sushipanda

In my building, there are two kinds of people that everyone has come to hate. The first are the folks who take the elevator either one floor up or one floor done; but especially those that take it one floor down. I work on the 7th floor, and give evil looks to anyone who makes me stop on the way down, just because they were too lazy to walk down a single flight of stairs.

The other is the guy on the bus who, when he sits down, immediately falls asleep with his mouth open and starts snoring. Not the low-volume, heavy breathing type snoring, but the full-on buzz-saw-in-a-wood-chipper type snoring. Thankfully, I had never encountered one of these guys, had just heard rumors about them existing on our company shuttle buses. I was lucky in that every time I got on the bus, I would just put my headphones on and fall asleep, and thus enjoyed a relatively disturbance-free ride.

Oddly enough, in recent weeks I noticed strange behavior on the shuttle whenever I got on it. I’d start getting the same types of looks that I gave those aforementioned elevator parasites, and just last week, I saw people get up from their seats and move a few rows back after I had sat down close to them. And then it dawned on me: I was the guy who was doing all the snoring! All this time I had just figured I had the good fortune never to encounter him, but in reality he was with me all the time!

Then, I sheepishly looked around me, saw that all the seats in front of me and next to me had been vacated, and everyone had squeezed themselves to the back. I then proceeded to prop my feet up, fold my arms behind my head, and turn up my iPod.

I love being famous.

Nothing to offset winning a can of soup at Yankee Swap with an open bar and hip hop at Bon Bon. Even when it’s cold, it can still be oh so hot!

The beautiful white DVD player I had paid 300 RMB extra to buy because it was beautiful and white has a USB outlet on the side. Initially, I tried to plug in my external hard-disk to see if the player could play all the mp3s and video files that I had downloaded throughout the past months and years. When it couldn’t, I tried with non-volatile flash memory instead, and wouldn’t you know, it worked! I could now listen to mp3s on my DVD player without having to burn them onto a CD or carry my computer into the living room. Of course, I could have simply connected my iPod to the speakers, but c’mon, that would have been too easy. Plus, I really wanted to use that USB outlet for something.

In regards to the video files, after some trial and error, I concluded that the player would only play videos in mp4 format. I went online and spent hours trying to figure out how to convert .avi files and .real files into mp4, but only succeeded with avi. Unfortunately, most of the episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “24″ I downloaded were in Real Player format, and thus unconvertible.

I spent a few more hours researching online, and learned that there was software out there for my Mac to take DVD’s and rip them into mp4 format. Perfect! So I went out and bought DVD seasons of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “24″ and “Lost” and spent hours and hours ripping them into the right format. Then I uploaded them onto the flash memory sticks, and plugged them into the DVD player through the USB slot. Finally, I figured out how to use that fancy feature on my new, beautiful machine.

And then it hit me: I had basically spent all that time converting my DVDs to files on the computer for the sole purpose of watching them on my DVD player, when I could have just watched the DVDs instead. Men truly are rational beings.

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Speaking of rational beings, this is Rusty’s last weekend in Shanghai. He’s heading back to Louisiana on Sunday for higher education purposes. Rusty, I never knew thee well, but you were fun to drink with, your gumbo is so good that I leave it in my fridge for a week and eat it until I find maggots in it, and you’re an upstanding fellow who likes to take care of his buddies. And I liked beating you at poker. Happy trails and best of luck to you!

We celebrated my brother’s arrival P.D. (Pre Diarrhea) by, what else, making him do stuff for us. Thus, early last week he found himself in the kitchen, working on making burritos and salsa and tacos for the panda household.

For those of you who have never met my brother, he’s a stand-up fellow with a very relaxed demeanor and a very unassuming disposition. This sets him up to be the perfect bitch for me, and I took full advantage, forcing him to compliment my apartment every 20 minutes and to set up my exfoliating bubble bath at 8:30 pm every night. And of course, to make the one thing that I crave the most every since I moved out here.

Needless to say, ANY burrito would have been savory and welcome in my mouth. Nevertheless, I as surprised at how delicious my carne asade burrito el Andrew tasted. I crammed two down my mouth, along with three tacos, and was reminded of El Faralito down in San Francisco’s Mission District, where Harsha and Joe and I often found ourselves around 2 a.m. in the morning, waiting in the ever-egalitarian line (SOMA geeks, Market Street bankers, Mission St. artists alike) for the steak quesadillas. Man, sometimes I really miss being back in S.F..

But then, there’s Shanghai, the greatest city west of the Huangpu! And for my loyal readers outside of this gloriously decadent city, here’s a not-so-clear shot from my balcony. Imagine it being much clearer and brighter, and know that that is the sight that greets me from a long day of slacking at work.

A glimpse of the world at my feet

My venerable little brother Andrew is in town for an undetermined amount of time, and accordingly I took some time off to make sure that he had someone with whom to spend his wintry Shanghai December. Good intentions can lead to gruesome results, however, as I took him to a New York style deli a short bus-ride away from my apartment for a quick American lunch to counter his impending homesickness. Unfortunately, not only was the food disgusting and the service akin to the quality of my underarm scent, we both caught a nasty bout of food poisoning that made us prisoner to our respective toilets last Thursday and Friday (and for me, much of the rest of the weekend).

On Friday, at his very worst, he suggested that I go buy some bananas, as both Web MD and his doctor back in San Diego had prescribed the fruit as an effective anecdote against what Mike and I eloquently term R.A. (Runny Ass). Odd, I thought, since everyone in China (even Chace) had told me that bananas are the cause of R.A., and not the cure.

At work, we often identify misinterpretation between the U.S.-based team and the Shanghai-based team as a result of inherent “cultural differences.” This issue with the bananas was a blatant case of “cultural conflict.” These two banana-beliefs could not be more antithetical to each other.

So I sat there and debated and debated whether or not heeding my brother’s advice and going across the street go buy bananas was really the best course of action for our present crisis. I felt just as torn as when I’m at a fake DVD store, pulled both by my desire to watch the latest American movie fare as well as my commitment to anti-piracy and artistic ownership.

Wait, that’s probably not the most accurate of statements.

Anyway, I decided to go with the bananas, not because I accepted one argument over another, but because I have two jars of Nutella in my cupboard, and pouring them on bananas was the perfect excuse to circumvent the, ahem, diarrheal impact of my choice. And there you are, the time tested axiom holds true: garbage in, garbage out.