Last time Yours Truly visited Beijing I was introduced to a kind of street food that I have since never forgotten. Called a shanbing, these things are full of all the hearty goodness that keeps a body running. Or a peasant farming, all day.

Well, I fell in love with them, and vowed to eat my fill when I returned. There was construction going on in J and S's neighborhood, and so it was a good bet that there would be a cart nearby in the mornings that made them. Apparently, in this neighborhood there's one guy, and he's a fixture. S refers to him as "the little man with the cart," and you'll soon see why. Anyway, after about 20 minutes of driving around looking for him one morning, we found him off the road on a walking path. Paydirt! Five minutes' worth of halting Mandarin later, I was once again tasting the cheap delight of Beijing po' folks food.

Here's how they make 'em:

1. The guy has this cart with a gas powered griddle on top. He spreads a thin batter over the top, cracks a couple of eggs on it, and sprinkles on some fresh green onion.
2. Then, he flips the thing over and spreads on a savory sauce -- probably some kind of soybean paste or sauce. If you like (and I do), he'll also spread on some hot pepper sauce.
3. He puts a fried, er, fritter or something in the middle (like a big flat potato chip), and uses the spatula to break it into foldable pieces.
4. Lastly, he folds the thing up with a spatula,
5. And serves it to you piping hot in a napkin. Eeeeeeeeeeyummmmmmaaaaaaay!

I mentioned above that we called him "the little man with the cart"; and you may notice that all of the shots above were taken from an above angle. See, we weren't really kidding about that nickname. See the picture to the right for a sense of relative scale.

All jokes about hilariously short asian cooks aside, I encourage you now, Gentle Reader, to drop what you're doing, get yourself to China, and eat shanbing in copious amounts. I did!

So last week we had a layoff at the company. This despite projected revenue growth for this fiscal year of 20-30%. Why, you may ask? Because of poor financial planning, and blowing flipping great wodges of cash on new buildings, new office space, and hiring an entire phalanx of administrative assistants, not to mention having hired a number of people into imaginary roles in the first place (Office of Organizational Development, anyone?).

Despite the fact that our little group is way, way, way in the black on our budget this year, we were asked to cut back our budgeted expenses by a painful amount, which at the end of the day amounted to gacking somebody. So we ended up losing this lady who worked for me. There are other circumstances that surround this woman, but let's just say that she got sacked because the Director wanted to end up with the best team after the cut (meaning, the group of people most likely to be team players).

The whole affair was bloody, partly because of the person's personality, and partly because she was going through a difficult personal time anyway (sick and dying relatives), and because she was physically ill during the two days we were going to let her go. Because the CEO wanted all layoffs completed quickly, the Director was more or less ordered to complete the layoff over the telephone.

Ugh. Ugh, I say.

So I called my ex-employee the next day to check in and see how she was holding up. She then proceeded to hold me up over the phone for the better part of an hour, reaming virtually everyone at the company in absentia and spewing bile and venom all over the mouthpiece. Turns out that everybody else in the department deserved to get sacked instead of her, and that the Director was and is an idiot, a liar, and an all-around bad person. And we should be ashamed. And she hopes we fail.

Oooookeydokeeeeey.

In case you are wondering, Gentle Reader, Yours Truly spent the duration of this call punctuating her rant every minute or so with a well-timed "ohh.." or "tsk...gosh, (employee's name)," all in the name of tea and sympathy. Man, being empathetic sucks sometimes!

Later that afternoon she called back, this time in tears, to thank me for my earlier call, and to melt down on the phone. This time it wasn't hard to feel sympathy.

But I sure earned my big beer at the end of the day. Layoffs are just nasty business.

Shel and I had to adjust our plans multiple times because we ran out of time to do things. One thing that we planned to do and which we got in early in the trip was a trip to get pedicures!

Yeah, I said pedicures. And hey, I got a manicure while I was there, too! See, I'm comfortable in my masculinity.

What?

Fine, think what you want. Anyway, the cool thing about this place is that because A) they wanted our money, and B) the place was on the fourth floor of a big market, we were able to walk in, sit down, and have them bring us cold beer while they worked on us. Sweet!

See, I had beer. In a can. That's manly!And Shel and S got some great designs on their toesies. Look, lilies!

On another day in Beijing, we went a-questing for knickknacks, gewgaws, and other baubles at one of the largest open-air markets in Beijing. From pottery to brass figurines to teasets to souvenir soldiers, this place crams it all in under a single sprawling covered square.

Here are a few pictures of the market as a whole:

Lining this square are various shops and such, which typically carry more expensive items of the sort that a collector might be interested in. We visited one such shop that sells shutter frames salvaged from wooden screens and friezes. These shutters, as you will see, are typically hand carved jobs, over which gold paint, gold leaf, or any of a number of different varnishes and stains are applied.

The shutters and the shop:

It may appear, Gentle Reader, that all we did was shop. Never fear: though we certainly did a lot of that, we did do other things, as you will soon see. Also, because we hit the big tourist sites during our last visit, you won't see any pics of the Great Wall, The Forbidden City, or Tianenmen Square here. But stay tuned for pics of our tour of the hutongs, my love affair with Chinese street food, and our trip to lovely Shanghai.

While in Beijing, we visited the Wu Mei Mini-Mart, which is like the Chinese folks' equivalent of a Wal-Mart. By which I mean that's where the everyday folks go to buy their food and necessaries. It ain't neat, and it ain't pretty. But oh, the things you can buy!

Outside there's a kite market, along with people cooking and selling a few items like ice cream and cold drinks. JW spent some time practicing his Zhongwen with a guy who was making noodles.


Inside, there was a market-type place, where people brought in their produce to sell. We got some pears and grapes, and some candy as well. Unfortunately, lychees are out of season, so I tried to get some lychee-flavored gummy candy. What I bought tasted like sweetened car joint grease.

I'm glad to be writing again, here in Beijing. Shel and I are on two weeks' vacation and I'm starting to feel the unease, almost one week in, of work-related tension and stress starting to peel off. Exercise has been helping, but today the air pollution is so bad that going running would be like putting my mouth to an exhaust pipe.

So it feels like the emotional analog to that moment in fasting where your tongue starts tasting bad as your body kicks into ketosis -- some say that your body is starting to get rid of toxins that way. JK probably knows what's happening.

Also, something deeper is going on.

Job Fatigue

I think that maybe six years of spiritual drift are starting to catch up to me, particularly with respect to what I do for a living. I work fairly hard, and I give the fruit of my cleverness and insight to this company, and it all seems pretty pointless. After all, the "executive management" is divorced from the specifics of the operation, and they regularly make decisions (or fail to make necessary decisions) that run counter to the spirit of everything I'm trying to do. That's disheartening if it goes on for a short while; but, as I'm seeing, this is a long-term pattern of action, and it isn't likely to change.

Shelley encourages me to look for a new job, or at least explore the possibilities; I tell you, I would rather stay with the familiar evil (with whom I am at least on a level of familiarity) than to start at a new place and pretend that the new evil I encounter is good. Academia is screwy; the business world is screwy. I work for a business that interacts with academia, so I see both sides.

Also, my salary is good, for the position I hold. And I like the guys I work with.

But God it is hollow stuff. I love teaching, and I love seeing people learn and do new things. I love analyzing problems and developing solutions. That's what I'm good at. What I'm not good at is accepting a world wherein I analyze a problem, make it known to management, and have it ignored to the detriment of my employees, our collective students, or the faculty with whom we work.

And I no longer believe that, at the highest levels, this company is interested in helping people.

While I labored under that illusion, I think I could tell myself that work as it was was worth the pain and effort. I got to teach, I got to analyze, and I got to do it in a larger context of usefulness to others. So what if there was no deeper meaning?

That perspective is disintegrating. I feel like I've been fighting a losing battle for the past four or five months in terms of our company doing the right thing by students and faculty (not to mention doing the right thing by our employees).

But more to the point, I guess I still haven't any solid moorings to this job, except for the sense that it exercises my talents better than any job so far. I have some authority, and I can do some brainstorming as well. I hoped that these things would collectively be enough.

What Else Is There?

I lay in bed last night, and Shelley asked me again about moving to China. That question gets at the heart of this problem, I think. My response is, "What would I move to China for? What would I do?" To which she points out some of the opportunities that Jerry has suggested from time to time. And to which I say, "What is there to do here that I wouldn't just do stateside?"

I think that at root here is a deeper question: what's the point -- for me -- of doing any job? What could I do that I would actually be able that answer the question well?

Because, from my college years on, I have believed in doing things with eternal points, I kinda set myself up for failure. I find it hard to believe in a traditionally conceived afterlife, so what's the point of doing anything? Where is the meaning that I might find?

Okay, I dropped a bomb in that last paragraph. It's true: I find nearly all of the stories we tell about the afterlife to be highly improbable at best and laughable wish-fulfillment fantasies at worst. I don't expect some eternal reward for what I do here.

But the idea that what I am doing is just for me, just for exploring me, is ridiculously self-centered. Why live for that? For that matter, why live?

So I'm having a job crisis that is a bit more than a typical job crisis. I'm drifting on the water. Is 34 too young for a midlife crisis?