So I'm a teacher, right, and I do teacher-things. One of the things I have never done, I just discovered, is conduct a "moment of silence" in a classroom.

Today began the first day of a three-day Period of Mourning for the victims and relatives of the southern China earthquake, the death toll of which is estimated at 50,000 (the official toll as of 5 minutes ago according to the China press is 28,000+, though the article I link to below says it is at 32,476). Today at 2:28pm, everyone stopped to have a moment of silence (three minutes of it, actually) in remembrance.


And because of internet censors, I have to surf Livejournal/myspace under a proxy, and thus most of my formatting options are kaput. Therefore, I can't really link to an article without posting the entire, cumbersome link right here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080519/ap_on_re_as/china_earthquake

I recommend you read it, it's pretty wild.

I had a class that begun at 1:30, so the memorial would hit about five minutes after our class break ended. I told my class that we were observing it in class today, and they were unexpectedly *elated* and happily thanked me. I have no idea why they reacted like that. The only reason I can think of is that they thought I *wouldn't* observe it. And I don't want to dwell on why they thought that, cause all the reasons I can think of just piss me off.

When we took our break at about 2:10, I stood in the hallway and smoked and thought about how one goes about orchestrating a moment of silence. At the
beginning of class I urged all the students, more sternly than usual, to silence their cell phones and let them know that if their phone went off during our silence in mourning for tens of thousands of dead people I would be personally breaking my foot off in their asses. To my astonishment, they complied immediately.

While I was smoking I struggled with whether or not to ask them to bow their heads, like how they do in the states when no one wants to say "....in prayer," but just wants everyone to look like they're praying. Would anyone take offense at that? Would they know that's how some people pray? I do the whole head bowing thing in the states when I'm in the presence of Christians, but I don't close my eyes. It's partly a holdover from kindergarten when I just wanted to be the one who could see when everyone had their eyes closed, and partly because I'm an Atheist.

Right now the g'ment is seriously cracking down on foreigners who show the teeeeeenist, thinnest stripe of radicalism, and there is always, *always* one Party Apple-Polisher in every class, so no matter what I personally was I had to step lightly.

Anyway, I was standing in class writing on the board when the class bell began to ring (they ring bells between college classes here). I thought that was odd, cause 1) I had set my phone alarm to go off at the right moment to remind me, and 2)it was way too early for the bell. After about 10 seconds I realized it was signaling the memorial time (and at that time, my evidently slow phone alarm went off).

I told my students to put their stuff down and take these three minutes to think about the people who died and the rescue workers who are trying to save others.

Then I sat down and stared at the floor. The school bell rang the entire time, and I read online (and heard from Sonny) that the memorial would be marked by car horns and air raid sirens and so on.

This is the only moment of silence I have ever experienced where the government mandated that everybody make noise.

After about a minute, I chanced a look up and my students. Every single one of them had their elbows on their desks, their eyes closed, and their hands clasped in front of their noses or under their chins. It looked for all the world like a room full of Christian missionary success stories. So much for worries about asking them to bow their heads.

My class appeared to pray for the entire three minutes, and for a few seconds after the bell stopped, cause who knows?

Other very strange (to be here for) things that are happening in China:

1. The flag in Tiananmen square is being flown at half mast. They showed the raising and the subsequent lowering this morning and it was weird to watch.

2. Chinese websites (including Chinese versions of western sites, like Yahoo and Google) have greyed out their font and converted their logos to black and white, which is unsettling to look at. Sites which have not greyed themselves out are posting memorial banners.

Go check out my pics in the album "Greyout" at myspace to see what sad Google and Yahoo look like.

Sigh.

For no reason, I image-googled my name (the Gibson one) today, and found a picture file of a Dr. Barrie Gibson's signature. It looks strikingly like mine. Weird.

http://www.dva.co.uk/

I just had this kind of weird thought while reading an article on why you should constantly question your doctor.

I used to see commercials for medical journals that doctors could subscribe to in order to "keep abreast of new developments in medicine." The article I'm reading now mentions this guy who passed a kidney stone, and then asked his doctor how the stone could have been prevented in the first place. The doctor told him to cut back on the calcium. The guy researched this, and discovered that actually an INCREASE in calcium (not the pill form) has been found to prevent kidney stones, not a decrease. His doctor was not abreast of new developments. At least, at the time the question was asked, perhaps this doctor had not read his journal yet.

So my thought was, if the doctor told this to his patient, and shortly thereafter became suddenly abreast of this new information, it is very likely that the doctor would NOT have informed the patient that the information was wrong, or that there was another solution. There's a teaching parallel: when a student comes to me with some weird-ass grammar question (this happens a lot) or says "Barrie, what's a 'cenote'?", I say "I have no idea, but I will find out and tell you later." Then I go home/check a dictionary, surf around and research it and take notes. Then some time in the future I accost the student (who has sometimes forgotten they asked) and say "A cenote is a natural well or sinkhole sometimes used by the Mayans for sacrificial offerings. WHERE did you find this word?" Every time, the student is amazed that I actually followed up on the question and makes a note. Then my ratings go up.

My family had two different GPs from the time I was born to about when I turned 18 and wasn't covered under my mother's medicare anymore. Never, ever ever did either one of them notify us about new things they had discovered in the way of treating MS, obesity (which both of them claimed was the cause of every single one of my problems. Migraines? Fatass.) or informed us that the previous treatment they had suggested was outdated or incorrect. I'm envisioning some lackey from their office calling the house and saying "Dr. Su recently discovered that a large amount of MS patients benefit from bee-sting therapy, it's no longer a fringe group of new-agers who are implementing it. Sorry for the disinfo." I picture Dr. Su flipping through a medical journal in her vast house with the canary yellow Hummer outside (this is true, canary yellow Hummer, her office was in Cave Spring, GA, a "city" with a total of three hotels and a population of 975 people. This is from their website. One page.) taking notes on a legal pad, which pad she will pass to a secretary the next morning who will make phone calls to the relevant patients. Keeping people up to date.

I think this is a good idea. Perhaps this was only my experience with two doctors, but in neither situation did they EVER volunteer information. It all had to be dragged out of them, question by question (my mother had her own legal pad that she brought to appointments. Dr. Su expressed annoyance, which won her no points with me), and very often my mother was the more informed.

I think that what happens is, for example in the case of the kidney stone, the doctor does do their research. But they don't immediately pass the information on to the patient. Instead, it is stored away for use by the next patient who comes in with a kidney stone. I do think that I would have more faith in a doctor who let me know when there was a change in treatment or thinking, or when they'd been flat out wrong. I guess that is NOT the way it goes, though.

Anyone?

I've lost 47 pounds since March. This is more interesting than you may think, at least it is to me.

There is a lot of shit that skinny people take for granted. For example, bones. I never had them before, but I have them now. In the past, people have actually commented on this lack of pointiness in my fizeek:

"You're cuddly!"
"Barrie is fun to hug!"
"You have no bones!"

These are, I'm sure, considered cutesy compliments. But they usually made me feel like a mess of mashed potatoes in a ziploc bag. Or a teddy bear, at best. But I am quickly on my way to becoming very UNcuddly.

I has a wrist bump. I has a collarbone. I has a jawline. Ankle bones has appeared too, but I won't post a picture cause they're incredibly ugly.

You skinny people don't realize how bizarre it is to lie down in bed and have to reconsider your favorite sleeping position because you have this NEW HIP BONE that pokes out. Or the surreality of walking past a shop, noticing something you like and thinking "That isn't gonna fit me," and then trying it on (cause hope never dies) and discovering that it does, indeed, fit you. An entire glittering realm of actually shopping in normal-size clothing stores is slowly opening up. And it feels very, very weird.

Every week there is another *NEW* feature on my body. Try to wrap your head around suddenly discovering things like this:

1. Realizing you could do with coring a THIRD new hole on your belt. I have now discarded this belt because it is just too long to deal with anymore.
2. Looking down at something and discovering that my neck fat doesn't collide with my shirt collar anymore.
3. The tops of my socks don't dig into my ankles and make that bulge.
4. My ass hurts when I sit too long (more bones).
5. I can use the third row of hooks on my bra.
6. I can get comfortable in an airplane seat.
7. I can fasten most seatbelts.
8. There is a space between my thighs. Light comes through it!
9. My rings fall off.
10. Sitting down and not having a belly-table in your lap. It just goes straight down, and I can't stop fondling it....
11. Chokers don't look retarded because I now have a neck.
12. I can now cross my legs at the knee, all lady-like.
13. I have a discernable jawline where there used to be only a stovepipe connecting my head to my body.
14. I am now clearly shaped like a female, instead of a brick.
15. I can make that farting sound with my armpits because I have hollows in them now.
16. I can sit all collapsed in on myself, like a telescope.
17. I got over being able to look down and see my toes a long time ago; now I can see my entire flippin FOOT.

I don't know if I can accurately translate the bizarreness of this experience using Livejournal. All I can relate it to is, basically, having a very slow body transplant. I walk past reflective surfaces and have this moment of panic when I don't recognize myself.

Learning how to pilot this new flesh vessel is also proving weird. I don't take up as much room as before, but in my mind I'm still the same size. I have propelled myself out of chairs and off the sofa with more force than is necessary a few times, and I still galumph around like I weigh a ton. But I no longer shake the bookshelf. A mindshift is also taking place: I'm getting to the point where people would no longer tag me as the fattest person in the room, or even use the "fat" adjective. I am entering the realm where people of *average* weight exist. Chubby. Truly bizarre.

I now weigh 169 pounds (my starting weight in America when I did Atkins was 245-250, and then my starting weight in China when I began again was 215) and I literally can't remember ever being this thin. I'm sure at some point in my life I had to be at that mark, but it was probably when I was about 14 and too short for it to seem thin.

Yes, I used to weigh 250 pounds. Check out this picture from 2002 if you find that hard to believe:


That picture is probably one of the worst ones of me in existence, and if I had known it was being taken, I would have done something about it. Fat people have a reportoire of methods for making themselves look thinner, especially in pictures. Beyond the whole "wear black" suggestion, there's also a whole bunch of stuff you can do in pictures so as not to take up the entire frame. Here's a peek into my personal list of Do's and Don'ts for posing for pictures.

NOTE: I'm not saying these pictures are GOOD ones, they're just the ones that illustrate what I'm talking about. Clicking the pictures in this section will take you to an entire gallery of examples. I tried to put these behind a cut, but it doesn't work.

DO:

1. Put yourself behind someone else. Grab other people and pull them in front of you. Put your arm around someone and shove half of yourself behind them while you're at it. Hug someone from behind. This is basic: the less of your body the camera sees, the smaller you can look.

Hide Behind

2. If you don't have a neck, angle your face downward to create a shadow under your chin. The camera flash is not your friend, cause it removes depth-creating shadows. Get photographed from above, if at all possible.

Chin Down

DON'T

1. Be photographed while eating. Not even as a joke. Fat people are fat cause they eat a lot, right?



2. Wear flat hairstyles. Makes your face look bigger.



3. Be photographed while dancing. Obvious reasons.



4. Don't give your profile. It shows you have no jawline.



5. Don't hunch all up on yourself! It's true what they say about good posture....



6. Don't pose inside something circular! You'd be surprised how many pictures of me standing inside some kind of round object I have. It just makes you look squat.



7. Let anyone "try" to pick you up. All their straining is evident in the picture. And check out that thigh.



And all these examples go out the window when you lose weight. Here's me now, wearing my AWESOME THRIFT STORE LOW RIDER JEANS ($8):





Pretty damn cool.

I finished one book today and began another one. Oddly enough, I ran across this sentence or a variation of it in both books. At the end of the first one, and the beginning of the second:

"There was a scent in the room, he recognized it as the scent.....of failure."

Or something like that. Both sentences claimed that there was a smell (maybe a stench, or an odor), and that the smell was "failure."

I didn't pay any attention to it until I saw it in the second book. I thought: This sentence went under my radar cause it is really trite (which is evident from it's cropping up in TWO books I am reading in the same day) and also, what DOES failure smell like?

I went out with the_reda and got some meat on a stick, came back home, and discovered the answer to my own question.

Cat pee.

Failure smells, for me, exactly like cat pee.

My female cat, Wilson, is in heat. Apparently this makes her pee on things, namely the bed in which I sleep. Not in the litter box, where the odor takes on a new dimension and doesn't bother me anymore. Over my holiday in America, she managed to pee on *every single sheet and blanket* in the bedroom, save for the ones that were closed up in the armoire. Now she has peed on those, too, cause they were on the bed this time.

I was disproportionately upset as I folded up the sheets and the blankets and stacked them on top of the other pissquilts in the corner of the bedroom, where they sat waiting to go to the dry cleaner. This smell is inextricably coupled in my psyche with the smell of people who can't get their shit together, who have too many fucking pets for their own good, who can't save any amount of money from month to month because they're foolish, who get their kids taken away because of the squalor in their houses. In other words, my parents.

Think about those people you see on the news who've had their entire house taken away from them and burned cause it was too filthy to salvage. Don't they always seem to mention that there were perhaps 50 some-odd cats in the house, too?

True, 50 some-odd pet finches would make just as big a mess as the cats, but bird shit doesn't smell like failure. Bird shit smells like Grandma's apartment, which represents "abandonment" in my Jungian-archetype Rolodex.

Failure smells like cat pee, no doubt about it. But I'm sure it has other connotations for different people/things. For instance, I bet cat pee doesn't smell like failure to Wilson!

I propose that Wilson the Cat can sense at least four things from every distinct whiff of pee. Since these sensations have no names in English, I will use cat shorthand. Wilson can smell pee and know one of the following things:


"?^" = Unknown male cat
"?v" = Unknown female cat
"!" = Foreign animal pee (including mine)
"++" = Tater's pee
"." = Her own pee.

Wilson smells not the failure inherent in her own urine. Matter of fact, she just jumped onto my lap and yelled at me, desiring carnal attention from a being which she considers to be a giant cat, like herself, just huge and bald. I imagine whatever she set out to do today, it was successful. If it wasn't, I am convinced it was quickly abandoned in favor of more easily reachable goals, such as peeing on my bed.

I just kissed her on her widdle nose. Success!

MEMES WITHOUT PICTURES

1. I am Chandler.
2. I am also Longcat.


THE END

This entry is pretty much an advertisement for my security software, which is TEH COOL. Prevx. Go to the blog and check it out. Laurel gave me a one-year license ($24) for it in December, and it is all I use.

http://www.prevx.com/blog.asp?ID=18

I'm posting this because if I do, I get free user licenses. And also because I just wrote a LONG review of the software on GiveAway Of The Day. I will give some licenses away if peeps are interested.

BUT MOST OF THEM I WILL KEEP.

**********UPDATE

I got 5 free one-year licenses, and there are now only THREE remaining.

Yesterday was Wes' birthday. Paintball was perpetrated. I had no idea there was a paintball course in Changchun, but there is.

Cost: About 8 US dollars per person, 65 balls. In Chinese monies, this is pretty expensive.
Temperature: 91.4 degrees.
Temperature in Camos: 135 degrees (approximately).
Temperature in motorcycle helmet: 309 degrees (head only).
Name of Location: "Wild Outdoor Counter-Strike Play."
Cost of black eyeshadow war paint: 50 cents.
Cost of crawdads consumed at outdoor beer garden afterwards: Same as paintball.
Bruise count: Three.

I'd never played paintball before, but I learned pretty fast after the first bullet in the kidney and thumb. A paintball in the thumb HURTS. And just because I only got three bruises doesn't mean I was only HIT three times. I took a couple of head/chest wounds that were pretty fatal, although Doug somehow managed to pick up a front chest wound and a hit on his back that looked exactly like an exit wound for the chest shot. I am jealous of this.

I am good at staying in one place and picking people off. Moving equals near-instant death, though.

FOREST TEAM SNIPERS FOREVER.

See photos.

Apocalypse Changchun

I MADE SUM PICHERS. YOU CAN SEE THUM.

LoLBoyfriend

About a month ago, I found three disks of America's Next Top Model and bought them. Because:

1. Fake dvds are cheap.
2. It was cold, and I was bored cooped up in my house.
3. I have a weakness for reality shows.

After a while, I broke down and watched the show, and became enthralled. It's quite interesting. Couple weeks ago, I started watching season two and felt this weird twinge of strong recognition over one of the combatants, namely Eva Pigford. I kept thinking "Damn, what have I seen her in before? Wait, have I MET her? No, she's been in some B movie somewhere and I've seen her before." I gave up thinking about it when I couldn't place her face and name and just watched the show. She went on to win the second season and I assume is now modeling like crazy all over the world.

Flash-forward to today. I check my email and there is a letter in there from Lynn Lamousin, the writer and director of "The Lady from Sockholm," a sock-puppet detective story. Summary:

"Wool War II rages and times are tough for sock puppets. Terrence M. Cotton, a washed-up gumshoe, finds himself knee-high in debt and praying for a big case. Enter Heelda Brum, a finely spun piece of high-end hosiery who hires Cotton to find Darnell, her missing mate. Cotton takes the missing sock case but the heat gets turned on high when Darnell's unraveled remains are discovered." (www.sockholm.com)

Apparently the movie is doing very well at festivals, and was recently featured on some magazine cover or another, hence the email. I get these emails because I was a volunteer prop creator on the set of Sockholm.

I claim ALL RESPONSIBILITY for the success of Sockholm. The person who designs and sews the miniature bags of rice, makes the hot-glue silkworms for the miniature terrariums, and cuts the corkboard is, of course, indispensable to the success of a sock puppet movie.

I went to the website and thought, hey, I am gonna download the trailer for Sockholm and show it to Sonny and brag about having worked on it. As it downloaded, I decided to see if I could snag the trailer for "The Walk" too while I was at it.

"The Walk" is this overtly religious low-budget movie I was in when I lived in Atlanta. My contacts for the audition were students of one of the black colleges near my house on Ralph David Abernathy, and one of my scenes was filmed about a block from where I lived. I remember walking on the campus to the audition in the basement of the library and feeling like I was giving off a high-pitched SQUAEEEEEEEEE alarm noise: WHITEGIRLWHITEGIRLWHITEGIRLWHITEGIRL.

Other than being the only white person on the set except for some of the crew (and thus being spackled with black-woman skin tone makeup by the makeup artist, cause that's all they had), the movie was incredible amounts of fun to make. I got to go to the homicide division of the East Atlanta PD and interrogate the lead character, this "haughty" female actress who gave everyone problems and pissed off half the staff who promised never to work with her again. I played a cop. I got to handcuff her. A couple times, cause the first time, I dropped the keys and we had to do it again.

I googled "The Walk," Onyx/Ninevah productions, and came up with the website for the movie. Looked around for a trailer, sadly none was available. Looked at shots from the movie.

And then I realized where I'd seen Eva Pigford before.

I was in a fucking movie with the bitch! The lead character, the actress who was the most pain in the ass to work with, that was her. I KNEW she looked familiar.

Small freaking world.

Huh.

I got a couple of unexpected guffaws out of this story.

Cop apprehends drug dealer and confiscates pot. Cop goes home with pot, puts pot into brownies and eats them with his wife (all the brownies, he says). Cop calls 911 later, convinced he and his wife have overdosed. On pot. Cop loses job.

Click here for the story, and AUDIO of the 911 call. The audio is what gets you. It is on the right, just click the play button:

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007705100450

Now, after listening to this, I've begun to wonder.....Is it even possible to overdose on pot? I've had pot brownies before, and they were intense to say the least. But at no point during my 6 hour high did I assume that I had overdosed. Probably cause it just never crossed my mind that one COULD overdose on pot. Listen to the call. Do my survey.



Take the One-Question Survey

It's that time of year again, and although I consider myself to be "aware," I had forgotten about this until I stumbled upon it online.

I just wanted to link to this to remind everyone (well, all the thinking people out there, anyway) that it has once again come the time to pay attention to this problem.

http://www.velociraptors.info/

Three weeks, total weight loss: 14 pounds.

Yippee!

This is creepy. Except for the books part.



And this is my favorite, mostly because of the last line.

     The Taiwanese earthquake of something like last week-ish is still wreaking havoc with the Chinese internets. Chinese websites are, of course, not affected too much, but poop on anyone trying to access anything on America's side of the planet.

     Recently Gmail and Livejournal have become intermittently accessible. Intermittently. And this is all. And Trillian is dead to me.

     As my internets have been ripped from my bosom, my house has become cleaner and cleaner. The past two days were spent reorganizing the closet, bathroom and bookshelf (the bookshelf was a task, lemme tell you) and there's more to do today.

    For Xmas I bought Sonny the first half of the third season of Desperate Housewives. We finished it in a week. And there is no more House, either.

    This morning I got up and looked at the faucet on the sink and groaned, "Now I have to shine that thing AGAIN!."
    
    Please restore my internets.

My birthday was this month, so sunjianmin took me to New Pants, what's basically a Chinese version of Glamour Shots and bought me an entire afternoon's worth of makeover and photo shoot. They have dozens of these outlets in my city alone, more than enough for it to be very common for every girl in the city to have her own portfolio of professional photos. They stuck me in a chair and made up my face for an amount of time which I will not disclose, in case you look at the pictures and say "They spent HOW long on her face? Doesn't show. What was wrong with her in the first place?"

It was a long time.

Then, cause I'm fat and Chinese people.....aren't......they couldn't use any of the fabulous costumes they had hanging around so they wrapped me in swathes of silk, in some cases they stuck sunjianmin in an Elvis suit and started posing us around so we'd look cute. It worked. Sometimes you can see in the photos which poses are awkwardly staged, and which ones are ones that came just from us fooling around cause we were in front of a camera. The pictures are then bound into a neat little book.

I hardly ever say anything good about China, so I'll mention this: I arrived at the studio at 10am, started shooting two hours later (oops! Long makeover, eh?) and we got out of there at around 5pm. Total cost, including printing of book and cd of photos: 100 Chinese monies. That's 12 dollars American. Pretty damned cool.

Check it ouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut.

We are teh Glamourous!

I love D&D. I really do. But if I had seen this ad on tv when younger, I'm not sure what my reaction would have been.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bPwMGjBmYg

Cast of Characters and analysis in order of appearance:

***Chick with the pigtails is WAY too into this game.
***Ditto for the blond dude. Too much koolaid for both of them.
***The DM looks old enough to be a child molester. And he looks like one of those really didactic DMs, like you're playing Live Action Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.
***I have never imagined a dragon as lame as that one. Also, my imagination is not in cartoon format.
***I think I've played D&D with the girl with the glasses. And she acted just like that. Generally it took her 20 minutes to make one decision each turn, and this girl looks like she's about to do the same.
***The dude with glasses and the blue shirt IS Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off (I noticed this after reading the Youtube comments) and is also the only person, along with Indecisive Glasses Girl, who looks like he's played D&D before.
***Here we see Pigtail girl again, mooning around wondering what to do. I'm guessing she's a bard.

Other remarks: watching Pigtail girl's eyes dart around like she's in a waking nightmare is hilarious. And I love how the voiceover sometimes switches into "inner voice command whisper" (use your lightning bolt!).

D&D is exactly like this. Every time. And I always cheer with the other players when we hit the dragon squarely in the head with our lightning bolts.

You say santa, I say dragons.

Santa! (dragons) Santa! (dragons).

First thing I thought while surfing Fark today and seeing this was, "Dude, that's my province!" Second thing was, "I give this one day to be on the national news. Nonstop."

I can't believe this hasn't been on the news yet.

I challenge!

I challenge all you tonedeaf mofos out there to take this listening test. And this is not one of those "listen calmly to the music and then some video of someone screaming their head off comes up so you get scared half to death" videos.

The test plays an assortment of pairs of tunes and asks you whether or not they are the same. A couple of them are tough as balls.

"The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct." says Jake Mandell, former band nerd.

My score: 83.3. Since I'm not a musical genius, this means the test is.....not hard. But fun! Scroll down below the intro paragraph and wait about a minute for it to load.

http://jakemandell.com/tonedeaf/