Possessed

I admit it. I am thoroughly creeped out by my nephew’s toy tractor. On the surface it gives all the implications of being one of those nice farm-like cutesy things with a spot behind the driver’s wheel for a barrel-shaped armless farmer to sit (if that isn’t scary enough it gets worse). The tractor is a decent facsimile of its John Deere real life counterpart. It has two enormous plastic tires in the rear and two normal sized tires in the front. It’s green with yellow seats and a blue steering wheel with a hitch for the trailer at the back.

The trailer is just the beginning of that slippery slope that takes us from normality to an entirely uncomfortable realm of the unnatural. The colors, though not usual, are at least in keeping with the cheery scheme of the tractor. The bed is a sunny yellow and the rails and sides are a nice primary blue. And then the tires are green. And the trailer only has two rails: one in the front, nearest the end where the trailer connects to the tractor, and one in the rear. Apparently you don’t have to worry about your animals falling out the sides and here’s why!

Your animals fit into pre-cut holes in the trailer bed. Common sensely enough, the trailer makers cut square holes for all four of your cloven-hooved beasts: a pig, a cow, a horse, and a sheep – all of which are exactly the same size.

Please appreciate the size issue for a moment.

Now in case the child playing with this toy has never heard the sound of a tractor before, the set comes with a key ring carrying four keys which collectively are so large they dwarf your four animals. Each key is a different color and ends in varying simple images which in turn correspond to “keyholes” on the sides of the tractor. By turning one of the keys in its matching keyholes one activates a noise box inside the tractor that makes the sound of a starting engine.

Don’t worry. That in and of itself does not creep me out. After the tractor starts and the engine is running for a while, a voice kicks in and issues various prompts. Following the directions will in turn provide various farm animal noises to match your disproportionate livestock.

Now, about the voice. I don’t know what the toy makers were going for but what comes out is a masculinized five-year-old girl with an almost gravelly high pitch back-of-the-throat rasp. It’s the voice I’m sure Cruella DeVil had as a young child. This is the voice the makers felt appropriate to put in a product designed for infants and toddlers.

Furthermore, the tractor knows when you’re not playing with it, and it doesn’t like that. If the tractor hasn’t been played with for some undetermined length of time, this voice will, without warning, echo from between the tires and say, “Hello, little farmer.” If you continue to ignore it, it greets you again. “Hello, little famer.” Only this time I know I can hear that possessed thing cackling at the end. Every single time I rush to turn it off but even several seconds after the switch on the bottom is firmly in the “Off” position, the tractor has to have the last word. “Goodbye, little farmer.” I always expect it to follow up with, “I’m going to kill you. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

I kid you not, I’ve had nightmares about that thing. But my nephew insists on playing with it every time he’s over (the thing is kept at my parents’ house). Fortunately, he’s too young to understand the concept of battery-powered toys. I told him yesterday that the voice went on holiday and won’t be back for a while. He accepted the idea readily, and I went into the other room.

I settled down to read when suddenly out of the next room came my nephew’s pitch perfect imitation. “Hello, little farmer . . .”

Bookshelves

Before we realized we would soon be moving, Brian decided to spend some of his job-hunting time brushing up on engineering knowledge and reading other books of interest. To that end, he created this:

Yup. That's a giant pile of books stacked on the edge of his desk. Honestly, I didn't really have a problem with that. Except that in creating this tower of tomes, he left behind this:

In case you're one of the majority who is looking for the problem in that photo, the problem is the gaps. Brian took books off their shelves and left no manner of support for the remaining books! For clarification, I've supplied a modified version to show you what my brain saw.

Why have you taken away hardbacks and left paperbacks to be bent and possibly broken? Are you torturing me on purpose? Don't you care about that thick copy of the History of Creativity? Do you realize that by leaving those language workbooks at a forty-five degree angle that the pages will be irreparably bent? I still use those workbooks! Do you just not care about the unsightly mess you've left of those three stacked shelves? And those are my linguistics shelves! You're an engineer! What could you possibly want with my linguistics shelves? And for heaven's sake why are you messing with anything on that lower shelf? Those books are purely decorative! Yes, it's the only copy of Chaucer I own, but the thing was printed I-don't-even-know-when and if you move any of the books on that shelf, the cover will literally fall off of Grandfather's Stories Taken from the History of France! 

Brain aneurysm on the spot.

After several deep breaths, educated Brian about the purpose of bookshelves, which is to hold books, versus the purpose of desks, which is not to function as book depository, all while carefully reshelving everything he'd taken out. And then after a moment, I realized that this would make a pretty good blog post and pulled all the books out again for pictures while Brian laughed.

But then I put them right back.

Reading and Writing and 'Rithmetic

I attended my first comic con last week, mostly because a friend couldn't use her ticket and didn't want it to go to waste but partly because I was curious about the writing panels. It was interesting sitting in panel after panel over three days listening to authors break down their processes and how they developed conflict etc. etc. 

I didn't notice the first or even the second time, but by the third day I was trying very hard not to laugh in every panel. I don't know how they managed to get so many authors saying the same thing, but buried in the talk about conflict, pacing, character development, outlining, plotting, and just plain writing there sat this recurring fundamental difficulty. The first third of a book, they say, should contain the rising action, character introduction and so forth. The middle two-thirds is the main guts of the story, the hero fighting everything you can throw at him, really wrenching out what makes your hero the hero and so forth. And the final third is the resolution, hero gets the girl, hero dies tragically, whatever. 

Did you catch that? According to every panelist who used this division system, every book has four thirds. Ah, my author friends, read and write to your hearts' content, but leave the 'rithmetic to someone else.

Same Train, Gabi. Same Train.

I was never sure how, as a native of Venezuela, Gabriella came to be part of a program whose first qualification was that one be a native speaker of English. Not to say her English was bad at all. She spoke it naturally and well, with only a few oddities from time to time. Her pronunciation of "hotel" with a primary stress instead of secondary stress (ho-tel vs hotel), for instance, was never an obstacle to us all knowing exactly where she wanted to go. But occasionally, just occasionally, Gabi just couldn't communicate.

On the way back from a weekend in Shanghai, five of us decided to stay in Suzhou for a couple of days while the rest of the group returned home. Damien bought our tickets and came back to explain that he had been unable to secure us all tickets of the same kind in the same compartment. Three tickets were sleepers and two were seats. He apologized, but the train we needed to catch home had only the three sleeper tickets left.

Four of us shrugged, took our tickets, and agreed to decide later who would get sleepers and who would make the long ride on seats. The fifth party stood still and stared. Gabi was confused.

She stood staring, intently focused on an invisible point and thinking, thinking hard.

"How are we all getting home again?"

"On the train, Gabi."

"But you said only three of us have sleepers."

"The other two have seats."

"On a different train?"

"On the same train."

"Oh! You mean . . . wait. Where?"

"What do you mean, 'where'?"

"So they're taking another train?"

"No, they're taking the same train."

"But you said only three of us have tickets."

"Three of you have tickets for sleepers. The other two have seats."

"On a different train?"

"On the same train, Gabi."

"Where?"

"Where on the train?"

"Yeah."

"In a different compartment."

"So they're not coming home with us?"

"They're on the same train."

"Will they get there later? Do we need to wait for them?"

"It's the same train, Gabi. You're all coming home on the same train."

"But . . ."

"Three of you have sleepers; two of you have seats. It's all the same train."

"But we'll get home at different times, right?"

"How would you do that? It's the same train."

"But we have different tickets."

"Three are sleepers and two are seats, yeah."

"So they're not riding with us."

"Yes. They are."

"Oh ok. They're just on a different train."

"No. They're on the same train. It's the same train."

"Oh I get it." Gabi nodded knowingly.

We all sighed in relief.

"So two of us will have to catch a different train?"

Addie, exasperated beyond control, sucked air in through tightly pursed lips and brought her hands, fingers tensely extended, up in front of her face. Bringing her hands violently together with each syllable, she growled through clenched teeth: "SAME TRAIN, GABI! SAME TRAIN!"

She never got it. Addie and I rode the seats. Eight hours overnight on hard seats being crowded by Chinese with no sense of personal space and little sense of personal hygiene was still preferable to trying to explain the complexities of train transportation to a confused Venezuelan in her second language.

Same train, Gabi. Same train.

How Not to Bargain

The first purchase any one of us ever made. It was evening of our second day in-country and our first day in Hefei, the city that was to be our home for the next 5 months. Our group consisted of sixteen Americans, two of whom spoke Chinese to some degree, Damien being fluent in Mandarin and Wesley in Cantonese, both of them men. Being in a Mandarin-speaking area gave Damien much more opportunity to use his skills than Wesley and also made him the proper candidate to conduct a group first: bargaining.

As I'm sure you'll have been told countless times by the time you leave, dear cousin-in-law, the Chinese method of buying and selling is called bargaining. Rather than set prices, the vendor will notice your interest in an item and begin pestering (read "aggressively pestering") you for how much you're willing to pay. While this doesn't hold true for department and grocery stores in buildings (such as the local equivalent of Walmart), it is certainly the case elsewhere including all stall vendors and even many indoor shops.

It being evening by the time we had ventured to "town" with our Chinese school liaison, Sally, very few vendors were still around and even fewer had any merchandise we were interested in purchasing. However, some of us wanted to begin to make use of the DVD players in our rooms and therefore went perusing the video stores. There being little to hold the attention of the rest of us, we waited in a square outside the store for Damien and Sheila to return.

Having been briefed many, many times about the cultural difference in shopping methods before coming to China, we felt very well-rehearsed in the lessons and we expected great things from Damien since he spoke Mandarin, though for some reason I seem to remember him using American dollars rather than RMB. Perhaps because it was only our second day in country and he hadn't exchanged all his money yet.

Damien and Sheila, a fiery twenty-something year-old east coaster, went in to the store to select a series to purchase. Twice they returned to consult various group members on which series we'd all prefer, given certain options. Then again they came back out to decide, away from the shopkeeper, just how much they were willing to spend. Another return trip decided who would be the technical "owner" of the purchased DVD set and therefore who would be taking it home in five months. This transaction was now approaching thirty minutes and Sally was beginning to check her watch when Damien and Sheila finally left the store, merchandise in hand, Damien shaking his head and Sheila trying not to laugh too loudly.

"Well, how'd it go?" someone said.
Damien just shook his head. "I'm an idiot."
None of us knew each other well enough for anyone to say anything, much less what any of us may have really been thinking. So instead someone asked, "What happened?"

"I asked him first if he was ok with American dollars," Damien started. "He was, so that was good. So then, ugh," he paused to face-palm himself in disgust. "So then I asked how much he wanted for the DVD. He said '40' and I was like, ok bargaining time! I have to answer quick to show I know what I'm doing. So I hurried and said, 'No. 38!' He literally laughed in my face and said, 'Done!'"

We all tried not to laugh too much and most of us chose to avoid the painfully obvious point to which we had all been privy. Some of us.

"Didn't you only want to spend 30?" someone said.

"Shut up."

Mini-series

A friend will be going to China in a few months with the same program I went with twelve years ago. It reminded me that despite planning several times to immortalize those memories in prose, I never have. But now I think I'll change that.

I have changed the names of all the American players in the following mini-series, for simplicity's sake, but left the anglicized names of the Chinese characters for the same reason. I will remain as faithful to memory as possible, but beg forgiveness should my memory ever deviate from "what really happened" according to anyone else who was there. These are the stories as I remember them. 

To my excellent cousin-in-law about to embark on a promisingly insane journey, these stories are for you as both a preëmptive commiseration and a warning. Enjoy.

I'm Sensing . . .

Brian, watching me prepare to go to work for a graveyard shift, noticed me putting on my snowboarding coat instead of a hoodie. "You finally come to your senses and decide to wear something warm?"

"No; my hoodie is dirty."

"Well I'm glad you admitted you haven't come to your senses."

You better be glad I'm walking out the door to work, right now, buddy. I'm not above putting ice cubes down your pants while you sleep.