One of Those Days

Today, I woke up at 5 am to get to work early and watch the sad US-Portugal game, I then spent the rest of my morning becoming incredibly homesick as I was building a power point about UW-Madison, then I was thrown in charge of making lunch plans for the intern group, couldn't find the new intern, lost the majority of my group, found them, only to have half of them decide to go to the restaurant next door, dumped noodles on my khaki pants, got gawked at by a group of gross old men, ran back to the office to finish the homesickness-inducing powerpoint, catch up on some news, and run out the door to get to an interview, get squished into a subway, get lost and almost run over on my way to an office building, wait a half an hour for the person to meet me, then have the interview interrupted for another half hour as she had to go to another meeting, walk back to the subway in the pouring rain, almost get run over again, get alternately concerned and confused looks from the local Chinese who wonder how stupid can a person be to not carry an umbrella in Chengdu, have the subway ticket machine eat my fair, get pushed around on the subway, walk through the mud and rain back to the Consulate, grab my stuff, walk home in the continued pouring rain, and realized that I've forgotten to do my homework, and finally reached that point.

You know, the one where you are either going to break down laughing or crying. Today, I chose to laugh, because, really... how stupid do you have to be to not carry an umbrella in Chengdu?

China is kind of like that. There are many little things that are constantly grating on you, and pretty much every moment you have to decide what your reaction is going to be. And if you can't learn to accept it, you will go crazy.