new year's eves past

this time, last year

spike marathon again

pretty sure i've watched more episodes of gangland than anybody i know

embrace, be humble

how do people live alone? mrs. tuckersman left yesterday afternoon for her holidays in Bordeaux and i have been going crazy in an empty apartment. i ate carl's jr. i ate yoshinoya. i phoned buca - she says there's snow in ny. i listened to that new nelly song. i tried to unlearn the russian phonetic keyboard layout and become a proficient of the default keyboard instead. this made my head hurt so i remedied by watching toddlers and tiaras, extreme couponing, my strange addiction, and moscow doesn't believe in tears. i went out into the silver lake night and bought a hand-packed pint of gelato (european yogurt pumpkin swirl, toffee, and almond fig) and shivered all the way back to my car as the container pressed its cold to my body through my purse. my life shouldn't be any different because i'm living, thankfully temporarily, alone, but it makes me agitated and i hardly know what to do with myself. we festively wrapped our air conditioning unit with wrapping paper for christmas 2009 and it has been loudly breathing in and out crinkled breaths all night like a monster.

cocoanut grove

i miss the ambassador hotel, which i never actually knew, and resent the green-glowing monstrosity that has taken its place. i wish there could have been a revival, where i would spend all my nights, steps from my apartment, in the restored cocoanut grove, where judy garland at the grove was recorded.

щелкунчик

last night mrs. tuckersman and i went to see the LA ballet's performance of the nutcracker. in it there was a russian dancer who moved and posed with swagger because he knew he was clearly the best dancer in the company. i suspect that the long beach staging was better than the one we attended. flying sleigh!

612

wild times at the printing press

i like the added meaning

the ecstasy of unbridled avarice

i just found seven hundred dollars of chinese new year's money in my room that i must have squirreled away god knows when. i think i'll do something wild with it, like pay my rent.

merry christmas from the los angeles eccentrics

the david house

two feet down a wolf's gullet

the history of one tough motherfucker

and now sometimes I'm interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,"look, look
at this!"

but they don't understand, they say something like,"you
say you've been influenced by Celine?"

"no," I hold the cat up,"by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!"

jay bells

i went to a people-who-ride-bicycles party last night in silver lake. i had the shock of my life when i saw a skunk wander out of someone's front yard and cross the street. never seen a skunk before. i didn't know that skunks lived in los angeles. i didn't know that los angeles could support wildlife.

this was my first holiday party where there were hired strippers, a trio of audacious, curvaceous women. i always thought that strippers just sort of pranced around, giving suggestive lap dances and collecting dollar bills, but the performance was much much more outrageous than that, falling only a few steps short of an amsterdam-esque live sex show. even more awesome than the skunk sighting.

ny excuse

booked my january tickets to new york. i don't really understand how to dress in cold weather so i'm just going to pack my whiny voice and trademark scowl.

угу

at some point during my ~nine hour bus ride today, i realized that at some point in my life i really want to shoe a horse.

the best thing about the chinese buffet in el paso is that there is HORCHATA and FLAN. yess. i feel so incredibly fat from going to chinese buffets for the past three days and am disgusted with my body.

the carlsbad caverns were amazing. highly recommend. i kept imagining this enormous drippy cave as my house. though as with every trip, however nice, i find myself homesick and quite eager to return to the angels.

tucson

my parents spontaneously decided to take a four-day bus tour to arizona through a chinese travel company. every time i've gone on one of these trips, with the flag-waving tour guide and matching stickers on our shirts, i've sworn, this is the last time i'm going to do this. yet here i am in a holiday inn in tucson. we spent around twelve hours on a bus today to get here. horrible movies were played en route, things like the bucket list and knight and day (so awful, the sound of cameron diaz's screaming.) ma kept pinching my nose and telling me i should really get rhinoplasty. i tried to learn some words, which i'll never use, out of a russian dictionary and had dreams of kid rock coming to my trailer, topless and wasted, and projectile vomiting all over a baby. for tucson dinner we went to a chinese buffet, because chinese bus tours will do everything within their power to suss out every lone chinese buffet in the southwest, middle america, etc. what was funny was that there was not a single asian person dining in said buffet, and then a bus-load of real chinese people flooded the place. it was as if you were in santa's village, ill-fated christmas theme park of 1955-1998 san bernadino yore, and a sleigh set free fifty elves to run amok.

hot air balloon ride review

Next, we didn't go very high at all. the whole time we were bumping into trees and talking to people in there back yards.

cute people

i hope taylor swift goes and buys herself something pretty with the money i paid fer her cd. i'm sorry to report that, in my professional opinion, the music on it is no good.

rumdiddlyumptious

we went to a bar last night where you first enter a ramshackle bedroom and then, pushing clothes and hangers aside, actually climb into the bedroom armoire, à la the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe. on the other side, you find yourself in cuba, à la guys and dolls or dirty dancing havana nights, with bottles of rum stacked to the ceiling and burlesque girls sashaying in fringe on the hour.

when i was a child i once had a nightmare of being in a haunted house where i opened the armoire and all the clothes came flying out at me.

juju

recently various unrelated people have tried to convince me of the veracity of astrology. after briefly reviewing the signages of people i love and hate, i maintain that there is no pattern / y'all crazy.

a more important revelation: they sell my peche lambic at trader joe's

good morning

covering the sleep on my face with make-up

last night we went out a-drinkin' to celebrate mrs. tuckersman's last day of teaching munchkins ever. like a bunch of old folk we four, a writer, a dancer, a model, and a me, were irreparably exhausted by 1:30 am and more than happy when the bartender called last call.

bad sign

my memory is completely failing me in the names of places and people department

presidio

sleepy, tired feet hello from a two-star motel in san francisco

maggie milly molly and may

yesterday anders took mrs. tuckersman and me to see all manner of wildlife in monterey. at the harbor there were medusas, seals, sea lions, sea gulls, and sea otters. never seen wild otters before. we spent last evening drinking with graduate students of monterey peninsula, many of whom are studying to be professional language translators. most of them hate living in monterey but are good-natured about it.

anderssimon

hello from a fold-out bed in monterey

gchat

Sergey: I see

no, I mean

you people here

like to feel guilty

or at least say you didn't want to black out

I mean

back home

we don't care

смотрим сквозь пальцы

traveling with charley

we are journeying north to salinas, monterey, san francisco.

we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

annual weather miracles

on: Every December I Move to New York

filming is now outside the chalfonte. lots of magic rain. it looks like it's new york again. this is cool, but not as good as last year, when i woke up in the morning and the entire street was lined with new york taxis and covered in snow.

sparks fly

wilshire was all traffic today. the road was narrowed off because a movie was being shot at the old church near the hms bounty. in the scene there must have been a hundred people dressed as vintage policemen and holding black umbrellas. it was very cool, like looking through a time machine.

my taylor swift cd is traveling through the mail to me

gainfully partfully employed

buca, after i told her on the phone about my new job,

"Asians are really into hair removal and it makes no sense."

shell

the hispanic man at the shell gas station told me, "kamsamnida," when he gave me my change at the register. awesome. i love living in koreatown.

scandiknavery

we are going to the swedish christmas fair today. there will be glögg, coffee, pastries, crafts, and that choir girl in white with the wreath and candles on her head. yay yay yay

back to school

i'm setting a pace for myself of one job application per day, because the process makes me miserable. in the meanwhile, i'm attending russian three every day this week с катей. the class is reviewing for its final, so in theory, i can absorb everything i've missed over the past semester. shloop.

how it was

people can antagonize this article as much as they like, but no one who actually worked in the pavilion every day can deny that everything written is true

http://www.chengduliving.com/greed-and-corruption-usa-pavilion/

ihop

катя and i lay dead and hungover all morning. rolled through the mcdonald's drive-through at noon asking for breakfast foods, were rejected.

i'm at starbucks, where people keep stealing my crossword. i had it on a chair next to me and a lady waiting for her drink came over, sat in my other chair, worked on my crossword (did a shit job), left. another man came, asked for the chair, and the opportunist also rolled up my crossword and took it with him. i only said you could have the chair.

i will personally pay, out of my non-existent income, for someone to make the interface of the usc job listings page suck about 96% less

home hot pot

my ma, moanin' and groanin' all afternoon about how they're carrying fewer taiwanese brands at the chinese supermarket.

dinnertime

pa: why are these noodles so bad

ma, instantly riled: because they're made in CHINA

my pa, talking about how basically no food existing in china is fit for consumption and that all the nice mainland restaurants import their food from taiwan, where there are standards

double rainbow

It is only in modern times that people have taken the Atlantis story seriously; no one did so in antiquity. -ac

the only things i did today were: walk my dog in three circles, almost stop breathing (out of anxiety) while watching the grand prix couples ice skating on tv, and organize my int'l loose change into ziploc bags by country of origin (for ease of spending, maybe, someday). bitched to myself about how i couldn't possibly have more money tied up in leftover danish kroner. went to visit with jaymee and kayla at night, was cold, wore a big coat. stuck my hands in my pockets and mais oui! a fistful of danish kroner.

i sure hope so, since everyone is moving away

DID should be my mantra. if it doesn't make me cry, it's officially Not Good

eventful imagining

since the best dreams come from waking up in the morning and re-sleeping, i've been setting my alarm for nine, waking up, and sleeping until around ten for one hour of quality dreamtime.

yesterday i dreamt of floating, alone, terrified, through a trash-filled, overcast copenhagen harbor on a tiny plastic red boat because i thought i'd be able to go snorkeling.

this morning i dreamt of climbing the stairs in keith's apartment to a second-level loft, which was a dark ballroom he'd completely decorated into a red yellow orange sparkling masquerade affair. we sat on the floor as dancers whirled around and by us in huge elaborate costumes and masks that keith had made. he'd gotten all the dancers for free off of craigslist by telling them that this would be a dress-rehearsal for a party he was throwing for his boyfriend, who is supposed to be some famous bigwig. all the dancers kept asking me about the boyfriend and whether i'd ever met him and i had to lie and say i hadn't met him yet.

american thanksgiving

night at my cousins', eating delicious foods, drinking wine, playing with the gimping old pomeranian, snowy. the family made fun of me for what they perceived as my new "mainland accent." all the asian women were loud and drunky; my cousins and i looked at each other, shook our heads. the younger relatives were all in front of the tv, glued to their laptops and cell phones. the tablecloth was soaked in red wine. i asked my pa who knocked over a glass and he said - your mother. watched videos from the very early 90s of my cousins' mental math competitions (hilarious and freakishly impressive) and a video of my third birthday. i was much cuter then. drove my family home (i drank wine like a winefish and didn't feel a thing) and the entire way ma kept blurting out - i'm drunk! i'm drunk.

this year i'm genuinely thankful that the fake bottle of johnny walker red label that i consumed in china didn't make me blind. because in retrospect, it probably should have.

china daily

whoozy from desperate

i've been thinking in depth about how i would kill for red velvet right now

Richard Calhoon Pot

insomnia was the emptiest it's ever been, with only four other patrons and a sea of empty tables for your choice. two girls were playing on a very beautiful set the slowest game of chess i've ever seen. for once, the christmas lights above the register made sense and there was an animatronic mrs. claus peacefully extending and folding her arms ad infinitum from a tabletop. outside, a father and young son paused in the nippy cold to appreciate a shiny bike locked on the street. the father asked me, now isn't that fun?

"Hi I am A kettle. Ouch! Listen I come to you for Advice. This flame is real hot but I love my job (I's getting cooked in ya know), Anyway Mister Oomp (he is the Father) Mrs. Oomp is the Mom Cris, Rich, Jan, Ray, Kent, Alan Limd, and Tim are the kids." They all hate me. They kick me, scratch me, throw me, and spits in meyes Mrs Oomp even uses me for them to throw up in. But I can't leave them. Oh well see you!"

чёрт поцеловал льва

i sat completely frigid outside today, cold fingers and toes, reading about participles until i felt incompetent. was rejected from a minimumwagejob tonight. have embarked on my second attempt to read the foundation pit. last night i couldn't sleep because i drank two cups of coffee before bed so i wandered the internet and discovered that a registered sex offender used to live in my very apartment. if these walls could talk

took my language proficiency test via landline on monday - accent was identified immediately as of-taiwanese-descent. rather proud of it

dodo almost everyday

I still doing same job, that's mean i have to see Dodo almost everyday.
What are you doing now? and how about your friend Brandy, is she fine?
Chiang mai stating for abit cooler now, not sure this year it's gonna be cold or not...how is your home, cold or hot?

Eddy

moma

i'm back in town and i demand that psychobabble re-open so i can move in there with my laptop and stacks of books and never leave

i hope when it's done re-modeling it's still grungy as fuck, that the baristaboy is still burning incense on the bathroom sink, that people still walk around with their leashed dogs, that the chairs are all still sort of uncomfortable and make your back hurt, and that the art is still the ugliest stuff in all of la

tom

the 2011 farewell to hungary

i want to go to budapest

secrets

as much as i love this room, i am completely disoriented and creeped out by being here. my duvet is so heavy it's oppressive.

mine

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love - from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter - to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.

june4,2007

today I went to work in the morning, I acidently lock my self in the garage, without any car key, it's all missy's fault, because as usually she wo'nt go downstairs. outside, lucklly I manage to break into the house from the kitchen window.hope you have a nice 1st day work experience.mom

snack time

all i did today was unpack and launder and sleep off my jet lag with back-to-back episodes of gangland playing in the background

i just had a salad a soup and a milkshake with my mama

weirdface

either i pinched a facenerve on the plane or there's a worm growing next to the corner of my eye

homeward bound

i followed a young romanian man who speaks chinese down from the mountains of koh phi phi to the ferry at the beach, rode the ferry an hour and a half to phuket, was driven an hour to the phuket airport, flew an hour to bangkok, waited three hours in the bangkok airport, flew four hours to shanghai, took the maglev from the airport and then taxi'ed to catherine's house, taxi'ed to the maglev again, maglev'ed back to the airport, flew fourteen hours to chicago, picked up my bags, passed through immigration, and re-checked them in two hours, and flew four hours to los angeles, all so i could be home right now.

kindness of strangers

i think i just met my guardian angel. he is a chinese man named jimmy.

my luggage in sum was definitely more than the mass of my body and i was the dumb girl with too many things and handicapped on top of it. he helped me get it through the turnstiles, onto the maglev, off of the maglev, into the airport and to check-in. after we'd already said our goodbyes, i standing in line looking at his business card when i looked up and he'd reappeared. he asked very pointedly whether i had money - in cash - to pay for my luggage if it was overweight. i shook my head stupidly, since i had about twenty dollars to my name. he hung around to make sure i checked-in successfully and helped me re-pack my bags when one was overweight and the other was under. when we got through security he said, god bless, and walked away.

persuasion

just finished my first jane austen book. i think now i am a real girl

hippietown

what is it about thailand that attracts dreadlocks, headscarfs, bohemian patterns and the new age?

useless thai medicine

i think it was three days ago when i coughed until i threw up. if this is the consumption you'll be the first to know

sawadee

awoke with a start on the flight to phuket when i looked out the window and the sheets of clouds looked more like glaciers on the sea. what is it about clouds that would make me believe in any religion

the best young couple was assigned to pick us up from the airport. adorable girl with high-pitched voice and unpronounceable name and her boyfriend, more uneasy with his english. they apologized profusely when they had trouble finding our guesthouse. the girl rolled down the window twice and asked people on the street for directions. i find that this happens often, that thai drivers, even taxi drivers, don't actually know where they're going, but will try to take you there anyways and along the way will ask any plethora of random people on the street for help. and even more shocking is that the people on the street will help to the best of their ability, which is very un-chinese. yuzhu told me that years ago in shanghai, if you asked for directions, people would completely ignore you, whereas nowadays they will at least pretend to not know. when we arrived at the guesthouse, the girl immediately jumped out to grab our luggage from the trunk and then accused her boyfriend of being a bad driver for not having been the first to take out the luggage. he was sheepish and couldn't stop laughing.

forever forgetting things

i didn't think i could like thai people more until i left my cell phone in the room of our guesthouse. of course i didn't realize this until we had checked out, taken an openair taxi to the airport, and checked-in. we were walking to the gate when i realized mid-step that my cell phone was in the bed in which i had woken up and had now left for good. i chucked loose change into a pay phone and cursed as it spit them back out at me again. when the lady at the awana house found my delinquent phone, i frantically told her that i was leaving the airport to come get it, and she gentle giggled on the other end.
i told my taxi driver that i had left my phone in my guesthouse and that my flight was boarding in less than an hour, and he said, okay let's run! and he broke into a jog and promised to keep the taxi waiting outside the guesthouse to bring me back again. along the way he played the type of music i would imagine my parents listening to - like ABBA, but not - and told me about the upcoming thai festival where flowers are put on boats made of banana leaves and rafted down the river. this is celebrated throughout thailand, but it is best in chiang mai, he said.

last night chiang mai hospitality

just when i thought i couldn't see more dreadlocks in thailand, i went to a reggae bar in chiang mai. we were supposed to meet with the younger brother of our elephant tour guide, but we got lost following his hand-drawn map and arrived thirty minutes late. when we finally found the place, asking several people of the whereabouts of place in questionable thai pronunciation, he was no longer there. an english boy attemped to hit on me and brandy in thai - we responded in the best imaginarythai that we could muster.

later, we finally found the thai boy, eddy, whom we'd been looking for. your standard american boy would have assumed he'd been stood up,but eddy'd waited for us and then went looking for us at our hotel when we didn't arrive on time, and had come back to the reggae bar two more times before actually finding us. we played a disastrous game of pool with him and his tiny friend mario before they dropped us off at our hotel on their motorbikes. eddy promised to never forget me the way the sun does not forget the day and the moon does not forget the night and then he offered to buy me medicine because i was coughing so bad.

hotness

I HAVE A FEVER AND AM COUGHING LIKE AN OLD MAN. MAKE IT STOP. my face is hot and the inside of my mouth is hot

land of smiles

In China, smiling at a stranger is usually met with a look of discomfort or shifting of the eyes. It became almost a game to see whom you could coax a smile back from, however tentative. Kobe, the boy who worked in the Donghu lobby and often delivered water up to our apartment, would look simultaneously pleased and uneasy when you smiled at him. When I arrived in Bangkok, I was surprised to discover that over the course of three months I had adopted some of that Chinese frigidity, when the Thais would grin widely at me and I would suddenly feel taken aback and almost imposed upon. But they are actually this joyous. The airport employees laugh and joke with each other and don't exhibit the bleak, mei banfa attitude of Chinese workers. Thais on the street boldly stride up to say hello and to inquire about the details of your itinerary and to offer tips and wish you a pleasant stay.

I met a man today who works as undercover security at one of the many temples we visited. He said that gangsters come to the temples, cut off the heads of the golden buddhas and sell them around the world on the black market, and this is not good for Thailand and the Thai people.

sassy cathy

from Catherine
to Valerie
date 3. nov. 2010
subject You Left Stuff...

so i was doing a sweep through and you left:

a drawer full of random crap

a habitat shirt

a pair of tights

a bra

what to do with them??

thai animals

this morning brandy and i went to the wat pho temple in bangkok, where we saw a thai man feed an entire bunch of bananas to turtles in a pond. he was especially trying to coax out an especially large turtle. from its head, i would guess the turtle was small-table-sized. we petted an orange temple cat, and a thai man put a very heavy boa constrictor on my shoulders for good luck. we are now in chiang mai, investigating our elephant-riding options, sitting on a porch in nice weather, next to a small fountain, getting bitten on the feet by rabid mosquitoes, and patiently awaiting dinnertime.

lamphu

it's strange to have blog access without a vpn. bangkok isn't very beautiful but the food here is wowdelicious. we can't help but think that we may have left shanghai a little too soon. i spend the first bit of every trip homesick. today we head to chiang mai.

Hi Val,

Thanks for the birthday dinner in advance. Have a fun and safe trip to Thailand.

By the way, noticed a notice from Taiwan that the Taiwan government is warning travelers to avoid going to the southern part of Thailand because of flooding or disease spraying. I don't recall exactly, but don't out too far from the capital Bangkok. Anyway, be careful when you are in Thailand. Don't buy strange things in Thailand especially local medical products, such as snack oil ... etc.

Have fun!

Dad

cryfest 2010

shanghai is over. by the end of today, i will be in bangkok. yesterday, qian yu told me he's never been on an airplane before. i asked him if he wants to try it, and he said he would be lying if he said he didn't.

going away

slept three hours. really quite sick. could not be more miserable because i need to finish packing and say goodbye to all the baoan today.

shishman two

last night i walked down the street in expo dressed like a cat, holding a turkish ice cream cone, and crying

errands packing

it is damn early. i am sick again. blue skies, helloagain. tomorrow is the last day of expo. i have not begun to pack yet my things litter the apartment.

things i'm looking forward to about home -

shoe shopping. toms and my annual, ritual desperate failed search for over-the-knee boots. the return to a country where shoes actually exist in my size.

doggins.

good company.

it not being so cold.

not paying for my internet by the hour. no great firewall.

driving like indiana jones on the hills of ktown.

chipotle.

aging

i find myself needing naps more and more often

new hat

i have this new hat that's my new favorite thing.

i was wearing newhat while in line to buy a headband at h&m when i turned around and three young chinese people were standing behind me, two boys and a girl, each clutching two fauxfur hats similar to mine. we all looked at each other and burst out laughing.

early coughs

3 am, finally stripped down and swam with the danish mermaid, in front of many. my cough, recently engendered by the weather's change for the incredibly-fucking-cold, seems to have become immediately worse. my hair is still wet and i think i have a fever. but i am awesome.

also, today, went to the kazakhstan pavilion for the fourthtime. while waiting for the 4-d show, bek told catherine and me about the different ways to eat horse meat, including horse sausage. i caught myself nodding and saying, yes, i would try that, and at the same time mentally berating myself because, no, no i wouldn't.

also also, somehow passed my foreign service test. even though i don't know nothin' about congress or iraqi geography.

cough cough. two days off.

good bad i dunno

aliya

rex said that in shanghai, the weather turns instantly from summer to winter, skipping fall entirely. it was so outrageously cold today, somewhere between 11° and 15°, that i wore sneakers, socks, leg warmers, a 3/4-sleeved shirt, shorts, a miniskirt, two jackets, a sweatshirt, and a fauxfur hat. and i bitched the entire time about the biting cold. sea dragon explained that there are two kinds of cold - the kind that chills your skin at the surface, and the kind that cuts to the bone. shanghai is the latter. i didn't know it gets this cold here. all the baoan were frozen and hopping from foot to foot because they are skinny chineseboys and their uniforms are pieces of chinashit made in the fabric market. one baoan was literally red-nosed from cold. after a mediocre day at work, we went to an incredible party at the dutch pavilion. i thought they would leave us outside in the cold with the sheep, but the party was very generously held in the crown - their VIP lounge. the golden bricks were each emblazoned with VIP and we were gifted with drink vouchers, which we managed to secure multiples of. the eclectic dj/house music was beyond excellent and i saw all my favorite people - hamburg germans, general germans, odense danes, sascha наш russian bartender, lithuanians, and the kazakhs. the kazakhs said, you look like you could be kazakh, which i think means, you look asian but bigger. they decided i need a kazakh name, which bek chose for me. afterwards, spent ages begging a delivery truck to take brandy and me to gate 4, the gate we need to get home from. they delivered us eventually, but too late, so that we missed the second bus home and had to walk all the way.

muji music

this morning an italian man took my hand and rubbed it all over his face. do not understand.

had these fnails sawed off today. haven't seen my real nails in two months. helloagain

bulletproof

my hair is turning into dreadlocks.

it's a robot it's a robot

went to the much-talked-about japan pavilion today. the queuing time is five hours, but the work-a-place made us a reservation so we could come in and take a look. the girls' uniforms are pink and gray, topped with a beaked hat that makes them look like funny birds. the inside was pleasant, but if i'd waited five hours i may have been mad. my most vivid memory of the japan pavilion will be of the girl seated in front of me, who vomited all over herself during the finale performance. the smell made me heave and i literally had to stand and flee my row.

southern barbarian

make your garden grow

am i getting cleaner or dirtier if there is mold growing in my shower?

teppanyaki four

blacked out before we left the restaurant. only thing i remember is falling in a bush. was carried home, apparently.

segregate

got into a fight with our CEO. this week only gets better and better.

heart attack

w0rk could not have been more of a suicide-inducing shitshow today. as soon as i was released i promptly went to the russian pavilion and had four shots of стандарт with kate and sascha.

pop the glock

today, re-visited germany, uk, and the netherlands. while working, met one of the three architects of the german pavilion itself. he told me about how the german pavilion is inspired by the structure of an umbrella. post-shift, massive turnout at the brazil party. i enjoy seeing the familiar partymongers stroll in to pavilion parties in packs, representatives from the danes, swedes, australians, kazakhstanis, canadians, us. the traditional brazilian dancing and drums inspired me to visit the real place someday. plus i want to see the big jesus. we were given tinsel boas and masks and confetti poppers that sprayed colored confetti into the air, into my gifted kiwi caipirinha, and all over the floor. i met a lithuanian named vitas on the shibo dadao bus home. he said, yes, like the singer. i work at eightthirty tomorrow morning, seven hours away from now. with eleven days of expo left, i'm going to attend every party i'm invited to and then some.

jimmy vs. joe

i was reading a decorating blog the other day, and i came across a carpet that actually gave me epilepsy. my brain was fried. i had to lie in the dark for like an hour.

sassy taxi

the other day, when i was paying a taxi driver for taking me home, he looked at the crumpled bill and exclaimed, why is this so shitty?! you need to love your RMB.

ttl picturesque

26° out today breezy perfect. went to a park, two subway stops further into pudong from where i live. walked in rubble, flew a goldfish kite i bought outside of jin mao tower yesterday for 20 kuai. lied in grass and dirt, smoked cigarettes, tried to skip rocks on the river, failed. had some of the best chinese food i've had in shanghai.

Robert: ok well... be well, live well... and keep in touch please... tell Val I says hello and all that... miss having you both as roomies or housemates, whatever

jeffer

this morning i got an hour-long massage at this chinese medicine practice on huafeng lu that was so mind-numbingly painful that i could feel my eyes rolling into the back of my head. it was like experiencing an exorcism. in a good way. i've had a chinese hairdresser tell me my hair is unusually dry and knotted, a chinese makeup artist asked me why i have such sparse eyebrows, do i overpluck them? no they are just that way, and this chinese masseuse told me that some muscle in my back is misshapen. and he dug into my acupressure points until i thought his hands would delve through dermis and separate muscles strand by strand and come out grasping on the other side.

tonight i had wine and cheese during sunset at cloud 9 on the 87th floor of the jin mao tower. nice view.

germany

there were over one million people in the expo, which makes the day where we ooh-ed and aah-ed over six hundred thousand moot. there was a massive line, staffed by chinese military, to get into the line of the german pavilion, which already wrapped several times around the building.

my guide, lina, was the cutest german-born vietnamese girl. she had enormous eyes and would cover her mouth with both hands and giggle like minnie mouse.

mao livehouse

as i predicted, boys noize opened with kontact me and closed with my moon my man. great show. third time i've seen him this year, but i've never seen him from so close before. i heard jeffer live for the first time, which i've wanted for a long time.

ghost

i haven't been sober in a week. it's been festive lot's to talk about. nothing to show because i lost my camera, naturally.

high blood pressure

i could not be more exhausted and frustrated from work than i am today. it was one of those days where you had to tell the old woman hitting your arm not to touch you, stop some kid from pissing all over the floor, get continuously mobbed by a hundred people every ten minutes, pushing and rioting and knocking down all the stanchions that bar them from your body, all yelling and demanding different things and complaining and betchin and blaming you. i'm lying in bed with the shades drawn and my heart still won't stop beating a million beats a minute.

extremely deutsche

upcoming two-day german experience. tomorrow, boys noize from 10 pm to 3 am, and then working at the balancity GERMAN PAVILION (on exchange) from 9 am to 4:30 pm. i am extremely excited, to say the least.

I WILL BE IN THIS MAGNIFICENT STRUCTURE

predestination

not only am i moving out and losing my room with a view at the end of the month, but the view itself will be gone when everything is torn down ephemeral

this morning i dreamt about having to write a screenplay sequel to batman

party in the usa

closing time today

puppy patrol do-gooding

body hurts from digging trenches for habitat for humanity in the rain with shovels and pickaxes. hand hurts, back hurts. we were completely covered in mud. we unearthed centipedes and earthworms and broken bowls. all the people in the area spoke a completely unintelligible (to me) form of Old Shanghainese, and an old lady talked to me for a solid three minutes as i nodded at her. the family had a very large pig with moist contracting and dilating nose, little piggies, baby goats, and bitty puppies. when we finally got back to shanghai we had our first and last party at our pavilion. big turnout. one of the kazakhs, whom i'd accosted at the last australia party, came up to me and said, you should have told people in our pavilion that you can speak russian. i said, why? i'm really bad. he said - we are very interested in people who can speak russian.

olivia was just doing stretches on the floor, downward-dog sort of stuff. i can't even imagine moving my body like that right now. we did this horrible brick-passing stuff yesterday and my right bicep feels like it's being stabbed by a sharp knife.

festive

our boys

i once asked them what's up with the peace signs. they said they don't know, they've just been doing it since they were kids.

killing like i'm supposed to

this morning, via skype, my parents couldn't agree on how my name is pronounced in chinese. identity crisis. i maintain that the second character is second tone, not third (opinion of my father)

tonight, the resident Beautiful Dane of building 14B said that my danish is "very funny." when i asked for further clarification, he said it is "cute." it's shit, but it's much better when i'm sober, promise.

double ten

I spent 07/07/07 in Shanghai at the 7th Absolut Icebar in the world, now closed.

I spent 10/10/10 somehow in Shanghai again, wandering around the A zone of World Expo with TTL. Amongst others, we saw TTL's Anhui province, the slang and funny dialect of which I have been trying to learn, and Fujian province, the probable land of my extreme ancestors.

Today was Taiwan's national day, uncelebrated here of course.

Taiwanese has extremely extensive tone sandhi (tone-changing) rules: in an utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by the rules. The following rules, listed in the traditional pedagogical mnemonic order, govern the pronunciation of tone on each of the syllables affected (that is, all but the last in an utterance):

If the original tone number is 5, pronounce it as tone number 3 (Quanzhou/Taipei speech) or 7 (Zhangzhou/Tainan speech).

If the original tone number is 7, pronounce it as tone number 3.

If the original tone number is 3, pronounce it as tone number 2.

If the original tone number is 2, pronounce it as tone number 1.

If the original tone number is 1, pronounce it as tone number 7.

If the original tone number is 8 and the final consonant is not h (that is, it is p, t, or k), pronounce it as tone number 4.

If the original tone number is 4 and the final consonant is not h (that is, it is p, t, or k), pronounce it as tone number 8.

If the original tone number is 8 and the final consonant is h, pronounce it as tone number 3.

If the original tone number is 4 and the final consonant is h, pronounce it as tone number 2.

qianyu

At work, I was helping a group of older people from New York and one of the men asked me where I learned my English. I told him, as I've so often had to defend myself so far - I am American.

I hate to berate him because he was, previous to this, a pleasant man. But this was infuriating. I wish the fact that I was wearing a full uniform, a name tag with my first and middle name and USA printed on it, spoke perfect English, and maybe the fact that we are an immigrant country, could have clued him in to the idea that I just might be American. I learned my English in the same place you did, sir.

The subject of the end of Expo came up again today - as it often does now - and a baoan quoted a poem to me about good friends never actually being separated, as they are under one moon, by one river. i said - what river. he said that there is a very long river that runs through china. i said - this does not work internationally.

dajiangyou 打酱油

i've learned to say hello, goodbye, and i have come back in shanghainese. i forgot how to say i love shanghai. in the anhui province dialect i've begun to learn sort of unsavory phrases that boys teach you and then hastily tell you not to actually say to anyone.

today a chinese man showed me the elaborate book of stamps he had collected from each pavilion and very seriously explained to me what better city, better life means to him and his hopes for world peace. i stamped his book on a separate page set aside especially for the united states, because it is an important country in the world and he did not want it lost amongst all the other stamps.

on the bus home from work a baby kicked me with it's small foot, which will become a big foot, which will stomp on the earth.

these days seven

7 thursday

Shamed by outdated/old world/largely inapplicable moral code

Had dinner at The Little Dirty, our staff canteen, with TTL, the baoan with whom I am closest. We talked about the end of Expo inexorably rushing forward, and about how meeting again would be rather unlikely. Hesitation, then small, hopeful promises were offered of future visits to America (someday, once rich) and layovers in Shanghai. Silence, and we dug around in our rice with chopsticks.

these days six

6 wednesday

Joyous Alexandr

Last day of my weekend. Spent it with Kelsey wandering the Middle East and Asia on foot. Morocco was a beautiful structure, but the best of the day - Qatar. Informative, interesting, friendly, beautiful. I did not understand Hungary. It had a lot of wooden sticks and a strangely shaped metal rock in the middle. Israel was an uncomfortably hot and stuffy greenhouse. Naturally, by our second pavilion I was fatigued. Three hours in, we escaped the Middle East in search of beer.

In the hidden Moldova wine bar a very friendly lady poured us generous samples of various Moldovan wines and pretzels that tasted like animal crackers. A big-boned Moldovian boy wandered around with a black eye and brightly-colored vest. The friendly lady was replaced by a spritely Moldovian girl who laughed and cursed a lot. When we tried to pay, there was no change in the register so the girl took the small bills we had, half of what we owed her, and exclaimed, "Let it be!"

The short detour did not distract us from the main goal of beer. We went to Russia's Snow Bar, where the Russian bartender boy I'd once met in the village happened to be working at the completely empty bar. I'd been walking back from a party late in the dark and he had said привет as a joke and was surprised when I responded.

Kelsey and I bought two bottles of Baltika 7, sat on the barstools, and watched the bartender be a total nutcase. He was already drunk, but he celebrated our new company with a White Russian, which he made with vodka - стандарт - and coffee. He tried to teach me the correct conjugations of танцевать and tongue-twisters like "рыбак рыбачил рыбу" and something else that I couldn't even begin to repeat. He blasted techno music and danced around and laughed, kicking an empty bottle around the floor.

these days five

5 tuesday

MOCA Shanghai

Walked through People's Park, through the marriage market, eating two big fried crabs on a stick. Here in the day parents convene with signs stating their child's stats (height, education, etc.) and desired stats (height, education, etc.) of potential matches. No pictures on aforementioned signs. I should have hunted for my dream man there.

Who decides that ooh-ey aah-ey ambient ghost noise is the appropriate backing track for contemporary art? I somewhat wonder what cumulative damage all the kooky films I've watched in contemporary art museums have done to my psyche. This one was of animals - shrimp, african clawed frogs, salamanders - seemingly being electrocuted in petri dishes.

these days four

4 monday

On How the Vikings Did It

It was our last day of work before our two days of break. We were freed from work at 15:30. Kelsey, Selina and I grabbed pisco sours from Peru, a few steps away from the United States. A pisco sour is some sort of Peruvian alcohol (pisco) mixed with egg whites into sort of a frothy mess with some suspect looking red powder sprinkled on top. It tasted like vitamins. Hank, Kelsey and I wandered into Norway, a glorious, beautiful structure that looks like stretched tarp, angled awnings, a ship. It is the only pavilion constructed entirely of wood. An affable boy, born in China but raised in Norway, ambled over to us. He proffered Snus, a sort of chewing tobacco in a little packet that my Norwegian friends all indulged in while I was abroad. I decided to authenticate my Norwegian experience by trying the infamous snus, sticking the packet under my upper lip in a very unattractive fashion. This resulted in my general inability to speak while in the Norwegian Pavilion, since attempting to do so would cause the snus to slip out and become potentially projectile. The more seasoned Norwegian snusers obviously have learned to somehow clutch onto the packet with their upper lips. I opted to just stay quiet for the most part. The juices made my mouth numb and my head dizzy. It all felt really Norwegian.

The Norway Pavilion is wonderfully serene inside - all windows and streaming with natural light and the smell of roasting Norwegian fish from the restaurant, which is supposed to be one of the best eats at Expo. I felt at ease and welcome to wander and read the displays. You can drink water from a water filtration system on display; it will be donated to India post-expo. Whereas many pavilions focus on modernization, the Norway Pavilion is based on the concept of nature in Norway, and how it provides a better life. There were binoculars with small 3-D movies inside and some pictures of polar bears. On my way out, I de-snused.

Afterwards we convened outside of Belgium for waffles and beer. The waffles were expensive - 40 kuai ($5.99) for a few bites - but it was so incredibly delicious (at least 40% butter) that I predict further waffling in my future. Hoegaarden (35 kuai, $5.24) washed down the waffle in a very indulgent affair (almost a delicious half of my daily income).

sneaky sound system

at this point, only girls hit on me. she was beautiful in a silent, bashful but persuasive way.

goodmorning

it's a glorious day out

look how complex this thing became in the post

my american friends

what in the hell geoff dyer spoke at the getty in june. and i didn't know about it. not a whole lot happens in los angeles, but even when it does word doesn't always waft out

balancityelectroparrty

blessed limbo

my main takeaway from china is that i can't possibly feel bad about myself or my prospects when everyday here i meet people who feel inescapably boxed in

nciku

i fucking hate writing e-mails in chinese

no more night coffee

i feel absolutely terrible because i lay sleepless in shanghai for three+ hours because i had a mug of black coffee at work. when i did sleep for three hours i dreamt most vividly about discovering that i am actually 1/8th black, and that my father is michael jackson's nephew and that i am actually related to michael jackson, despite never having been a rabid fan of the music

posterity

encounters

today i met some american girls who insisted that i should let them through the fast access lane because the chinese people would want to take pictures with them inside the pavilion. i do not think they were very happy with me after our little chat. i also met some wild chinese young people who sat on a train for fifty hours - two days and two nights from northern china - to come to expo in matching outfits - matching plaid shirts and jeans and big lens-less glasses. over dinner at the little dirty, one of the bao an talked about how he wants to work very hard while he is young so that someday he can move to america.

pastel

noon just woke up. this morning i dreamt of drawing a very large apple in oil pastels while singing rainbow high from evita

best i ever had matematics

free beer all night in poland tonight. which is why it's 5:10 am and i've just gotten home. we rode a coca-cola truck back to the village and paid the driver in pins. you have to be creative when the buses stop running. a taxi driver once told me that the expo village isn't really a village because real villages have crops. in poland i met a norwegian boy and a polish man who's lived in denmark for the past 35 years. i don't hunt them, they just find me. it's meant to be

lord lord mother

last night i dreamt that we had a ton of dirty dishes

waltz across texas

i find myself sort of irresistibly attracted to the chinese boys here

metric - police and the private

privet

the boys have been viciously poking my bruise. my knee is throbbing. i met two russians in the village today (i was minding my own business. i don't hunt them they just come to me) and they invited me to the russia pavilion bar tomorrow night. moscow mule?

status of the bloodspread. hank says his go-kart bruises are all gone, so now it's just me

ernest tubb

i would waltz across texas with you

visiting navy

tons of young russian navy running around expo yesterday. they were around 18 19. some were buying souvenirs like the stuffed haibao in a box. some were eating burgers at our quick service restaurant. two showed me on a map where their boat was parked on the river. i asked them why they were here and they told me that the president was coming to the russian pavilion at 15:00. i ran to russia around 15:15 in my rain slicker and saw the masses of security, the long procession of black cars, the chinese government officials, and medvedev waving at the crowds from the front of the pavilion.

eurasia

yesterday on our way home after work ryan and i went to uzbekistan, kazakhstan, kyrgyzstan, and bangladesh. we complimented one of the kazakhstan pav workers on his uniform, a gold long-sleeved shirt with a blue vest and gold shoes. he said that it was too hot in the summer. we told him that our outfits used to be too hot for the weather as well, but everyone became upset and the outfit became polos and shorts instead. the kazakhstani barked a laugh and said, such a democracy! that we could complain about our uniforms and have them changed.

henna from bangladesh

liquor factory

i should work on my pool skillz. this farce will only further repel boys.

turnstiles

i have reached a zero-tolerance policy for chinese people who tell me that i am not an American. being an asian-american here is like being a second-class citizen. in limbo - not a real american and not a real chinese person either. i do not know why it is that when you anger a chinese person (ie by making him wait to enter the next show instead of this one) he retaliates by attacking your nationality and thereby, your authority. a man yelled at me this morning and i yelled back. a friend commended me for my restraint (for not socking him in the face as he deserved) but i do not feel like i was restrained at all. on the flip side, a younger, unaffiliated man subsequently apologized for the crazy motherfucker and the abusive tirade. every day we come home exhausted and talk about how the chinese people treat us bad.

besides that, i had a very nice day at work.

we ate at shishman again and the turkish manager man giggled all over the place when he didn't know how to answer our questions in english. also spent three hours sitting on a fence talking to the bao an about dead bodies we've seen, places we'd like to visit, the mid-autumn festival in their home province anhui, siblings, hair dye, fights they'd been in, american halloween, how they can't afford girlfriends or to get married, how the company that employs them takes 3/4 of their paycheck. conclusion is that it is difficult to be a young man in china.

shishman

yesterday a student ambassador measured my blood sugar while we were getting doner kebabs for lunch. he lanced my finger and squeezed the blood out for me and the turkish manager man at shishman came over and watched. i thought it would hurt like a bitch the way the prerequisite finger lancing for blood donation does, but it really didn't hurt at all. it did sting. 106 - normal.

pambassador

from a china daily article about people competing to be panda zookeepers for a month:

"The 'pambassadors' will also learn how to set up wooden ladders for pandas. Climbing ladders is a favorite pastime of captive pandas and setting up ladders will be part of the competition," Wang said.

lord. they are trying to escape, obvi

mid-autumn

last night was the moon festival and it was so cloudy you couldn't see the moon at all.

chatty cathy

re-inspired to study after meeting an armenian on a bicycle last night and having only russian as a common language. number of russian speakers running around expo is astounding. my inability is frustrating

re: new hair cut

aquarium day photoblug

after the pearl tower, the next most famous buildings are the world financial center (left) and the jin mao tower (right). people are pretty evenly split into two camps in regards to which is their favorite. i side with the bottle opener.

hank josiah and i went to the shanghai ocean aquarium. i remember seeing the construction plans for this aquarium three years ago, when i visited a much jankier shanghai aquarium out in the middle of nowhere, as opposed to this expensive structure right in the middle of the city.

i saw the giant chinese salamander. look at the face on that thing! like a monster.

one thing i found disconcerting was that many of the animals looked like they were in containers too small for them. the dejected babies killed some of my joy.

this escalator went through a tank. rad.

descending.

sawfish. gnarly.

afterwards, we went for a stroll along the Huangpu.

i commissioned a 20 RMB (2.9749 USD) portrait of hank for our living room.

last night we went go-karting. i tripped going up the stairs and landed on my knees, which are looking terrible. the boys have driving bruises.

two nights ago, i was totally off my face when i played with this dog at kedi.