In the bustle and hustles of life it's easy to forget what you want to say about a great deal of things that appeal to your mind and intellect. At the end of the day it sometimes just depends whether you've got a pen and pad at hand, or a willing party to converse with on your topics whether your ideas are consolidated or lost. I don't lack those to have discussions on teaching, but for the greater questions that I chew the edges of, I really do lack that person who can give back as good as they get on meatier issues.
So when they do come it is sometimes quite astonishing. We had a visitor last weekend, someone I'd met before, and had lunch with him. Perhaps it was just because I could talk to him one-on-one that the topics could flow as they could. I asked him the topic of his thesis: Lexical cohesion in Jane Austen translations, not that it was interesting; lexical cohesion, now that is something I can talk about - it's a Diploma topic - thus we talked for quite some time about the in's and out's of lexical cohesion; that was a leaping point for our discussion of writers: Peter Hessler, Han Han and Nobel Prize winners; our mutual appreciation of commentator Liang Wendao (who has a show after midnight called Open the scroll for 8 minutes, reviewing a book in exactly 8 minutes); and then we broached the wider scheme of social networking in China. It had been a while since I could bounce ideas and impressions of someone. It was good.
He's still very young. Just entering the workforce. Possibly gay. Curious and eager about the world beyond. It'll be interesting to see how he develops as a person. And maybe we can talk again.
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