about the chips

i should explain about the chips packets. they're a symbol of something inherently flawed in china.

you know when you open a packet of chips you grab that little plastic flap on one side and pull on the other side. that's what the flap is for. it has a raisin detter. nespa? right. well, here it seems they saw the little flap on american packets and thought that's what a packet has to look like. but they never asked "why" or rather "wei shen me?" so they've got flaps, but you can't open chips packets without industrial strength garden shears, or possibly light explosives.

so, they've become symbolic. simply put: nothing here works. DVD's have a shelf life of 2 weeks. DVD players about 2 months. and one of the buttons on the remote won't ever work, usually the subtitles button. one in three DVD's you buy will simply stop working after 4.6 minutes. the shower will drip annoyingly. the gas from the cooker slowly dissipates. the water dispenser will a.) refuse to cool the water and b.) drip. The PS2... don't talk to me about the PS2.

i love china. i really do. i love the people, culture, history, sense of wreckless abandonment. all of it. but they deserve better. and they get shit because there's enough of them to buy shit if it's cheap enough. if you go into a shop and slap down your previously purchased merchandise and announce that you won't ever come back and tell your friends never to come back they will laugh for a second and sell your stuff to the next guy who comes in. consumer demand. hah.

it's a pity. perhaps it's better around the coast, shanghai, hong kong, etc. not here though. people frequently look you in the eye with that wounded look of "how can you possibly suggest this DVD might have been filmed in a cinema?" and then sell you a dvd that was filmed in the cinema and pretend it never happened once you come back. i know about testinbg the things, i'm just illustrating the annoyance. badly. badly illustrating it, that is. the annoyance.

and richard burns rally sucks. or perhaps my PS2 steering wheel sucks.

still. i chose to be here. i hope y'all can appreciate the possibility of this contradictory position: where i can critize and still choose to be here. is that allowed in the information age? or does the world demand absolute consistency? (don't answer that.) (the world's a hypocrite.)

zaijian a.