My Weekly Run-Down: 12/6/09

I figured that with the College Football season now pretty much over, I would need another weekly entry to take the place of my now concluded Power Rankings.  I came up with this idea of a weekly run-down to go over various things that happened in the previous week.  While it will probably be more time-consuming for me, it will also be far more entertaining for you readers out there on a weekly basis.  So here we go:

Five Things I’m thinking about This Week:

1)     A Lack of Plans—Nobody in China makes plans for anything ahead of time, if one of the teachers wants to take us out for dinner on a given night, we usually don’t find out about this until we are on the bus going home.  This is compounded by the fact that if anybody else is aware that a group is going out to eat, people will just join along.

About a month ago Gavin and I wanted to take a couple teachers out to dinner.  They had taken us out earlier so we owed them (you don’t split bills here, you just alternate taking each other out).  Our problem was that we made it known to a bunch of other people on the teacher bus that we were doing this.  When we got off the bus we suddenly had become a group of seven people when we were expecting four.  Needless to say our bill that night was much more expensive.

Flashforward to this week, and we are leaving the office to get on the teacher bus when one of the English teachers tells us that another teacher from the previous dinner wants to take us out to eat and drink.  While I was planning to do a bunch of writing that night, I obviously agreed to go along.  When the time came for all of us to get off the bus, however, nobody mentioned that anything was happening.  We just quietly followed each other off the bus so that nobody knew we (8 of us) were going out.

I find the entire process bizarre.

2)     Oh the Weather Inside is Frightful—It is really cold in our apartment.  I woke up in the middle of the night last night and my clock indicated to me that it was 52 degrees in my bedroom.  That is cold!  Insofar as I can tell, there is nothing we can do about this.  The government regulates the heat in the apartment building and we’re not about to go and buy a space heater for the next three weeks (when we leave for break).

     On the bright side, at least the heat seems to be working because it’s not going to get above freezing until we return from winter break.

3)     Locked in the Classroom—On Thursday when I arrived at my first year class, I found all of the students standing in the hallway.  The doors to the classroom were locked and there were two students asleep in the room.  I had two of the girls run up to the English office to get another teacher (assuming the other English teachers would have keys).

    When the teacher arrived, she started to bang on the window to the classroom in hopes that the students inside would wake up.  This was unsuccessful and we brought the students to another classroom while I wondered why one of the head English teachers did not have a classroom key.

4)    Tell Me Why—The Grammy Nominees were announced this week, and I just have one question: Why are there so many music awards shows?  VMAs, AMAs, CMAs, Grammys . . . It seems like every week I read about Taylor Swift winning more awards at a new award show.  Sure I love Taylor Swift just as much as the next guy (actually, probably a lot more), but who is actually gaining from all of these awards shows?  Do people actually watch them all?  Do people watch any of them?

5)    Not a Girlie Show—Over the past couple weeks my roommate and I have watched the first three seasons of 30 Rock.  Whenever anybody told me that I should watch the show, they also told me that the relationship between Liz (Tina Fey) and Jack (Alec Baldwin) was not a romantic one, and not the reason to watch the show. 

I, however, believe that the relationship between Jack and Liz is the only reason to watch the show.  Their overly-platonic relationship is one of the most interesting ones I have ever seen on TV.  In some ways it is the antithesis of sitcom relationships as the writers (ostensibly Fey herself) go out of their way to make it known that these characters will never end up together.  On the other hand, the tension between the characters is so prevalent that the audience (at least me) WANTS the characters to end up together. 

I love it when Liz pokes her head back into Jack’s office after talking about something.  I loved it when Jack went back to Liz after her pregnancy scare and when Liz went back to the hospital to be with Jack after his heart attack.  I love that Liz loves hanging out with Jack’s mom, and I love that every so often they send the characters off to some random event together (i.e. the business retreat, the high school reunion, the Prince’s birthday) as if they were a couple.

However, the rest of the show is a complete mess.  Tracey Morgan only has about half a dozen funny storylines (I loved when he was on Larry King) which is disastrous considering that we’re talking about 6/58 episodes.  Jenna is the most worthless character I have seen on a television show since Brendan disappeared from Step by Step.  She is neither funny nor interesting nor hot. 

People who think Kenneth, Grizz, Dotcom, Jonathan, or Frank are funny are probably deluding themselves into remembering the characters only when they are at their best (because their typical storylines suck).  Kenneth is probably the most overrated character on television.  Scott Adsit (Pete) might be funny, but he is CRIMINALLY UNDERUSED.

Furthermore, the show has no handle of its own continuity.  It just throws things out there (like the secret Liz heard from Drew’s ‘mother’, Floyd having a key to Liz’s apartment, Tracy being hunted down) and never attempts to resolve them or bring them up again.  Maybe my standards are too high from How I Met Your Mother, but I expect my shows to have tight continuity.

Anyways, I still like the show because the relationship between Liz and Jack is so interesting and those characters are hilarious.  I just wish the writers gave the supporting cast more to offer.

Rising up My iTunes Play Count

Last Christmas: Taylor Swift—I decided to amp up my iTunes Christmas playlist this year, and the first place I looked was to Ms. Swift’s holiday album.  While I am still unsure if it is a real album, you can buy it on iTunes to hear her renditions of some great Christmas tracks.  This is probably my favorite song of the six.

I know I’m not in America because . . .

. . . if I really don’t want to discuss the ND coaching search, all I have to do is not respond to e-mails.  If I was in a business job in Chicago, Boston, New York, or DC right now, I’d probably have to talk about this sort of thing every day with various people.  If I had been home for Thanksgiving, everybody would have asked me about it.  Here in China, nobody outside of my apartment knows anything about Notre Dame Football.

They do, however, know a lot about the NBA, and I talked to several people about Allen Iverson’s ‘retirement’ last week.  I probably wouldn’t have talked to anybody about A.I. if I was living in America right now.

Hypothetical Question of the Week:

Here are two options for Notre Dame Students, fans, and Alumni:

Option 1:

Notre Dame ends each of the next ten seasons with a record between 8-4 and 11-1.  The team plays in 6 BCS bowl games over that period of time, winning 3 of these games.  The team never plays for a national championship in this timeframe.  All other aspects of the football program (disciplinary and academic) remain on par with where they are today.

Option 2:

Notre Dame ends each of the next five seasons with a record between 9-3 and 12-0 and the team plays in 4 BCS games.  However, during this period the graduation rate of the football team drops below 75%, 10 JuCo players are admitted to the University, and five players are charged with felonies.  The team wins the 2014 BCS Championship Game.

Which option do you choose? 

Meal of the Week:

This week, we had a visit from the man that chose Gavin and I for our current position. He is an American priest that works in South Korea, and he came to check up on the school that he founded about 10 years ago.  On Wednesday he took us to dinner at a Korean Barbecue restaurant.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with it (because I do believe you can get it in America), Korean Barbecue essentially involves serving raw meat (usually beef or chicken) that you then prepare on a grill in the center of the table.  Usually the meat is marinated in Korean style sauces, and since you basically cook it yourself, you can cook it as much as you desire. 

I think Korean Barbecue is great because it is essentially just an entire meal of meat.  While others oftentimes put the meat in lettuce to eat, I just pick it off the grill with my chopsticks and eat it plain (which is awesome).  We usually get rice with our food, and sometimes people order other smaller dishes which I will eat depending on how they look.

One weird part of the meal, however, is that the meat comes to the table in large strips and you then use scissors to cut it.  I find the practice of cutting meat with scissors very odd.

Overall, Korean Barbecue is usually what we eat when we go out to dinner with the religious (the Salesians) that operate our school, and while every individual place that we have been is slightly different, they have all been outstanding.

Quotation of the Week:

I hope to usually write quotes from other people in this space, but this is probably my greatest and wittiest quick response joke of all-time.

Fr. Henry: “So, will you be going to law school?”

Me: “No.”

Fr. Henry: “Well, your dad’s a lawyer, isn’t he?’

Me: “Yea he is . . . but was your dad a Priest?”

Picture of the Week:

This used to be a large river in Yanji that people needed the bridges in the background to walk across.  Now, people can just walk across the river.  It’s really cold here.