I’m sitting at my new desk, the one I waited weeks to get delivered while my DVD cases sat stacked up “temporarily” in the other room, waiting to be organized. Well, the desk arrived a week ago, and I simply haven’t mustered up the energy to move the DVD cases over to the desk and organize them properly. Once again, I’ve only complete 95% of the task. In fact, I’m probably going to end up writing about 95% of this blog, and then leave the computer on while I sprawl across my new sofa and watch 95% of a Grey’s Anatomy Episode.

However, this 95% rule can be said to only apply to my life 95% of the time. Which means that the other 5% of the situations I face I either don’t do at all, are meticulously program to the point where one could possibly say I invested 120-130%! And in those rare instances, usually in matters of great importance to me such as a) finishing all the food placed in front of me and b) attempting to find true happiness in the realm of love and emotion, I find that 120% usually means that I’m trying extra hard to change something that simply cannot be changed.

Do people, myself included, have the capability to alter something fundamental in their nature? Does it take time, patience…or is it a hopeless cause? Or does it vary, depending on which fundamental…and which person? I struggle with these questions as I find myself giving 120% to something…and I’m not sure I’m even getting close to 95% in return. Perhaps it is time for me to ratchet it down, to stay within the confines of the 95% rule. It’s gotten me far enough in to provide me a blissful and contented life. I guess it is just that I thought I could finally get to 100% on something, to feel whole…and instead I’m still wandering around in the wilderness.

Time to lose myself in a television series…

Ok so this isn’t the first time that I’ve been away for a long stretch of time and come back to defend my indefensible ass with a slew of excuses, but this time, I really mean it when I say I’ll be blogging more regularly now and taking panda love to even danker corners of the web than ever before.

Ah, forget it, even I’m getting tired of this schtick. To be honest, a lot has been going on for pretty much the entire month of September, and while I simultaneously rub the 9 day Chinese National Holiday from my eyes and set my sights back on normality, it makes sense that this blog had to take a bit of a backseat. After all, I had to spend time getting my new apartment ready to be inhabitable, to then buy the necessary accoutrements to inhabit it myself, and then to bask in the new pad during most of the break. Most of this activity entailed actually leaving my computer and physically doing stuff, which is new to me, and has taken me a while to adjust.
Thank God vacation is now over and I’m back at my desk at work, mindlessly surfing away like I was created to do! And to my bosses who are reading this and deciding whether or not to keep me on the payroll…I kid, I kid.

So here are some highlights from the past few weeks when I neglected this site that, in hindsight, I would have blogged about had I the gumption or the initiative (or hell, someone to move my lazy-ass fingers over the keyboard):

- Went to my third Chinese wedding, and I think I’m really getting the hang of these things. First off, it is necessary at any one of these ceremonies to play as much Celine Dion in the background as possible. This includes when the guests are sitting down, when the couple is reading off their vows, and even when they are exchanging rings. Also, parents are of utmost
importance and have to be thanked for making everything in life possible for the young couple. Tokens of gratitude this time included back-massagers for the respective sets of parents. This wedding had both a bubble machine and a dry ice machine, so there was a lot to look at top to bottom. A lovely evening for a lovely couple, and suffice it to say that I will be fine sitting out my next handful of wedding invites unless they can top this past one in visual stimulation.

- My annoying habit of celebrating a noticeable weight loss by giving myself carte blanche to gorge on beer and fructose and beef fat has gotten the best of me again. And now, corporate services has just emailed out a notice saying that in addition to the two kinds of cookies we already get for free in the pantry, they’re adding two more varieties. So that’s four cookie flavors now that I can snatch up and cram into my mouth with abandon, and no one will stop me. My desk is now literally a crummy place to be.

- The furniture guys called up last week to tell me they were set on delivering the bedroom set the next day, “would someone be home? Oh, and by the way, one of the nightstands hasn’t been delivered yet, do you mind if you just deliver one tomorrow and its companion a few days later? Thanks for your patience.” So the delivery guys come, and I’m excited because I can actually move into my apartment since I have something to sleep on. Hold the phone, the mattress has been delayed as well. Someone forgot to mention it to me. I end up calling the furniture company again, and what do you know? I’ll have to wait four more days at the earliest before they can deliver the mattress. Which, of course, is perfectly fine since everyone knows that as long as you have the bed frame, the mattress doesn’t matter at all! Getting a little worried, I call the sofa people.

“Oh yes, we forgot to mention. You wanted a sofa with the recess on the right hand side, but we only have one on the left hand side. We’re sorry for the delay.” So I clenched my teeth and retorted, “So you’re telling me that the sofa that I ordered two weeks ago that you promised to deliver tomorrow…you won’t deliver?” To which she replied, “yes, we’re very sorry, but we can deliver the sofa that you didn’t want tomorrow if you really need it tomorrow.” Tomorrow being the day they committed to deliver it to begin with. “Oh, and to show you how sorry we feel we’ll throw in complimentary foot stool.” Did I get the foot stool if I agreed to take the sofa I didn’t want? “Yes, we will send that to you either way.” So the next day, dirty spots on it, and it’s also a vomit-inducing shade of peach whereas the sofa it’s supposed to be paired with is white. This causes the innocent lockmith who is standing next to me when the sofa is delivered to say out loud to me: “the colors don’t match, why on Earth would you buy such ugly shit?”

- I’ve finally gotten off my schneid and started buying DVD sets of TV shows. I burned through the first two seasons of “Lost” in about a week and a half, and I’m relieved the second season is wacky enough that I won’t obssess about keeping up with Season 3. And now, I’m in the midst of drowning in two shows that couldn’t be more antithetical to each other: HBO’s “The Wire” and Bravo’s “Project Runway.” I know I’m late to the game, since I’m on season 1 of both shows and Joe used to rave about “The Wire” back in ‘03. The show is unbelievable, though I have to admit to being swayed by all the critical love that the online guys that I read so much are lathering on it. I like “Project Runway” because it turns out I love watching grown men sew. It’s that simple.

- My Dodgers are out of the playoffs, my Detroit Lions are now 0-187, and all I have on TV are 60 Chinese channels, 30 of which show the same news program at 7 pm every night. But I’m happy because I stare at all of this stuff on a 42 inch LCD screen sitting on the floor of my living room. I also spent about 400 RMB too much on a DVD player because I thought it looked cute in white. No wonder I’m so into “Project Runway.”

- My new refrigerator freezes everything I put into it, including broccoli and milk and a huge pot of stew. This, even though I have it now turned as low as possible. Wait…maybe it should be as high as possible.

It’s 4:30 pm on my first day back from vacation, and things are finally beginning to make sense.