'Tchhh,' the foot masseuse clucked at me when I flinched my foot away from her roughly 10,000 pounds worth of pressure concentrated on my toe joint, like it was weird that this would cause me to flinch, and turned to Julian. 'If she slept more, maybe she wouldn't be so sensitive to pain,' she said in Chinese.

This was an off the cuff statement if I'd ever heard one, since I do have tons of problems, I'm sure, but none of them involve sleeping. And nobody has ever accused me of being sensitive to pain.

As she beat up my feet, she and the other masseur gossiped about Americans.

'Americans like to drive big cars,' they said.

'Americans want to invade Iraq,' they said.

'Americans always are coming in here wanting to know how to get to the Drum Tower,' they said.

'You should be careful what you say about Americans because Americans are listening,' cut in Julian, and luckily, even though China is the least sarcastic society on the planet, they took it as a joke instead of a threat.

Flinch by flinch, whimper by whimper, she also diagnosed me with heart and intestine problems before briskly punching me in the heels and sending me on my way.

Before I left, I asked to use the bathroom. In the back, there was a small bunk, a hot plate, and a squat toilet in about a 4x10 space - I was for some reason surprised to find they lived there, in the back of a five seat foot spa, even though almost every bathroom I've asked to use, restaurants and all, has revealed a similar setup.

In the body massage place today, for example, an off-duty masseur snored gently on the bed next to mine as a child ran between the beds and the owner's cell phone exploded into Disney knockoffs. My neck and lower back had clearly offended the girl massaging me in a past life because she elbowed and wrenched them into submission. I learned my lesson; I didn't fight her or yell even when she started trying to pry my skull off like a baseball cap from the nape of my neck or when she took her fists and aggressively knuckled my forehead from eyebrows to ears along the hairline until my face skin felt detached from my skeleton.

That said, when I was face down in the circular head pillow, I was also powerless to stop a torrent of snot (or some kind of miscellaneous head fluid) from flooding out of my nose onto the floor after all her kneading suddenly released something in my sinuses, as my arms were being pinned by her thighs, so I guess I got my twisted revenge in a way.

There is a lot to like about Chinese massage places, not the least being the price: if an hourlong massage cost between $4 and $10 in the States, I would certainly get one more often. But beyond that, I actually like the frenetic atmosphere. It's convivial. I don't need to be ensconced in some velvet-curtained shakuhachi den. It's not that serious. I feel a lot less... catered to when everyone's just massaging and chatting away the day together rather than me having to feel like I'm enslaving someone in my relaxation enforcing cave. That's all I'm saying.

Before the massage today, we all found some pool tables just hanging out in an alley along with a bunch of noodle stands, a dumpster, and someone's laundry. We had to go for a little bit of a search to discover who the keepers of the cues were (the phone store proprietors, of course, who else?) but at a comfortable dollar an hour, we played away the hottest part of the day. The sight of three foreigners playing pool in a residential alley was way too crazy for passersby to ignore, so we had a silent but swelling audience for all four games. I won some favors when I found that there was a tree in the way of my pool cue for a particular shot, but I tilted the cue near-vertically and made it anyway. The sweat pooling in my thumb crook in the 95 degree heat made all my shots smooth. Clearly I've been missing out on the secret to being a pool shark all these years: extreme heat.

Every time I get a massage (not often, but enough to remember that this happens), the pleasure turns my brain to mush and I lay there thinking ridiculous thoughts:

In the future, when we're all engineered, genetically or otherwise, to conform better to our jobs, will massage therapists have hands that automatically generate massage oil with the right nerve twinge from the brain, or, primitively, a touch of a craftily hidden button? Will employers pay for their employees to have this feature installed, and if so, will it be somehow tweaked so that the feature will automatically disable ouside of work hours? Will male employees then pay chip hackers the big bucks to come retweak the chip so it works all the time, and therefore makes masturbation easier? Would the employer somehow have the chip's activity tracked, and then fire the employee for using work materials for personal use? Then could the employee sue the employer for invasion of privacy?

I lay there, I think these things, I think, I love the future. I love massages. And then I get a little panicked and hope that my concentrating so hard on ridiculous future scenarios didn't keep me from feeling the strokes of her hand.

I lay in bed thinking about this.

It’s raining, finally. It has been raining for days. I need sheets to cover myself at night for the first time in months. Outside, my laundry is streaming soap and rainwater into the gutter, which is streaming soap, rainwater, sand, and orange leaves into the neighbors’ fish pond. A cream-and-white cat crouches on the tin roof overlooking this stream; its ribs loop painfully under its skin. It jumps in our kitchen window at night and eats our rats. Sometimes Ibu shoos it away with well-aimed kicks. I can’t understand this. Just because it washes the rats down with some of our trash.

I think about this, and how it relates to what I want. Mostly I think about how it doesn’t. I think about how I grew up. I think about my conviction that every only child is spoiled. I still believe this to be almost always true. It’s definitely true in my case. I’ve never denied that.

Louise was adamant, always, in her declaration that happy people will be happy regardless of changes to their environment, and unhappy people, the same thing. I believe her, even though I don’t want to. It makes wanting to go home irrelevant. It makes my now strong and pervasive desire for good food irrelevant – and when is that ever a good thing? What has the world come to when there’s no difference in happiness between masses of MSG soaked rice with a tiny, soggy cut of bay-caught, filthy-from-the-barge-traffic-tuna, and a wood platter stacked with an immaculate, perfectly cut variety of raw fish adorned with daikon, carrot, and seaweed?

It’s not that, though. I know this journal has tired of bearing longing-laden descriptions of faraway food, and I’m trying to quit, but at this point, it’s an addiction. Every thought train is derailed there.

Nothing really makes me happier, though, to wish for, than good food and an endlessly thorough back massage. And after that, a nap. In the sun. But not the equatorial sun, not this sun that’s impossible to cower under for longer than five minutes without beginning to feel faint. Somewhere Californian in June. And a swim in the ocean, at the kind of beach where there’s a slow, steady dropaway and bodysurfing waves. And more good food when I emerge. And then a soundproof music studio, equipped only with a great touch-sensitive electric keyboard and a microphone and no other human being for miles, just for good measure. Hours and hours of that, with snacks at hand, more hours until my voice is hoarse. And then a party. But a party with only my closest friends, and maybe their guests, and nobody who I felt I had to invite just to be polite or to keep up appearances. Getting drunk would be okay, but not getting drunk would not be prohibitive to having fun, and if the alcohol happened to run out, half the party would not take off for another party with a keg, nor want to. Everyone would take forever to get sleepy, and there would be a long period where everyone wavered in their minds between being asleep and being awake, and spoke with that dreamy quality that, if heard in the morning, wouldn’t seem to be following any thread. Everything would be uproariously funny – everything would hold gravity – everything would seem to hinge upon everything else. And everybody would fall asleep at different times and the conversations of the people remaining awake would drift into the dreams of the people who had fallen asleep.