other people’s lives.

so the shopkeeper took a day off to hang out with me. i know he can ill afford to lose a day’s pay (especially at $180 an hour), so i hugely appreciated smoking 800 cigarettes on the bed while listening to murray street, sitting in da’an park and getting kind of high, and just talking and doing stupid stuff perfectly suited for the stupid young kidz we are.

i like the fact that other people know the dangers of manic depression too. people do it all the time!

literature in times of functional analphabetism.

i haven’t really written anything substantial lately, so let’s discuss a few novels i got my hands on lately.

1. zadie smith – on beauty
   mrs smith’s first novel, white teeth, was a happy-happy-jolly tale of multiculturalism. this made her a star in late 90s britain, but wouldn’t really wash right now. on beauty is considerably darker, and much nicer. it’s about a british professor at an american university, who starts a relationship with the skinny poetess genius in residence, much to the dismay of his wife of moby dick dimensions.
2. marisha pessl - special topics in calamity physics
   this is much better. also set in an american academic background, it’s a detective story about blue van meer, a slightly anti-social teenager, her eccentric father and hannah schneider, blue’s film teacher, who commits suicide on a camping trip out in the woods. this makes blue concoct the most implausible conspiration theory on earth… that turns out to be disturbingly close to the truth.

now though, i’m going to sit in the park. i’ve had an exceptionally nice day so far, so yay. this deserves some clarification, which i shall kindly deliver at a slightly later date. ta, dear reader!

sunshing.

taiwanese like to adorn stationery with dreadful poetry, comparable to what e.e. cummings would have written if he was an ugly 16 y.o. girl in a miniskirt (and blessed with a questionable knowledge of the english language). i just wanted to share this with you (i saw it on the back of such a map with plastic sleeves):

in a narrow path fragrant
smell of grass and sunshing
scattering towards as thousands hopes
never been leisurely for long times

accidentals.

well, life is quite boring these days. this is mainly due to my current financial situation, which could be great, were it not that my Emergency Fund (in the blue tin box, for those interested, gna gna) will go straight to our trip to hong kong next week (oi!).

i’m seriously considering quitting the teaching job. it’s good if you need the money, but i don’t really, and then it’s just ultimate tedium. french claire’s prophesy was self-fulfilling: i am too good to tell kids what to do. they can find it out all by themselves. (ah sweet April 25 when i’ll tell them what they can do.)

the thing isn’t the kids though; working with children is surprisingly fun and rewarding. if you know me, you know that i loathe any possible authority, and authority is abundant in the Happy Marian English School. i simply can’t grasp why those kids have to slave away in elementary school and a supplementary english class they didn’t even choose to attend themselves. i try to minimise the authority involved, but with a watchful Manager From Hell that gets hard some of the time. she seems to expect the place to function like a top-three university of sorts, while everyone else involved blatantly doesn’t really care at all.

this said, kudos to claire for working as a teacher for two. and. a half. years. i’m not servile enough to handle it after one month and a half. the bad news is that she wants to quit now, too. it’s perfectly understandable, as she gets to work with three yo.s who don’t know a single word of english every day, and the demands of the Venerable Manager are quite the pill to swallow as well.

the only reason why i still enjoy it isn’t working with the kids as such, but making the Lesson Plan taste the floor each and every single day. this is actually obscenely funny, when people keep on ranting about the importance of Keeping In Line With The Ridiculously Detailed Lesson Plan…. if they only knew what i’m doing there. gna ha ha!

by the way.

i completed my initial and grand Tattoo Plan yesterday. the thing is that i’m getting slightly addicted. some more stars added to that small smattering of scintillating designs wouldn’t hurt anybody…… would they?

celebrity crush.

brooke commanded me to sum up my celebrity crushes. well, i’ve got a crush on…

laetitia sadier, the godmother of spacy pop.

trish keenan, the heiress of spacy pop.

 patrick wolf is a caucasian i could actually force myself to go to bed with.

alison mosshart’s music isn’t that substantial, but she’s a beautiful woman.

kim gordon, for she makes my heart beat faster.

margot tenenbaum, yet not that palthrow woman.

francoise hardy.

i’m gay, but there are (almost) no men on this list, because the most beautiful men are to be found strolling around taipei with big sunglasses on, looking gay and desperate and asian. so there.

ha to hypocrisy.

as i am writing this, i am sitting on my balcony, wrapped in a towel and listening to pj harvey on my extremely advanced earmuffs. this is all good, were it not that i received some disturbing news from back home yesterday, when my mother called me.

mother: ‘er em, you’re going to be angry.’
me: ‘did you run off with one of those men on second life? or will i really be angry?’
mother: ‘angry, affirmatively.’
me: ‘well, you better tell me.’
mother: ‘AHHH your grandmother is IN A COMA and IN INTENSIVE CARE and your uncle and her hb are with her and they’re probably TALKING TO THE DOCTOR because i tried to call them but THEY DON’T PICK UP THEIR PHONES waargh waargh bouhouhou.’
me: ‘when did you last try to call them?’
mother: ‘well, a hour and a half ago.’
me: ‘why don’t you try again?’
mother: ‘because I DON’T WANT TO, why should it always be ME, i don’t need to know ANYTHING haa haa haa.’
me: ‘i’m going to have a smoke, and you call them.’

as it turned out, the little hypocrite had turned on her second life and smoked the unusual amount of 20 cigarettes, until she finally decided to pick someone as a Confidante. due to her slightly hysterical nature, neither aunt Annie, uncle John, Zoe or my cousin could satisfy her desires for yelping around inconsolably, so she decided to inform me, at last, after three days and a half.

me: ‘why did you wait this long to call me?’
mother: ‘because you are UNREASONABLE and HYSTERICAL!’

this is actually true, but whatever. nanna turned out to be a lot better already, and my mother had inflated the problem somewhat over the course of her 68 phone calls to our relatives, who have the same lust for sensation and tragedy. everything that reaches my ears these days is a gross travesty of the original slice of news from back home. example:

aunt anne, january: ‘i’m going to tunisia to (add innocent and academic reason) for two weeks.
my cousin, mid-february: ‘and aunt anne is going to TUNISIA and would you care to know WHY exactly? she (add something that would be worthy of histoire d’o in a mediterranean setting).

a few weeks later, i wrote an e-mail to aunt anne, subtly inquiring if she had become the next pauline reage. it turned out that she had visited museums a volonte and hadn’t seen a beach, let alone a sex club (hm yes) from close by. the problem with this quite amusing attitude is that if something really serious happens, everyone tends to inflate it to the proportions of a full-on nuclear holocaust, and nobody takes the situation seriously. i’m ever so tempted to cause a scene.

i wrote a haiku, or some other sort of post-modern poem:
mass hysteria
runs in
my bloodline.

whoo, alright, yeah… uh huh.

3000+ honorable patrons! time to throw a funky party, dear readers.

kathia reference for the insiders: DANK U BLOGLAND.