I live in a place with bars on the windows. In this terrible, ugly concrete building with exposed, rusty, smelly pipes. The ongoing battle is staving off the stench of the burping pipes- stale, dirty water.  Opening the windows helps.  It’s warm in Anyang, even at the end of October the temperature still climbs to the 70s- though it’s starting to get tired and in the next couple of weeks I’ll be wearing a hat and gloves. Now we can leave the windows open, but the breeze carries in dust that, within a couple days, coats the surface of everything.  Even in our slippers we track the dust all over the floor. 

Chris and I assumed, when we were told we’d live in the “older” building (the other foreign teachers live across the road from us in the “newer” building) that it was built in the ’80s if not before- a gray block with neat squares carved for windows that was actually built in the mid-’90s. Our apartment is on the second floor, but most of the six-story apartment buildings in the university’s little neighborhood also have bars, which makes us question the validity of “oh, Anyang very safe.” So.  Bars on every one of our windows in our long, narrow apartment. But I’m getting used to it, our apartment of white walls- naked still except the dirt smudges and chips in the paint, our hard, tiled floor that poorly disguises the cold, hard, thick layer of concrete that separates us from the apartment below- tile that was white-ish  once but now stained with the city’s grime. 

Yes. Anyang is an ugly city.  Although there have been many sunny days since we arrived, we’ve only seen the sun a few of them. Only seen a blue, blue sky a few of them. Sure there are many many parks, huge tracts of land, some formerly plowed by peasants, with tidy, organized paths spotted with saplings, and plenty of rolling grass for you to camp on, drink your milk drink or your bottled water. But the grass is dull and brittle, struggling in this dry climate.

I suspect, but have yet to confirm, that many of the average Chinese cities are like Anyang- not terribly large or small, with some important history to claim but are ignored by the burgeoning international tourist trade.  Old narrow streets where the cars, bicycles and mopeds play chicken with each other while maneuvering around a crowd of men squatting on low stools playing Chinese chess, around carts-on-wheels selling bananas, apples, potatoes, carrots, greens, steamed bread, dumplings, fried pig’s blood, and miscellaneous household goods, and pants for toddlers.  The tiny shops and restaurants are jammed together, sharing one long stretch of concrete with their concrete walls. The beautiful traditional Chinese architecture, the roofs that swoop to points and the red pagodas don’t really exist- not in Everyday China. Anyang has a pagoda near the city center.  Aside from all the signs written in characters, it’s the only other obvious way of knowing you’re in China, and not in some old, dilapidated factory city on the East Coast. Too many shops selling the same goods- many cheap reproductions like jeans and jackets and accessories- three people is the maximum occupancy but twenty will cram in- how there can be enough business for all the shops to exist?  

The fashionable people of Anyang, the women in bold colors and patterns and new high-heeled boots carrying their over-sized bags on their arms like the beautiful celebrities, click clacking along the flat, mucky streets, a brilliant statement of color, the new money in this city of growing, expanding new wealth, building shiny new concrete structures, or buildings with a white tile facade, burying so much history with smokey eyesores that do nothing to alleviate the strain of always looking at a dull, smog-tinged sky.

The honeymoon is over, China.  It lasted quite a while- over two weeks of new sights, new sounds, new smells.  Two weeks of gorging myself on rice and steamed vegetables and instant coffee and peach juice before trudging down the gray dust-coat, crowded street to buy the fresh vegetables lost its exciting flair.  I’ve been craving pizza and a latte with the same intense desperation as a child staring at a cookie jar that’s been placed, woe to him, at the top of the fridge. Pizza and a latte. Hell, I’ll settle for real coffee. Two of the easiest foods to get in Chicago- or anywhere in the U.S., I imagine.  I bet there’s a Starbucks inside Mount Rushmore.

But no, no.  Not in wee Anyang, city of some hundreds of thousands. I find this shocking.  Hasn’t Pizza Hut infiltrated Asia along with McDonald’s and KFC? Oy. All my students know about pizza so I want to yell Where the hell do you get it?! Surely the local KFC doesn’t serve pizza? (Why isn’t there a local Pizza Hut?) Ah, they deserve more credit.  My students are actually quite well informed- asking me questions about the U.S. election and how I’m affected by the credit crisis.  They know about pizza, even if they haven’t tasted the complete perfection that bread, mozzarella cheese, and tomato sauce (with hints of oregano and basil) create in your mouth.

So Chris and I are stuck here longing for the day we go into a Pizza Hut in Beijing. You know it’s bad when Pizza Hut sounds like the best pizza ever created.  

So no pizza or any kind of Italian food. Not even spaghetti. The supermarkets sell a variety of noodles, but none appropriate for tomato sauce. For the sake of my well being (how much rice can a person take?) I’ve decided to make my own noodles and pasta sauce from scratch, as pizza will pose a problem since we don’t own an oven.

I took a solo journey to the hypermarket, Dennis, to buy olive oil. I had to blow dust off it to check the experation date but, thankfully, I still have a few months.  As I meandered through the aisles, not lingering too long as it’s nearing 5 and time for the post-work crush of pushy, impatient people, I’m struck by several rows of Lay’s potato chips.  Hmmmm… salty chips.  I rarely ate the things except at BBQs when the vegetarians are left with hamburger buns and chips for dinner.  Somehow, finding this familiar, Western brand was reassuring, a comfort to my pizza-longing heart. It was by no means a substitute, but I know what to expect from Lay’s and it was with that confidence that I attacked the shelves, looking for the “original” flavor but only finding things like,  ”Seafood Spicy Flavor.”  ”Pork Spicy Flavor.”  What the hell?  These aren’t potato chips! I practically flung cans off the shelf, but could only find “Chicken Spicy Flavor.” Damnation! 

I picked up my broken hopes and begin to move on when something caught my eye: a lavender bag of chips with the Lay’s logo. Underneath the logo: “Natural & Cool Blueberry Flavor.”  BLUEBERRY Potato Chips? Next to it another bag: “Natural & Warm Mango Flavor.” MANGO?  There are pictures of chips on the front of the bag so yes the fruity flavored things inside are definitely chips. But Blueberry and Mango? Seafood and Pork flavor made a little sense but mixing sweet fruit with salty potatoes?  Now I had to try this.

And Chris and I did.  I didn’t know what I expected to happen when I tasted a blueberry chip, Nirvana I suppose, but what I tasted was blueberry muffin but saltier.  And in chip form.

“I don’t know about this weirdness,” I said, slowly swallowing the chip-muffin.  

He nodded but said he preferred the mango chips, as he didn’t have any associations with mangoes so the sweeter flavor didn’t bother him. It did me. Not nearly as sugary as blueberry but sweet enough to repulse- like drinking peach juice with a mouthful of salty chips. It’s just a bad idea- whose idea?  Do the chinese actually enjoy blueberry chips?  Curiouser and curiouser.

At least I have my olive oil and spaghetti… we’ll see how that goes.

I’m happy that I can honestly answer my students “yes” when they ask me (multiple times) if I like Chinese food.  It’s delicious and not at all like the shit American Chinese food you get at places like King Buffet.  They must dummy it down for our bland taste buds.  Turkey, stuffing, corn, apple pie… compared to a bite of chili pepper and fried vermicelli, the traditional Thanksgiving meal might as well be cardboard. When Chris and I cook our own meals, which is most of time because we’re intimidated by restaurants due to the indecipherable doodles, it’s things like rice and steamed broccoli sprinkled for dinner. Yep, this keeps with our blah food traditions, but we also have no idea what these spices are that the Chinese use let alone how to prepare them without accidentally frying our mouths off. It’s when we go to restaurants with the other foreign teachers that we get the real Chinese food.  

Lately, we’ve gone to a hotel owned by the university.  I suppose it’s because it’s easy to get to, not crowded, the staff knows a couple other teachers and it’s more like a western restaurant. The floors are kinda shiny, the same tables and chairs are neatly organized around the spacious room and the waitstaff wear coordinating uniforms. Many other eateries in our neighborhood feel like dive bars.  A good crowd there for good food and drink, not for atmosphere: chipped tables and stools haggled from a garage sale cramped together by scuffed walls. The food is still piping hot and delicious, probably brought to you by one of the family of the owner who’s wearing street clothes under a greasy apron.  

There’s a great mystery to ordering food in China. You really don’t know what you’re going to get.  I’ve already explained about the doodles, so you know there’s absolutely no point in trying to decipher the restaurant’s nice, laminated menu.  Instead, you try your damn best to tell the waiter what you want.  A simple dish that they should have, like egg and tomato.  One teacher, Robert from New Zealand, has this handy cheat sheet.  Organized into three columns, his little packet of paper has the Chinese characters, the English translation, and the pinyin of a variety of dishes. So we point to what we want. Even then, even though there are neatly typed doodles, you still have no idea if you’ll get what you order.  The past few times, the waiter has returned to the table, presumably to tell us they don’t have one of the dishes.  It’s several minutes of pointing, grunting Chinese, and hoping someone understood something before the food arrives. Last night we went 1-2.

The hotel knows Robert quite well because he’s been teaching here for going on five years, I think.  There’s a particular potato dish that we’ve come to love that the restaurant makes special for us Westerners- mainly because it’s simply cubed potatoes cooked in this lightly spicy sauce, uncorrupted by any weird meat or vegetables like how it’s normally prepared.  Robert told us he and one of the other teachers invested some time “training” the waitstaff to cook this simple potato dish.  When we go to the hotel, we look forward to this dish.  Only last night something went wrong.  Even though we’ve had our waiter before and the kitchen staff knows Robert, our potatoes came out looking like bean sprouts- white and finely sliced- with a kick that sent me grappling for my shot glass gulp of tea, whose hotness did nothing to calm my mouth.  When my eye stopped watering, I took another timid bite from the serving plate- there are no “normal” plates, rather we all use our chopsticks to pick out bite fulls from the heap of food on the serving plate, and what we can’t immediatly eat, we put in our own saucer-sized plates. I was surprised. The potatoes had a vinegar taste but so long as I chewed slowly, I could handle the spice. Tasty, actually. 

Our next dish arrived, the spicy cabbage.  We originally tried for button mushrooms and vegetables, but we deduced from the waiter’s earlier talk that they couldn’t prepare it. Robert picked spicy cabbage- not one of my choices. The white cabbage bathed in this deep red-orange liquid that I knew was going to fry my mouth (Red and orange equal spice).  I’m sensitive to spice and sometimes have difficulty with mild salsa so I was appropriately worried about this cabbage.  As long as I took pieces not too soaked, I could handle it. This is a different kind of spice than Mexican spices. I don’t know exactly what, except they hit somewhere else on the mouth.  As I filled up with the spicy food, my lower lip started to tingle.  When the vermicelli with chili pepper (thin, stretchy noodles the color of rust) I inwardly groaned.  How the hell would my mouth survive this onslaught?  Lucky for me, the noodles didn’t contain a lot of spiciness, rather they were incredibly flavorful with a hint of spice that, after the cabbage, I hardly noticed. 

Just before the noodles, the waiter brought us two unordered dumplings- fist-sized balls of dough stuffed with noodles, vegetables, and egg.  We looked at each other, “what the hell? Was that what the waiter tried to tell us?” and then we gobbled them up because they were good.

My tingly lip forced me to quit before I was thoroughly full, but we wouldn’t have been able to polish off the potatoes and cabbage we had to leave on the table anyway, our bellies rolling around in Chinese spicy goodness.

Due to a flaw in the Chinese education system, students are taught to read and write English at a young age, but no time is spent on speaking the language.  Enter the Foreign Teachers Brigade of Anyang Normal University!  Their are five of us, besides Chris and myself there is a girl from The Philippines, and two men, one from New Zealand and one from Poland.  We teach Oral English. Our mission is simple- get the students to talk. 

I have mostly first year students, and they are the most interested in what I have to say and eager to practice their English.  But there are two older classes (third year, I think). The Asshole Classes.  Most of the students clearly don’t want to be there.  They text, listen to their MP3s, nap, or talk to each other, which distracts me from my failing enthusiastic attempts to teach the handful of interested students in the front rows. It took multiple times of me saying something like “shut the hell up or get out” before the bad seeds, led by a girl named Pom Pom, finally simmered down- and proceeded to blankly stare at me so I focused my energy on helping the students who did want to be there. 

But the other seven classes are fantastic.  Many students are shy and still reluctant to speak in front of the whole class, but they’re attentive with their shining eyes and bright faces. Part of it, I suspect, it the novelty of having a foreigner as a teacher.  Many freshmen are from small villages and Anyang isn’t exactly a tourist mecca so us foreign teachers are the first foreigners they’ve ever seen.  Which explains the questions I got the first week:

Can you speak Chinese

What is your impression of China?

Do you like Chinese food? What is your favorite? 

Can you use chopsticks? 

What is your impression of China?  Anyang? 

What do you think of Olympics? 

Can you speak Chinese?  (My attempt at “I am a teacher” is met with happy giggles and claps).

It does get tiring by the end of the week repeating all that information (I have nine classes total, 18 hours) and my feet ache from continuously standing in ill-fitting shoes, but I leave my first year classes feeling energized. That I am actually doing something worthwhile and helpful instead of regurgitating information into a computer. I am Super Teacher!  Ready to impart knowledge on all! And I can learn from the students, too, who are very eager to help and teach me Chinese.  I do wonder what happens between the first and third years that make the older students so… unresponsive.  Is it pressure from exams and classes and finding a job that builds into those apathetic faces?  Or are they bored with the foreigner’s goofy attempts to get them to talk? Or… what? No matter. This will not impede Super Teacher and her Mission!

“5:17 AM.  72 degrees.  Time to get your asses out of bed so you can get your Foreign Expert Certificates!” the loud, robot-woman voice announced.  5:17.  What a terrible time to be alive.  Chris, myself, and one of the other new foreign teachers had a 2+ hour drive to the capital of the Henan province, Zhengzhou to the hospital for a few routine tests before we complete the visa/residency permit/Foreign Expert Certificate process.  We had to do that before China allowed us in so I don’t know why they’re making us do it again- and in much less… hospital-like conditions.

Bleary-eyed, we arrived at the hospital, filled out paperwork, and immediately followed James, the aggressively friendly Chinese man in charge of us, trotting down the hall and poking his head into doorways before shoving us in.  ”You go in here!”  The three of us scrambled into the room for the chest x-ray, to another room for an ultrasound, to the EKG room, to another for blood pressure and weight, another for blood, and my favorite- the urine sample.  All the while James quietly ushered us along, barly giving us time to wipe off the ultrasound goo before shooing us into another room.  Give me an hour wait in a doctor’s office any day then fighting a posse of Chinese men for a turn.

Chris somehow fell behind so Annie and I went to the second floor on our own to do the last two tests- blood and urine.  Two men wearing surgical masks and rubber gloves sat behind their respective desks, an open trash can on the floor on each side of the desk and vials of blood neatly arranged in those special blood crates between them.  Three wastebaskets sat on the floor by the door where, I would see, people chucked their swabs coated with dried blood.

Annie and I waited our turn next to a wall that had four huge, distinct flower-shaped blooms of mold growing into the baby blue walls.  There was mold in the room where we’re giving blood.  I checked to see that the men taking blood were using new needles because, now, I just wasn’t sure.  And yes, fresh vials and needles opened from sealed packaging.  The process itself went as it should, you know, bleed into vials, except no band-aid or tape to stop the bleeding, just two cotton swabs that you toss into those open bins.

       Chris enjoys a Chinese donut after our tests.

One to go. Urine. We found the room where a woman wearing a surgical mask indicated we were to pick up a tiny plastic cup that could hold now more than 1/2 cup of liquid- and there’s no lid.  It’s not even a real cup!  It’s shaped more like a scoop with a plastic tab to serve as a handle.  I have to pee into this?!?  Annie and I were pointed down the hall to the public bathrooms.  Public squat toilets.  By the smell, it clearly hadn’t been cleaned the night before.  Holy Shit. How can I possibly do this?  I’ll just let your imagine run with how you squat and pee into a cup.  It can’t be done without making a mess and to add to this- how do you pull up your damn pants when one hand holds an OPEN CUP OF PEE?  You can’t. I set the “cup” down on the ledge separating the two toilets. Not sanitary.

Sigh… I remembered the last urine test I took in Chicago.  I was given a sterile kit, complete with wipes and a little funnel and a lid for the cup.  And it was an actual cup that I just left in the bathroom in a special collection spot where the nursed would pick it up.  

I washed my hands and used a Kleenex to gently walk the cup back down to the lab.  Yes, yes.  There’s open cups of urine being walked up and down the hall all the live long day.  Of course I dribbled as I weaved around the group standing between me and the drop off, but at least I had a Kleenex whereas the men behind me did not.  

I placed the cup in a tray filled with twelve other filled cups.  I was lucky 13.  There was space for at least 11 more.  I wondered if there was a lid to that or was it someone’s great responsibility to carefully walk the tray up and down twenty more flights of stairs- because what I’ve seen so far indicates that the hospital wouldn’t actually put the lab next to the collection spot.  

I rushed back down the hall and washed my hands again- with just water because China doesn’t believe in putting soap next to the sinks.  God bless you, Suave hand sanitizer.

I ran downstairs and flung myself outside, taking a deep breath of cool, smoky yet refreshing air trying not to picture a bajillion germs dancing around my skin. 

When James asked us what we thought of the hospital, what the hospitals are like in the U.S, my polite response was “sterile.” His responded by explaining that, until recently, not many foreigners were coming to this region and not many Chinese were going abroad so they’ve had to scramble to keep up with the demand for these sorts of tests.  True, we’ve seen evidence of this scramble in Anyang.  I know I bring my own rich, Western attitude to, well, everything, because that’s what I know.  I’ve heard people say Americans are too clean, but seriously, China?  It’s been hard to wrap my mind around why a wealthy nation, a nation that just sent three people into space, has moldy hospitals, open cups of urine walked down the halls, and no soap in the bathrooms.

Chris, being the good nerd that he is, has decided to learn the Chinese characters.  We’ve already gotten ourselves a tutor to help speak the language, but learning to read it is much different.  See, to my very western mind, learning to speak and read another language go hand in hand.  As you learn to read, you learn to speak.  Not so when the written language is composed of 900 billion different doodles that you have to memorize.  I was content to just speak because that’s more important, but Chris would not be satisfied.  He even got himself a book on the characters and for the past two weeks has been meticulously making flashcards and quizzing himself.  His first goal is to master “category A” the 2,000 most common doodles before taking on the other 2,000 just common doodles, and lastly the “2,202 words the frequency of use of which is next below words in category B” so says his book.  If you’re a good little student, you can master all the doodles in the book in…FOUR YEARS.  Yikes!  So you see why this avid reader lacked enthusiasm to learn to read Chinese (aside from important doodles like “hospital” and “noodles”).

Yet watching Chris pour over that doodle book, pieces of paper fluttering around him, his hands colored with black ink I felt ashamed of myself.  I couldn’t let him show me up!  I’m in this small city for one year, where not many people speak English so the least I can do is try learning the most common doodles.  I took a deep breath and picked up a stack of flashcards.  Some, like “one”, are easy because it’s a single horizontal line.  ”Two” is two horizontal lines.  ”Dot” looks like a big apostrophe, but suddenly you get incredibly complex doodles, like “to stay, to live, or to stop” is a combination of multiple doodles that look absolutely nothing what it means.  Chris’s book has explain that there is a logic behind this complex writing system, but it has become so convoluted that it stopped making sense.  And obviously there are no Chinese cognates so you have to memorize the 900 billion doodles.  Eek.

But anyone who’s tried pure memorization knows it’s not very effective.  Especially when you’re trying to cram all those doodles into your brain with nothing to associate them with. This goes doubly for me so, in some cases, I’ve resorted to creating stories to remember the doodles.  So, it’s been working well with doodles that look similar.  An example:  

This is The Epic Tale of Zhŭ :

丶 is zhŭ. His life begins insignificantly, he is but a dot upon the earth.  But after much hard work 丶 becomes 主 or zhŭ, the lord, emperor, the most principle person in the kingdom.

The stories of 丶 travel far and wide and soon a stranger arrives.  He is shown such hospitality, such kindness that he decides to zhù ( 住 ) or stay with 主, thus stopping his journey and living in that kingdom forever.

They become life long friends, performing many great deeds together.  Upon their deaths a flock of doves, the zhuī ( 隹 ) arrive to carry their souls to the underworld.

Oh, China.  This is what you do to me!

“It just occurred to me that this is you’re last 24 hours in a free country.  Oh my god!”  My mother was very surprised at that realization.

And it still hasn’t quite hit me that in a little over 12 hours, Chris and I will be boarding a plane to China. I don’t know quite what to say about this.  There’s been a lot of thumb-twiddling to get to this spot so I feel more of a stoic “finally” than anything else.  Not so anxious or scared or even super excited just kinda “time to get going.”  

Maybe this is a product of traveling and having moved around so much as a child (thank you, parents).  This is just another adventure, another new place to see. Dealings with the Chinese government are one indication of the crazy world we’re about to enter. The language is another. I’ve heard enough horror stories about China (and the extraordinary things) and I think I’m as prepared as I need to be. Bring it on China!

Yesterday I saw some friend’s of my mother that I hadn’t seen in several years.  At least four if not longer.  And they used to baby-sit me, which made it weird for me in a way.  In these sorts of situations, I’m not sure how to behave, considering just a visit to my parent’s house (especially when my siblings are there) makes me revert back to the uptight, shy 14 year-old I used to be.  I feel that if my sister was around, we would have been chasing and hitting each other while every one else yelled and threatened to ground us. Surely, we both be in tears by the time someone thought to physically separate us.  Anyway.  None of that happened because it was just me and I was quite proud of my very adult behaviour.  I tried not to be sooooo shy at least.

What my mother’s friends also brought were hazy memories of elementary school days spend in this tiny Iowa town name Algona- a place I already cut ties with especially since I hadn’t been back there in fifteen years.  So I was shocked to here that wee Algona became home to the world’s largest Cheeto.  I imagined this huge cheesy glob as tall as a one story house!  It would be displayed in the middle of a cornfield, with a caution tape around the tower of cheese as vistors poured in as far as Alaska to oggle, take pictures and stop at one of the little huts made to look like Cheeto bags to buy I Heart Cheetos t-shirts and Cheeto-flavored ice cream.

Alas, after reading a bit, it’s not nearly that large- only a couple inches.  It would rest comfortably in your palm.  But still, Algona bested everyone and won the e-bay bid for it.  This was back in 2003 and I’m still shocked that I didn’t somehow hear about this great phenomenon. Evidently, people do visit the 5,500- population town to see the thing- it’s on display (resting on a velvet pillow under a glass case) at a local restaurant, which is just silly to me because it’s not that big.  Maybe living in Chicago has ruined me.  Now if the showed the likeness of the Virgin Mary, I’d be more persuaded.

Chinese lessons for me have taken a new turn. The past few days I found myself awake by 10 AM so I rewarded myself with a bit of TV. The 10 AM slot was new to me so I consulted the TV Guide channel and to my happy surprise, Ni Hao, Kai-Lan was on!

My old manager enthusiastically told me about the Nick jr. show a couple months ago. The cartoon is about a Chinese girl and the shenanigans her and her animal friends get into. There’s her ye ye, too. He practices Tai Chi.

The great thing is you learn a few words of Chinese in each episode! Since Chris took the Rosetta Stone, my studies have slipped, but with this half hour of song and interactive activities (oh yeah, Kai-Lan speaks directly to her audience!) my vocabulary is steadily growing and I’m more sure of myself. She regularly says ni hao and xie xie and zai jian, so I don’t forget the basics.

Yesterday, I learned the word for up (shang) and down (xia). Today it was dinosaur (kong long)! I don’t see how that will fit in with my daily life, but I could bust that one out at parties and really impress my Chinese friends!

Xie Xie, Lori!

So I made it back to Minnesota all safe and sound. And I was never so happy to see the crappy mattress on the floor that serves as my bed at my parent’s house. After one week straight of interrupted, fitful sleep, that familiar mattress in my familiar room where I had the sweet sound of a fan to lull me to sleep was the most wonderful thing. Oh, bed! I missed you so much! And I gave him a gigantic hug.

Anyway. The last full night in Cable, I watched a couple episodes of the first season of This American Life. One segment in the episode Pandora’s Box struck me. It was about modern day pig farming- not an issue near my vegetarian heart, but fascinating nonetheless. You see, modern pigs- the pork and Spam that the rest of you eat- is essentially generated in a lab. These pigs have been genetically modified to provide as much meat as possible. Consequences of this: the docile piggies don’t roll around outside in the mud, anymore- in their 6-month life span they never go outside. Because of that they are so delicate that you have to shower before coming in contact with the pig. These modifications have also caused their personality to change. They’re tense and skittish. The walk from their itty bitty pen to the truck can cause such an excitement that their muscles would seize and the pig could no longer move. They don’t mate anymore- this is done in the lab. And the taste! This is also being decided in the lab- and rated by paid taste-testers. Even the look of the meat is being modified. Remember “Pork the other white meat?” Pig meat isn’t really white.

Holy crap! I have no idea what to make of this. How am I supposed to feel? A very large part of me is thoroughly disgusted with this treatment of these defenceless pigs. That was one of the reasons I became a veggie- the cruel, unnecessary treatment of animals. Is growing pigs in a test tube necessary?

I thought about genetically modified foods. True enough, we don’t know the long-term effects of having scorpion DNA added to corn. Are there weird side effects to this “new and improved” pig meat? Maybe we’ll end up with babies with nine heads, but genetic modification has its advantages. Added vitamins to corn is a definite plus to regions with famine and malnutrition. But that’s just corn and contrary to what some people think corn and carrots do not have feelings.

If you spurn genetically modified veggies because of those modifications, have you thought about animals? Pigs were once wild and were domesticated several thousands of years ago. And now they’re being created in a lab. Where do you draw the line between what’s acceptable and what’s not?

Just because it’s fun consider humans for a second. The Hyper Games. A sort of anything goes Olympics. If you’d like to meddle around with drugs and cheetah DNA by all means. In professional sports and the Olympics you’re supposed to use what God gave you to compete. Supposedly, this makes things fair. But what about these fancy, high-tech (very expensive) swimsuits the likes of Michael Phelps were wearing? Or fancy running shoes? This by no means levels the playing field- especially since not everyone can afford to be outfitted in bajillion-dollar swimsuit.

A very large part of me doesn’t care that pigs are being manufactured. Do the pigs posses the self-awareness to know that they’re being treated abominably? Should this even matter? What about people that want to inject cheetah DNA into their legs to see if they’ll run faster? Whatever happens to them is their deal.

Seems I’ve developed a blase attitude towards science- as I think a lot of humans have. It’s understandable since allows us to live long, healthy lives and it’s given us the Internet. But I wonder where the limits should be, what’s “right” and “wrong.” How do we know when we reached it? Seriously, how much can a little piggy take?