so yesterday on the subway ride home, i had an interesting conversation with one of my coworkers. funny how most of my blog entries come from the time i've spent in transit. for you fervent readers of my blog, it was the girl who told me that all she cares about now is getting married. after telling me that she had three blind dates set up for after chun jie and revealing that she still has her v-card (i did NOT ask), she asked me about whether i had siblings, so i returned the favor. she told me she had an older brother, about 35 years old. i asked if he was married yet, considering that she seems to come from a pretty conservative family and chinese people get married pretty early. she said no, that he didn't want a wife, only girlfriends. i was thinking "playa!" until the next words came out of her mouth- "he's a costume designer." now, its not fair to make judgements, so i know that i am jumping to conclusions. it just seems like in a country where people are wild to get married before they are 30, and where being gay is a huge loss of face to yourself and your family, and factoring in the internationally known proclivities of male costume designers, maybe, just maybe. i didn't say anything to her though. its just like when my roommate last summer, a newcomer to Beijing, told us about this great Chinese girl he'd met at The Den, a local bar. we did not tell him that the Chinese girls who hang out upstairs at The Den are all prostitutes (p-tutes, if you will). we let him discover this fact for himself when he woke up one morning to find two months' rent mysteriously missing from his nightstand. a harsh lesson, maybe. but when you tell someone that his girlfriend's a prostitute or that her brother's gay, you, messenger, are most likely going to be shot.