I'm easy to please.

For the one or two who don't know, I'm extremely ticklish.  Not just under the arms, the ribs, the knees; I mean I give myself the chuckles shaving.  I laugh when I put on a hat.  I'm that ticklish.  And today, this mixed curse saved me 200 yuan and an mp3 player.

There's lots of frustrating things about pickpockets, but at least I got a giggle out of it before I caught him.  Why did he look sheepish, instead of worried or guilty, as he slid his footlong tweezers back up his sleeve and slipped into the crowd?  Was he embarrassed to be flouting his Olympic obligation to welcome, not rob, his "foreign friends?"  Or did my overfavorable reaction to his playing pocket billiards on my table trigger some latent homophobia?  

We'll never know, because he was gone before I could ask him, and my Chinese probably wasn't up to it anyway.  So I did what I do when Chinese alienation sets in: I went and visited our friend Ron Jeremy.  English student by day, beergarden boss by night, RJ never fails to cheer us.  Two pipes of Black Cavendish and 20 minutes of friendly Chinglish later, China was back in my good graces.

I guess you could say I'm pretty easy to please.