little sparkee.

i have been thinking about what it would be like to be an english teacher here. many english teachers i know here, fall into one of the following categories, none of which are pretty:

1. ‘buh taiwan is so baaad it sucks it’s so diiirty and i can’t speak chinese buh’ – but, you wouldn’t find a job at home, would you now? loser.
2. they come from the sort of country you just want to leave sito presto, and have no other choice, really.
3. ‘i know perfect chinese it’s ea-say’ – and then they start speaking what seems to be belorussian.
4. ‘well i’ve been here for 8 years and i don’t really have anything to go back to’ – AAAH.
5. i want to live in an asian country. – fair enough, really.

so i’ll take a real job, thank you very much. also, there was a luxy ladies’ night! and a dinner with my family-in-law! grandmother spoke the quite immense words: ‘my mother always had a big keg of lychee wine with her when she went shopping, and then she had some every five minutes. her life was happy, albeit a bit short.’ i love granny lin.

pictures of nicole in a green room, and the pretty little dinner:

simple pleasures.

yesterday evening, after eating my diner dinner and receiving wonderful gifts, we were a tad stoned and listened to stereolab’s enduring the groop played space age batchelor pad music. the heavenly la la la and da da da-s could almost make me forget the buzzing feeling in my newly tattooed arm, and how bloody old i’m getting! (chuckles in a very self-satisfied manner)

the world was, almost, saved.

ex.

ex-novelist, ex-teenager, ex-erotomane, ex-prestigious university student, ex-lover of japanese boyz, ex-model, ex-english teacher, ex-it boy for two days and a half, the list goes on.

tout de fucking meme: i’m officially twenty years old today. parties will be held, tears will be shed, kisses will be distributed, money will be transferred and spent. PARTY BEESH!

qing china, cocaine, shinkansen, pretty boyz and brick red walls.

we went to tainan on saturday, dear reader. now, i wish i’d gone there before: although there’s a million inhabitants, the city looks surprisingly roomy and still has ties with its fairly interesting past (it was the first sizeable city on the island, and it shows). the only disappointment was the blazing heat, and getting up at seven in order to take the shinkansen, which is one thing the taiwanese did extremely well. we were there in an hour and a half, where we would’ve needed three hours on a slow train six months ago. bravo, republic of china, bravissimo!

i wanted to lick the temples, dear reader. that’s how gorgeous they were. i even wanted to lick fort zeelandia, the base from where the dutch ruled south taiwan for twenty years in the seventeenth century. so when we were back in taipei, we went to this really big gay club, where i proceeded to lick half-naked boys’ tummies and was licked in return. it was quite effervescent, and i was obscenely high. all in all, a normal weekend in taipei city, where the shinkansens are fast and the boyz… are pretty. pictures of tainan, that marvel:

the Tainan HSR station:

haishanguan, a qing hostel that is a (unfortunately closed) black magic museum now:

some street scenes, including tainan’s qing-era city wall:

the icing on the cake are the confucius temple, fort zeelandia and the zeng chengkung memorial, all of them gorgeous as fuck:

hysterical realism: a reverie.

some people apparently see fit to say that i add a bit of drama to my blog posts. interestingly, these are the very same people that go to a party and pose for a kajillion boring-as-fuck pictures, so that they can look at them later and tell themselves they had fun, which is a very questionable approach to life. the difference, dear reader, is clearly in the way people look at the world. i see something interesting everywhere, or make it happen (ie. cause a ruckus).

case study: professor chen. she was quite boring in the beginning of the school year, but she started wearing tiger suits and screening taiwanese crime films (in taiwanese!) pretty quickly. take the restaurant where i often dine: the waitresses are screaming around in english now. things get better and more hysterically realistic. a little cute bird told me (moreover) that the prime example of, let us call them the mini DV crowd, had seen fit to dramatize his life himself at the feathery friend’s expense, in a really pathetic and transparent way.

***

personally, if i can’t have the bonjour tristesse or the glamorama, i’d rather have nothing.

what’s the morale of this cryptic story? have fun, and if there’s no fun, make yourself some. even if it involves running around in a rainstorm with two overloaded shopping bags while a taiwanese woman is running behind you and trying to give you a newspaper to hold over your head, as i just did myself. my life is a reverie. a realistic one. a hysterically realistic one. tats!

answer.

time for some clarifications!

claire: hm, you kind of know the answer to that, my love. i am a confused boy without any moral boundaries. WHA WHA WHA WHA, wha wha.
tommy: thank you love!
hannah: it’s just hard. it’s just kind of hard to explain. it all comes down to aunt amaryllis who was right with her analysis of right wing-strategies to scare the shit out of everybody. octave didn’t really disappear and anneliesje didn’t either. with her military junta money, she now lives in the algerian flatlands. however, liesbethje and deborah weren’t very easy to persuade that liesbeth wasn’t exactly the omniscient queen of the universe.
xiao p.: well, someday, probably soon because i threw pride out of the window in favour of pure pleasure.

from blown speakers.

ah, au revoir, finals. see you (preferably) never again. i managed to get 87 somehow, by talking about arthur koestler, ecstasy, hooking up with asian boys, michel foucault, stereolab and all the other things i do and read and listen to. my defense of the 一胎規定 policy came out well, so i’m quite pleased with the oral part, too. things shall turn out for the better.

more exciting news: i bought a pretty pretty diesel watch and i’m finally going to the dentist to get my teeth bleached and ponied up. but not now, no. now is the time for listening to the new pornographers and reading michel faber in the park! ta ra, reader.

also. i noticed that there’s been 4,300 people here now. it’s time for another CONTEST! address me your questions, and i shall answer them earnestly. yay!

pink cloud tracing paper.

i am reading arthur koestler and leonard cohen is moaning about sex and death in the background. he’s not even moaning elegantly, since i’m listening to his downright awful phil spector-produced album, the death of a ladies’ man. koestler’s the thirteenth tribe is irrational nonsense about khazaria, the khan and his twenty-five consorts, and so on. why do i punish myself like this?

BECAUSE THERE’S FINAL EXAMS AND EVERYTHING IS BETTER THAN STUDYING.