On coworkers

It's 3:22 am, I'm still up for no apparent reason, I can tell that I will probably go to sleep and wake up around 8:00 am for no apparent reason, and I'm blogging because I'd decided today during lunch that I'm bloody blogging tonight and no amount of exhaustion was going to stop me, by golly!

I truly, truly wish I had a shot of whiskey or tequila something strong and vile and suitably engine-cleaning right then, because the end of that statement demanded a shot of something that really ought never to touch a human esophagus. Although, in very instantaneous retrospect...anything that ends in "by golly" probably doesn't deserve a drink stronger than warm milk.

I digress here to mention how much I hate warm milk. This is a story I often tell friends who (I think) haven't heard it before, and I'm reasonably certain that's the case for most of my friends in New York and a goodly many in Virginia. Basically, during my first few years in China, while my father was getting his degree here and my mother was supporting him by working at the local photography factory, my grandparents on my mother's side felt that the most suitable breakfast for a growing boy was boiled milk with an egg or two made sunny-side up tossed into it. Yes, it tasted about as good as it sounds, which is to say I'd almost rather have eaten live, wriggling nematodes. Almost. But being the obedient Chinese boy I was supposed to be I ate it and never complained. The entire awful concoction was also laced with a small amount of sugar - arguably to make it more palatable - but really it just lent the thing a sort of insidious quality that makes me surprised I still like sugar as much as I do. It's like it was trying to fool me into liking it. Here, little boy, eat this! It's sweet, so it must be good! What? What do you mean this tastes like soggy pig bladder?

So, to this day, warm milk and sunny side up eggs, together or otherwise, are two substances guaranteed to nauseate me.

This may also be part of the reason I get maybe one good night's sleep in seven.

Anyway, back to work - one of my coworkers is romantically fixated on a man going through a divorce with his wife of several years. He has three children. She doesn't seem to understand why, precisely, getting involved with this man would be a bad idea. My general manager and I have actually spent some time trying to explain, much as you might to a ten year-old, why dating a divorcing man is generally a horrendous idea. ("No, honey - you can't date the emotionally unavailable man with three children. Now go back to bed.") I couldn't believe I was having the conversation. It smacked of trying to explain to a person why strapping bleeding beefcakes to her ass and jumping into a shark tank was a bad idea.

Halfway through, however, I stopped wondering how on earth this woman had managed to avoid being eaten by ravenous sharks the last thirty-odd years, and started wondering whether this was really what mainland China was doing to its people. Now...I've lived in the US since I was five, and for all intents and purposes I am an American. I still do hold to some strong emotional bonds with certain Chinese ideals, but on the whole, they've been filtered through my parents and, thus, aren't nearly as concentrated as they might have been had I grown up there. I look back on my parents' marriage - the colossal, possibly even leviathan, gaps in communication; what seems an almost complete unwillingness not only to compromise, but even to accept the other person's viewpoint as potentially valid; the years of festering resentment over the most trivial matters - and in that context my coworker doesn't seem all that strange at all.

I haven't visited China in ten years, but relating to people, communicating with people, and being willing to open yourself up to people can't be such an alien concept in my ultimate homeland, can it? I mean, humans by their very nature need to reach out and touch people, find other people in sympathy with them, socialize! Can an entire society exist that makes a woman fundamentally unable to understand why, exactly, a man who is trying to sever a very strong emotional bond with the woman he's loved for years isn't exactly prime dating material? And so unable, in fact, that I think she's asked me to clarify at least a dozen times the last two weeks why, precisely, seeing him is probably a bad idea?

Unless, god forbid, this is some kind of bizarre Chinese mating ritual? "I'll talk to the computer guy about my fixation with the divorcing man! That'll make him like me for sure!"

Don't laugh. I wouldn't be contemplating this if it weren't a definite possibility.