ambitiously attempting to get some reading done during my honolulu vacation + friends’ wedding, so i downloaded some ebooks to my kindle app. we’ll see how these books work out on my droid x screen.
definitely looking forward to some relaxation and life reevaluation. wish me luck!
an excerpt from river town by peter hessler. read this book last year and stumbled across it whilst packing.
“it was hard for me to imagine a better job. my students were eager and respectful, and they were bright. the college was not prestigious, but in china less than 2 percent of the population attend any schooling beyond high school, which meant that even fuling’s students were a very select group. in fact i was glad to be at a lower-level school, because there was an unpolished quality to the students that i had never seen before. everywhere else i had been, education rounded off the edges much earlier – in america, even high school students were cagey, cynical, suspicious. education was a game and students played it, but in fuling they hadn’t yet reached that point. their intelligence was still raw – it smelled of the countryside, of sweat and much, of night soil and ripening rapeseed and everything else that compose the sichuanese farmland. and in their thoughts were flashes of the land, glimpses of the same sort of hard beauty that surrounded the teachers college, where the campus ended in terraced fields that ran steep up the side of raise the flag mountain.”
i think i’m going to start including snippets about standard social etiquette. random ones. common courtesy, professionalism, just plain common sense. sheesh, some people just don’t know and were never taught. heck, i think some of these things are just good to know, even if you don’t follow them.
lesson #1: holding doors (only for guys who care. i mean if you’re going to do it, do it right. not trying to be sexist here. for the record, i don’t give two craps if a friend forgets to hold the door for me. however, if a guy is trying to impress me, i tend to notice small acts of consideration such as those in the door-holding category. though i’ll admit a moment of, “oops, i didn’t realize the door opened this way” is always pretty entertaining. i’m all about the socially awkward moments.)
question: who should enter an inward opening door first?
answer: the man. he should push the door and hold it while the lady enters.
question: who should enter an outward opening door first?
answer: the woman. the man should pull the door open and hold it for her while she enters.
question: who enters a rotating door first? trick question. think about it….
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answer: the man! he should get in and get the momentum going so the poor chick doesn’t have to fight door friction on her own.
note that the initial action is always taken by the man, whether it be pushing or pulling.
BONUS question: who exits the elevator first?
answer: doesn’t matter. get the F out as fast as you can before the doors close! i always appreciate a “you first” gesture though.
this post was partly inspired by the brooks’ brothers series. included titles are how to raise a lady, how to be a gentleman, and a lady at the table. pretty good rules to live by. some of these lessons seem like common sense or second nature to some of us, but you’d be surprised to hear how many people…just. don’t. know. i mean, the PKT house at MIT had a manual for their pledges. i learned the rotating door rule from there.
i think this will be a fun series.
meeshiemoshie 