just to keep you abreast...SARS is freaking everybody out here. i have been pretty sick for a week but mostly in my head. snotty and all. people keep telling me to go to a hospital because you can just drop dead from it's quick progression. but i know why i got sick. i don't really have a cough(knock on wood) and i don't want to be sick and more vulnerable, and go to a hospital where people actually have it. so, i'm ok. i'm just sick. and back to our regularly scheduled program...

homosexuality is a very touchy subject around anyone i've met here so far. not to say it has come up that often, but the general consensus is clear. in fact the gay community culture is so sub, that on the up-stroke while giving head, there are reports of getting the bends. but here is something i find totally interesting: body language and body contact between same sexes is more intimate than in america. girls walk down the street with arm in arm, and boys will stroll with pinkies locked. women i knew in foshan would touch me all the time. interesting. but the kind of contact that lacks sexuality. it is just intimate.

so i was given the name of a jewish man here in beijing. and he just invited me to have seder with him. my jewish mother will be moved to tears knowing i will be celebrating passover in china on the high holy days. i'm not even a jew anymore in the states. well i am. but only in my blood. and when it makes me look good. i'm not even kidding.

my dreams of late are of heartbreak and broken home. it takes a molecule of sound or smell to trigger vermont and queens nostalgia of days past. i have have known so many more tears of sorrow than joy and when i am placed in this test of survival, it is the sorrow i remember most. all of the fighting. all of my pets who are gone. lacking the ability to reckognize who were allies and who were enemies. feeling so alone and disconnected. my religion is the rebellion to those days. to that part of me. to that powerlessness. and i can not access my church yet. this has been really hard and i wonder what the difference will really be on the other side of something. this is really hard.

< yeah >