Day 40. Or 50. I've lost count. This entry is going to be pretty text heavy, and a bit dry. This is definitely a "for me" blog that I won't post on FB, because it is "not interesting" and "is the ranting of someone stuck inside for over a month". 

So, what have I been doing? Not so much, as you'd expect. My day is pretty chill. I get to wake up whenever I want without an alarm (loving that). In the morning and afternoon, I teach my two, 40 minute lessons per day. And many days, we get to go outside to line up and get a stick in my mouth for a COVID test (we've done probably over 20 so far). The rest of the time I fill with Reddit, Youtube, video games (a lot of those - I'm going through the entire Tales series, and I'm up to the PS3 era). Of course, cooking has been happening. My stir fry game is getting up there. I also made a pretty good frittata, and a curry potato pie. Ella made a restaurant-level sweet and sour pork, so we're certainly eating (and drinking) pretty well. Oh, I've also started playing piano.

Actually, I have a lot to say about that, so before I get into my thoughts on the situation in Shanghai, let me get that off my chest. If you'd like to skip ahead, and I recommend you do, I will indicate the end below:

Right, piano. I'm sure this will make my parents happy, at least. They pushed me to learn it well, 30 some years ago. And honestly, I hated it. So, why now? I'm not really sure actually. I suppose because Ella started learning ukulele, and she thought it would be fun if we could play together. But honestly, I'm not really a music person. It has been years since I've opened the music player app on my phone for anything but podcasts. But I guess I picked piano instead of something else because of similar reasons my parents used when I was a kid - it's like a big video game controller. I always found the non-binary nature of guitars and wind instruments really frustrating. Yeah I know the notes will be the same if you're good, but that just seemed like an unnecessary hurdle. Plus I wanted an instrument I could either A) find everywhere, or B) carry. That was my thought process to buy a harmonica years ago (no idea where that is), but I found that hard to play and kind of gross. So, piano it is. I picked up a keyboard for about $10 online, and yeah, it's not great. But it's fine for me.

How then, do I learn this thing? I approached it the same way I teach language, oddly enough - set a goal, and work backwards from there. My long term goal is that I want to see sheet music of songs I like, and be able to play that. Apparently this is an unusual goal, because every tutorial absolutely, positively, suuuucks at teaching you this. It's amazing pianos still exist in the world, as I assume every student would have smashed them in frustration. It reminds me of the very outdated ways of teaching a language, like Grammar Translation (i.e. the way you probably learned in High School, like I did with German). Endless drills, memorization of rules, and other tasks while some taskmaster says "You are not allowed to do that thing you want yet." And consequently, I remember very little of German.

So for my first lesson, I wanted to play the first bit of the Mario theme. That's all. I didn't care about my finger placement, or what the "right" way to do things was. And when you throw all those silly per-requisites away, it only takes like 5 minutes to do. And that was motivating. Motivating enough to play more and add more songs. By now I'm able to do the treble clef fairly competently. I only use 4 fingers (I guess I have a short thumb? It's really uncomfortable), I don't know the difference between the types of notes, but it doesn't matter. I'm doing things I actually want to do.

So now I have to think, how does piano instruction suck so much? Is it because that people just teach the same way they were taught? If so, what a waste. Surely there were things about your instruction you found difficult or disliked. Why wouldn't you want to improve on that? Or maybe I'm being too cynical, and there are plenty of piano instructors that do the "set a goal and work back" approach. All I can say is that if they were around as a kid, and the words "must", "rules", and "correct" were not in their vocabulary, I may have stuck with piano. For now, I think I'm partially learning in order to play with Ella, and partially out of pure spite for every stuck up tutorial out there.

====END OF PIANO RANT====

I guess I had a lot to say about piano.

I remember back when Ella and I were in Bali, we got hit by an earthquake. In truth, it was incredibly minor. It definitely was not minor the next island over, but I guess because Bali is a well-known place with lots of foreigners, it get a lot of attention on the US news. However, I feel the attention it got was really overblown and very clickbaity. People saying how scary it was, how things were shaking, etc.. Yeah, I mean, it is an earthquake. Things shake. But the whole thing was 10 seconds and was not at all severe. This has sort of colored my opinion of mainstream US news that they care more about views than being objective. It is my impression, although I cannot confirm, that is how they approached the situation in Shanghai.

And I'm sort of in between a rock and a hard place, here. The official state news will of course say everything is great. However, foreign news will say everything is terrible. And what I don't see is anyone in the middle. In truth, we are fine. We've always been fine. If it was the apocalypse like western news says, I feel I would have noticed. I mean, try to have 25 million people pull in the same direction? Good luck, with that. There will always be people who do not agree and fight back. I would like to see stories that are a mix of "Hey, these people are chilling on their balcony, but these people are struggling to pay rent." I guess because "everything is fine here" is not exciting news, but it also is informative, which is what I want. I just wish there were more of me.

But really, Ella and I have been okay through this whole ordeal. Early on we were a bit low on food, but instead of trying to do it ourselves we joined the community group orders. Now, along with government handouts, our biggest problem is eating the food we have before it goes bad. We've literally been giving it away boxes of food to neighbors with larger families. The only real struggle now is the mental one. Fortunately we're both pretty introverted, and have been more or less fine. Early on we'd get bummed for a day or so, but it rarely lasted. We'd occasionally get on each others nerves, but we would both talk about it and work things out. We're really quite used to it by now, and I think I could tolerate it for longer - not that I'd want to be any means, dear god let me go to a bar. However, I don't know how this all ends. I get COVID is dangerous, but is a lockdown this long the solution? There has to be a cost-benefit analysis, and I am not sure where things lie. Regardless, I think this will change Shanghai, for sure. Some 80% of foreigners, according to polls, say they're going to leave after this. I mean, asking people in lockdown "do you want to leave?" is going to skew the results for sure, but even if a fraction follow through it will feel like a different city. On the one hand, as a foreigner I'll be an even more rare commodity, which is not nothing for the salary. On the other, the idea of another lockdown is a hard sell. While this time has been tolerable, it has not been enjoyable. I am certainly not in the right state of mind to decide this now, but if China is going to stay hitched to the "zero covid" train, we need to consider if we want to get off at the next station.