We should have a word in English for the feeling you have the morning after you stay up late watching Goldfinger on ill-gotten DVD in your apartment in subtropical China while a Tibetan scirocco blows in through the bug screen and you shower and dress in 15 minutes despite which your wife says you look handsome even though you’ve been wearing the same 3 pairs of pants and 5 shirts and 3 pairs of shoes for two months and you rush to the bus where you plug into your iPod shuffle which you’ve programmed to select 20 songs completely at random from your 10,000 song library and you hear a heavy/bluesy live Led Zeppelin song about fornication and then Lauryn Hill unplugged and then the Beatles’ “For No One” while you pass motorcycle taxis and old women with rickshaws as you descend into the dusty yellow suburbs in the dusty yellow sunshine and then you hear some perfectly anonymous techno song which makes you feel like you’re living the soundtrack to a really surprising Wes Anderson movie and the last song you hear as you pass through the center of the town whose name in English means Apricot Groves but which lost its actual apricot groves 10 years ago to uniformly awful apartment blocks and light electronics factories and shoe factories and metal recyclers and walk-in clinics and plumbing supply stores and international schools is none other than Monty Norman’s “James Bond Theme’ so you realize that your life is better than all but one of Wes Andersen’s movies. We need a word for that feeling. How about liquacious? Salugrious? Help me out here.
The day gets even better when a Chinese colleague asks you to define “sub” and you say it’s a kind of sandwich which is the first thing you think of and she looks at you crosseyed and you say it can also mean substitute teacher and she says that makes more sense and you say it can also mean a boat that goes underwater.
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