the color of its countries

I hope I've lain fallow here long enough to shake off any potential readers. I tend to blog better when I can pretend nobody's listening.

I've officially given up on presenting any sort of coherent or well-informed opinions on anything current or regional here. With nine months living in China under my belt and a couple of politically skewed pseudo-historical accounts on my bookshelf, I do generally have the audacity to make sweeping generalizations in conversation, but my friends put me in my place often enough to make it clear that I really shouldn't try to claim any authority on paper. It is also the case that I've spent enough time denouncing those who do presume to pontificate that I'd be a rotten hypocrite if I kept up the attempt.

So it's not really that I don't have it in me to be a windbag -- see previous posts if this is in doubt -- but when I go back and read it, I feel like an ass, and then I stop posting. So if I do manage to keep up with this, which may be a bit of a stretch anyway, it'll be in a rather humbler vein: things I find delightful, ridiculous things that happen to me, bizarre dreams I have, and perhaps the occasional YouTube video that isn't of me.

And that's that, really. I'd advocate against commenting on this post, as I'll probably blush and hide in the bathroom and you'll never hear from me again. If you keep mousey quiet, though, we might make it out of the doldrums.

Fingers crossed,

yrs, ever affly