karen o

nothing gives me the fuckin chills the way hello tomorrow does

i'm always happy in the day and depressed at night

coffee roof

me n' scribs

i've had a bombdiggity time in entertainment for the past month.

just mc'ed at xin tian di

and i report to operations in seven hours

the equatoguineans go home wednesday and i'm feeling vaguely sad about it

Katy Perry - E.T. Futuristic Lover

smugface

good morning skype starshine

little pie

leg bruise

i want to be this way forever

equatoguineans as described by me&wiki

sat on a rock outside my apartment for two hours tonight talking to two guys from equatorial guinea. almost completely in spanish. i struggled, they laughed.

they are dancers in the african pavilion. Equatorial Guinea, officially the Republic of Equatorial Guinea is a country located in Central Africa. they really like tupac and dmx. In the continental region that is now Equatorial Guinea there are believed to have been pygmies, of whom only isolated pockets remain in northern Río Muni. they like los angeles because that's where tupac is from. Equatorial Guinea is located in west central Africa. there's an entire style of dancing called "west coast" and they dance it to timbaland. Equatorial Guinea has a tropical climate with distinct wet and dry seasons. equatorial guinea is the only african country whose official language is spanish. The current president of Equatorial Guinea is Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. one rooted for france in the world cup and the other for spain. Pre-independence Equatorial Guinea counted on cocoa production for hard currency earnings. they only smoke when they party at the discotheques, but in equatorial guinea it's common for young children to be smokers. The majority of the people of Equatorial Guinea are of Bantu origin. there are a lot of chinese people in equatorial guinea working in business. The principal religion in Equatorial Guinea is Christianity which is the faith of 93% of the population. they think it's funny that chinese people who look young turn out to be in their 40s and 50s, whereas in equatorial guinea, when you are 15 you already look 29. Under the regime of Francisco Macias, education had been significantly neglected with few children receiving any type of education. in equatorial guinea, they are not afraid to go up to any girl but here they are because they can't communicate.

rejuvenation

i used AIM today. i felt like it was 2000 all over again.

sounds of donghu

went for a night stroll around donghu with a glass of instant coffee in hand because god knows what else to do around here at night. walked to the playground near the gym - was disappointed to find that there are no swings there. there were some africans nearby playing drums on the grass. this may sound stereotypical, but the africans are always playing drums. in the expo, it's commonplace to hear their radical drumming thundering throughout the grounds. they always whip out their drums at angola parties on thursday nights. i can still hear the drumming now from inside my room. i like it. i walked by building 15. there was a kazakh, it may have been the nice one who gave me his seat on the bus, but it was too dark to tell from a sidelong glance, outside yelling into his phone in russian. что ты не помнишь? i think he said. or was it что! ты не помнишь!? but that may be wrong still. i like standing on my balcony with the river view and daring myself to look straight down eleven stories for as long as i can until i feel too weak and fearful to go on.

я чуть не

If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.

make-believe blog

Kære Valerie
Jeg kender ikke ordet "blomstringsfestival", kun ordet "blomsterfestival". Det er ofte svært at afgøre, om der skal være s eller ej, men jeg ville også sige "blomstringsfestival", men som sagt kender jeg ikke ordet.
Mange hilsener og jeg sender dig en cc snart.
Mikael

showboat

just watched judy's performance of ol' man river for the first time and it gave me chills. what a great singer. what a great song

miguelin dreams of gender equality

the spain pavilion is creative and interesting and beautiful the way i wish all the pavilions would be

It looks like this enormous, contorted, textured basket. The exterior is really awesome and there are signs all over it saying not to smoke near it, aka please don't burn down our pavilion. It looks like it would go up in flames in seconds.

Inside, the walls are this sort of pliable rubber material and all the Chinese people freak out when they lean against it. The walls are not flat, more topographical and following the roly-polyness of the basket's exterior. The room is really dark and cavernous and I thought I was going to blindly kick over some kid. On the walls they project this awesome humungus movie accompanied by some amazing beats avant-garde-type music. The movie is of like galloping horses and sort of amorphous stuff. And then this collection of bones descends from the ceiling and just hang there. Then a flamenco girl (real one, not movie) comes out and does some really sexy dancing in front of the projections. At the end of the film, they show footage of some famous Spanish tennis player I didn't recognize. Every time he hit the ball, it caused a huge crack of thunder and lightning would flash through this room.

In the next room there were screens arranged in cool slanty panels and they showed lots of antique photos of Spanish couples and people. Lots of assorted footage, but all quite cool-looking.

The last room, the most famous, is the giant baby. You walk into this huge room, and there's just this huge fucking baby. It's animatronic and stands like, I don't know how big things actually are, but I would say 50 feet as a bad guess? It's made out of some really skin-like material and it doesn't emit any sound, it just sits there and moves its face like it's going to cry. The way the eyelids rumple is really convincing. No one knows why this baby is there, but I'm guessing the basket structure is some womb metaphor, which is funny because Japan's pavilion is also supposed to be a womb (theirs looks like some sort of sea creature.) The baby just sits and distorts its face and all these bubbles fall down around it.

corpse mode

i got a massage today (hands down my favorite activity). even though i'd been speaking to the masseuses in mandarin, they still asked catherine what i was and remarked that i could be singaporean or malaysian...or indian. the masseuses were migrant worker girls who would chatter away at each other in hushed but clearly audible tones about gossip at work, their children (plural - don't know how they managed to defy the one-child policy), husbands, sex lives, and us, the curios of the west. "her neck is very bad." "it's because they sit in front of the computer all day." throughout i felt like a corpse deaf and dumb or a kobe beef cow being rubbed and marbled. my masseuse kept telling her masseuse friend about how flexible i am and then to demonstrate she would start bending my arms and legs backwards as if i were gumby.

havfrue

there was definitely someone swimming with the mermaid yesterday before the expo opened

She has been beheaded twice and has had her arm cut off, but The Little Mermaid has never left her spot on Langelinie pier since 1913. Until now.

look at this creature look at its habit

The depths of my depravity: I'm homesick for my Old Apartment. The one I lived in for three weeks. That I have replaced with an identical, or rather, identical but superior apartment.

old apartment

new apartment

Right now, I am seeking asylum in Old Apartment. The main reason is that New Apartment does not receive our wireless reception, which is a grievous offense indeed, one that I have yet to resolve. But internet aside, I can't deny the feeling of relief and contentment that I feel in this white bed surrounded by Old Apartment and the feeling of quiet anxiety I feel in the white bed of New Apartment.

Redemption of New Apartment

I have a sliver of river view

it's cool. i don't know what that igloo structure is. something expo, presumably.

i don't know what kind of sham smirnoff they sell in china, but it almost completely froze in the freezer and it gives me a headache. sham sham sham

tom-esque

i do not receive the interwebs in my new apartment. this is a huge, neurosis-inducing problem.

donghu 14B1104

It's fate. I'm moving in across from the Danes. There are like femten bycykler in my new building.

face deco

oakleyway just became a ponsorsay. so we all have to wear these space-aged things every day and look oucheyday.

ten am rabid tropical climate

this seriously sucks

r&r

screw exploring the city

on my day off i eat tim tams in bed

letters from home

Dearest Valerie.
My heart aches daily for you. I spend my days trapped, as if i were a caged bird, hopelessly beating my wings against the bars. Alas, i miss you.

In less gay words, we need to fucking skype!

letters from home

My friend Ian (who lives in Beijing) wanted to make it his mission to teach the Chinese how to queue- but he gave up because NO ONE knows what lines are for and why you stand in them.

It is VERY frustrating BUT I understand it. With 1.5 BILLION people, if you waited your turn for everything, you would die

no macarons

i didn't find the macarons. presumably because, well, i think i walked into the wrong building. but i did buy a bottle of vodka, a papaya, tim tams, and a block of dark chocolate toblerone. so i guess i officially have food in the apartment.

your oakleyways or your life

was able to sleep past 7 am for my first time here. becoming a real local. was woken by my work superiors, demanding to borrow my ugly oakleyways. i only value them because they are valuable $cha-ching. woke up to a deluge of wonderful e-mails from friends! very excited should sleep in more often

pass me to dena

i need macarons stat

i've been looking at pictures of them online and my heart has been palpatating

a bakery sort of nearby supposedly sells them and i'm going to go tomorrow on my last day off

letters from abroad

Final thoughts: the men here are SIGNIFICANTLY better looking than in LA. I didn't want to jump to any rash conclusions because of one or two handsome men, so I gave it a good long while. But damn, ladies. I want to jump the bones of every 20th guy I see. And they're so tall and strapping! They have to bend over to fit in the underground cars! A lot of them! We ain't feeding 'em right back home or something because this is what men should be.

mademoiselle

Her Russian vocabulary consisted, I know, of one short word, the same solitary word that years later she was to take back to Switzerland. This word, which in her pronunciation may be phonetically rendered as 'giddy-eh' (actually it is gde with e as in 'yet'), meant 'Where?' And that was a good deal. Uttered by her like the raucous cry of some lost bird, it accumulated such interrogatory force that it sufficed for all her needs. 'Giddy-eh? Giddy-eh?' she would wail, not only to find out her whereabouts but also to express supreme misery: the fact that she was a stranger, shipwrecked, penniless, ailing, in search of the blessed land where at least she would be understood.

stole this

Blessed are those that sneeze a lot.

witch doctor

antibiotical

nom. 2 in the couff couff series

my muvee, betch

i've been listening to choral music almost exclusively since watching the philadelphia boys choir & chorale perform two days ago. we used to sing like this, which has been painfully home-set to the footsteps of khenkel's and mine in space



this is the first song i ever learned. it's about dying. when i hear it i can actually smell my freshman apartment and feel the sheer death terror of being musically incompetent.

ey

the canada pavilion is superior because the staff is made up of beautiful beautiful half-asians wearing uniforms designed by cirque du soleil

day off

this wet cough could be considered a death rattle.

"If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business." - thoreau

a little night music

when i receive an assignment, and the addendum is to "be creative," i can only frown

i took a real picture of myself coughing.

one of my higher-ups at work today suggested seeing a doctor

but much as in the civil war,

i believe survival rates are much higher here

if you stay out of the hospital

sick as a dug

it's well over 100 every day and we're all bedridden with a cold. bedridden in that still-have-to-get-up-at-seven=and-go-to-work way. fml where are my drugs

stewed grilled charred nuked

i find it hard to put into words just exactly how miserable the weather here is.

for some insight, today at 9:15 am, according to weather.com, it was 93 F, feels like 106 F

no measure on the humidity, but i think an accurate descriptor would be "wetter than swimming"

one sock

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.