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.