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I’m in this place of mind, maybe it is work, maybe it is the friends I keep, where I feel people over-think things. For the most part this doesn’t bother me – hey go to town on your discussion of three inch washers – but does kind of annoy me when I get asked to participate in the hyper analysis of such things. Yes, it’s true that if your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail. But it is also true that a hammer is a damn good tool. If you have a nail, you should use a hammer. There are lots and lots of nails out there. ...

Lydia finishes her 15 kuai ice cream and she wants more. She asks for one more, a pinky one this time, and being denied this asks for Aidan’s but not mine because it is chocolate. She is such a strong willed little girl who knows what she wants and knows when she wants it. One may consider he spoiled or selfish. I call her Lydia. In lieu of ice cream I ask her if she would like a piggy back ride. She gently suggests that she would prefer ice cream. Gentle as in “No!”. But she relents and it turns out she didn’t know how much fun a piggy ride could be, at least for the rider. ...

James Blunt came onstage, made a sound with his guitar and then his voice and the Star Live club in Beijing came alive. In a kind of middle aged expat, rich young Chinese kind of alive. I appreciated that he was on time. Yang and I were 20 or so feet from the stage, off to the side, and when as the rest of his band joined in and the lights came on Yang’s heart skipped a beat and she asked me to let my hair turn back to brown and grow it long and maybe grow a shaggy style beard. I noticed Blunt’s eyes were unnaturally white and alert as he ripped through the song and toyed with the audience. ...

Aidan tells me he is not sleepy as I pick him up. Two minutes later he is asleep in my arms as we ride the Beijing subway eastward, towards home. The subway train isn’t as packed as it was on the way to the game when people forced their way in and off the train and young girls took took pictures of Aidan with their cell phones. But it was still crowded and Aidan is getting heavy so I was grateful when a stocky older Chinese woman ushered me towards a seat as she chased out the existing seat occupant. I sat and looked at my son sleeping so peaceful and thought this would be perfect if we had actually saw the game. Then decided the game was secondary anyway. ...

My cell phone rings and it is Aidan. He just off the plane and is waiting with Yang and Lydia for the stroller. He starts to tell me about his new lego toy and that he put it together all by himself. I am waiting just outside the gate, wearing my blue sweatshirt, hood on. My hair has been an out of control mess for about a week and it will be another day before it is orange, so I feel more comfortable hiding it. ...

It is about 11:30pm when I return to the hotel room in Tokyo, Asaka district. The day has been long and since I started out tired to begin with, I worry that sleep will not come easy. The restless night of the over-stimulated and over-tired may await. It then dawns on me that my son has turned five today. Or was it yesterday? Or is it tomorrow. Or both. I settle on both. Aidan is 17 time zones away and is 5000 miles away, with Yang in the Bay Area. He is probably awaking now, his first day of five. ...

It is Chinese New Year eve and we arrive at the small public square across the street from our home. The square is dark and empty. While Aidan and Lydia wait with anticipation, Yang asks the security guard if it is ok for us to set off our fireworks here. “Keyi, keyi 可以 (sure, sure)” comes the response. We make our ways towards the center of the square and light our sparklers. Its cold and dry and a bit windy so the sparkrs take a bit to light. Once lit, Lydia is waving and dancing and Aidan is stabbing and jaunting. Another group of people joins us on the square and they light fireworks that shoot maybe five stories high and explode in light. We quickly run through our meager supply and dash to the fireworks stand to buy more. I want to buy a box of high flying exploding rockets but don’t want to lay down they cash (40 USD). We buy some more sparklers. In an unexpected occurrence of common sense, the fireworks stand does not have any matches. ...

Even before the plane levels off and the seatbelt sign dings off, the middle aged Chinese woman sitting next to me is socializing with her friends. She thinks nothing to lean across my “space” to hand a snack to a friend sitting in front of me. Her voice is loud and it is hard for me to imagine her as a young woman. On my left is a large white man who looks to be in his mid fifties and his snoring slightly. The person in front of him as fully reclined his seat as has the person in front of me. I feel trapped, like a mouse must feel in a a glue trap. The thing is I want to pee. Need to pee. I’ve been holding it in for about two hours now – the flight sat on the runway for 90 minutes – and my bladder is about to burst. I check the barf bag in the seat back to see if it has a waterproof lining. It does not. I wonder why they still stock these on planes, do people really get air sick anymore. I mean, this plane, a 747 seats something like 400 passengers and weights a gizillion pounds. I squeeze my legs together a bit and try to listen to the Chinese conversing all around me. Their language sounds nothing like my learning mp3s. I decide to practice and say to my ritalin staved Chinese neighbor, “ni hao” which means hello. She smiles and responds in perfect English “Hi, first time to China?”. I take out the book I purchased specifically for the flight, Nicholas Spark’s The Notebook. I’m a voracious reader but with my work schedule this past year and my life blowing up the way it did, I haven’t touched a book. I am so excited to finally have time for a good read. I get 30 pages into and I am bored. At 50 pages anger sets in and I put the book down. I pick up the vomit bag, pull out my pen, and begin to write: > _Came home a little bit early last night, shed not a tear when turning out the light, no I don’t hurt like I used too… _ And I was off filling up every inch of the puke bag and then the inside cover pages of that horrible book. I stopped just short of writing on the notes page of the in-flight magazine. The words coming out like the anger of a teenage girl, fast and furious and I must say amazingly connected. But, I have a confession. The first sentence is the beginning of a Kelly Willis song called Not Forgotten You. It’s a trick I use when my anger compels me to write but said anger does not allow my brain to lay word on paper. I’ve been using this trick a lot lately. As I was tearing up the barf bag into small pieces the American man sitting next to me asked if everything was ok. I said yes, and that wasn’t a lie because I felt much better now. He then asked if I had taken Jesus as my savior and I told him no I hadn’t but that I had recently learned that Jesus has a pet cow – a pet baby cow – and I’ve been wondering if Jesus was really a Hindu. He said that wasn’t funny and I said I wasn’t trying to be funny and I could tell he was extremely angry and wanted to spit on me or maybe hit me. Instead, he took a deep breath, got up and walked towards the bathroom. I followed him. When he exited the restroom and saw me ready to enter he started to smile, thought better of it, and brushed past me. Maybe he was embarrassed about the stank he left behind. When I got back to my seat, I tried to step over the rotund American and accidentally stepped on his toe. How was I to know he had an ingrown toenail. The next nine hours to Beijing were not a lot of fun. I was written out, the in flight movies were horrible and barely visible, and the food a cross between healthy choice and Alpo. The Chinese woman spoke to me from time to time at seemingly random intervals. It was like having a five minute conversation spread out over five hours. > Her: “What’s your name? ...

I’m making my way to the subway and the song in my headphones goes “we are born to shimmer, we are born to shine, we are born to radiate”. Which is a good thing because it is damn cold here. Later, I am sitting on the coach, Aidan is directly across the small wooden table we have, in his small wooden chair. We are playing cards. He called me at work and asked to play when I got home. So here I am, developing a not quite five year old into a card shark. The game? WAR, five across. Which means we both lay five cards face down and then flip one by one. Whoever wins the best of five gets to keep all 10 cards. This is a nice balance between what Aidan can learn and what my boredom will tolerate. In the middle of the game, Yang’s mom Yihang comes downstairs, opens our large living room window and then sits near the window. She is trying to let some fresh air into the house. Which, I might add, works like a charm. How can I tell? Well, it is about 10(F) degrees outside and I am suddenly freezing. Aidan seems not to notice. Was I surprised? No, not really, but that’s a story for another day. ...

While Aidan is free with his affection, Lydia makes you earn it. Last summer I would come home from work and spot Lydia sitting on the couch, peacefully. Lydia’s response after the split second it tool to notice me? A joyous “baba’s home!”? Not exactly. In a flash, she would stand up and race to put on her ultra-man mask and completely cover her face. I did not take this as a particularly good sign. This was her regular greeting for me until she discovered the red plastic stick which she used to whack me. I tried to take it as a sign of affection. Not necessarily positive affection, mind you. ...