Aventurina King

The last time that happened was in China.  I had over-immersed myself in Chinese literature and my blogs' English was compromised by a small army of grammatical mistakes.  At the time, I was painstakingly pushing through To Live, courtesy of the author Yu Hua, and Huang Jin Shidai, by Wang Xiaobo.  Both of these men hold quarters in the pantheon of recognized, studied and revered Chinese authors.  Their works are ornamentations and distortions (to a limited degree) of communist propaganda stories: they generally involve hopelessly naive country bumpkins who satisfy their sexual cravings in explicit and humorous ways (by squatting in the local women's bathroom for example.) 

At first, I had enjoyed these novels.  They were like toys shelved up high which you can barely touch with the tip of your index finger.  They were beyond the grasp of my Mandarin reading skills, but even I could make out that the writing was humorously simplistic and that it was trying to reach out to existential questions through childishness.  A few months down the road I began to view this simplicity as pretentious and was repelled by it.

Therefore, when I came back to the States, I naturally turned my attention towards the opposite: novels in which baroque sentences, weighted down by idioms and acrobatic literary allusions, bloomed as fervently as ornamentations on a Moroccan rug.  Well, this wasn't the reason why I started reading books by Guo Jingming, the 20-some year old prophet of China's youth.  It was because they were sentimental, like goo-ed down chic-lit, but then again, they were in Mandarin, and language practice was enough to justify this new guilty pleasure.  

An exemplary passage which surprised me, not by its eloquence, but by the fact that it made me cry:

"Xiaosi [the aloof talented high-school Romeo, but he doesn't know it himself] once told me [me being the socially awkward apple polisher Juliette] a story about angels.  I forgot the story's details, but I can vaguely remember its outline: everyone has a guardian angel who looks over him or her.  If this guardian angel feels that your life is too miserable, that your heart is weighed down by an excess of sorrow, it will come down to earth and take on the form of a person near to you.  It could be your friend, it could be your lover, your parents, or the stranger you crossed paths with briefly.  These people appear silently by your side, and accompany you in your happiest moments.  And then, they disappear, as silently as they came.  But they leave happy memories.  Maybe in the future, you will come across endless hardships, but at least, you have those memories to warm your heart and give you courage.  So, all these people that leave us silently, they are all guardian angels, returning to the kingdom of heaven."

Excuse n. 1 : New words need New illustrations:

Once a week, I will go through my "intellectual" phase.  Those few hours in which every bible-length philosophy or molecular physics tome is like a pebble begging to be turned over (or a pigeon begging to be frightened into spreading its wings-although Parisian pigeons will not budge under any circumstance, you have to walk around them).

At this moment, I am thinking a lot about reading the History of Western Philosophy, but more so am asking myself a few questions:

1)Is the act of smiling to express happiness genetically inherited, or is it something that babies have to learn to do?

2)What of the act of crying?

Granted, the answers to these questions may be out there in some wikipedia entry.  But smiling's fundamentality in human behavior points to it being transmitted genetically.  Smiling is the only way to shake off those layers that qualify us as strangers without even speaking a word.  I can only surmise smiling must have been very useful to the prehistoric Aventurina.  If she could come into a neighbor's cave to seek shelter from the rain and win over agreement with a smile, how much higher her chances of surviving and passing on the gene.

I have begun yoga exercises.  This all started when my mother came to town the week before.  My mother has loving blue eyes which can take on an intense stare when she is talking about something she believes in.  She talked about yoga this way.  She had started reading an out-of-print bestseller, a yoga memoir of a balding writer who had experienced, and written about, the art's wonders.

I ordered two yoga DVDs over Netflix.  One is called Yoga for Losing Weight (it doesn't actually make you lose weight, it's the balance of your mind and spirit which gives you the strength to go dieting, supposedly...) and AM and PM Yoga.  And there I was, a week later in the living room, desperately trying to hold the poses illustrated on the TV set.  After three days, I have not yet noticed anything divine, or miraculous going on within.  The exercises do heat up my body, they give me a slight burning sensation in my palms (which I attribute to the work of the mind) and do relax my muscles.  Only to give me cramps the next morning.

On a different, but equally newsworthy note, I was invited to see Larry King setting off the Nasdaq opening bell last Friday.  It was a sympathetic publicity gesture that gave me an impressive glimpse of the American publicity machine (I spent nine months in China as a publicity manager, the comparison of American and Chinese publicity is illuminating my days).  The ceremony took place, as it does every morning and evening, in the Nasdaq studios at the base of 4 Times Square. The crowd of journalists and publicists skirted around the ring of cameras.  At the center of the semi-circle stood Larry King, and his wife (perhaps, probably).  Two minutes before 9 30, everyone was asked to begin clapping "you are live" boomed a tall woman with a headset after she had detailed the hardships of clapping for two-minutes straight.

Countdowns, any countdowns, make me nervous.  I guess they harken back to cinematic bombs which have crystallized in my subconscious through years of viewing and re-viewing.  By the time I had finished thinking this, the Nasdaq market had opened.