Unintelligible

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Camillo invited me over tonight. "Hey, I'm making barbecue come on over." So I went over and as soon as I got there I was Mrs. Slavery to the King. I started by buying them beers and taking a ton of stuff outside for the barbecue. Then once we got it all outside some of the people started arriving - Hui being first. "What, you haven't made it already? I just came over to eat. I didn't want to have to wait so long. Why did I come here?" "We just got the stuff down here. We'll have it ready in a minute." "Aah, grumble, grumble, grumble." A couple minutes later I was asked to get some oil. "Get some vegetable oil" "Okay, not a problem" I was desperate to get away from Hui for a minute. I started walking down the hill. A few minutes later I was stopped by Eason behind me. "What's up? You want to join me, you need something? Or you just making sure I can say it right." "I don't think you can say it right." I got a little upset by that and decided to go back and sit by myself for a little bit drinking. Fortunately Camillo had gone back up to his apartment to get something so I was actually left alone for a couple minutes. I decided to call Liz and she actually told me something really smart for once. I told her I was going a bit crazy as I do sometimes here with all the staring and all the mistrusting and all the crazy things that I don't understand. She told me that it was normal for me to go crazy here. And she's right! Here are two perfect examples.

First of all after the barbecue party finished we watched Fifth Element which is in English with Chinese subtitles. The beginning where you have to pick "play" or "deleted scenes" has a bunch of cars flying by with the different options on each cars. You have to pick the right car to get the movie to play. So they couldn't pick the correct car and just kept pushing buttons not understanding the whole thing. They passed the remote around the room and just kept pressing a lot of random buttons. They refused to give me the remote for whatever god awful reason. It would have taken me two seconds to press the right button but they wouldn't let me. It was killing me! Once Camillo finally found the right button he turned and said to me "The remote's in Chinese how would you know which button to press?" I was about to scream at him so I tried to calmly say "I have a remote at home! You think I don't know how to use it?" So what if the remote is in Chinese. That has nothing to do with whether or not I know which button to press. I've gotten used to a Chinese remote a LONG time ago. It has to do with the movie itself. Sometimes I don't know which button to press either, WHEN THE MOVIE IS IN CHINESE!

The other thing that happened is I walked home talking to myself and I realized that it was perfectly okay. If I had walked out in public full on talking to myself in the US people would think I were crazy! And that would have been a problem because normally they don't think I'm crazy. But in China it's not a problem. Because I'm already crazy! I'm already one of the only ones who is white. They look at me anyways. It doesn't matter if I'm talking to myself or not. Hence I could actually get used to talking to myself. And then going home I really would be crazy.

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