There is something endearingly annoying about John Hodgeman. He’s the “I’m a PC” guy who often contributes hilarious segments to The Daily Show. This weekend he contributed this piece in the Sunday Globe’s Ideas section where is seems to revel in the misery of being from an annoying state like Massachusetts.

While I certainly don’t share his sentiments on being almost ashamed of his birthplace, I do admit that a lot of the quirks and inconsistencies that he points out are accurate. The difference with me is that I think that these are the very things that sets my home apart from everywhere else, making it a special kind of place where only a special breed of folks can excel.

To me, Massachusetts will always be my endearingly annoying home.

Today I was asked to join the Editing staff at Xinhua PR Newswire here in Beijing. I’ll be the assigned English editor on the overnight staff, which means that I’ll be working for mostly US- and European-based clients. My shift? 10:00pm-6:00am local time. I start on October 6.

This schedule will make it tough to host CouchSurfers, but I will have my weekends free so it will not be impossible. As for the hours, well, as any of my friends would tell you, I am a natural night person. In fact, as soon as the Olympics were over and I had no more reasons to get up at 9:00am to meet people or go to events, I was going to bed around 6:00am-7:00am and sleeping until 1:00pm-2:00pm. Even when I was working the 9-5 shift back home, there would still be a time each night where if I wasn’t in bed already, something would click in my body and I would get a burst of energy. Basically, I’d be up until 4-5 in the morning.

Getting to bed at night has always been a struggle, so this shift wont be a problem for me. What’s more, it will actually make it easier for me to keep in touch with friends in the US and watch the baseball playoffs, football and basketball at the 24-hour bars. (Though I’m not sure of I *want* to watch many Pats games after last weekend’s debacle.)

The only problem? The job starts on October 6, which is the date that my current stay on my Tourist visa runs out and the company can’t actually get me my work/resident visa until I start. To stay legal (and avoid possible jail time and a 500 Yuan/day fine), I either have to get permission from the government to extend the validity for a couple of weeks, or I have to leave the country and re-enter to get another 60-day stay.

I’m not sure what I’ll have to do right now. I’ll know in the next 2-3 days and I’ll keep you updated. Stay tuned!

Several of my friends in the US have the iPhone. They are huge fans and rave about its applications and user interface via a touch screen. I have messed around with it a little bit and while I like it a lot, I am not quite as blown away by the interface as my friends are.

Frankly, I need a keyboard. I can’t stand texting using a number keypad for text messages and I don’t really trust a touch pad to be able to stand up to the rigors of my typing. I’ve got big sausages for thumbs and the keyboard on my Sidekick LX works like a dream. (It also has a built-in MP3 player and the memory is only limited by how much can be stored on a standard Flash card- currently that’s up to 8 gigs.) I’ve often told my iPhone-loving friends that if Apple’s uber-product had a robust slide-out keyboard for texting, e-mails and note-taking, I’d jump on board in a heartbeat.

I guess that Google has heard my prayers!

Today I finally read some of the specs on the new G1 phone, and, lo-and-behold! It has a touch screen and a slide-out keyboard! Sure, some of the features are a bit wonky, and, as this article suggests, some of them point towards “unrealized potential.” This is great for me, because the fact that Google’s platform software, Android, is free and open-source, means that tons of cool features will be made and cell phone manufactures will be lining up to use it. This phone is just the first step on the road to some very cool innovation that will come very son.

Since I’m in China, the wireless networks pretty much suck, so any tricked-out phone that I bring over will be limited to calls and texting and -MAYBE- some internet browsing. (Danger’s web browser doesn’t work on China Mobile’s network, so I have been internet-less with my Sidekick so far.) Forget e-mails; even Blackberries are touch-and-go here. China’s wireless networks just aren’t as robust as ours in the States and they probably wont be for another 18-24 months, so lots of mobile features that we take for granted in the US are wonders to the Chinese. You should see the eyes light up when I show locals the integrated IM & MySpace features on the Sidekick! But with the Wifi capabilities of the G1, and since I live in a big city like Beijing that has plenty of hotspots, I’d be all set.

I’ll have to wait until I visit home sometime next year before I can check this puppy out for myself, but from what I’ve seen so far, this -or its next version- looks like it will be my upgrade of choice.

I thought that moving away might help a little bit. It didn’t. Today I figured that I would be able to go out and enjoy walking around my new home city, playing the part of tourist perhaps, like yesterday (more on that soon). I couldn’t. Instead I just stayed inside.

It was a gorgeous day here in Beijing. The sun was out, the sky was clear blue and the humidity was low. It was a gorgeous day… just like it was 7 years ago.

Everybody remembers where they were. Everybody has a story. Some of us have connections -however tenuous- to what happened in New York that morning. Some lost loved ones.

I didn’t lose anything but sleep on 9/11 and the days that followed. I worried intensely about my best friend and her husband who lived just a few blocks from the Towers. I counted my blessings that I had not been able to get the day off from work so that I could jump onto an airplane and take a trip that week like I had wanted to. I was filled with trepidation as I called into my office at Boston’s Logan Airport to let them know that I wasn’t going to come in that day because that’s where the attacks originated from and I (like everybody else) just… didn’t… know… what… might… come… next.

My friend was fine, though no calls would go through and it was 2 days before she was able to get an e-mail out to let everybody know that she had been evacuated from her neighborhood. The days off that I had already booked for that week were a blessing because I was glued to the TV for 3 straight days until my good friend Dave called myself and a bunch of others and insisted that we all go out and have dinner together. It was time to get back out there and BE with each other. (I’ll always be grateful to Dave for doing that.)

So nothing terrible happened to me back then except for fear, some insomnia and a bit of scheduling fortune that kept me at home instead of stranded somewhere when the airports got shut down. But for some reason I always seem to feel like every year I should stop and remember that day. And every year I do.

Since the Games have ended, my status here has officially changed. I have gone from a tourist/spectator to alien resident/expat. In America I’d be reviled and assumed to be an illegal immigrant, but here I feel welcome. As the Olympics drew to a close I had my first experience interacting with the expat community that I am now a part of. Elisa, one of the fine folks that I met when I went to Tianjin to see some soccer, was leaving town. She wanted to have one last night out with her friends and she was gracious enough to invite me along for the fun. (NOTE: Click on any of the images below to jump to my complete photo album from this night with lots of additional details.)

It’s a funny thing, this expat business. Jonas, the guy who first invited me along to that soccer game, mentioned to me that a significant portion of an expat’s social calendar is made up of going away parties. There are tens of thousands of foreigners living and working here in Beijing and there is so much turnover that every night there are groups of friends marching around the city’s bar streets bidding farewell to somebody. As excited as I was to go on this first outing, I was also certain that this would not be my last goodbye pub crawl.

The night began with dinner at a very good restaurant at the other side of Dongcheng district. Here I met some new people: Xiaoye, Pierre’s girlfriend Ana, Vincent and 2 other friends of Elisa’s (I am ashamed to say that I forgot their names!). I have always loved the Chinese style of eating dinner, as it makes meeting new people very easy: You sit at a large, round table with dishes that everybody takes helpings from. There is a constant interaction that Western-style dining just doesn’t foster in the same way. Having to help people spin the Lazy Susan around, pass items back and forth, and reach over people to get at what you want pretty much eliminates your ability to sit quietly. If you’re not talking to folks, you’re still bumping into them.

After a fun meal we all headed over to Sanlitun. This is a neighborhood right next to Dongzhimen where a large number of bars, restaurants and expat hangouts are located. There is a main drag and several side streets and alleyways where the close proximity of the buildings is very reminiscent of the French Quarter in New Orleans. In fact, given that you can drink out in the streets and walk from bar to bar with your drink in hand, it often functions the same way- though there is a glaring lack of roving camera crews and girls going wild. Much the better, IMHO.

We started our “crawl” in Nanjie Bar, which is famous for their cheap drinks. We were going to bounce around from place to place in the alley that we were in, but when we went outside, the crowds were all hanging out in the streets anyway, and the wait staff continued to get us drinks form the bar, so we just stayed where we were. This actually allowed even more people join our roving band of merriment and I made some more new friends: Julia and Jane both live in Beijing (Julia is an expat and Jane is a transplant from a village up north), and Amany, a CouchSurfer who was passing through town and I had hung out with earlier in the day.

We eventually moved off the street that we were on and across a wide boulevard to another section of Sanlitun. Once there, we hit Bar Blu, which was playing cool 70’s and 80’s dance tunes and had a packed roof deck.

My memory starts to get a bit fuzzy by the end of the night (and by “end of the night,” I literally mean “morning,” because I did not get home until 5:00am), but one of the last things that I remember clearly was my run-in with members of the New Zealand Women’s Indoor Volleyball team.

They were all out getting plastered and they had a bunch of guys hanging all over them. One of these fine ladies -I never got any of their names- decided at one point that it was time to start dancing on top of the 5-foot bar. This was a tall woman -at least 5′10”- and she towered over everybody. As I looked up, and up, and up to glimpse her completely trashed face she suddenly lost her footing (BIG surprise) and tumbled backwards right towards me.

My reflexes were clearly slowed by my now more-than-slight inebriation, but I somehow managed to shift my body out of the way and hook my arm under her shoulder just before she slammed onto her back and cracked her skull on the floor. Uninjured, she bounced back onto her feet, wobbled a second and then threw up her arms in triumph, screaming as if she had just nailed the Floor Exercise in Gymnastics. I put my arm back onto hers (I had helped her up and steadied her during her momentary loss of equilibrium) and asked if she was OK.

“Fuck you!” she shouted at me and stormed off back to her group of teammates and male hangers-on.

Damn Kiwis.

I got my revenge, though. A few minutes later I got the guy that she was slobbering over to bring her back my way to pose for a picture. Funny thing: When I told them both that I wanted a shot of a drunk, belligerent Olympian for my blog, neither of them (or any of her teammates) seemed to mind all that much. I wonder if the alcohol had anything to do with that?

Everything starts to blur after this, but I know that  had a great time. I’ve got the pictures to prove it.