I'm back in California and dealing with reverse culture shock. Surprisingly, as accustomed as I am to giving little credit to psychological analyses, reverse culture shock is something that I've come to accept. It would take a very balanced person to get through the change without feeling a little depressed about being home. California feels so extravagant and rich, I miss the simplicity and gentle politicking of China. I've convinced myself that by spending some time here in the USA, I'll be able to go back to China as something more than an English teacher. Hopefully this will serve as a motivation to work hard in the years ahead. I'm working on my parent's iBook, in IE 5.2/Mac. My webpage suffers a slight disfiguration on the sidebar, and will receive a proper updating. Other than that, things are just dandy. Working on MacOS X is fun too, although being on a dial-up I can't take advantage of things like Apache and download huge binaries. Plus the fact that the computer belongs to my parents, I don't want to load it with extraneous applications. I really missed my bike this last year. It never would have survived Tianjin's pot-holed roads and muddy streets. I rode to Tower Records tonight and browsed the magazine I haven't had the chance to peruse in a year (Foreign Affairs, the Economist), learning a new word in the process: blench, which I first assumed to be a mis-spelling of blanch (it's a variation) but it turned out to be a word in its own right with a similar meaning to its cognate. I also found a good Korean textbook, which I thought did not exist. And a book teaching Arabic script, which may convince me to add Arabic to my list of goals for this next year. From Simon Willison's weblog, I found a link to the Which PowerPuff Girl is Your Blog? quiz. I'm Bubbles, yeah! Bored? Pick one of the 52 Projects.