Habit Formation

In middle school, I was part of a drill/dance team.

It's a Texas thing. Fight songs, Friday night lights, and stadium heat-- our curricular calendars revolving around the glitzy triad of football team, marching band, and red-lipped ladies in jazz shoes. I remember applying to my face a very precise permutation of warpaint, dictated by our director to the very brand and color (on the waterline went a Maybelline highlighter in some wintery shade, maybe "Alpine Snow"?)-- a hassle that put me off makeup-as-streetwear till sophomore year of high school. I could kick pretty high, struggled with sticking my double, showed very discernably almost no dance talent. I still have my right split, but whatever grace I might have accrued has been outgrown, just like I've outgrown those spangled red gauntlets and flesh-colored tights.

Since I've come to China, I've noticed an old drill team habit resurfacing, in the supermarket aisles and the smoky plazas crowded with pedestrians. I stand with my hands at my waist, thumbs pointing forward and fingers braced at the small of my back-- the way I filed into so many high-kick lines to brassy music, on that little yellow field by the high school. It's whatever. My stint as a Crimson Cadet wasn't a very formative experience in general. I can only guess this has something to do with how awkward I felt, shaking my silvery poms around the field lines and being told to "project"-- to smile my disconcerting jack o'lantern grin at the highest row of the bleachers. I feel awkward like that in China, a little helpless and vaguely like performing. My American-ness, unverifiable by yellow hair or obvious accent, slips on and off me like a drill team grin.

We went to the local market, which has changed surprisingly little since this time last year, the same fashions still arrayed on the silvery mannequins. The puff-sleeved dress in which I posed in front of a snowy Branford courtyard with Laura and Caroline still hangs on its rack, in mint-green, slate, and purple. I bought another dress, its bodice proclaiming in felted all-caps, "NO ONE SEEMS TO UNDERSTAND THE PROJECT." I find it charmingly cryptic, and anyway it's neither obscene nor (gasp) ungrammatical, so yeah.

In my perpetual quest for little beauties I found also this: a bin of lovely apples, with a matte satin finish and a porcelain pallor, as if someone had dragged them onto a .psd and toggled the saturation bar far to the left. Which is exactly what I'd like to do with my world, most of the time. "Life," I've said out loud a lot-- it's the sort of social misstep I make with alacrity in good company-- "looks best lightly desaturated and tilted towards blue." We didn't buy any. I didn't think they'd be as good to eat as they were to look at.

I've started wondering about CET Harbin. As a newbie Light Fellow, I've got no idea with it means to attend an intensive language program. When I try to picture it, I get some composite of Xu laoshi's L3 heritage class (a cult) and TASP (the only sleepaway camp I've ever been to, though hardly representative of that summery genre of experience... also a cult). I hate making generalizations based such a scanty sample of n=2 (which hasn't stopped me in the past), but I guess it'll be cultish? I'm a little bit afraid I'll bomb my placement test with such aplomb that the resident director (a biffle of some cousin of my father's, apparently-- Harbin-as-homecoming means for me a very small world) will mournfully rescind my acceptance. And there's the matter of full immersion. I've developed the boorish habit of volleying curses in sotto voce when I can't make myself understood. Usually this happens when I try to explain something internetty to my grandmother (something that'd be nigh-impossible even if I spoke perfect Chinese or she perfect English), a situation unlikely to arise in Harbin. But still. I won't have that luxury under language pledge.

As least blogging is becoming (almost disturbingly) easy. I've got this tendency to navel-gaze when I'm not surrounded by more interesting thinkers, who keep me flitting around the edges of their ideas instead of submerging myself in my own banal ones. Without that constant hum of distraction, that tendency's coming out. I've discovered something about myself as a result-- I've got a really irritating prose style. It seems to get at once primmer and doughier by the day; eventually I'll find myself producing the most impenetrably convoluted Victorianesque fare (because my soul strains naturally towards more decorous times), as my engagement with the English language fades. So, sorry, Dear Reader. (Isn't that whole direct address thing the most annoying Victorianism ever?)