sept 17

(a response to my virginian friend)
i've decided to go on a date with a chinese girl every week. the main benefit i've gotten from these dates so far, apart from not being lonely, is that i hear all these crazy stories about peoples lives, in the social medium that i am best equipped to draw people out; i'm trying, as something that will be the subject of whatever i write, to comprehend the results of this syllogism:
1, every person is almost an infinity of lived experience, emotion, etc (learned from having been in love with a few people)
2, there are 7 billion people alive today

doing this stuff with girls here instead of virginia makes the second part a lot more real. i'm trying to understand how precious human emotion is to me, when there's so much of it... so the other night in an anonymous chinese cafe i drank beer listening to a woman with long, straight black hair hold back tears as she told me about her alcoholic father from anhui province, and her dj boyfriend (he likes dj cam too, made me think of your adolescence). i'm not interested in being a reporter collecting these facts, because facts seem to be too concrete- these feelings are not, they are preserved in aspic. i just want to write a biography of the emotions that zip around this city along with wireless internet, subway trains, police cars...
in some ways, this place is a perfect backdrop because it is so urban, but in an almost less threatening way, i can do whatever i want without fear of any kind here, silhouetted against gigantic neon buildings and handing roses to women and drinking brandy in smoky expensive nightclubs. but its like gotham because its not really identifiable in some ways (even beijing has a more reconizable urban form than here- here, as i suspect bangkok, jakarta, etc, is very repetitive, a constant iteration of the same form).