lost in translation.

when kristen attacked the shaishaiguo (shabu shabu, a sort of crossover between hotpot and carpaccio), it semt to be attacking her instead. one of the funniest sights i’ve ever seen. the shengyupian (tuna sashimi) was another spectacle. yay, i’m so giddy about this. chopsticks are fun for torturing foreigners.

maybe i never get anywhere, but kristen does.

my friend kristen is coming today! nobody else’d be so foolish to leave Vegas for Taipei….. for me. me and roommate reddylocks are going to make her sweat.. em. well, we’re going to make her paint our walls in a ‘collaborative effort’: we’ll lie down with pj harvey on the stereo and she can paint. god created the classes, after all.

but seriously: i’m glad and smiling. yay.

jeez louise.

this louise character was kind of exuberant: the stereotypical dirty indie girl, with clumsily dyed hair and weird clothes that looked like they came straight from oxfam. now that’s exactly the kind of girl i happen to like, so i decided to socialise with her. well, she was easy to get along with. she was always stoned, maybe that has something to do with it. a typical conversation with louise would be like this:

‘hey louise, what’s up?’

‘hey simon, i smoke too much pot.’

‘yes, you better slow down before you’re underground!’

‘it’s because of taiwan.’

‘oh really?’

‘taiwan is the ibiza of asia. gay people are very hip there. urban cityscapes like that movie bladerunner. blah blah blah.’

my interest was immediately sparked. i imposed my presence on her (’shall we do some calligraphy together?’) to get to know more about the scholarship that got her to taiwan. i SO wanted to get out of that small and incestuous, clinically dead circle of east asian languages students (and academics).

anecdote: i had actually gone out with my classmates, one long, boring evening. first they watched a boring chinese movie, then they went to a bar next to the faculty to sip ice tea and exchange gossip about classmates, and then they went to sleep at 11. i felt rather angelic and nice because of all the meth, but i’d rather locked myself up at home with brooke, ridge, an iris murdoch novel and a big shotgun. it was clearly time to get out of that dusty place.

louise would be my pathway to liberty. ha. well, she got me the scholarship, all right. i’m extremely lazy and have no patience at all for filling up forms. also, the required hiv test scared me (not that i had any good reason to be scared… i’m not that stupid.), so she went along to the clinic with me etc. the problem with her was…

that she was lying and had a huge grudge against taiwan. and apparently against me. being in taiwan for a year had been her saison d’enfer, dark night of the soul, you name it. i’ll elaborate later – when i saw my illusions collapse in face of em, reality.

autumn oh-five.

i decided to go live in the college town in september 2005. i settled on the worst-looking place there was available: stalinist soviet structures didn’t come worse-looking than this. actually, it was a sixties-early seventies experimental housing unit that was poised to be torn down some years after its completion, BUT the funds lacked, so they just decided to keep it open as a housing facility, and watch it desintegrate merrily. ah, the belgian ways of doing things.

my first contact with my roommates brooke and ridge wasn’t so good. i walked through the dark cold war-style corridor when i saw two ghastly figures (one tall, one short) emerging from the emm… fog. one turned out to be a girl in a tartan skirt, and the other one a girl wrapped in what seemed to be a tablecloth. it quickly turned out to be a tablecloth, when they gathered around me and asked if i had a safety pin.

well, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, but everything turned for the better. short brooke was an avid music fan, and a sneering, bitter intellectual on top of that. (give her a bottle of vodka and she’ll start to cry & lock herself up in the bathroom.) tall ridge was an avid eh… seducer of men. of course that didn’t always work out as planned. (give her a bottle of vodka and she’ll climb over the bathroom door to rescue brooke from her alcohol-fueled oblivion, then she’ll start to cry & hide under her bed.)

so we were stuck in our respective situations, but at least we were stuck together. decadent evenings with chloe helped as well: lots of cannabis, phil collins, kevin blechdom, chocolate brownies, and the more explicit peaches lyrics available. schoolwise, everything was just as bad as it’d ever be, since all the nice kids had flunked big time, and those who were left with me were about as exciting as Ambien 500. (of course there were some good people. i shan’t generalise. nooooooo)

well, something had to give, and it certainly wasn’t me. and this is where, deus ex machina-like, ‘louise’ stumbled into our classroom. probably wearing something purply and made out of cheesecloth.

let’s make love and listen to death from above…

…is the best song of this year. anyway, the rest of that first bachelor year was boring. nikita cracked down and didn’t do her exams (much to the dismay of her ‘friend’, ‘mrs. thatcher the wet dog’, an ignorant bitch if there ever was one), and nicoline vanished, because she was afraid of the slightly chubby, very gay, 45 y.o. chinese teacher (he was caucasian. how is that possible?).

so i was left to my own devices, weren’t it for chloe and chacha, my next and somewhat more faithful sidekicks. everything slipped by unnoticed really: ‘maggie thatcher’’s pathetic stabs at intellectual superiority – i always preferred physical superiority anyway – and my eventful relationship with the jap boy, which would end in a rather regretful scene that august (2005).

i went to france for a couple of months, and had long and engaging conversations with my parents’ friends: the greek writer and his consort, the art gallery owners dancing to disco versions of cuban revolutionary anthems, the british hippie couple with an austin morris from the seventies, etc. i love them, and they’re wonderful freaks. now, things really should start to get interesting.

autumn oh-four.

when i started learning chinese, my whole world caved in around me. speaking seemed to be easy enough (if you could live with the fact that nobody would ever understand you), but writing was a herculean task. fortunately there were some nice people around, including nikita and ‘nicoline’, my faithful sidekicks during the first term, and ‘the teddybear’, a cute, slightly older boy with long, fluffy blonde hair. he’d turn out to be something to stare at when i was high on meth and ostentatively not paying attention to the chinese history class. (don’t ask me anything about the 1911 xinhai uprising, but i know everything about the way he smiles.)

so in short, i had a crush, enough drugs and two faithful sidekicks. nicoline was extremely nice. her goody-goody looks concealed an endless ability to lure boys into liaisons (we had a plan a and a plan b, and neither worked out, of course). she wasn’t reluctant to join me for ‘alternative economy class’: drinking vodka and wallowing about how we should’ve been in class etc.

now for the drugs. how did i get them? well, they were provided to me by a cute japanese boy i got to know during that first term, and whom i’d start a relationship with shortly afterwards. it was the only thing that got me through really, most of those university students were about as interesting as frances farmer (if you’ve seen that movie ‘the frances farmer story’). of course he was an absolutely awful person, and seven years older than me, but i’m kind of into that stuff.

hello.

haha so this appears to be my first post. so anyway. i was born in 1987, in a small-time city, grew up in an even smaller-time town and in an isolated place somewhere in southern france, where i learned how to absorb huge quantities of alcohol, read every book i could get my hands on, and developed a good taste for music and clothes… rather gradually. you wouldn’t want to know me as i was in 2000, unless you love psycho nerds.

when i had to go to uni, i had no idea what to choose, it all semt boring as hell. anyway, i decided to learn chinese, which was boring as hell, but i met some people who would become the best friends one could ask for, and one person that proved to be a decisive influence… and the reason why i’m typing this here, in taipei. bear with me while i start my epic story, in a belgian college town, in the autumn of 2004.