Dryope

Warning: Slightly Dirty, But Not In a Fun Way

This is bizarre.

When I was in China, most bathrooms I saw were basically glorified (or actual) pits that you squatted over. (Once it was a room you were meant to aim into, but I don't think that hotel got many women guests.)

If you went to a nice place, like the teahouse I taught English in, there was a western-style toilet. But inevitably when you went to sit down on it, there were shoe-marks. The Chinese women who had come before you had, adorably, no idea what to do with the seat and had just done what they were used to.

A lot of us foreigners used to chuckle over that one.

Then, today, I ran into this:

If you're daring, consider this: Squat on the rim of the toilet in your bare or stocking feet while you eliminate. "Squatting straightens the recto-anal angle and opens it more fully so elimination is much easier," says yoga practitioner Richard Ravizza, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Pennsylvania State University in Scranton. "You could think of it as straightening a partially kinked garden hose."

Apologies for introducing the term "recto-anal angle" into your day, incidentally.

Sloth v. Greed

I've been trying out Henry James's theory that it takes 21 days to stop a bad habit. I eliminated one annoying habit pretty easily this way, and now I'm ready for another.

Unfortunately, I have absolutely no willpower when it comes to this one: waking up on time.

After 20 years of chronic fatigue, I'm now free to wake up like normal people. This is great--this is liberating--but I've still got 20 years of a bad habit to eliminate.

I've tried setting the breadmaker to 6--if I don't get up on time to get it out first thing in the morning, it'll get soggy. I discovered that at 6 in the morning, I can live with soggy bread.

I've tried promising myself I can do all my favorite things for an hour if I get up on time. I discovered sleeping is my favorite thing (but of course, only in the morning. At night, I'd rather do all those other things.).

I've tried forcing myself to sit up and reason with myself about how I need to get up, as soon as the alarm goes off. I discovered that I'm very unreasonable in the morning.

I even bought a $150 watch that wakes you up at your optimal waking time. I discovered that I don't have an optimal waking time.

Finally, I have a workable method: a combination of greed and annoyance. I found a charm necklace at Ann Taylor Loft that I want. Instead of buying it, I promised myself that I /could/ buy it if I woke up on time /and got out of bed/ every day for 7 days.

The annoyance part comes from Bill, who now has taken to mumbling, "get up...necklace" when the alarm goes off. I have to say this works pretty well. :)

The only problem is that I'm not sure I want this necklace that badly. What do you think of it?

http://www.anntaylorloft.com/atlLMProductPage.process?RestartFlow=t&Merchant_Id=1&Section_Id=626&Product_Id=87796

Anything Goes

I watched "Temple of Doom" again, and for the first time since I've been learning Chinese (scarily, nine years now), I started paying attention to the opening number.  Ostensibly in Chinese.

It's completely unintelligible. 

This isn't just my opinion.  I poked around for help on baidu.com and found a post in Chinese wondering, innocently, what the lyrics were and "is it not in standard Chinese?"  There was also a funny critique of it on this page, that gave her credit for a good performance, but called her "so called Chinese" "a mess".

But the great thing about the character of Willy is that she's such an airhead, no one would believe it if the Chinese were pronounced the right way. 

Still, I'm interested.  It looks like one or two people are, too, because I found one site that cites a bit of the supposed lyric:

Yi wang si-i wa ye kan dao / Xin li bian yao la jing bao jin tian zhidao / Anything goes.

(From: http://www.admiralsarms.com/indy/ag/index.html, who claims to have gotten it from the novelization of the movie.)

I'm still trying to find the whole song translated into Chinese somewhere, but for the moment, this is all I have to work with.  (It's a short song anyway.)

I'm stuck for what most of it's supposed to be, though.  Like, what the hell is "si-i"?  I think it's meant to be from the beginning, though--"wa" is pretty limited, and it fits "stockings", as in the first line: "In olden days a glimpse of stocking / was looked on as something shocking / Now heaven knows / Anything goes."

Here's my guess of what it means:

Yi wang si-i wa ye kan dao

以往丝袜也看到

(Before silk stockings also could [uh, shouldn't there be a not (不) here?] see) 

Xin li bian yao la jing bao jintian zhidao

心理[心里] 变 要拉警报 / 今天知道

(Mindset [mind] changed need to sound the alarm / Today know)

The last line is a total stretch, though--I'm not sure 拉 (pull) goes with 警报 (alarm) like that, and the meaning, of course, is complete nonesense the way I have it here.  I'm going to need to look in some better dictionaries to figure this out.

These are my keywords for searches...

Anything Goes 随心所欲 or 百無禁忌 depending who you ask

Cole Porter 科尔·波特 or 寇爾波特 (again)

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 魔宮傳奇

To be productive, you first have to wake up before noon.

That's got to be a maxim, right?

Type-A Hell

I wish I could actually write more on this blog.  I think of plenty of stuff to write during the day, but then I'm at work, but that's certainly not an option.  Then I get home and here, literally, is my schedule:

20 minutes exercise

20 minutes housechores

20 minutes bills, email, etc.

2 hours dinner, entertainment, time with loved one, dishes

2 hours work--to make up time for having a genetic disease that causes chronic fatigue because my company doesn't have sick leave.

bed immediately (10pm) and then up at 6am.

EVERY NIGHT.  I have, like, a timer that I carry around with me.  It's completely insane.  Would you like to see my morning schedule?

It's supposed to be:

Up at 6am, and--

20 minutes getting ready (incl. packing lunch and preparing breakfast and coffee)

20 minutes writing fiction

20 minutes studying languages (a new one every month)

--and then running out the door.

It's completely ridculous.  And don't even ask about the weekend.

I've investigated weird sleep patterns to make time (biphasic and polyphasic, or, if you prefer, "uberman" and "everyman"--yes, I'm reading puredoxy's blog and I'm on the uberman yahoo group, god help me), which are very stupid and yet so very very tempting, read coaching books (currently: Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, which is lovely, except she keeps suggesting therapy for organization problems ("why are you subconsciously undermining yourself"), and Success is a Choice, which is slightly more touchy-feely than a drill sergant), and I even have a watch that--

--oh, wait, never mind--my ten minutes are up.  That's the ten minutes I decided for tonight to assign to writing my novel, since I didn't actually wake up at 6 this morning, or any other morning in recent memory, so I just eat into my sleeping time so that I don't go to bed not having touched my language and fiction. Not that I've actually slept any night before midnight, no matter when I go to bed.  Ah, look, now I have ten minutes for language before I go pretend to sleep. Here I come, German. 

Hilf mich!