work all day

realized that my favorite thing about my job is my outfit. ridiculous.

yesterday, a man shook my hand and thanked me for watching over his daughter. i liked this so much.

huh

it was a bit strange for me to clean my room today, find an old diary, and read this on the first page:

hanzismatter.com

keith: checked out the website loveit<3thankyou

i DEFINITELY saw this when i was in arlanda in april, though i just thought it was kind of weird and didn't think about it too much at the time!

Arrivals Sign at Stockholm Arlanda Airport

from: Johan
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:41 PM
subject: Look at this Arrivals sign from Sweden

This is from Arlanda, Stockholm's international airport. They have a lot of these signs.

In Sweden, we pride ourselves on being way better than everybody else, by the way.

Johan, Sweden



It appears manufacturer of the sign did not have correct language and fonts pack installed. Instead of displaying 到達 (arrivals), the second character showed up as a rectangular box.

yuLike

last night during dinner my mom was telling me about how floods were common when she was growing up. if there was a storm, her elementary school, which was on the mountain top, would send all the kids home. parents didn't panic back then the way they do now. the kids would all link arms and climb down and back home to town. they would wade through knee-deep water, surrounded by floating radishes, dead wild pigs, and dead chickens washed down the mountain.

she once had a dream as a young child of an enormous flood flushing the town and a giant carousel descending from the sky and lifting all the children away.

harry potter

was so good! i was shocked! it was very thrilling and well-paced and was so pleasing that i was somehow able to forgive the horrendous child acting. the adults were excellent per usual but ginny weasley needed to be kicked off screen because i couldn't stop snort-laughing at her dead lines and made-of-wood body. hermione and ron were not so good as well, but as long as ron keeps making that face he always makes then i am happy. love stories were lame and forced, but they were similarly annoying in the book. 2.5 hours sped by & i was thoroughly entertained.

also really enticed by the where the wild things are trailer.

labor

today i decided that i am so over my job

presents

all i want is someone who is willing to give me massages like all the time

anaheim ink

aside from my many other serious work roles, i am a silent but cold-hearted tattoo critic. given the total surface area of flesh i observe on a daily basis, i have come to the conclusion that the world is in a very serious need of a tattoo shop with artists [native to] and [skilled in] writing in chinese. and i go as far as to specify, writing in traditional characters. i have seen countless glaringly botched tattoos in chinese. they are almost always horribly distorted - top or bottom heavy, biased to the left or right side. the spacing is not even. don't people just blow these things up on a xerox machine and trace them? i don't understand these rookie mistakes. let's just certify a class of people who know what they are doing and make everyone else's life easier.

people get chinese tattoos basically because they look cool. so they might as well get traditional, which is more intricate than the uh yeah simplified characters. but for some reason simplified seems to be the preferred system of the crappy tattooers. traditional is better. i don't just say this because it's the writing system i learned. the traditional character LOVE, which is popular, actually has the chinese character for HEART inside of it. simplified cuts this out. love without the heart. not as good. apply so on and so forth.

in the end, why would you get a tattoo in chinese on your body when you probably wouldn't permanently ink it onto yourself in english? because it would make you look dumb? that is how i feel when i look at you. on the rare occasions in which i can actually read the characters. i saw a man today who had PIG written on his arm in big bold chinese. i couldn't stop looking at it. he definitely wouldn't have done that in english. more acceptable to embarass yourself in front of a smaller segment of the population? also, how does it feel to not be able to read your own tattoo but to know that certain strangers on the street can? but if you're going to do it, at least get them done right. i saw a tattoo of LOVE the other day that was missing the top stroke so the tattoo wasn't technically of any existing character in the chinese language. how awkward.

doppelgänger

i met a small chubby pale boy today named jake who showed me his secret handshake which consisted of drumming on his belly. he told me that i reminded him of mulan, whom he met at goofy's kitchen. he said that she said that her favorite color is blue. i very much wish i could be mulan in goofy's kitchen.

i also met his small brother logan, whose hands were prune-ier from swimming than any prune-y swimming hands i have ever seen. they belonged to an oldest man.

heinz

just saw a heinz ketchup commercial of a germinating seed that grows into a tomato plant and sprouts a ketchup bottle. it's captivating.

can't wait for toddlers&tiaras on tlc.

kats birthday

fireworks make my heart so fast

here and here

temporary conclusion: best songs on here,here,andhere are going away and one sail, one sea

99 ranch

highlights from grocery shopping with my mother

- she feels my arm. "you're a pig. but at least i hear they're smart."

- comparing pickle labels to make sure to buy the pickles from taiwan, not china

- "just marry someone who is stupid and nice and will follow you around and listen to what you say"

- i'm driving, she is in the back seat. i hear, "woof! woof! it's hot! woof woof!"

one sail, one sea

mexico was one hundred and seven degrees hot and eighty percent humid. the weather was absolutely rabid. i knew that there are very beautiful beaches in the baja area, but i didn't realize that these places are basically like the tropics. chunks of rainforest-like areas. we went to cabo san lucas, mazatlán, puerto vallarta. so so beautiful the places. i enjoyed talking to the people i met there, despite at times accidently blurting out yes and no in danish instead of spanish. my mother somehow managed to bump into two of her customers on the boulevard in puerto vallarta. they said, the world is really too small.

27 dresses

on weather: stepping out into the current heat is like being punched on the face. it is the type of weather for the opening of any good fiction story, where men loll about, irritable and pugnacious, and water drips off of everything. it's the type of weather that would make bridesmaid dress shopping, an activity i should enjoy because i enjoy buying unnecessary clothing, miserable. i spent a july afternoon climbing in and out of crumpled towers of satin intended for a january wedding. i sweated into expensive-only-because-of-the-weddingpremium fabric and left a graveyard of unflattering dresses. and there is something very gone with the wind in that itself.

going away

small hitch in travel plans...

where the hell is my passport?

ricfan09

saw up with travis - thoroughly enjoyed the film. it was filled with enough cute to make my week.

Let me tell you, on the Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters ride there is a CM who is just great. His name is Ric and he makes me believe in the magic of Disneyland everytime I see him. He is always telling stories, making funny jokes, and letting people do things most cast members wouldn't ever bother with. This guy is bound to be the next Maynard. He is so helpful too. So next time you're in Tomorrowland, look for Ric on the Astro Blasters, he'll make your day. MAYNARD WATCH OUT!
REPORTED: RicFan06 22 MAY 06

$$$

i liked when shopping in south coast plaza yesterday i was in marni, where an item of clothing ranges from $1000-$2000, and my mother kept proclaiming loudly that the store looked like a thrift shop and how weird it was that there was only one of each item. even better was when she told the michael kors saleswoman that the purse the woman was hawking looked like a laundry bag.

luna

i would be more satisfied if the moon looked more like a place

sbc

absolutely can't wait to see bruno. can it come out now?

new phone

after losing my cell phone in tivoli, i came home and acquired a replacement - same species as the one i had before. since then i have been very diligently teaching the new twin's predictive texting function all of the curse words that i use in my classy daily conversations, which its predecessor had already learned and submissively proffered in its collective word bank. now when i decide that the word boobs or bullshit or fucker needs to be part of my cell phone's vocabulary, i feel somewhat like i am corrupting a child.

here, here, and here

after letting the new album sink in, my conclusion:

6 to 4

ratio of listenable songs to skippers

largely unremarkable, but i accept it. i can't decide which is my favorite song. but worst song on the disc? BORED OF YOUR LOVE. the band is not called man&dia. thanks.

honglaowai

i am so so so exhausted from work that tonight i am not taking my dog on our 11 pm walk. i feel like my body is melting and floating away from me. so my mother recently discovered youtube. when i got home from work we listened to videos of taiwanese oldies. and then we found a video of this old, extremely famous taiwanese song about the merits of hard work sung by an american who must be on crack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq6SP9YxBGQ&feature=channel_page

my mom was absolutely pissing herself. i concur. it is pretty goddamn funny.

i do believe in fairies

last night i had dinner with a friend of eight years and an australian friend i have not seen in more than three. today i made two children genuinely happy with silly trinkets i stole from behind front desk. after work drove home with basshunter, louis armstrong, and randy newman in my car and with my favorite fireworks in the world swelling upwards and bursting outwards and sizzling downwards above me. felt the rare feeling of feeling as lucky as i actually am. i do all of my best feeling in the car. in my rearview mirror, big goldflashing sparkles rained down on the city.