Sweeping the Dirt

Yesterday ACC arranged for us to go see a "Chinese Play" - actually it was "The Playboy of the Western World" by JM Synge, translated into Chinese and set in Beijing. It was very odd, and obviously I didn't understand most of what they were saying, but thanks to the English plot summary handed out at the door I was able to follow most of the plot. It concerns a man who turns up at a beauty parlor (I think in the original, Irish version it was a bar) claiming to have killed his father, which everybody thinks is very exciting and they decide to let him hide out there and all the women try to seduce him. The best part was when the four women in go-go boots and miniskirts started dancing spastically to Chinese pop music and pouring beer on the playboy. I have no idea what that was all about, but it struck me as very Asian.

When I got home, I dined on Convenient Noodles and crackers and started watching a Jeeves and Wooster, but then Lili came by and my roommate, who had been watching a movie, said we had to listen for a minute and unplugged her headphones. "Please don't," I said, but I think she thought I was kidding, and before I knew it we were watching Scary Movie 2, which is a spoof on horror movies, and which I do not think anyone reading this would enjoy. It was extremely excessive and gross, and I didn't understand any of the references (except one which I think was a reference to The Canterbury Ghost - is that possible?) but somehow I found myself laughing from time to time. A sort of "I can't believe this is happening" sort of laughter.

Then we watched a very strange movie called Palindromes, which significantly messed with my head. It was rather intense and had some very upsetting subject matter, but it was interestingly done. The main character was played by about ten different actresses of different ages and races. Sometimes she was a very large black woman, sometimes a skinny white girl with long red hair, etc. This was not as confusing as I expected it to be.

This morning I went to the gym. I'm trying to get back in my routine, which was thrown off by our trip to Sichuan and the midterm before that. As I ran on the treadmill I listened to Dressy Bessy and watched about half a dozen women in blue jackets sweeping the dirt outside. This is very Chinese. People sweep the dirt all the time. I saw a woman sweeping the dirt on Mt Emei, which was even stranger, somehow, than sweeping city dirt. When you sweep the dirt, how can you tell when you're done? There's not going to be any less of it. Perhaps it's simply meant to serve as an extremely obvious metaphor for life.