Stop pulling on my legs, I'll come out when I'm ready.

So here's what's going on. I got all gunned up to do NaBloPoMo this year thinking it would be a great way for me to tell the China trip story (albeit in stunted paragraph form) and then, on a tear, I decided to go ahead and give NaNoWriMo a whirl, too. Why not, right? So then OBVIOUSLY the writing project I was hired into TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO smugly lurches to life and adds itself to my November to-do list, so yeah. I have no doubt whatsoever that I can post every day to my blog, pound out a 50,000 word novel AND satisfy the legal bindings of my contractural writing agreement. It's such a non-issue I don't even think we should talk about it anymore. Ever. Again. Seriously, don't bring it up.

I turned thirty-five in October and that went about the way you think it went. If you're under thirty-five you're no doubt imagining a huge drunken blowout, and if you're over thirty-five you're pursing your lips and shaking your head because you know full well I spent the entire day crying under the bed. Turns out you're both right because as it happens I can drink and cry and hide all at the same time. It's a life skill. If you're thirty-four you wouldn't understand.

You too, Atlanta.

Randy and I just returned from an epic trip to China. We hadn't planned on it but some friends put a trip and a group together and ultimately it was like twenty-three dollars to go on a world-class China extravaganza. Beijing, Xi'an, Chengdu, Lijiang, Dali, Kunming, Suzhou, Tongli, Shanghai.

Six domestic flights once in China. I ate a box and a half of Dramamine over sixteen days; my blood now runs orange but hey, no other passengers got puked on for once. And it's starting to look like my peripheral vision might come back so it was obviously the right call.

I tried to write about the trip during the nine free minutes I had there with an Internet connection, but China blocked access to Blogger before the 2008 Olympics and never opened it back up. I already called and bitched out the US embassy, don't you worry.

No I didn't. The US embassy stopped taking my calls like four years ago.

So I'm going to write about the trip as I go through all the receipts and brochures and everything I picked up along the way. I don't expect that to help, it's all in Chinese, but maybe there'll be some pictures or numbers or a Rorschach in there to jog my memory.

I can tell you this, though: the Beijing airport is absolutely unbelievable. We stepped off the plane and into the gate and Randy and I were both pretty positive we'd landed in Gattaca. What year is this, 2118? Is there some international airport contest going on that I haven't been privy to? Because if so, Beijing fucking won. You can stop pouring concrete, Dallas / Ft. Worth, it's over, we lost.