5 weeks

The weekend is quiet, of which only 5 remain before my return to the States. And that fifth weekend I still need to make it to Beijing to fly out to Vancouver then Toronto and at last Chi'town. It will be a long day of travel. These days are lazily sliding by, inclement weather turned me indoors this weekend watching "Goodfellas" and "Heathers" and trying to cram a bunch of useful Chinese vocab in my head that will be necessary to employ when I meet my cousin(s) in a few weeks. It's becoming more and more apparent that my time here is quickly drawing to a close and so now I'm shuffling to learn with a restored motivation, so to speak.
Tonight I went out with Masatoshi looking for 米酒 at any local Korean restaurant but they were all closed so we settled on beer and skewers at the regular place I typically go to. It's notably cold out so we more or less jogged to the restaurant, until the big red neon sign appeared at the slight curve in the road. For me, eating skewers is only really palatable any more with a nice cold 雪花 beer. We sat and talked about the program and how it's end is near. I also thought about an afternoon in Beijing with Shawna back in late August when we met up with this kid named Gavin who is a friend of my Cantonese friend Simon. After meandering thru that network of insane modern art galleries called 798 in far NE Beijing, the three of us went to a roadside hole-in-the-wall skewer place where we ate a ridiculous amount of skewers and drank a good amount of 雪花. That was a good afternoon, passing the time by talking and eating for like 3 hours. That's the way an afternoon should be.
Anyway I like hanging out with Masa; for one thing, he prefers to speak Mandarin in most cases since he doesn't always understand my English (I talk too fast and I mumble a lot). I'm not sure what we talk about come to think of it, and I guess I still really don't feel like I know him well even though he's one of my only friends here.
I feel a little frustrated thinking about how I'm building up a stronger basis for both spoken and written Mandarin only to have it inevitably degrade to a substantial degree when I once again drown myself in the science books. No matter what anyone says it is difficult to maintain the pursuit of a language once you are removed from the host country, removed from opportunities to speak (Eugene is not the place to learn Chinese), and removed from the subject altogether. Soon I will be transplanted to a molecular evolution class, among a hoard of other ridiculous ones. When I return I will be a biology major without a single connection in the department, which is scary. I will graduate 6 months after I return to Oregon. I feel it would be a strategic move for me to simply strengthen my relations in other depts like human physiology by being a TA again, or chemistry by getting hired in the lab again. I can just build on these relations, no one says I absolutely have to have biology dept references when I'm looking for jobs and whatnot. Maybe someone will, but if they think I am not good enough it is their loss. My loss of course until I do find a reasonable job...