Cup of Cha
This is China

The Beijing magazine City Weekend, until fairly recently, was considered the weakest of the three listings/English magazine in Beijing. But then Time Out got shut down and That’s Beijing became The Beijinger, confusing some during the adjustment period. So suddenly City Weekend had an opening to make it’s pitch for the top spot.

It’s a nice magazine, and there is one feature that always cracks me up: Day in the Life of. Basically they find different people around Beijing and have them chronicle a day in their lives. The part that I like the most is that certain aspects of the profile, especially the first lines, are always stunningly similar. Let me give you a few examples.

The Olympic Intern:

9:30 a.m. Rise and shine. I hate my alarm clock. I throw it across the room and roll around for another half an hour. I begrudgingly force myself out of bed and into the morning haze.

The Dumbass American:

7:40 a.m. Alarm goes off but I’m too tired to get up, so I hit the snooze button a few times.
8:06 Finally get up, look out the window and ask myself, “What was it again that made me leave the clear skies of the Great Plains?”

The Supermodel:

8:00 a.m. The alarm goes off. I struggle to get up for my 9:30 a.m. photo shoot.
8:20 Wash up, still feeling tired.

The Olympic Sound Specialist:

8:10 a.m. Hear Hit FM half-dreaming. Remember my gf asked me to set the alarm 10 minutes early.
9:05 Say bye to my gf then go back to bed.

Am I the only one noticing a pattern here? Wake up. Not Happy. Hit snooze. We get it: people don’t like to get up in the morning. Is this really something we need to read about? Now if someone added something to it like: “Wake up at 4AM with light streaming onto my face because someone decided China is really only time zone. Hit snooze.” Maybe we could talk.

So what’s the deal? Are the people they find really lazy sad sacks, or is the English speaking community here a bunch of lazies? (Or perhaps not that original.)

But WAIT! I did find one entry with someone who bounded out of bed with tons of energy. Le French DJ:

12:30 p.m. I wake up quite energized. I usually have to crawl out of bed on weekend mornings, but last night was my first Friday night without a DJ gig in months!
12:45 Time for my daily coffee injection: black, three mugs in a row.

Wow! He woke up with tons of energy…at 12:30PM. And still needed three cups of coffee! I wonder if the Chinese authorities read this feature before deciding that no one under 25 was going to get a work visa any more. They must be under the impression that the entire life of an expat in Beijing involves getting drunk and hitting snooze.

Meanwhile, I think that people being profiled should go in the opposite direction entirely. They should be ambitious. Bold:

5:45AM Wake up 15 minutes before the alarm goes off. After all, William F. Buckley didn’t make his name by waking up at 6 every day.

5:50 Eat yogurt while heading off for my daily 10-mile run. No time for shower. As John Belushi said, time spent on hygiene is time lost from living.

6:15 Finish my 10-mile run. These two and a half minute miles are really giving me a lot more time to finish writing my Chester A. Arthur novel.

6:32 Finish writing my Chester A. Arthur novel. The critics will love the 417-page work on America’s most banal president. Most people don’t realize this, but Fred Thompson modeled his career on President Arthur.

6:34 Start brainstorming about John Major biography. A man’s got to keep busy.

6:36 Hit snooze.

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Tags: city weekend, expats, laziness
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