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Gratitude is the new Zen and I find my gratitude with a bit of spite. I am feeling grateful to be picking up Elisa after school which I only get to do maybe twice a semester. I have an afternoon of fun planned. Video game arcade, dairy queen ice cream, and Chinese “hamburgers” for dinner. A am grateful for the anticipation of joy and it did turn out to be a great father and daughter afternoon. But as I wait I am also spiteful. The reason I needed to pick up Elisa was because her mom did not give the Ayi (nanny) her scheduled day off over the weekend so I needed to take a half day off my work to pick up Elisa. The mom didn’t do it because she wanted to go snowboarding for the weekend leaving two of her three kids behind. Last I checked the mountains are opened all week and the mom doesn’t really work during the week. So, how’s that for spite? ...

It’s a late March morning and I’m walking with Elisa to the south gate of our apartment compound. It is one of those mornings in spring where it feels warmer outside. Two birds in a tree above us catch our attention. They are making a racket, either fighting or playing. I ask Elisa which. She says fighting since they both probably want the same part of the tree. 100 feet in front of us we see a black bird with white strips swoop down onto the path. It walks a bit and then picks up a tree branch. The bird climbs effortlessly with the branch looking awkward in it’s beak. Halfway up a nearby tree it lands and uses the branch as part of the nest she is building. I don’t recall every seeing that firsthand before Elisa and I get to the apartment compound gate and have to wait a couple of minutes for the car. I check my phone and show her the car location and tell her the last three license plate digits. We mostly stand in silence. When the car gets there we climb in back, Elisa in first so that I can get out first to protect her from bikes when we do get to her school. I check news and sports and my day’s schedule on the ride in. I ask Elisa if she has any tests that day which isn’t probably a great choice of topic. We get to school and we get out. Her friend arrives at the same time and she squeals Elisa’s Chinese name when she sees Elisa. Elisa scoots over and they walk hand and hand into the school. I turn the other way. Power on my headphones, pull up the hoodie, and do the 10 minute walk to the subway station. Crab into a car. I will be at work and hour later, in time for my 8:30am call. On this day I need to meet Elisa after school because somewhat unexpectedly the ayi had the day off. I meet her and Elisa’s eyes light up when I say “video game?” which is what we call the arcade at a nearby mall. She plays for a bit while I stand. We then go for one of her favorites, what she calls “chinese hamburgers” because I can’t remember the name of the food. We devour a burger a piece. We then call a didi (like uber) to take us home where Aidan and Lydia are waiting. Thinking about the bird from this morning I realize the nest is a little bit stronger. ...

I’m cooking dinner. Not really sure why I’m cooking dinner. Had a huge lunch with the kids, Sabrina, and Sabrina’s parents at a local tex mex place. The quality of the tex mex wasn’t great and that was known going i Back to cooking dinner. Lydia helped with the Kale chicken salad and then I asked the kids to get off their pads and phones until after dinner. The pad and phone time battle is a losing one. And I guess one about control. Not sure what the real harm is. Then again, as I mentioned, I’m not sure why I am cooking dinner. So there’s that. But the kids do get off the pads and phones and soon there’s laughter in the house. Uno is being played between Elisa, Aidan, and Sabrina. Lydia is on the couch doing “art” which is an upgraded term from what she used to just call “drawing”. I finish cooking, a kind of chicken casserole that takes an hour. Lydia and Aidan set the table and the five of us sit around. Elisa as usual doesn’t want to try anything. She’s satisfied with the sweet potatoes I cooked earlier. Aidan takes a few bites and says he’s full. Sabina, Lydia, and I eat well. From kitchen to table - two hours. From table back to pads and phones - 15 minutes. The 15 minutes was filled with talk about school and some laughter. Leftovers for lunch packed and dishes washed the end of my week with the kids is about up. Time to make sure they shower and sleep with their pads away from their beds. The weekend last most weekends I have with them was uneventful. Friday night pizza party, movie night. Saturday afternoon basketball with Aidan and Lydia, Lydia suddenly wanting to learn after our trip to the US. A play date for Elisa. Sunday was mostly lunch and digestion. And then cooking. ...

My dad’s ready to go for coffee and stands up and puts on his sports coat. His shirt has a few stains. His undershirt is yellowing. His fly is open. Does one tell one’s dad his fly is open? Aidan came home from school on Wednesday night not feeling well. Dizzy, he said. He didn’t have a temperature. His grandmother texted me pictures of his mom at a party and told me to give Aidan medicine and maybe go to the hospital. She worries like that. Aidan went to bed early and the next morning still wasn’t feeling good, no fever, but largargic. The other kids went to school and I worked from home to take care of him. Aidan didn’t do well in last semester’s final exam. Really did not do well. It turns out Friday was the make up exams for students who didn’t do well. He wasn’t sick, he was stressed. I am at a 70 person all hands meeting where my boss is trying to explain a change of strategy. He is the boss apparently because he talks a lot. Someone asks a question about the strategy he doesn’t have the answer too so I stand up to explain. I talk in bullet points. By the time I start my third and last bullet my thoughts are racing in different illogical directions and I have to slow down and reconstruct the bullet points in my mind from the beginning. My body is shaking when I finally sit down. I am 16 years old and washing dishes in my childhood home. For some reason my dad is in the kitchen after dinner which he seldom was. He hands me a dish. I try to make a joke about something, I forget what. He thought I was saying he had bad breath. He explodes and I think he’s going to take my head off. The food arrives for pizza party movie night. I frustrated with something and haven’t had a chance to clear the dinner table yet. I call the kids in to help with setup like I normally do. Aidan just opens the pizza box to take a piece. Elisa knocks over her soda onto the floor spilling everywhere. I get angry. Tell them they need to help. I don’t like it when I get angry. I am at work washing my hands in the bathroom. As I dry them I look at myself in the mirror. Nice shirt. Too bad it’s wrinkled as all get out. When did I stop pressing? ...

I wake up to a jet lagged haze feeling frisky and fat. Both confirmed I exit the bedroom towel wrapped around my waist and walk to the shower. The light in living room is on. Sabrina’s dad is sitting on the couch watching TV at 6am with the sound low. Apparently his hearing is good. Sabrina’s parents stayed at our apartment while we were in the US since the apartment they’ve been staying at doesn’t have an elevator and getting up the five flights of stairs is tedious for Sabrina’s mom (backstory: Sabrina’s parents come to Beijing during the winter months to visit their daughters and because Beijing has central heating). As we touched down the night before I had asked Sabrina not to let her dad cook for me as I’m particular about what I eat and I don’t want to have to be polite and eat what he makes. I was feeling particularly in need to control my food after a couple weeks of eating whatever I wanted in US. So of course as soon as we unpacked, Sabrina’s dad served us a full home cook meal. After dinner I went for a walk with Sabrina and she asked if I understood what her dad was talking about during dinner. I said no, that I wasn’t really paying attention. Normally I just zone out when conversation goes on in Chinese. He was trying to speak to me, she said, and was frustrated that I didn’t respond. I had no idea. ...

I think about anniversaries and sometimes they loom in front of me with the anticipation of accomplishment or dread. When I first started at Microsoft in September 2005 I remember picking my first Corpnet password. I read the policy saying it would need to be changed within 90 days. I told my cynical self that I will never need to change it. They would find out I was a fraud long before then. When I hit four years I started to notice the speeches they five year people gave. The 10 of them got to go up during and all hands and speak for a minute or so. I worried and planned what I would say for the next year. When the anniversary came there was something like 40 of us so there was no public speech. I got recognized in a team meeting which suited me better. I was, however, planning on leaving MS at that time so my words I don’t even remember. Always grateful for the employment I was burned out at the time. Or as I put it then it took too long to build stuff and I wanted to build things. So I took my gap year or more precisely gap 14 months. That caused the MS anniversary reward tracking mechanism to get a bit messed up. Four months after my return to MS and during a 60 person all hands I was surprise presented with my five year award. I sheepishly said I already had it. They let me keep the trophy anyway so I had two five year crystals. Because of my 14 month gap my actual 10 year anniversary was a bit hard to calculate. Ok, not that hard for a neurotic. Even one that works at MS. On the subway on the way home I wrote the broad outline of my “speech” – truths and motivations are for you to fine, believe in the best of people because then at least you will feel better – and calculated the date. The date came and I received an email asking where sent the crystal too. It arrived a month later and now sits on a chest in my bedroom next to the five year crystal and other MS trinkets I care about. No speech, no words of advice. Do I have something to say? Yes, but I’ll save that for another post. Does it matter what I say? Not really, but it does make me feel better. ...

Aidan goes into the restroom with a pair of scissors and starts to cut his hair. A few minutes later he emerges, unsuccessful, and asks if he can go get a haircut. I need one too, my homeless look not working so well this winter so I say “sure”. We recently moved so we don’t have a goto place to get our hair cut so we just head out looking since it seems every block in Beijing has a hair salon. Until you are looking for one. We do find one after a couple of blocks. It looks small and not busy so we look a bit more but end up going inside. A middle age woman greets us hopefully and Aidan asks if they can do a haircut. I have ask if they can do us together and she says sure and then she taps a young man sleeping in a chair who turns out to be my hairdresser. ...

It is a week before Christmas and Elisa asks me what I got Aidan for Christmas. She really wants to know and when I won’t tell her she tries to find out if I’ve already bought the present yet or not. And if not, what would I buy. She asks me over and over again over the next few days and then again on Christmas eve. She never does asks me what I got for Lydia. ...

It is just over a year ago and I’m trying to flag down a cab to send the kids to school. And it’s windy. And the temperature is below freezing. And there is freezing rain pelting the side of our faces. And the cabs are passing us one by one without stopping. It’s at that moment that I switched to Uber and from the next morning onwards booked cars from the comfort of our apartment or the building lobby. Didi had been around for some time before that with the ability to book taxis ahead of time. I occasionally did this, or had a friend do it for me, when waking up in a hard to flag taxi place but in my apartment downtown taxis were mostly available in the mornings except when you really needed them. Once I switched to Uber the I quickly became a convert. About half the price of taxis, can get a car anytime, and can track the kids progress when I sent them to school or to some event. Uber app was also in English and was easy for me to set up payment. Over the year the service started to get more expensive and it felt like the quality of the drivers stopped as we were constantly having to communicate our location despite GPS. One of the last times I used Uber to send the kids to school we were looking for a white car with 9X0 as the last three license place digits. We walked a half block to where GPS said it was, say the car, waved at driver and then tried to open the door. Door locked, we knocked, looked into the window which was tinted and tried to open the door. Still locked. Then the driver turned away. Turns out the place was P20. Uber still showed the car at the corner and when I called the driver he said he was coming. I cancelled and put the kids into a taxi. Uber lost to Didi in the competition here. For a while it was great as a consumer. Both sides so hungry for the market they were subsiding our rides. But when Uber lost the Uber App was replaced with a China and Chinese language only App. At which point I switched to Didi and it’s Chinese only App as well. Since we moved I’ve been taking Elisa to school using Didi (the elders kids school is a short walk away). The first day was similar to my first Uber day. Raining ice, winding, cold. I could not communicate well enough in Chinese with the Didi driver and needed someone to help me. Later I got the routine down and can take Elisa without help. After dropping off Elisa at school I then have a 10 minute walk to the subway so I can get to work. Fortunately a new service recently launched a couple months ago – 1 RMB bike rental where you grab a bike and drop it wherever you stop. There are actually two such services and now you can see bikes returning to the streets of Beijing. ...

It is the summer of 2005 and I’m heading out for a walk. A woman with a white skin looking down at a map looks up and notices me. And then walks up to me. She starts to speak French and I say I don’t understand. She switches to a fairly heavy accented English and apologies saying she thought I was French. The then asks where the Russian markets are. Apparently they used to be right here and she visited them a few years back but now she can’t seem to find them. I say I only know Yabao Lu, a few blocks away, but she says not that one. A few months later I was looking Google Earth and I used it’s time lapse feature. I went back in time for my apartment building. Back to 2001 or so. When what existed in it’s place was..you guessed it..russian markets. ...