Eternal Sunshine

She is free to do what she wants.. She doesn't need no ex-boyfriends advise, which probably would be to go to celibacy. I wish I could put here in a little glass-bottle somewhere so I could control her and so she couldn't hurt my feelings. I'm still pitch black jealous, fueled by all the pain in the past. The feelings after finding out she had cheated on me and the humiliation after taking her back never went away. There was too much pride for me to swallow being another white guy in her life, and so many parts of me that didn't want to go with me on the ride that is the life with Samantha.

Just as we had spend a couple of weeks not talking, or not exchanging much more than some angry lines on New Year's Eve, things started to feel more neutral and I wanted to know how she was doing. I had been thinking about asking to be my sister, an attempt to find a place for her that would be bearable for me. That Friday night at 1.54 am she suddenly got online

[01:57] wana talk to u... as a friend.....

She was crying and drunk... after having made out with a 38 year old married expat that works in her office, in front of many of their colleagues. This, the day after she had kissed the college next to her in the office in a taxi on the way home.

I was trying to comfort her at the same time I felt the wound in myself open up again. I was glad she turned to me, it satisfied the possessive side of me to know she still had feelings for me, but it was unbearable to listen to it.

[01:59] Junkette: drunk
[01:59] Junkette: stupid
[01:59] Junkette: messed up
[01:59] Junkette: i dont know whats happenin
[01:59] Junkette: iim just messedd up.

She got on the phone, and cried... I was in chock and talked about us being friend, trying comfort her while inside I felt all black. The connection broke after a couple of minutes since her phone ran out of battery.
...
We continued to chat...
...
[02:52] Junkette: do u love zhNG WEN?
[02:52] Junkette: i feel horrid u replaed me so quuickyly
...
[03:02] Junkette: i miss a lot of pple.
[03:02] Junkette: i miss ou
[03:02] Junkette: u
[03:02] Junkette: [the name of the expat guy]
[03:02] Junkette: (germab n
[03:02] Junkette: merried guy
[03:02] Junkette: scvante
[03:02] Junkette: everyone..
[03:02] Junkette: i miss bits n puieces of evertone
[03:02] Junkette: i miss having somenoe.
[03:02] Johan in Beijing: guess i wasn't that special
[03:03] Johan in Beijing: so i could hold on to you
[03:03] Junkette: no
[03:03] Junkette: u were
[03:03] Junkette: u beli9eved uin me
[03:03] Junkette: u shared..
[03:03] Junkette: u were willing to stick w me
[03:03] Junkette: a girl like me
[03:03] Junkette: im really a piece of shit.
[03:03] Johan in Beijing: i'm off...
Session Close: Sat Jan 08 03:03:57 2005

The last pieces... I could understand her, pretty much have felt the same. There is many people I have feelings for, but it's not the same as making it possible to base a life together. I so understand her desperation to fill a void.

She will hopefully make the best decision, a decision that she feel that she can stand for and afterward look people in the eyes. One should never let the adult person's desperation and desires kill that inner child (which in Samantha's case right now is about 10 years old).

I was the one who broke up but I'm still sitting here feeling hurt and melancholic. We couldn't go on in our vicious miserable circles. I guess my senses caught up with my feelings in the end, but they are coming back with a vengeance. What that girl is doing is still seriously effecting my feelings. And I wish there would be an easy way to make it go away...

This is Samantha's blog entry:
Carnal desires

.


ZhangWen has been great to me and she is definitely right being causious with me. She knows that she came into my life when there was a lot of things going on in my head. It is a good thing that she is busy with her exams and let me have these days by myself. I admire so many things about her.

I guess this break my silence when it comes to handing out private things on this place... but I guess it will only be good friends that bother to read it... and hopefully it will help you understand me a little better. That was the point with this thing from the start.

Storm

With the country still in chock after the thousands of people that died in South-East Asia, my parents have had to think about other things.

Letter from my dad:

[Last night we had full storm here with winds peaking at strength of a hurricane. The forest across the main road is completely devestated, it looks just like a giant has been roaming around. Loads of trees has been snached off a couple of meters above the ground. We have been without electricity the last couple of days. Some of the power lines are in such bad shape that they will have to be rebuild. It has been nice to have a wood fired stove to cook on! Take care of you and lots of hugs... God's blessing from all of us. Dad.]
(My own translation)

Natten som gick har det varit full storm med orkanbyar här, skogen på andra sidan Hångervägen är fullständigt skövlad som om en jätte slagit ner den , massor av träd är knäckta några meter upp. Vi har varit utan ström ett dygn och fick tillbaka strömen ikväll, men många hushåll får ingen ström på upp till en vecka, vissa ledningar är så förstörda att de måste byggas om. Det var skönt att ha en vedspis att laga maten på då. Ha det nu så bra många kramar och Guds välsignelse från oss alla genom Pappa.

(That was in Swedish...)

My parents live on the country-side, in Åminne (just outside Värnamo) in Sweden.

Modern Art

Good or bad art? Scary according to ZhangFan. According to a book by the painter it was something about the focus on our clothes and style. Something about people trying to get attention. Guess without looking in that book I wouldn't have a clue... now I have... perhaps a clue... Well... it's...hmm... fun?

Well... No matter how fun it was, I'm a hell of a lot more touched by movies, books, and music. This format doesn't move me much.

DaShanZi Art District

Ceren contemplating the connection between human sexuality and the creation of this Mao bust. Sexuality is our drive for everything we do, right?

Today me, ZhangFan, and Ceren took a taxi down to the much hyped DaShanZi Art District. Very few Chinese seems to heard about it, while the whole foreign community seems to have been there. The place is a factory area where some deserted buildings have turned into art galleries and studios. Since there are still factories in operation, on the streets you see foreigner and workers in a quite odd mix. The contrasts are remarkable. Most places seemed to be closed at the moment, but there was still a handful of places worth visiting. As usual, modern art drives me crazy, being so pretentious and incomprehensible. The fact that it exist though I find very amusing and it gives me a warm feeling for the whole of humanity and the ways we seek to express ourself and get acknowledgment. Really!

My favorite

Feels actually pretty good and I can understand the use of this one.

Exercise equipment

You can see these machines all over the city. Must be some regulation that forces each block to have them. ZhangWen said that it was some sort of lottery that paid for them. To me they seem very pointless since there is no resistance in the movement. Could possible be good for your blood circulation, but walking or going up some stairs would have more effect I think.

Skype

I have lately tried to persuade my sister to get Skype. It is a little program that turns your computer into a phone. This is supposed to work as a little reminder to them... I'm you do not qualify in the category of being one of my numerous sisters, you might still want to consider it.

Do you have broadband? Consider buying a cheap headset with a microphone (my cost 32 RMB=$4 in the supermarket) and try it. My ID is "johan_garbolino". Free calls over the world. Very easy and works great. For a fee you can call fixed and mobile phones too. Skype should really pay me for the advertisement I'm doing for them.

Go get him!

Last night I was talking a couple of hours with Eddie in Boston. He just quit his well-paid job and is heading off into the world to learn all languages there is. He's got a little bag of money with him that will let him be able to survive a couple of years without working. He could retire now if he settled in China. We've got a young, single, Swedish guy out there with a bag of money, high education, great future prospects, a lot of time, and unsure what he wants to do with his life. Did you hear me all Chinese girls out there! I want him over here so I have someone to drink beer with, so go and get him.

UPDATE: Edward requested me to add that he is handsome, has a great body, is gentle and modest. If that is not enough I can say that his salary recently got raised a lot (he will continue to work as a consultant for a while). He's 1.78 m (?) tall. He could very easy get the things that is absolutely necessary for marriage (TV, washing-machine, and fridge), he could possible also satisfy the most demanding of Chinese women (car, flat, and RMB 100K+ in the bank). Guess that is all needed to know. His email will be available on request. Please attach a picture. Go get him!

What is your size?

Discussing this and that.

Buying YouZi

This is according to my dictionary a "pomelo", a fruit I didn't know the English name of, but knew the Chinese name for it! My Chinese getting better than my English? No.

2.4 Jin (= 1.2 kilo) youzi was with todays price 4.8 RMB ($0.57).

The street outside

The street outside is bustling with activity from early morning to late
night.

Change of Mood

When calling Stefan on midnight New Year's eve, his tone of voice and the fact that he almost immediately started talking about the disaster made me realize what a large impact this has had on people back home. He is working as a journalist for the Swedish public radio and had been calling relatives to victims of the disaster. Reading the Swedish news leaves you with a different impression than the other international news. It gives you a very Swedish angle on it. The focus is on the Swedish victims on the beaches in Thailand. The geographical distance to the disaster is not important, it's of course the emotional distance that the readers and viewers have to what has happened. In this case a large part of the population knows someone that has been affected, and a very large part of the population has visit these beaches, including myself.

I can't really say that I'm very affected, being away from much of TV and not reading tabloids, and only the foreigners that I meet here bring it up in conversations. I'm not aware of anyone close to me that has been involved in the disaster and I feel very grateful for that.

More than 9,000 foreign tourists, mostly Europeans, were still missing nine days after the Indian Ocean tsunami hit coasts and devastated beach resorts.
The Guardian 4 Jan

Sweden, the European country hit hardest by the disaster, has warned that its death toll could rise to 1,000. So far, the government has confirmed 52 deaths, with a further 827 people missing. It said it had no information about 1,495 others believed to have been on holiday in the region.

The death toll from the Indian Ocean tsunami is set to rise "exponentially" above current estimates of 150,000 as relief workers reach remote villages and survivors succumb to disease, UN officials warned today.

The Guardian 4 Jan

How I publish my Blog

I got asked how I publish my blog. This is how I do it.

The Blog
I have set up my blog using Blogger, the perhaps most popular blogging service around at the moment. It is very easy to get started and it's free. The blog will be posted on the address garbolino.blogspot.com. Since blogspot.com is blocked in China I can't see it in its original form nor comments made on it. I have configured it so that comments are automatically mailed to my gmail account. In fact, I can't edit or reply to any comments. The only power I have over comments is to remove the whole post (and possible repost it).

Image hosting
It is possible to post images directly to blogger without paying by using the program Hello, but since it doesn't work with proxies and it leaves you with little control over the images, I have decided to use the Flickr site to host my images. For their free account they have an upload limit to 10 MB/month. Since I compress the images to 50kB to 100 kB that is acceptable. In the future I might consider subscribing to their services or perhaps even moving my blog to their
site. Flicker also offer my the option to mail the images to the site and automatically have the images and the text posted on garbolino.blogger.com.

Extra feed
As I said above, blogspot.com is blocked since some official in China has judged that something written there might be harmful to the Chinese on line population. It is not blocked because of my blog. There are probably thousands of blogs on blogspot.com. To let my Chinese friends or friends in China be able to read my ramblings I use the services at the Feedburner site. Using their service I repost the blog to feeds.feedburner.com/Garbolino. It is not so pretty, it will only contain the last couple of postings, but it let people read my postings here and it is free.

UPDATE 050109: It is possible to load blocked webpages by loading them from other websites. One such service is Anonymouse. It is a little bit slow but so far it works. You can for example check out my blog here.

Complicated? Not really. The problem is that I'm in China using a service which is blocked and I don't want to spend any money. When I post, I right click on an image, choose 'send to' -'Mail recipient', choose 'Make all images smaller'. My email client starts and I write my post and send it (using the Gmail account) to Flickr - Voilà! - it's up on the web with my picture. Not that hard.

Any ideas for improvements are welcome.

Coffee in the afternoon

No school today so I use the time to write a couple of lines and have an afternoon coffee by myself in my little room.

This is not a diary. I don't reveal my most intimate feelings or secrets. It is not what it has turned into. When writing about things that I feel is very personal, then I get impersonal. The postings will be small reminders of what I have done and I think when I read these postings I will be able to fill in the blanks myself. Some good friends of mine might be able to do the same too.

I'm not sure what kind of impression the little anecdotal pieces that I write make, but I'm quite sure it won't be a very balanced view of how it is to live here. I write what I feel like, and that might not be what might be most interesting for others. I like this medium and I want to
continue writing. After my stay in India, studying in Germany, Spain, US, university years, people I've met, I have very little left but a box of pictures in my parents home. I never see them and the memories and impressions are fading fast. These post will stay up and be more easily remembered and accessed. Hope it will make it easier for me to stay in touch with people that I care about.

I huset där jag bor...

The building where I live on the fourth floor. Flags are out to celebrate the new year. This and slogans on the public billboards are the only sign of celebration.

ZhangFan's birthday

ZhangFan is my friend and language tutor since more than a year back.
We've spend A LOT of time together chatting by now and we have become
good friends. At periods of time we have met up every day and chatted for about 2
hours. I think she mostly does it because she think it is interesting,
but I also pay her a little for the trouble (10 RMB/h). Yesterday we met up as
usual at BeiDa, this time at ShaoYuan building 7 since all other places
are so cold. After chatting for about 2 hours, mostly about whether people
that were passing by were Korean or not (ZhangFan has a thing for Korean guys)
and/or whether she considered them to be fat or not (only if it was a girl), she told me it was
her birthday! She's born on January the 1st! I didn't know. Guess I'm
not such a good friend after all... on the other hand I hardly remember
anyone's birthday... We went to her favorite place on earth, KFC, and
had French fries and ice-cream, waiting for her friend to come. Later
her friend bought her even more stuff to eat.

We made an appointment to go out for lunch today. Since sat up all night
surfin' (I'm still working on a proposal to that company) I delayed it
to dinner. We went to the 'Sculpture in Time' Café in WuDaoKou, which
she seemed to think was very exotic. I'm sure she will talk a lot about
that experience with her friends. I bought a book for her as a gift, and
then... back to the glorious KFC for more dead chicken.

Happy birthday ZhangFan!

The plan

I've gotten started on my little project which is to plan an initial market assessment for a US company. The guys have been really helpful and have not assumed that I know anything about the telecom market and not much about telecom at all for that matter. I've had 'lessons', where my colleage Jamie taught me how the infrastructur of the networks work and who manages them here in China. They have forwarded a zillion documents and emails that I have to catch up reading. The plan is the following:

* Read and try to understand the zillions of documents.
* A miracle occurs
* The great plan emerges
* Profit

How could people survive in the pre-google era? Guess that www.acronymfinder.com www.howstuffworks.com will come in handy too.

The office is on the eight floor in the Union Plaza, just behind the Fullink Plaza. I take the subway to ChaoYangMen and walk a little bit. Doesn't take me more than about 50 minutes from my room to the office. During this week there has't been that many people in the office since most employees are out on location. We've got Arissa the always cheerful Receptionist, Eva the Office Manager, Ben the Executive Director, Jamie the Market Development Manager, and me the Project Manager. The rest of the 15 people or so I don't really know that well or haven't met yet, including the founder and big boss David since he is on honeymoon.

New Years Dinner

Me and Wen.

We had a really good evening going out with TianMengYuan and her boyfriend. After finishing dinner we went to Moonhouse celebrating New Year, made a quick visit to Lush, and finished the evening eating bbq:d Chicken wings in a 'greasy spoon' kind of place.

TianMengYuan's boyfriend got drunk after a couple of glasses of the weak Chinese beer! Got all red faced and fell asleep while we were eating! He told us he easily got drunk, and yes, he was telling the truth. Pretty funny.

New Years party

We had dinner together in the apartment on New Years eve. In the picture
TianMengYuan is steaming buns and frying vegetables together with
ZhangWen. Afterwards we headed to Moonhouse and made a quick visit to
Lush, before ending up eating again (grilled chicken wings) at a small
place close to the aparment.

McShrek

This place sells hamburgers made of Ogre meat.

Spotted by the 4th ring next to BeiHang University.