Maxwele was jogging on Cape Town’s De Waal Drive just before 6pm last Wednesday when a convoy of six government cars sped past him.

“I waved them away, as if to say ‘hamba’, because of the noise. After that a black BMW X5 pulled up and three guys jumped out, pointing guns at me,” Maxwele told Sowetan.

Say you want about the current or past US administrations but I think they would at least respect one’s right to flick them off.

• on my bed, at a slight angle across it
• on top of the covers
• feet hanging off the end and head below the pillows
• arms folded under my head

Who knows why.

me: yp
wow, brilliant typing
friend: you are a skilled typist
me: there’s a reason I’ve made my name in the field

…

[later, after I told him not to worry about me dating someone in particular]

friend: I’m not at all worried
about you making a move
ON ANYOEN
oh damn
undone by poor typing
it’s like I’m you!
me: haha
it’s because you have giant fingers
that are unsuited to normal sized keyboards
friend: it’s true
you should see me type on the G1
me: like a clown in a midget[1] car!
friend: everybody needs an automobile!
this was the largest car I could afford!

[1] Of course I mean a very small car, not necessarily one made for or used by little people.

• relative wealth
• relatively little security
• relative lack of paranoia about safety
• less of a correlation between race and class
• stores open late
• people talking like me
• people not talking like me
• big cars
• expensive food
• cheap electronics, clothes

–

I really like these vintage Japanese baseball cards.

• Buford- it’s not the laugh he has when someone tells a joke, but the laugh he specifically reserves when he tells stories. It’s a stifled laugh in the midst of a sentence when he’s setting up something particularly amusing. “So we’re at the circus [stifled laugh] and there’s this guy, right [stifled laugh], and he…”
• Jesse – He is a perfect example of the contrast between a big, tough exterior and a giggling laugh.
• John V – When John would laugh really hard, he’d transition from his normal laugh to a higher pitched laugh. I think it rubbed off on me.
• Colin A – I don’t know if Colin still does this but in high school he’d laugh in a moderately contained manner but his nostrils would flare and contract rapidly during his laugh. I tried to imitate this; it’s inimitable.
• Jeff M – Jeff has a few laughs, but my favorite is the mouth-fully-open boisterous one when he finds something really funny.

JW is a solid dude. He’s the sort of guy who, if you asked him to take time off work to show around a Malawian guy you barely know around New York, would probably say yes. He’s also the sort of guy who could be the first person to inform me of my receding hairline and I wouldn’t take it as an insult or an effort to embarrass me; he would simply be informing me of a fact.

JW is also the sort of guy that might have traveled to Bermuda on the spur of the moment a few years back and returned with some Bermudan black rum. And though I was of legal age, I may have never have been even remotely tipsy.

And so it may have happened that we may have mixed that rum with ginger beer to make dark and stormies. And I may have gotten drunk for the first time as we sat in the hallway outside JW’s room and laughed and chatted, stumbling down the hall to the bathroom at necessary intervals and marveling at slushy feeling I was getting in my head.

Maybe.

Near the end of my time living in Taiwan, I decided to go to Kinmen (formerly transliterated as Quemoy), a Republic of China (Taiwan) island 2km off of mainland China for a weekend. It’s a fascinating place that’s had a lot go on in the last century: isolationist Fujianese culture followed by briefly adopting British-Asian colonial styles and then sustaining shelling by both the Japanese and Maoist Chinese.

It leads to some shocking scenes: traditional Fujianese villages with miles of bomb shelter tunnels underneath. Or sorghum fields, waiting to be harvested for traditional brews, with rusty anti-parachute spikes every 10m. Such images are endless.

The English proficiency was very low and I had mastered only a few dozen words and phrases of Chinese including such useful phrases as “This is a pair of chopsticks” and “This is my business card” so communication, or lack thereof, was a major issue. I didn’t hear any English on my flight. I was picked up at the airport by someone that couldn’t speak English; I was taken to a scooter shop where I rented a scooter from people who didn’t speak English. Only when I got to the guest house did I hear any English and then it was quite broken.

I was in over my head. I was an island.

At one point I tried going to the local-style noodle shop. Well, I succeeded at getting there. And I succeeded at standing awkwardly in the entrance for a while. I even succeeded at pointing at a bowl of noodles with pork and indicating I wanted that dish.

When the proprietor said something as she carried a bowl past me, I thought she meant it was mine so I followed her to the table where a young man and an older woman were already sitting–it’s not entirely unusual to sit with people you don’t know–and started to sit down. Then the young man’s friend returned to the table and sat in that chair and started eating the dish I thought was meant for me.

Seeing my confusion, the young man got up and grabbed me a chair. “Xie xie” (Thank you). A dish of various meats and tofu arrived. “We,” he said motioning in a circle, “together.” “Oh. Xie xie” and I tried a few pieces. My noodles arrived and I started eating them. (They were delicious, incidentally). He pushed some sauce toward me. “Spicy.”

Finished with their meals, the young man and his friend got up and paid the proprietor, who gave me a funny look. He came back over to the table. “You no pay.” The spicy sauce must have started to get to me because my eyes welled up a bit. “Xie xie.”

No man is an island, it turns out.