Unlost, or Cell Phones and the Age of Colliding
Posted: August 4, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cell phones, china, facebook, fear, iphone, modernity, n+1, twitter, urumqi Leave a comment »I wanted a map. The only unmet desire I had from my warped old clamshell cell phone was access to a map. For this desire I had a perfectly symmetrical argument: I will never again be lost. No more will I get off the subway and not know which way is North, nor realize I’ve forgotten to write down the address of a party or meeting room. No more will I stare at the dumb faces of buildings, trying to match their bricked frames and shaded windows with an arrangement of numbers and letters, whose only real order lies in some old civic planner’s papers, which even she’s forgotten by the time I’m trying to find the outlines of her work in the gloaming streets of outer Queens.
The Right Thing Last; Afghanistan, Poppies, and Opinions Before Facts
Posted: October 31, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: afghanistan, Bill Clinton, bluster, bullshit, china, debate, fact, genocide, iran contra, iraq, michael thomsen, military, nucleear, oliver north, opinion, taliban, war, winston churchill, yellowcake 2 Comments »I was living in China during the build-up to the US invasion of Iraq. Separating fact from hunch, and political distortion from opinions of reasoned conviction was hard in any location. In China, it was especially tough because of the tightly controlled media (my phone was tapped and emails with particularly divisive verbiage had a way of not making it through to my inbox), and my comparatively child-like ability to understand the language in which they were delivering news in the first place.
In addition to my regular course load of teaching college freshman basic English, I taught an advanced class for a group of engineers from a giant steel corporation that basically ran the city I lived in. For many of these classes, I’d choose a conversation topic instead of lesson planning. In the process of informal debate, I’d write new vocabulary words on the chalkboard and explain a few new colloquialisms, and call it curriculum.
