Messages like these get me motivated. For the past few months every time I have opened this blog I have done little more than try to get idiot blogspot to format the fucking photos as I like them on the page, just before giving up a little bit later. Messages like these reminds me that there are other things I could be doing with my time and posts.
I wonder what exactly being ‘idiosyncratic’ means.
The fact of the matter is that I am actually rather bored in China. And this isn’t the fault of China as a place so much as the fact that I am mostly just a boring person. Being such, I pretty much do anything to constantly distract myself, like signing up for a 10 week long course on grammar theory geared towards teaching grammar. It’s nice, and it makes the time go by. But after having a particularly trying week for a number of reasons (I won’t get into them) I found myself trying to get the work for this class done as quickly as possible before a midnight deadline. I got momentarily fed up with the assignment and decided that I would do a better job of it if I had cake.
Now, when I do things like this it does not mean that I will take the five minutes it takes to go get cake and not think about my assignment, but rather that I will continue to think about the assignment as I walk towards and back from cake.
The point is that my mind is generally occupied by other things, so I wasn’t paying much attention when I damn near toppled down the escalator. I made a grab for the hand rail in time, and was pulled back to the landing I had just come from right before I ate a step.
I guess the fault was my own, as I really wasn’t paying much attention, but after years of doing everything in automatic one hopes you can do something as easy as going down some escalators without much of a problem.
And then I saw what the problem was; someone had switched the direction of the escalators. The right escalator now came up, and the left now went down.
The next day, they had been switched back.
Now that is really not the kind of thing that should bother a person, but I tend to obsess. And so I spent the passing days observing the escalators, looking for patterns, trying to understand their behavior , and trying to see if there was a why.
I’m pretty sure their isn’t. One day the elevators more one way, the next they may be the same, only to swap a day later. It’s like looking at a string of binary code, really. Each day could be a one or a zero, but you never really know which.

In both of these pictures I am going down the escalators.

And it pisses me off every time I use the damn thing. And it still trips me up. But there is a saving grace to this whole stupid thing, and that is the fact that it trips everyone up. So every now and again I get to watch a puzzled native hurriedly get on the wrong elevator and damn near trip over themselves doing so. And while this gives me a chuckle, I still fall for the trap pretty damn regularly.