I’ve made it back to America safe and sound

It’s 3am and I’m still up feeling antsy and jet laggy.  Maybe it’s that I have nothing to do, really, for the next few days and that’s a shock to my system after what I’ve had to go through the past month and what I’m going to go through starting next week.  Nevertheless, I still feel antsy and sleepless now (but yet still sleepy, oddly enough) so I guess I should try to write it out and enjoy my parents’ freely offered Heinekens (thanks mom and dad!).

The past few days have really been a total blur. I remember being on a plane and getting totally annoyed with screaming, rambunctious children, surrounded by terrible, international flight attendants (seriously, they’re horrible– they always end up yelling at me or the people around me for no reason– but domestic flight attendants are usually really nice), then being stuck in Detroit for hours and hours.  It feels like it was months ago that I was stuck in the Nanjing train station because our train was delayed for, what?, 2 hours? 3 hours?  I have no idea.  But here’s a picture, that should be sufficient for any of you Americans never to complain to me about how terrible the crowds in Walmart are:

This is the normal amount of people, you wouldn't believe what the train station during spring festival looks like.

Anyway, I’ve had a blast the past few days… at least according to my pictures… even though when I look at them I can only imagine these situations as being months or years ago, not the mere few days ago that they really were.  Here’s a little flash thingy from picasa that will let you see them all quickly.  Otherwise you can click here to see the album (for my sharebros on google reader).  There are some gems in there, so check it out!

And with that I think I can finally go to bed!  Good night, America! It’s good to be home.

A bit unbelievable!  They are EXACTLY his moves.  My only regret is that at the end it didn’t break down into the full-blown MJ song showing his badass updates of these moves.

Is this dance form dead?  Sarah Richison– we need you to weigh in on the state of this style of dance!

update: I mean, obviously, “Jazz Dance” is not dead– look at the plethora of middle school kids who take classes in that sort of thing.  But was Jackson the pinnacle of this style that was shown in the youtube video above?  Is Dance (capital D) all just po-mo B.S. now or is it being upgraded in a way that the layman can identify with and love in the way that Jackson did?  Is there anything going on that’s as accessible?

We’re sitting in a tiny, but clean and modern, room at the Super Motel 168 at the Pudong airport in Shanghai. In about 8 hours, we will board a plane that will take us, perhaps forever, out of China.

I feel like this, my last night in China, should inspire intense emotions, but really it’s kind of hard to feel anything right now. In fact, the past few weeks since we decided to leave, have been a complete blur. I think we were fortunate to decide so late in the game not to return– it didn’t give me a chance to become overly sentimental about leaving China. Last night, following an awesome, and at times tearful, going away party, I kind of broke down finally and realized just what a big friggin’ deal this is to me. It was when I was walking home from our local pub (lubricated with quite a bit of whiskey and green tea) that I really started to realize just how strange this whole thing is.

I came to China immediately following college in 2005. I’ve never had a “real” job outside of teaching English, science, and computer science. I’ve never worked a 9 to 5 type job, or lived in a place that wasn’t designed for a student. I guess, outside of being a student, I’ve never had a “normal life” in the US, and that’s something I think Anne and I are both craving. China is many many different things, but “normal” (compared to my US background) has never, not even for a second, been one of them.

There are so many things that I’m so glad to leave behind. The staring; the little things that are so easy to do in America that are next to impossible here (eg. changing coins into cash or having someone understand a street address– taxi drivers almost universally flip out if you try to tell them an address to go to– hell, even HAVING an address for that matter, since our home apparently had no physical address in Nanjing); the water that is undrinkable from the tap; the food that is likely dosed with any number of horrible chemicals; the TERRIBLE, disgraceful censorship of the internet and media that occurs blatantly and at all times. Most of all though, I’m happy to leave behind the sense from the local people that I am not– and never will be– a part of the culture I live in. After four years here, I feel like I know a lot about China– more than 99.99% of Americans. I can speak some Chinese (not conversationally, but more than enough to get me around). I know about China’s history. I keep up with what’s going on in Chinese pop culture. Despite all this, though, and despite any desire to the otherwise that I might have, I would always be an outsider in China: a waiguoren (an out country person) or even just a laowai (which is literally “old out”). I think most of the time that I was unhappy in China is in some way related to this simple fact of expatriate life in China. No matter how involved you are here, how much you know, how well you speak Chinese– you will always be an outsider in this culture.

That’s not to say that people are hostile or mean to me. In fact being an outsider sometimes affords you great privileges over the other people around you here. I’ve also made so many wonderful Chinese friends. People who care deeply for me, and who I care deeply for as well. But I do mean, that as a whole, I could never be seen as a normal person here– but always first and foremost as an outsider to the culture.

There are also so many things that I’m going to miss here as well. An amazing farmer’s market that’s open all day every day; cheap DVDs of just about any movie you can imagine; a healthy upper-middle class lifestyle; people selling watermelons at the roundabout near my house; not tipping; bars and shops and restaurants where people know me and know what I like; my students, who have been some of the most amazing people I’ve ever gotten to meet. SO many things. Most of all, though, it’s the people that I’m going to miss the most. I’ve made friends from all over the world; I’ve made friends from China and have loved the cultural exchange our friendship offers us. To my Chinese friends, I could never express enough how much they have taught me and how much I appreciate that. To my “foreign” friends– the ones from the US, UK, Oz, New Zealand, France, South Africa, and so many other countries– I wish I could express how absolutely awesome they have been. Here’s a tested and true fact about expats in China: 99% of them are crazy. I don’t mean fun, lovable crazy either. I mean frightening, arrogant, racist, sexist, violent, pedophilic crazy. Most of these people, I truly believe, would be in jail in Western countries. Most of them, I am certain, came to China because they would absolutely not be tolerated in their home countries. This 99% of the foreigners you meet here is horrible. That final 1%, though– the people who I was so lucky to get to call my friends are the polar opposite. I’ve met some of the coolest, smartest, funniest, lovable people in the world in Nanjing China. Meeting those people is always strange– it really is like picking out a needle in a haystack. But when it happens, there’s this amazing connection that transcends countries of origin, age, race, sex, or any other thing that keeps people apart. God I’m going to miss these people.

The strangest thing about leaving, though, is all those things that I absolutely hate AND absolutely love about china. The traffic that is complete pandemonium; the thorough lack of professionalism at all times; trains and train stations; poor working men walking around with their shirts pulled up to their nipples; incomprehensible Chinglish; crowds that most people who have never been outside of a western country could not even begin to imagine. These are the things that I think will get to me the most when I get back to America. Though often they were the banes of my existence here in China, I think when they are absent from my life, I’ll find myself missing them, and I think more potently than I’ll miss things like cheap DVDs and also more potently than I’m going to enjoy having things like cheap cheese and tap water.

It’s definitely been an amazing 4 years, and I have no regrets about my time in China. I’ve grown as a person so much because of my experience here, and in so many different ways.

I have so many emotions about all of this that it’s hard to get it out. It’s also hard to actually feel so many conflicting things at once. And I’m sure I’m going to keep feeling these conflicting emotions for years and years to come– probably for the rest of my life. In the end, though, I feel nothing but extreme happiness for the time I’ve been here– extreme love for the people I’ve met and became friends with. And even a patriotic love for China itself.

So, all I guess I can say now is zaijian, zhongguo… and a big final xiexie for everything you’ve done for me.

Scout left for Shanghai today.  She will stay in a “Kitty Condominium” for 2 weeks until her rabies vaccination is cleared, then she will fly to Amsterdam for a night in a Kitty Hotel (I’m not making this up), before flying to Dallas to be picked up a day before my wedding.

Thanks Mom and Dad for all the help you’ve given and for putting up with my panicked, middle of the night emails about trying to move my cat internationally.  You guys are champs, and believe me, Scout will (eventually) see it the same way.  Your Grandkitty will be very happy eventually!

The above pictures come from this album of best of photos from this summer.

Some highlights are the “booze bus” that drove us around to different bars around Nanjing. There was a Hawaiian theme, and I took it a bit overboard (hence the tacky hat).

There’s also pictures of me with my students, the watermelon vendors near our house, the logo I designed for our local cricket team The Nanjing Nongming (farmer) Cricket Club (who SMASHED the Shanghai team this weekend, I might add), and various others.

And now, I’ve delayed my essay marking even further.

In some very big news, Anne and I will not be returning to China following our wedding this summer.  Instead we will be staying in the Fayetteville area and starting anew with our combined total of three cats.  We made this decision at the last minute, but ultimately we feel it’s a good idea.  China is fun and we live an exceptional lifestyle (we’re relatively wealthy here, something we definitely will NOT be in America), but we never planned to live here forever, and following the wedding when we’ll be in the area anyway, with a little bit of freedom on our honeymoon to get ourselves set up, this really is just a good time for us to move back.  We’ll have a busy two weeks ahead of us, but it’s looking like it can get done!

If you live in Fayetteville, drop me a line!

That is all.

Click to embiggen.

It’s way too long, but I don’t feel like it’s padded at all. What does this mean?

a) Chris Clanton is a megalomaniac.
b) Chris Clanton is a well rounded individual who has done many interesting things.
c) Chris Clanton needs to learn to edit (which, resume aside, is true.  I was always WAY over the page lengths required on college essays).
d) Nothing!  It’s the 21st century!  Everyone has a long resume these days!
e) It doesn’t matter.  You’ll never find a job in America anyway.

Real advice is certainly welcome as well.  Email me if you’d like a copy– especially if you’d like to offer me (and my long resume) a job!

Oh, by the way friends and family, we have decided as of last night to stay in America after the wedding instead of moving back to China.

Glowdoodle is completely free and completely awesome.

If you’re like me– a bad, but prolific photographer– you’ve certainly ended up with many hideously backlit crappy photographs that you will never want to look at again and that make you regret your heavy index finger.  BUT before you go for the delete key, why don’t you try out this fun little photoshop project to repurpose your crappy photograph into something cool!

This tutorial is geared toward photoshop newbies and introduces some basic concepts in photoshop such as selecting a color range, layer styles (eg. overlay), rendering clouds, and basic chopping.  However, though it’s written for people who have never touched PS before, it should still be a fun project for PS pros.

One final note, this is written based on using photoshop 10 on mac osX leopard, but it will obviously be the same on a PC or with different versions of PS.  Also, if you don’t have Photoshop (good job on not being a software pirate) the open source photo editor GIMP should use pretty much the same processes as described below.

To get the cool animation you’ll need to be running OsX leopard OR have some sort of desktop wallpaper switching program available on your native OS.

Overview:
The end result of this will create a desktop wallpaper featuring a sillhouette in front of an ever-changing colored background.  It should look like this video.  The link is to youku which might be a little bit slow, but you should get the idea.  The end result will be much less grainy and a lot more fluid than what you see in the video.
Step 1: choose a photo
First you’ll need to find an appropriate crappy photograph.  A good one should have an obviously dark foreground and an obviously light background.  Technically an obviuously light foreground on dark background should work just the same, but you’ll reverse the next couple of steps.  For our tutorial, I chose this photo. Open it up in photoshop.

Step 2: resize it!

It’s important that you do any resizing right away to save you lots of work in the future.  You want it large enough to fit snuggly on your desktop, but not so large that it’s going to hog your harddrive.  Since we’re not printing it, I’d resize it to the width of your desktop.  I went with 1440 pixel width– the native width of my desktop.  To resize the photo go to image -> image size.  Make sure you have “constrain proportions” checked!

Step 3: Make the silhouette:

To make it a “pure” silhouette, choose Image -> Adjustments -> Threshold… Threshold is a simple but powerful feature.  It moves any “light” area to become pure white and any dark area to become pure black. The dialog box that comes up will allow you to adjust what is considered “light” and what is considered “dark” by photoshop.  Play around with this bar until you get something that looks smooth without jagged edges (though many of the jagged edges you see will be fixed once you click ok, and we’ll smooth it out more later) and without blotches of black or white where they should not be.  In other words, eyeball it.  Here’s what mine looked like.

Step 4: Seperate them layers!

Next we need to seperate the layers of our image so that we have the silhouette on a layer all by itself with a transparent background (instead of a white background).  There are many ways to do this: quick mask, pen tool, etc., but the easiest and fastest way in this case will be to select a color range.  The idea is that we want to select everything that is black, and then copy it to a new layer.  This is surprisingly easy to do given how complex our picture is.  Simply go to Select -> Color range.  That will give you an eyedropper to select your black.  Choose a black area, and click.  The preview image will show you what will be selected in white.   Again play with the fuzziness until it looks good and not too jaggedy and then click OK.  this should select the silhouette and exclude the white background.

Next we want to copy our silhouette to a new layer.  Go to Layer -> New -> Layer via Copy or just press “command - j” (ctrl-j on windows).  And bob’s your uncle.  You can click the little eyeball off next to the background layer to see that it is indeed the silhouette that you copied.

Step 5: Make the background interesting, pt. 1- setting up and ordering our layers

To make the background “interesting” we’re going to use two cheap photoshop tricks– the gradient tool and cloud rendering.  Begin by making two new layers.  You can go to layer -> new -> layer twice (clicking ok, each time) or by clicking the button indicated in the picture twice.  Easy as pie.  BUT WAIT!  Remember we want these to be the background, not on top of our silhouette, so move them underneath the silhouette layer in your layers pane by dragging them into place.  It should look like this.

Step 6: Make the background interesting pt. 2, working with gradients.

Now we’re going to apply a color gradient.  First choose the gradient tool from your left hand tool bar.  By default it is hidden underneath the paint bucket, so click and hold the paint bucket to get the option for gradients.  Select it.  Now we need to pay attention to a few things here.  First of all, you want to leave the “dark” part of your gradient the same all the time, so make the “background color” in the toolbar menu pure black.  Next, choose an arbitrary “light” color– in my case red– for your “foreground color”.  You will never change the black background, but you will change the color of the foreground color to make different gradients later on.

Next choose what style of gradient you want.  We want to use the same colors as what’s in the tool bar on the left, so choose the first option.  Finally, choose what type of gradient you want.  For mine, I chose a round gradient that moves from the light color in the center to the dark color on the outside.

Finally draw your gradient. Click in the center (or wherever you want to center your circular gradient) and then drag to the point where you want the gradient to end, for me this was slightly off the picture.

There you go!  You have a nice background!

Step 7: Making an interesting background pt. 3, clouding it up.

Well that’s all well and good, but this has been WAY too easy of a project!  Why don’t we tweak our background just a bit to give it a slightly more natural feel.  The problem: the gradient created by photoshop is just a bit too sterile.  Robotic.  Clean.  We want to give it a slightly more discombobulated feel by obscuring the colors just a bit.  Nothing too strong, but enough to just make it dirty enough to where the photoshopping isn’t AS noticeable.  We’re going to render some clouds to do this.

First, click on your completely empty layer.  It should be between your gradient layer and your silhouette layer.  Now choose Filter -> Render -> Clouds and OMFG WHAT HAPPENED TO MY PICTURE??? IT’S SO UGLY NOW. SHIT UNDO UNDO UNDO!

Calm down.

We just need to tone the clouds down a bit.  First of all, we’re going to change the layer style from normal to overlay (see picture below).  Clouds are rendered given your choice of color in your tool bar.  So if you have red and black, the red will be the “light” part of the clouds and the black will be the “dark” part of your clouds. When we change this setting to Overlay, instead of using these red and black colors, it will just overlay the darkness and lightness of the clouds, not the actual colors (this is a very poor explanation of what, exactly, overlay is, and I don’t really understand it, to be honest).  Next we’ll want to set the Opacity down to a pretty low setting so that we just get a hint of the “clouds” (see picture below).  In the end, what you see won’t really look like “clouds” as much as incongruity in the gradient that gets rid of that sterile, clean gradient that we had before.

Yeah… that’s lookin’ good!

Step 8 - OPTIONAL - Minor clean up

You’ve probably been viewing your picture in a reduced view (like 25% or 33% of actual size). Go ahead and kick it up to the real size by clicking View -> Actual pixels.  Look at your silhouette.  Is it jagged and pixelated?  If not, go to step 9.  If it is, you might consider smoothing out the edges just a bit.

There are many ways to smooth these edges, but the easiest way for us will be to give it a slight Gaussian Blur. Make sure to click on the layer with your silhouette– NOT THE CLOUD OR GRADIENT LAYER!  Go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur.  This blur is pretty powerful, so you only want to use a very light blur.  In my picture, I went with a .5 pixel blur.  But really, just eyeball it.   That number will change depending on the size of your picture and just how jagged it is.

Step 9 - Save everything!

First go to File -> save and save a copy of your separated photoshop file.  This will be a .psd file and only good for photoshop use.  But you might want to come back to it later to add more colors.

Now save the copy that will be used on your desktop by clicking File -> Save for Web & Devices. There’s lots of debate over which format is the best.  I won’t get into that, but I personally prefer .png files.  So if you want to follow my lead exactly, in the the Save for Web & Devices, choose png-24 from the presets list.

Make sure you save this in a new folder where you can easily find it again later.

Step 10 - Add new colors!

Now here comes the fun and easy part.  Back in photoshop, click on the layer that has your gradient in it (beneath the clouds and above the “background” that we actually never see anymore).  Click on your gradient tool again, and now choose a different foreground color.  Really experiment.  You’d be surprised what colors actually work here.  Light colors make it look like sunrise, dark colors can make it look apocolyptic.  It’s pretty hard to get it wrong.

Anyway, choose a new color, draw the gradient again, then choose Save for Web & Devices again with a different name.  Repeat this many times with lots of different colors– in other words you’re very quickly generating new pictures that are exactly the same except for the background gradient.  It doesn’t matter if the gradient began and ended in the same place– when these are animated later on, it will just look like the light is kind of moving around, and it actually looks better that way!

Do this with about 12 or 13 different colors– or, hell, however many you want.

Here’s are some examples:

Step 11 - Throw it on your desktop!

To get this animated on your desktop, you’ll need to be running osX leopard.  If you’re on windows, you can probably achieve this with a desktop wallpaper switcher program, just google it.  There are dozens.  But assuming you use OsX leopard this is very easy.  Go to your system preferences window, choose desktop and screensaver, and add a photo folder.  Choose the folder where you saved all the different pictures with different colors.

Next, tell it to change the picture every 5 seconds– you can choose random order if you like, but it’s unlikely you’ll be able to tell what order it’s going in if you have lots of pictures.

And voila!  You have a sweet, catchy desktop that is impressive and fun to watch.  The way OsX changes from picture to picture works magically on this so that the colors will fade from one to the other.  The only problem I have is that I’d like it to change the desktop a bit more frequently than every 5 seconds– like every 3 seconds or so– to make the changes more fluid, but nevertheless it’s a pretty sweet set up!

If you try this at home, let me know the results, or if my tutorial is clear. Especially if you’re new to photoshop. Did this help you figure out some of the features? If you’re a PS pro (I’m certainly not), was this pretty accurate? Are there easier or better ways to do this?  What else could improve it?

Here’s an amazing video from this weekend’s concert by Carsick Cars in Nanjing.  Zhongnanhai is the brand name of a famous Chinese cigarette.  If you watch closely during the video, you can see the crowd throwing lots of these cigarettes at the band during the song.  Zhongnanhai is also the name of the compound where the Chinese Communist Party live and work all day, but Carsick Cars insists that the song is about the cigarette.

Anyway, if you haven’t heard Carsick Cars yet, this video should be enough to convince you that they’re one of the best bands (internationally!) out there right now. If you have heard the Carsick Cars, this performance should cement just how awesome they are.  The video is on vimeo since youtube is still blocked.  That means within China it’ll be a little bit slow, but well worth the wait.  For those of you with speedy access to Western internet, I recommend the HD version.

Carsick Cars - Zhong Nan Hai (???), Live at Castle Bar, Nanjing, 5-23-09 from Chris Clanton on Vimeo.