August 24, 2018
Friday
Friday morning, I woke up at much earlier o’clock than I really intended to but not really surprisingly early considering that I’d actually gone to sleep at a reasonable hour. Since everything was ready, including having reserved a car to take me to the airport, I didn’t really want to be waking up too early as I knew I’d be spending the weekend in Beijing with the King of Late Evenings and Later Mornings. (Seriously, of all the fully functioning adults who I count among my friends and acquaintances, Myf is the most capable of never waking up before noon. Which is fine. Perfectly fine. Just so long as you aren’t trying to go touring with him and aren’t trying to race the sunset every single effing evening. If that’s what you are trying to do, it isn’t fine.)
Got to the airport and got checked in without too much hassle. Overweight charges on my bike box ran me a little over CNY 500 (or a third the cost of my airline ticket) but even with all the annoyance of dragging that massive thing from one place to another or getting it into vehicles,it was still worth it to be going through the airport with only my little green Mickey Mouse backpack and a single plastic grocery bag.
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I chose not to ask for a wheelchair for the airport. Days when my bad leg isn’t acting up and I’m not about to fly internationally (which means I’m not going to have to deal with walking on a hard surface after a dozen hours of slowly swelling) I always feel super awkward being all healthy and normal seeming and asking for a wheelchair. Days when I’m also traveling with sporting equipment, I feel even more awkward. The middle of the next day, on the subway, when my leg just went “yeah,nah” at me and I ended up—before the biking had even started—having to take one of the prescription anti-inflammatories, I had to remind myself that I had chosen not to ask for a wheelchair at the airport on the grounds of “pride”and “not looking stupid” and that I should take this as my reminded not to make any other similarly idiotic choices this tour.
I'll get my real dose of "being Jewish" in later in September when I head back to Beijing by train first for Rosh Hashanah and then for Yom Kippur but I got a little taste of actually observing my own religion (as opposed to timing my Sunday arrivals for lunch with the Christians to coincide with the end of the sermon) by going to Kehillat Beijing with Myf. Of course, with his combined Beijing and New York connections, despite there being less than 20 people there, there was of course someone he knew.
Afterwards we moved on to the Arrow Factory Taphouse to wait for Zaiming to arrive from Shanghai. Much excellent beer (and a few mediocre ones) was drunk before we headed back to an apartment belonging to Myf’s parents for more conversation and catching up.
The two of them both have backgrounds in computer security related work so, before we sat down and had a long and in-depth discussion of all of the surrounding circumstances of my horrible experience from three months ago, they suggested that we put all the electronics in the closest convenient Faraday Cage (in this case the freezer). If I’ve got any spyware, I doubt it’s anything complicated enough to be turning the mic on and listening when my laptop or phone are just sitting on a table. I also know that there’s nothing which I’m actually worried about having overhead because I honestly don’t have anything to hide. But, until we could talk completely freely, they didn’t know that. Not for absolutely certain.
I’m 37 years old. I grew up on the leading edge of the world of internet connectivity. I knew not to just go meet strangers from online without at least making sure it was a public location and other people knew where I was but this was back in the days before rickrolling or doxxing or swatting were things let alone things with specific words to describe them. It wasn't all that long ago that all you needed to look up someone's home address was their name and a telephone book. I’m both old enough to remember stuff like that and young enough to be part of the social media generation where we share everything.
Prior to the Incident–and the police having my devices in their possession for a couple days–it never even occurred to me to do basic security conscious things like having encrypted partitions. Because I know about such things now, I’m entertaining the thought of putting TrueCrypt on the next laptop. On the other hand, considering that my resolve lasted nearly 20 seconds before just giving the police my admin password, I’m not exactly the sort of person who could really benefit from encryption.
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Sometime around 4am when every permutation of every detail of the Incident had been shared and all the other less complicated and scary but more ‘catching up with friends’ type gossip had been shared, the three of us went to sleep.
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