Two weeks into my 62-day Shanghai lockdown, I come to hate my second-floor neighbor. To be fair, we’re all losing it, but this guy just ratted us out to the entire 200+ person compound WeChat group. All we did was…
Hello again
It’s been a while. The other day I read some fanfiction that I wrote back in 2006 and okay, here is the thing. It wasn’t that bad. It certainly wasn’t great, or even good. But I had a few well-written…
The best and worst books of 2020 (so far)
One of the lasting effects of quarantine has been that I started to read for fun again. Over the last couple of years, I’ve completely fallen off the wagon. Then, COVID happened and when the illness started to devastate Asia…
Dianshan Lake
Last Saturday, I went to Dianshan Lake, an oasis right on the border of Shanghai and Suzhou. It was so nice to get away from the city and feel like you were in nature, and in some ways feel normal…
What it’s like to travel in China in 2020
We left Shanghai this past weekend, for the first time since arriving in March. Actually, that’s a lie. I left for a weekend in Moganshan back in May, which was a two-hour drive away into the mountains of Zhejiang. But…
Recovery
I am officially entering month 8 of surgery recovery. I feel like I lost an entire year of my life to my back. More than two years if I count the way my back limited me beforehand. I hate how…