These are a few of the most frustrating things:

Much unlike Fraulein Maria's raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens... far from it in fact:

For the past few days I have been physically resisting the urge to scream, scream at this place, at this culture, at my students, at my computer, at random people in the street.

Some things are trivial, some things are heartbreaking, some things are rude. I want to scream at them all for exhausting me, defeating me, and making me feel farther and farther from the One whom I know of nothing that can separate me from His love.

For example:
-Text messages that say "are you free now?" (no being the near constant responding message, is anyone ever really free right now?) followed by text messages that clearly demonstrate frustration with me. How am I supposed meet those demands?

-The girl wearing jeans and a matted t-shirt using wooden flip flops to prostrate herself across the grimy intersection through traffic in hopes to gain a surplus of merit. Will she ever know freedom?

-The fact that I cannot buy an international airline ticket online myself (though I've spent days trying), nor can I go to the local ticket office (for two hours) and buy it because they only issue tickets to Chongching. Why does it look possible when it's really not?

-Offering to cook a big American dinner for some colleagues only to have half of them show up late or not at all as I stare in dismay at what will amount to more leftovers than I can eat and too many dishes to wash in the sink. What is the point of working so hard?

-Getting dragged to nearly outside of town to go meet some friend of a friend only to be basically ignored and then told I can take my own taxi back. Is my time not valuable to anyone but me?

-The thirty minutes to an hour that it takes for my email page to open. What am I supposed to be learning through this?

-The girl who never comes to class showing up late (interrupting my class) and then bursting into tears halfway through proclaiming that she's sick and needs to leave (again interrupting my class). How can I match such insolence with grace?

-The fact that the only English phrase that I hear that is grammatically correct all semester is a shouted "I want to f*** you" and all the other like attention (totally unprovoked) that I get while trying to be a normal person and simply live in this city. Will they ever realize the total devaluation of a human being that such attention produces?

-That the fish (and basically any other meat that people cook in this place) is full of bones, one of which I think I swallowed a few hours ago. Is it possible for a person to live having swallowed a fish bone?

-That smell. What on earth is it?

It is hard for me to adequately describe the feeling that the combination of these things produces. Unease, tension, anger, worthlessness, truly woeful inadequacy, a horrid mixture of all of the afore mentioned.

Grace is a certainty, redemption is reality... but all I'm asking for is a break.