Brief post, two things.
Things and How They Act on You
I think I'm not unusual in that I 'power through' things and have this idea that I'm 'powering through' things and maybe kind of I am, but also they (the things I'm 'powering through') are acting on me -- affecting my mood and state, and quite possibly my performance in various ways.
The thing I'm thinking of in this case is the dismay and sadness of being temporally offset from the place that you are. 'Jetlag', of course; and then exacerbated by the fact that I in general keep a schedule that feels strange in a city like Hong Kong: I get up a bit before 5am and try to go to bed between 11 and 12. The result, on a trip like this, especially one where you're in an office for a lot of the day, is that the days get a bit lonely and sad! You're up and working, walking the streets to the amazing dim sum place, at y'know 3:45am so you can get some work in and also wtf that's when you woke up.
And it's okay, because you got like five hours of sleep because by the time you got home at 9:40pm you were like...munh. wut do i do? You don't know anyone; you're food-adventured out; there's no cultural activity available to you, you're tired...so yeah, bed like 10pm.
You get in a weird loop.
This is a super mundane observation! I'm sharing my version of the time-tested experience of the happy-but-lonely business traveler out on his or her own. I guess the "happy-but" part of that might be distinctive; I'm often happy-but-lonely. I kind of like being lonely; or perhaps I like other things that come with the experience of loneliness, and occasional loneliness is the margin/edge/price that I happily pay for things that I like.
ANYWAY. All part of an experience that has, as I've hopefully been clear, many nice elements.
Such as!:
I am in an elevator at Pacific Place. Pacific Place is a ritzy mall complex, atop which the ritzy hotels at which the Professors stay are located (more on these ritzy hotels in a subsequent post). These ritzy elevators are glass (or whatever: clear); as you pass each floor you see the ritzy shops, ritzy people, etc.
I think I am not being precious when I note that, despite my tall whiteness, the people of Hong Kong are more than savvy enough to see that I stick out a bit in this context as not-ritzy.
So I'm going up in one of these elevators. A delivery man gets in with me; early 50s, physically smaller than I am, carrying a stack of bound parcels. We make friendly hey, hey eye contact.
We ascend. And on the next floor, as we go up past it, there is a certifiably ritzy lady with her certifiably ritzy guy. Both Chinese. She's taller than he is and conspicuously beautiful as well as ritzy; she's dressed very well and has a very beautiful face. We can see him less well but he's also dressed in a casual/expensive way, and his hair is set in short complex ritzy chunky spikes on his head.
The ritzy couple is clearly having not-exactly a fight, but a thing. She looks consternated. His hands are up at his sides. She pushes his chest. Not shoves it, but also not a coquette-ish joke. Like she's annoyed and is pushing him like c'mon, seriously?
And the elevator keeps ascending and the ritzy couple is lost to us inside it, to me and the delivery guy.
And me and the delivery guy look at each other and I don't even know what we were both thinking but we were both thinking the same thing. It was some inchoate and complex combination of
-- "gosh, she was pretty"
-- "ha! looks like our boy has some troubles"
-- "I wouldn't mind having those troubles"
-- "ah, humans"
It was a combination of those things. I don't know the ratios or the recipe, but those were the ingredients. I know. And I know he was thinking it, too, in approximately the ratios I was. Perfect sync.
And he, the delivery guy, he thwumped his chest with his fist twice like hwump hwump, in a gesture that looked to me like a familiar gesture to him but that isn't something people generally do where I'm from. And he said something joking and rueful in Cantonese that was definitely all that stuff in the paragraph above in like five or six words.
And I laughed, neither pretending to understand nor pretending to not understand. I just laughed, and he just hwump thwumped his chest again and repeated an abbreviated version of the already-short thing he'd said, and then the door opened and he grabbed his parcels--tied in paper, wrapped in rope--and got out of the elevator.
Things and How They Act on You
I think I'm not unusual in that I 'power through' things and have this idea that I'm 'powering through' things and maybe kind of I am, but also they (the things I'm 'powering through') are acting on me -- affecting my mood and state, and quite possibly my performance in various ways.
The thing I'm thinking of in this case is the dismay and sadness of being temporally offset from the place that you are. 'Jetlag', of course; and then exacerbated by the fact that I in general keep a schedule that feels strange in a city like Hong Kong: I get up a bit before 5am and try to go to bed between 11 and 12. The result, on a trip like this, especially one where you're in an office for a lot of the day, is that the days get a bit lonely and sad! You're up and working, walking the streets to the amazing dim sum place, at y'know 3:45am so you can get some work in and also wtf that's when you woke up.
And it's okay, because you got like five hours of sleep because by the time you got home at 9:40pm you were like...munh. wut do i do? You don't know anyone; you're food-adventured out; there's no cultural activity available to you, you're tired...so yeah, bed like 10pm.
You get in a weird loop.
This is a super mundane observation! I'm sharing my version of the time-tested experience of the happy-but-lonely business traveler out on his or her own. I guess the "happy-but" part of that might be distinctive; I'm often happy-but-lonely. I kind of like being lonely; or perhaps I like other things that come with the experience of loneliness, and occasional loneliness is the margin/edge/price that I happily pay for things that I like.
ANYWAY. All part of an experience that has, as I've hopefully been clear, many nice elements.
Such as!:
I am in an elevator at Pacific Place. Pacific Place is a ritzy mall complex, atop which the ritzy hotels at which the Professors stay are located (more on these ritzy hotels in a subsequent post). These ritzy elevators are glass (or whatever: clear); as you pass each floor you see the ritzy shops, ritzy people, etc.
I think I am not being precious when I note that, despite my tall whiteness, the people of Hong Kong are more than savvy enough to see that I stick out a bit in this context as not-ritzy.
So I'm going up in one of these elevators. A delivery man gets in with me; early 50s, physically smaller than I am, carrying a stack of bound parcels. We make friendly hey, hey eye contact.
We ascend. And on the next floor, as we go up past it, there is a certifiably ritzy lady with her certifiably ritzy guy. Both Chinese. She's taller than he is and conspicuously beautiful as well as ritzy; she's dressed very well and has a very beautiful face. We can see him less well but he's also dressed in a casual/expensive way, and his hair is set in short complex ritzy chunky spikes on his head.
The ritzy couple is clearly having not-exactly a fight, but a thing. She looks consternated. His hands are up at his sides. She pushes his chest. Not shoves it, but also not a coquette-ish joke. Like she's annoyed and is pushing him like c'mon, seriously?
And the elevator keeps ascending and the ritzy couple is lost to us inside it, to me and the delivery guy.
And me and the delivery guy look at each other and I don't even know what we were both thinking but we were both thinking the same thing. It was some inchoate and complex combination of
-- "gosh, she was pretty"
-- "ha! looks like our boy has some troubles"
-- "I wouldn't mind having those troubles"
-- "ah, humans"
It was a combination of those things. I don't know the ratios or the recipe, but those were the ingredients. I know. And I know he was thinking it, too, in approximately the ratios I was. Perfect sync.
And he, the delivery guy, he thwumped his chest with his fist twice like hwump hwump, in a gesture that looked to me like a familiar gesture to him but that isn't something people generally do where I'm from. And he said something joking and rueful in Cantonese that was definitely all that stuff in the paragraph above in like five or six words.
And I laughed, neither pretending to understand nor pretending to not understand. I just laughed, and he just hwump thwumped his chest again and repeated an abbreviated version of the already-short thing he'd said, and then the door opened and he grabbed his parcels--tied in paper, wrapped in rope--and got out of the elevator.
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