Moplumsy, the Blog

NEW WEB COMIC!

2010-12-11T12:20:00.000+08:00

Hey y'all!

I know it's been quite a while because I suck at blogging, but I want to introduce everyone to my new, awesome webcomic, Milk of Morgnesia!!! I've gotten over 600 hits so far, which makes me feel real famous and stuff, and I'm getting great feedback, mostly about peeing or spitting out liquids unexpectedly. Check it out!

Meanwhile, I go to Costa Rica in 3 days and the US in 10. I'll be bringing the Wacum tablet and the scanner with me so I can work on the go. Yay, technology! Boo, planes.

I love you.

Web comic

2010-11-24T11:36:00.000+08:00

I am working on one. As soon as I have it up and running (and have like, at least 3 posts on it), I will let you know, my loyal 1 viewer.

Holy hell, it's been a while...

2010-08-25T10:09:00.008+08:00

Nerds, guys! My life's all different and crud now. But instead of telling you about it in paragraph form, which I don't have the energy to do at the moment, I'ma lazily list this puppy out to make sure I convey to you a truly thorough full-on update of Ms. Moplumsy's life.

Employment

The biggest recent change in my life is my brand spankin' new job. I'm an academic writing instructor for the new writing division of a test prep company, and currently my days are filled with sitting down a whole lot, drinking brain tumor-inducing levels of Chinese Diet Coke, and planning out a comprehensive 12-week academic writing program for fourth and fifth graders.

I'm not yet certain if I can say, for SURE, that I'm happy I made the move. There's a lot less ruckus, which is nice, but the office atmosphere is a bit stark and everyone's a real grown-up here, which harshes my doofus buzz to the max. I like that I get to work with my best friend (my current boss) and our awesome, insanely intelligent co-workers. I don't like that starting next week I'm going to have to be running all over the city doing tutorials. I also don't like that our workday starts at 9:30 and ends at 6:30, or that my weekends are now Thursdays and Fridays because we work all day every Saturday and Sunday. Then again, there ARE other perks, such as...

It's like I live in a fucking 5-star hotel.

I moved out of the ZhongXue dorms to an amazing downtown apartment last month. The place is 200 square meters, incredibly conveniently located, and beautifully maintained. I have two roommates, both of whom are, as far as roommates go, wholly acceptable. My bedroom has a king-sized bed and a private bathroom with a big ol' bathtub. The icing on the cake, however, is that we have an ayi (maid) come 5 days a week. If you dind't catch that, let me reiterate: I HAVE A MAID CLEAN MY HOUSE FIVE DAYS A WEEK. I don't have to do SHIT as far as domestic duties are concerned. No dishes, no laundry, no sweeping, no scrubbing...When I come home, my bed is made and the kitchen is clean and the bathtub is freshly scrubbed. I realized how spoiled I'd (already) gotten when, after my first week there, I got really angry when I arrived home to find my laundry hamper still full. Then I laughed, because I have a maid cleaning my house five days a week.

Family

My beloved older little brother has moved to Shanghai! He lives with a couple of my good friends in an even MORE lovely, MORE centrally located apartment on Huaihai Lu. He's doing well and has just found a job at an international kindergarten. Overally, it's just badass to have family here to hang out and play tennis with.

It's summertime in Shanghers and, since I always used to go back to the States during this time, it's also my very first time experiencing day after day 95 + degree/100% humidity city weather. Overall assessment: Fuck. At least in the winter you get to put a couple of layers of clothing between you and the universe, but the challenge these days is to find clothes that walk the thin line between preventing me from drowning in a puddle of my own face sweat and being acceptable enough to please conservative parents. Stepping outside is like walking into a sauna, except the sauna is a concrete box full of garbage.

Multimedia

This summer, I've become totally obsessed with both 30 Rock (I AM Liz Lemon, for better or worse) and C.S.I., with which I have a long-standing love affair. But the main thing I'd like to mention here is the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated. It's basically his report and opinions on a personal research project to investigate anything involving the subject of animal-based food production. Holy shit. All I can say is read it and make up your own mind on how to best go about living as an ethical omnivore (or even an ovo- and/or lacto-vegetarian) because damn, it's not easy. Wow.

Hungry

Last, but not least, I've shrunk significantly. Since February, I've lost a total of 23-25 pounds depending on where I am on any given morning. My goal is to get it down to a consistent 25 pounds and then maintain this until about October, after which I want to lose another 15-25 pounds, depending on where I feel happiest. As I was losing the weight, I was hungry pretty much constantly, but that has changed, which is why I'm maintaining at the moment. Also, I work out on a fairly regular basis (though it's gone down from 4 days a week to 2 since Brother arrived), and the other day I walked up ELEVEN FLIGHTS OF STAIRS to get to a job when I thought the elevator was broken. Turns out it wasn't, but the point is that I didn't die.

A Video Just for Dad y la familia Costaricense!

2010-05-14T08:42:00.004+08:00

This is a video I took for you guys in Yangshuo, China as we motored down the Li River in a "bamboo" boat made of pvc pipe. Te extrano! Te amo! Enjoy!

Happy 23rd Birthday, Tristan!

2010-03-20T11:14:00.004+08:00

For my brother's 23rd birthday, I got my 4th grade honors English class to do a little project as a present. These kids are my babies, they might be my favorite class ever, and I'm happy I don't teach in the US right now because I think the amount of hugs I give/get on a daily basis from my munchkins might be considered inappropriate, which is really sad.

4th Grade Honors Journal Gems

2010-03-05T12:13:00.003+08:00

...Or: 9-Year-Olds Kick the Creative Shit Out of Grown-Ups

___________________________________________

Journal Prompt:

Write about as many of these journal topics as you wish, but remember to KEEP WRITING during the journal time in class!

1. If you could be any color in a crayon box, which would you be, and why?
2. Write a list of things that make you laugh.
3. What would you do if you were principal of the school for a day?
4. Describe your perfect dream house.

___________________________________________

Charles
1. White, because if I am white, I will be the long-lifest. Do you know why? Because the owner often don't use me, and I can see my owner's life. It is fun to see my owner's life, if it is not sad.

4. I will make the library bigger than 10 dinosaurs, and when the books add together, it will higher than the moon.

Grace
3. Please try to come to school wearing your Halloween costume.

Andrea
4. My dream house is to have wings. And has chocolate-smelled water to wash my hands and my room will have lemon smells. I would tell my house to fly whenever I want to.

Jade (a boy)
2.

A person was eating soap.
make a zip on my stomach.
The hericoper wings is made of knife.
Eating the ice-cream all over the face
A baby pup in his pants
A man just fell down in the ice.
A man just step on yucky pu

Holy Shit

2010-01-21T12:09:00.005+08:00

First of all...bad Moplumsy. Very bad Moplumsy. Bad Moplumsy for never blogging ever. I suck at blogging, I know.

That said, I totally had my brains blown out today and I'd like to share.

This week is finals week, and the kids are taking exams. All in all, it's pretty boring. We sit in the classroom for two periods of about an hour and a half and watch the kids while they take their tests. No talking allowed. After they're done, they draw on the backs of their tests.

Enter Dave. Dave is a fifth grader, and an amazing artist. He is constantly decorating things with dragons, monsters, tigers, etc. Today, however, he decided to draw this:

Yep. That's a world map. Drawn from his motherfucking memory.

Kid drew this in like 10 minutes without looking at any sort of visual reference. Knowing this, check out central America. Check out Europe. Check out Africa. Check out the positioning of the equator, and relative sizes and positions of the countries. And before you say something stupid like, "But Bolivia is landlocked and the equator goes through southern Somalia," fuck you. Dave's a fifth grader who can draw a world map from his brain with 85% accuracy. You, on the other hand, are a retard. If this were my kid and I saw this, I'd immediately throw him into some kind of government super soldier spy program where he would learn to smuggle secrets out of dangerous places using only the power of his incredible photographic memory. Or enroll him in an art class (which he doesn't take).

Basically, the next time you're proud of a doodle, think of Dave and feel a little worse about yourself. I sure will.

Damn.

The Great Firewall and Projects on the Backburner

2009-09-20T20:30:00.003+08:00

In the words of George, Prince of Whales in Blackadder III, "Ah, school, school..."

We're three weeks into the semester and I'm already completely drained. Three years into being an elementary school teacher, I finally feel fit to do well, like I really know what I can and should be doing, but no matter how much I put into it, it never feels like it's enough. I spend hours on weekends scouring the internet and my own book collection for creative, stimulating supplementary material, and still the weeks churn by, and the tests keep coming, and I'm out of breath.

So, updates.

I haven't been on here in a while due to China. China, it seems, hates technology. Earlier this year during the Xinjiang uprising, China decided it was best to ban all social networking sites, quickly rebutting with several press statements to the effect of "China isn't afraid of the internet." This has led the several thousand expats virtually (pun! har!) stranded as pictures, blogs, and video are nearly impossible to get out of the country via anything but email.

But there are ways around it. I've recently set up Witopia., a VPN that works via what I can only assume is magic, on my home computer. Apparently it does some internet voodoo with words like "routing" and "encryption," and ta-da! I'm able to tweet.

So I'm back-ish. Like I said, I'm insanely busy this year, and I'm just getting over a knock-out head cold that set me back over the weekend. I do, however, in an awesome and fortuitous turn of events, have some pretty amazing creative projects hovering in the background of my professional life, if I can just get the energy and time to work on them. For example:

1. Da Ren and the Brothers Cong

This is my fabulous children's book idea that I plan on developing and then marketing to Disney in several years. The main character is Da Ren, an old wise man that goes around helping people. The cleverness of the concept is in the illustration--Da Ren is shaped like the Chinese character "da," for "big," and as such, Da Ren is an enormous fellow. In his first adventure, he helps out the Brothers Cong ("Cong" meaning "follow"), a pair of brothers who cannot do anything independantly of each other. Eventually, though some wisdom and a long walk, Da Ren teaches them how to be their own person. (The character "cong" is made up of two "ren" characters, "ren" meaning "person.") Clever, huh? And the illustrations are even better. The major plan is to develop the character well enough that Disney will, in the footsteps of Dora the Explorer and Ni Hao, Kai Lan, buy it from me and turn it into a multicultural learning/money sucking machine.

2. The Starving Artists

Jesse and I are trying to write a screenplay in between long boughts of being really flakey about it. Still, the premise is fun, and we have a great time writing it. Basically the movie is about a man who rigs an art contest to gain an inheritance from his father, with some hilarious jokes and a wonderful, wonderful painting thrown into the mix. I really hope we can get around to actually making this happen, but truth be told, we're both fairly pressed for time as far as the present is concerned. So far we've mapped out the scenes in the first act, but no actual writing has been done for the hard copy screenplay yet. More details to follow, you know, when they come up.

3. Various cartoony things

So as you can see at the top of my blog, I've been learning how to make cartoons with Photoshop. This is a grand hobby and hugely fun for me to do, and as it turns out, people like my stuff. I've been contacted to make lots of different t-shirts as well as promotional posters for my friends, and I'm the official Rainbow Danger Club resident artist (Rainbow Danger Club being my boyfriend's SWEET ass band). So yeah, nothing huge, but I'm having a great time and getting a bit of recognition for my work from the people I love most, and that's what count, right?

Anyway, I'm off to spend the precious little time I have left this weekend doing what I love most of all--having a very difficult time completing very easy crossword puzzles. But regardless of my ability to know English words, things are looking up in the creativity department.

La Selva

2009-08-06T12:40:00.002+08:00

Wow, what a couple of weeks.

Basically, the last two weekends have involved me partying my balls of with my brother and a small group of two close friends. Last Friday night, Tristan threw a going away party for our friend who is going to be a Vista volunteer in Maine. Halfway through the night, he got punched in the face by a girl.

Here's what went down: I got Tristan a pair of Groucho Marx glasses that has a turn-y thing on the nose and when you wind it up, the eyebrows and mustache go up and down creepily. So anyway, there was this girl at the party who was trying to fuck everyone, and she was flirting with people while wearing the glasses. Tristan said, "Be careful with those glasses." To which she replied, "What, these glasses?" *SNAP.* That snap was the sound that was made as Bitch broke the glasses while looking at Tristan, like some bully would do in High School Musical. To this, my brother said to Bitch, "You're a stupid bitch." Apparently this went on for a couple of minutes until, finally, Bitch hauls off on my brother four or five times before he put her in a very calming, humane headlock for a moment and sends her on her way. He spent the rest of the night and most of the following day absolutely ecstatic that he threw a party in which he got punched in the face by a girl.

So now I'm in Costa Rica. I met up with my boyfriend yesterday in San Jose, and we took an 8-hour bus down to our jungle cottage this morning. By "cottage," I mean "palace." Apparently, dad spent the entirety of this past year adding shit onto the house, and now we have a second bathroom, an upstairs office with a 50" plasma television, and wireless internet. Meanwhile, China's blocked the fuck out of any social networking sites. I'm sad that I'm going to be less connected to my cyber community back in Shanghai than I am here in the fucking jungle.

So I recently made my biggest adult purchase to date, which was a 30 GB iPod touch, a Gateway netbook, and a Bamboo Wacum tablet, all of which have changed my life, probably for the worse (but definitely the more pleasurable). Things I am currently into because the robots allow me to be:

Twitter. I held out because it seems to be destroying the integrity of internet publishing (har), but turns out, it's addictive. I especially like it because it requires next to no commitment. (If you want to follow me, my name's moplumsy on there too.)
The iPod touch. I know I mentioned this above, but have you guys seen this thing? It's pretty much the goddamned future. Seriously, I've got two Chinese dictionaries, a Spanish translator, the entire first season of The State, and a game called Globall that shows me where every other person playing Globall is in the world. Shit could probably do my laundry if I downloaded the right app.
"Stuff You Should Know" podcast by howstuffworks.com.
StumbleUpon

I'm so ronery...

2009-07-07T07:29:00.003+08:00

Sorry for the lack of updates recently...China has blocked blogspot and it's nearly impossible to get to these days.

Anyway, I'm back in the States, thus the writing. I've been here since July 2nd, and I've gotta say, I'm in a horrible rut. Unlike last year, I truly feel out of place in America now. My friends are back in Shanghai or traveling this summer. My brother's really busy (though in a totally awesome way...not only is the kid working and going to school, but he's getting his goddamned pilot's license and has flown solo several times so far). I have people to visit in NYC and Boston, but not here in WV. It doesn't feel like home anymore. I'm lonely. Ick.

July 4th was special, though. The brother, three friends and I went up onto a secret rooftop fire escape to watch the fireworks over the Mon. River. It was lovely, and then we went to 123 for the Mayday! party with Big Ass Manatee and brought the club down. And did I mention the ribs for dinner? All in all, a good, old-fashioned WV July 4th.

And to sum up my schedule in a sort of nebulous manner, summer looks like this, in order: Williamsburg, VA with Mom and David, NYC/Boston, Costa Rica with Ming :-), DC for a few days (Brit? Alisa?), then back to Shanghai.

Oh, yes, and I'm also getting into some awesome Photoshop art and I'm developing a children's book with a REALLY good hook. But more on that later--I'ma go sulk and feel restless for a while.

Journey to Hong Kong

2009-05-07T10:27:00.025+08:00

Last week was our Labor Day four-day long weekend break. A certain friend and I decided that since it was his birthday, and since we'd been extended the invitation by recently-made mutual friends (his friends from college--new friends to me), and since it was, in fact, the longest break we get this semester, we should take the opportunity as it presented itself to head off to the exotic land of Hong Kong.

The journey began with a 20-hour overnight train from Shanghai to Kowloon Station. We got soft-sleeper tickets, and both happened to be on the top bunks. At first sight, I was certain that we'd both be sleeping in the hallway due to a sad physical inability to actually get up on the beds, but it turned out that flip-out foot placements in the walls in combination with a variety of strategically placed bars made the climb relatively easy for spry young people such as us (or is it "such as we"?). We got settled in our room quite nicely; our roommates were a young woman from Hong Kong who spoke no English and an old man who spoke relatively great English for someone I assumed was from the mainland (I forget where he was from). At around 5:00 P.M. on the 30th, we were off.

Accommodations (the top bunk...)

Happy birthday!!!

The train was simply fabulous, and I couldn't stop babbling about how much I was enjoying myself...I've always enjoyed travel by train and boat, and this was my first time on a sleeper. I brought a bottle of wine for the birthday celebration, and we enjoyed it in the dining car with an older couple from Liverpool who were traveling around Asia for 30 days. The food was simple Chinese fare--your basic tofu, Kung Pao chicken, sweet and sour pork, etc--and definitely not bad for a travelling kitchen. We spent a lot of time talking and playing cards and reading. The next day on the train wasn't much different...breakfast in the dining car (fried eggs, bread, jam, and instant coffee), and a lot of reading, chatting, and looking out the window.

We arrived in Kowloon at 1:00 the next afternoon and were met by our friend Will, who we were staying with. After dropping things off at his house, downing some noodles and grabbing a pineapple-barbeque roll at the local bakery, we headed off to hang out around the Midlevels escalator area and the Peak.

Protest for migrant workers' rights in downtown HK

Downtown skyscrapers

The Midlevels escalator is kind of the awesomest thing ever--a seemingly neverending series of escalators up the side of a mountain in downtown Hong Kong. The escalators are surrounded by lots of cool little shops and restaurants, and Ming and I eventually headed back a couple of days later to check out some used bookstores, which DO NOT exist in Shanghai. After reaching the top of the escalators, we continued up the mountain in search of the Peak, the highest point (I think) and supposedly best view that HK has to offer.

Views from the Peak

Our strategy for finding the Peak was to walk up the mountain, but after running into signs that said things like "The Peak -->" and "<--The Peak" right next to each other, we decided to taxi it for most of the rest of the way. The path at the top of the mountain was a beautiful reprieve from the concrete onslaught that is existing in Asia--HK incorporates nature into its cityscape pretty harmoniously. It was moderately crowded but still quiet and jungley at the top, and we rounded the mountaintop and took in the fresh air and some great views. After a long wait for the tram back down the mountain, we went to Nathan Road for dinner.

Now, at this point it's important to know that when in Asia, one is constantly harassed by men and women trying to sell stuff, beg, scam, give pamphlets for who-knows-what, and peddle fake versions of anything made by human hand. Nathan Road was no different, and being in walking-in-city mode, I naturally kept my focus forward and ignored the continual bombardment offers. By chance, Ming stopped by one of the men who was advertising a restaurant and took a pamphlet--surprisingly, it looked pretty awesome, and we decided to go.

The restaurant advertised was an Indian/Pakistani/Arabic restaurant. We were lead by a bearded man into a shady looking hallway with advertisements for strip clubs all over the walls. He then took us into an elevator that resembled a steel-reinforced cell at Camp X-Ray, and another questionably shady individual entered the elevator and began talking with our escort in hushed voices about "where'd you get that horrible scary big fucking scar on your face." It was at this point I was certain that the three of us were going to be brutally murdered. Turns out, the restaurant was quite pleasant, and the food was absolutely delicious. (Though I suppose that nothing whets the appetite quite like being presented with a delicious and satisfying meal only moments after expecting to be sold into a southeast Asian prostitution ring.) We then headed over to a bar called Carnegies, which just happened to be across the street from the hotel where people were quarantined for 7 days because of a possible M1N1 outbreak. We just roll that hard (actually, by the end of the night I was absolutely exhausted and practically dragging everyone back home).

Saturday morning, we got up early to get out to Lantau Island to see what we first were told was "the world's largest Buddha." At some point later, we read it was actually "the world's largest sitting Buddha," which eventually was changed to "the world's largest outdoor sitting Buddha," and then finally summed up as "the world's largest outdoor sitting bronze Buddha." It was only about an hour into the line that someone mentioned that May 2nd happens to be Buddha's frigging birthday, and that it was likely that every person in Asia was headed where we were. Oops.

Spot the error.

Enormous effing Buddha on a crowded mountain

So the wait was long (decent though--2 hours when we were expecting 4 so all in all, not bad), the tram ride was terrifying (only to me) and beautiful, and the Buddha mountain village was a tourism clusterfuck. Seeing this thing up close, however, was totally worth it. It was ENORMOUS. We hung out for about 30 minutes or so, then bopped off back down the mountain for a quick change at Will's house and then a bus ride to a beach barbeque with Sarah and company at Deepwater Bay.

A Deepwater Bay picture I stole from Ming's camera

Apparently, beach barbeques are a very Hong Kong thing to do. After playing on the beach for a bit while people stoked the fire, we went over to our barbeque pit. The barbequing situation consisted of a large cement area with about 30 or so barbeque pits, each surrounded by four concrete benches. Every single one was occupied. People apparently go out early in the afternoon and spend all day roasting various meats, drinking, and having an overall great day in the sunshine. The whole experience, framed by the beautiful backdrop of the islands and the bay, was a relaxing throwback to summer barbeques in WV or Costa Rica and was the highlight of the trip, at least for me. We left around midnight, and heard the next day that about an hour after we left, the police were called in to stop a brawl in which 20 drunken Hong Kongers started battling with bbq skewers and beer bottles.

S'MORES

Our final full day was spent shopping, which was mostly uneventful...shopping in HK is pretty much exactly like shopping in Shanghai, though I DID find a hot dog stand! (No hot dogs on the mainland...what a pity.) The day ended with a final trip up the escalators for dinner at a great Malaysian mom-and-pop establishment and then a fast jaunt over to the entertainment district (I totally forget what this was called), where we went to a Russian bar with a special room set at like zero degrees Fahrenheit. They give you faux-mink jackets and you stand around sipping vodka in the freezing cold. It's fun for a minute or two, but quickly loses its novelty.

It was really cold.

On the final morning we bid Will adieu and headed out to what we expected to be a leisurely Western breakfast and the airport. Unfortunately, we left 30 minutes too late, got lost and ripped off by a taxi driver who charged us an extra 10 HKD for putting a bag in the trunk for 2 minutes, and couldn't find the restaurant. We settled for an impromptu 7-11-style fast food breakfast on the side of the road instead before catching the Airport Express train and heading for home.

All in all, and despite the rush of the last morning, it was a fantastic time and a great way to spend a much-needed vacation!

Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

2009-03-20T08:36:00.002+08:00

We're learning about riddle poems in my 5th grade honors English class. Here are some of the submissions I received yesterday. Answers (lest you need them) are at the bottom of the post.

1. I am famous and I am bright.
I am hottest at blue and coldest at red.
Always there to be,
Though not in your eyes.
I can be seen through a river,
a telescope, or a mirror.
-Ruixuan

2. I am wrapped inside boxes,
which people give others.
Yesterday is rubbish to me
because I only care about "now."
Though I have two meanings,
I am still one word.
If you know me,
You are very wise.
-Leonard

3. I am hardened rain and crystallized tears.
On Antarctica, I've existed for years.
Hard as glass, soft as silk,
I taste great with sugar and milk.
You can see me as transparent,
You can see me white.
You can't see me when I fly,
but you could when I'm dry.
-Miranda

4. My brother was home plate.
The military thinks I'm useful.
People whisper that I'm off limits.
The letters I'm created of are as be.
Scramble through the first of me
and you get closer to gaining a point.
What am I?
-Andrew

5. Sometimes I'm tall,
Sometimes slight,
But never do I have might.
I loom to sight (?) in bright light,
But vanish in the dark black night.

My owner loves me dearly,
Since I'm by her every hour.
But often she's still lonely,
Not knowing where I am.

You see I'm not a person
Who talks and eats with her.
She can touch but yet not feel me,
So what on Earth can I be?
-Julia

Oooo! Answers:
1. star
2. present
3. ice
4. base
5. a shadow

I love my kids!

A Visit to the Glasses Market

2009-03-18T13:10:00.012+08:00

I've always needed glasses for reading. Scratch that...I've always liked glasses for reading. I have a teensy astigmatism and it will randomly cause headaches if I read without glasses, but only sometimes. Many times I can go without, but I've found that over the last 6 months or so, I always need my glasses to read.

Another mildly associated but uninteresting story: I bite my nails, or rather, I bit my nails before coming to Shanghai and realizing that there very feasibly could be particles of human feces and loogies and snot rockets all over my hands at any given moment. So I used to do my own acrylic French manicures back in the States. I was good at it, but it required the use of nail glue, which is essentially superglue.

So one day I found that my glasses and my nail glue in my purse had found each other and made out, and that there was a thin film of scratched and immovable dried glue over the left lens. Being poor and being in the US where prescription specs cost a good hundred bucks or more, I dealt with it. For two years or so I read with my one and only pair of horribly scratched, dreadfully cloudy glasses.

Fast forward to this weekend--Shanghai is known for its vast shopping opportunities, and there is a specific market for nearly everything if you look hard enough. If you need clothes, head to the fabric market for custom-made tailored items. If you'd like some fake Chanel bags (but made with real leather), they're a subway stop away at the fake market. If you find yourself in need of your own personal copy of the Mona Lisa, go to the art market. Beautiful pearls for a fraction of the cost of the same items in the West can be found at the pearl market. And crickets...well, you get the idea.

Now I always knew there was a glasses market, but as I'm not the adventurous sort I never made the time to bop over there. That changed this weekend. During a day of shopping my depression away with Chelsea, I figured I needed to end the torture of reading with stupid, broken lenses once and for all.

Off of Shanghai Railway Station stop at the cross of lines 3 and 4 is a little alley, and underneath this alley is an enormous eyeglass supermall filled to the brim with eyeglass frames and custom lenses, all available at personally-bargained prices.

Crowded on Saturday.

The wares.

I settled on a pair of black and a pair of rosey mauve frames, and gave the kind fellow working the booth my old pair of glasses. He then put them into a machine that, while in concept seems like it would be from the future, looks like it was made in about 1985:

Ghetto, yet accurate, prescription reader.

Within a minute, the man handed me back my old glasses and a small slip of paper with my exact prescription written on it. He took Chelsea's stuff and did the same. Then off the man went to work:

Now, to backtrack, we had been told by our friend Dennis who had gone the previous week that the whole glasses-making process took about 20 minutes for him. Not so for us. We spent a good deal of time wandering around, checking out other merchandise, and randomly finding other things to take pictures of, like this:

These glasses bend over.

The red ones I really thought were cool AFTER I had bought my other two pairs.

I fell in love with these things. Chelsea, not so much:

Anyway, two hours and 250 kuai (around 40USD) later, I had two brand-new prescription pairs of beautiful glasses (no pictures--don't have any--sorry) and a nagging feeling that I kind of wish my eyesight was worse so I could go back and get more. Sometimes it REALLY pays to live in Shanghai.

My Humble Home

2009-03-17T13:46:00.014+08:00

Since I'm finding myself faced with more free time (though right now I'm hardly free--I'm in the middle of my geography 5 class and am punishing them for being loud by having them read quietly), I'm now finding it easier to blog about my life here in Zhongguo.

I know that some of my friends back in the US have been interested in my living situation...no time like the present, eh?

The Living Room/Kitchen

Here's the view, more or less, from the door. My coffee table and uncomfortable love seat. The lamp is standing on a table in the corner, and extends over the center of the room.

Some art and stuff across from the loveseat.

The kitchen. Do you see my kettle? That's the only place I can cook.

View from the kitchen, looking back at the door.

The Bedroom/Home gym/Entertainment Center/Vanity

The view as you walk into the bedroom.

Where the magic happens, obviously. Sorry it's messy. Check out the home gym. Also, computer station.

My tv right at the foot of my bed and my vanity over by the window.

The Bathroom/Pony Shower

Girlie sink things.

Look at how friggin enormous that thing is! Sorry about the mess...it was laundry day.

I'm off Facebook again...

2009-03-16T19:48:00.009+08:00

It seems every time I hit an emotional crisis, I deactivate Facebook. It helps me get away from, well, number one, being a stalker, and number two, putting my big dumb face out there too fucking much to be enjoyable.

I'll be back eventually. I just need time not to see some things. Bah.

In the meantime, might I entertain you with some hilarious images from my beloved Whore of the Orient?

The racist minstrels on the wall in the building where I hold honors English.

Inappropriate bookworm.

I can come up with no snappy caption for this one. It's a picture of a mushroom (or an oyster or muscle or something) that Chelsea and I saw in the elevator of Cloud 9 Shopping Plaza. I said it looked like a horrifying, horrifying vagina, and she added that, yes, it certainly did, one teeming with STDs that hadn't been attended to. Keep in mind, it's a restaurant advertisement. Mmmm...

Provocative ATM prompt.

In all fairness, it's my favorite kind of explosion.

My First Exhibition: Lao Eyes 2!!!

2009-03-07T21:03:00.014+08:00

So last weekend was fun. As I mentioned in my last post, Greg, Jesse, and I had our art featured in the second run-through of Lao Eyes, our school's teacher exhibition, downtown at Harley Bar. For those of you who do not live in China, a "laowai" is a foreigner, making "lao eye" an adorable play on words. As per your many (one) requests, I'll go ahead and get my pictures up here, with a couple of explanations, for your aesthetic enjoyment...

This is the whole kit n' kaboodle, all together...the untitled seven deadly sins series. I thought about interspersing the pieces together with the other artworks, but ever since I finished Pride, I've been thinking about it as a cohesive whole. Now, for a closer look...

Gluttony: 1 of 7. My favorite of the bunch. Originally, the word "gluttony" was included in the cityscape below, but I hated how it looked, so I inked it out and filled the remaining space with what you see here, setting the lettering for the rest of the series.

Sloth: 2 of 7. Get it? Heh heh.

Wrath: 3 of 7. This one took the longest by far. The Major Arcana VI card of the Tarot is "The Lovers" and this card is modeled off its equivalent of the Rider-Waite deck. In this version of the card, Adam is taking his rib back.

Greed: 4 of 7. I've done a couple of pieces now (some unrelated to this) of a world being held by an enormous space hand or space person. At first, I really didn't like this one and almost scrapped it, but after a while it really grew on me.

Envy: 5 of 7. Pretty self-explanatory.

Lust: 6 of 7. This was a really hard one to come up with. The final concept was the mouth as a sexual organ, holding a heart inside it as a lure.

Pride: 7 of 7. This was the absolute hardest one to come up with, and I didn't even start it until the Monday right before the art show. It started with a Google search of "pride," which eventually lead me to Wikipedia, which eventually led to the article "vanitas," which lead to my idea.

From that article:

In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic still life painting commonly executed by Northern European painters in Flanders and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term vanitas itself refers to the arts, learning and time. The word is Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity. Ecclesiastes 1:2 from the Bible is often quoted in conjunction with this term. The Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible) renders the verse as Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. The verse is translated as Vanity of vanities; all is vanity by the King James Version of the Bible, and Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless by the New International Version of the Bible.

Paintings executed in the vanitas style are meant as a reminder of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, encouraging a sombre world view.

Common vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certainty of death; rotten fruit, which symbolizes decay like ageing; bubbles, which symbolize the brevity of life and suddenness of death; smoke, watches, and hourglasses, which symbolize the brevity of life; and musical instruments, which symbolize brevity and the ephemeral nature of life.

The actual skull here is modeled off the sculpture "Vanitas" from the same article.

Prince of Orange René de Chalons died in battle in 1544, at age 25. His widow commissioned the sculptor Ligier Richier to represent him offering his heart to God, set against the painted splendour of his former worldly estate. This production resides today at the Church of Saint-Étienne, Bar-le-Duc.

Though he's offering his heart to God, it looks to me like he's checking himself out in a hand mirror.

Greg also has pictures up on his blog of his and Anthony's work...check it out!

Things that are making my day bad despite my life being altogether good right now

2009-02-25T14:01:00.007+08:00

So generally, I'm quite down today despite:

1) Miraculously recuperating from deadly sinus infection from hell after a few doses of antibiotics. (I'm finishing the course, don't ya'll worry.)
2) Finishing the last, missing piece of my exhibition series for Saturday.
3) Finding OUT about the exhibition on Saturday.
4) Having watched the new episode of The Office that my neighbor graciously downloaded and gave me on the jump drive.

My reasons for blech include, but are not limited to:
-shitty weather
-the Chinese teachers in our office yelling their conversation very very loudly
-it should be spring already
-the Chinese teachers in our office keep the windows open and it's cold
-retarded Chinese beliefs like "You can't keep plants in your room at night because they give off carbon dioxide."
-the taste in my mouth right now (old instant coffee! POOEY!)
-your mom
-it smells like poop in our elementary school stairwell
-the larval-stages-of-pubescence shithead boys in my 6th grade ESL class
-the eternal dilemma of whether or not to return to this godforsaken school
...and much, much more!

Luckily, I've been keeping myself relatively busy today by designing the poster to our exhibition, Lao Eyes 2! (It took about 40 minutes.)

Obviously, my name isn't roughly spraypainted out using MS Paint in the original copy, but I'd like to keep this blog as anonymous as possible in this day and age of stalk-by-numbers identity theft, thank you very much.

Maybe I should write again?

2009-02-24T08:50:00.004+08:00

Maybe I should get my thoughts down on pa...well, this electronic stuff a little more often. Tristan said there were like 20 people at Brittany's wedding that read this thing religiously, waiting with baited (baited?) breath for my next bowel-shatteringly hilarious insights into the world around me. Why doesn't anybody tell me these things? Shit! If there's anything I love, it's someone who thinks I'm awesome. If you read this and you like it, would you please leave me a little something that makes me think it's worthwhile to keep writing? Even if it's just a little, "Hiya, buddy. I don't know you, but sometimes your writing makes me pee a little."

So maybe you should expect more from me. Maybe. I say that with incredible flakiness. But while I'm here, let me go ahead and update you on, well, things since October here in Zhongguo.

November: Thanksgiving was celebrated at Punjabi just like last year. Afterwards, the Punjabi dancer mysteriously disappeared for several months, making us all very sad. But then he came back. All rejoiced.

December: Tristan visited! I got a migraine, which was not fun. The night before Tristan and I left for Beijing, we both got horrible stomach flus and were projectile vomiting up to and including our arrival at the airport. It was awful, but fun and memorable in retrospect. We climbed the Great Wall the next day, luckily without barfing, and I realized that day that I am very bad at physical activity that involves climbing and/or walking. So Tristan spent all day encouraging my winging fat ass up the 2000-year-old national treasure as I screamed things like, "LEAVE ME HERE TO DIE." Beautiful, though. Then we went to Xi'an (crazy Christmas party) and Chengdu (pandas!). Tristan partied like a rock star with my friends, while I mostly stayed at home and ate things.

January: I spent CNY holiday (Happy Ox Year, btw) in Amsterdam and Istanbul. That is all you need to know. Just kidding. More later.

February: CNY ended, the new semester began. Jingle and I went to a singles mixer (neither of us 100% single at the time) on V-day at Vinoteca for some chocolate and sparkling wine. Even though we tried our best to win the free bubbly offered to people who played love games the hardest core, we lost again and again. (We still got roses and chocolate, so not a complete loss.) Several days later, I stopped seeing someone right in the goddamned middle of an all-out body crushing sinus infection that had me snotting uncontrollably and sleeping for 48 hours straight in unbearable pain. It was a rough couple of days.

So all shittiness in my personal life aside, the Next Big Thing is my first art exhibition at Harley's Bar this Saturday! (Which I didn't know about until one of my office mates read the notice to me off the school's message board.) All in the Shanghai area should attend and offer to buy my stuff, though none of it will be for sale. You can offer though, and that would make me feel good about myself. The pieces are marker on canvas, black-and-white cartoons of the seven deadly sins, minus Pride, which I have not created yet. I may or may not have it available for Saturday. (Probably not.)

I'm bad at updating.

2008-09-22T12:15:00.011+08:00

Everyone in the United States believes I'm dead. Here's an update for the last bits of September and the overall month of October:

1. The beginning of October kicked off with a week-long holiday called Mid-Autumn festival (which oddly enough starts at the very, very beginning of autumn). Official Chinese policy calls for 7 days of school followed by 7 days of vacation. The week-long break hardly made up for those last two school days on the weekend. Regardless, I used the time to my advantage and spent several days decorating the apartment and making deviled eggs. I used to feel bad about my lackluster drive for adventure, but it turns out, I simply like being in my home more than I like just about anything else. All-in-all, a splendid week.

2. I have FINALLY started learning Chinese! I'm taking lessons for 2 hours every Tuesday with a personal tutor, whom I adore. Turns out, Chinese is a very simple language to put together, but the problems with it for westerners generally fall into one of two categories: 1) physical inability to pronounce sounds and 2) lack of context clues to tell you which ma of the 20 fourth-tone mas you should be using. The difficulty is not learning all the words...the difficulty is that there simply aren't enough words to go around, so each word means about 50 different things, all with the same tonal inflection and character.

3. I'm in a roller disco picture with Robin in the print edition of City Weekend with Avril Lavigne on the cover.

4. I went to the zoo over the break and had an utterly Chinese day with Jesse and Jingle. First off, one should never go to the Chinese zoo during a Chinese national holiday, as every other person in China is also seeking wholesome daytime recreation (the upside to which is the absolute overload of cute Asian babies at the zoo full of cute animal babies). The first major difference between a Chinese zoo and an American zoo is that the former is essentially a petting zoo regarding any animal that won't try to rip your arm off. At the ostrich pen, one can pay five RMB for a small tub of animal feed or spinach leaves to offer the enormous (and aggressive) birds.

Then there was the kangaroo yard. For 20 RMB, you and your loved ones, children, and pets can enter a large fenced-in quad with grass, trees, and about 30 kangaroos running every which direction. Some lounged as people pet their heads. Some hopped away from screaming children. More than once a kangaroo that was just beginning to trust me was chased away by a couple of kids trying to grab its tail.

The highlight of the event was the petting zoo, which at the very least was filled with domesticated, socialized animals that actually belong in a petting-zoo. As we watched a fat Chinese baby carry around a fat Chinese baby lamb, we heard laughter erupt ahead of us. Looking up, we saw that two of the smaller pot-bellied pigs in the yard had started having sex. It was raw and hilarious and frightening, as the erect penis of a small pot-bellied pig is about a foot long when outside its body, bright red, and about the width of a straw. Naturally, we got the whole thing on video.

Good jokes

2008-09-12T08:19:00.005+08:00

I discovered this summer that my 5-year-old brother Charlie has mastered the Delicate and Moste Anciente Arte of the knock-knock joke. For your pleasure:

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Moose.
Moose who?
You have a moose in your butt.

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Snake.
Snake who?
An anaconda is going to bite your face.

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Sandwich.
Sandwich who?
You eat a poop sandwich.

No need to thank me...just pay it forward.

Summer, in a Nutshell (and school)

2008-08-26T06:19:00.004+08:00

First things first: quick recap of summer...

Hung out with Tristan a lot during the first few weeks of being home. Morgantown. Visited Horace and the family. Shawn and Kat's wedding and subsequent NE trip. Ribs. Costa Rica. Poker. Captain Zero. More ribs. Skin products, Brittany, and expensive rental car. The end.

So now I'm back in ol' Shanghers and loving it once more. New teachers are here, old teachers are here, and the same sense of community has returned triple-fold with the new teacher's dorm, which houses nearly all of us. I've got to say, it's the most baller I've felt in quite some time, and I now have a shower big enough to clean several small ponies.

My kids are fabulous as well. The All-Supervising-Powers-That-Be thought it unwise to let me be in charge of the art projects once again (they explained to us in an excruciating lecture exactly how they made our schedules, but uh, I was too busy trying to drown myself in lukewarm instant coffee), so now I'm teaching three geography classes, an English, and an ESL. I love my English class, and I actually look forward to our longer classes together because they put me in such a good mood. I'm okay with the geographies. ESL is a bit of a chore, but one should expect to learn life lessons in the most unexpected places. Example:

Assignment: Make a sentence with the word "then."

Answer by Andy, 6th grade: "A dollop of romance now and then is good for everybody."

Then there are the changes. The elementary school now has a ball pit, which I discovered today. The back gate is open between 4:30 and 8, which is fantastic for trips to Trust-Mart. All the same old shenanigans apply.

Next up, birthday festivities.

Happy June!

2008-05-19T09:01:00.003+08:00

It's been an intense couple of weeks, so let's start at the beginning.

May 17 was officially the coolest night of my life with the Bacchanalia party to celebrate Kate and Jeff getting thismuch older. What's cooler than a toga party? Oh, not too much, unless you're having your toga party on a boat. On the Huangpu beside the Bund. With a band. And trashcans full of ice and cans of beer, and a two story beer bong. And did I mention the togas? I think I mentioned the togas...

The 23rd brought us to Roller Fabulous, the once-every-two-month roller disco party thrown by crazy people who don't believe in safety. What I love about China is you can have things here that would NEVER, EVER fly in America...for instance, an open-bar, crammed beyond fire-hazard capacity roller disco filled with costumes and spilled alcohol. It's dangerous and incredible and highly recommended for those who don't mind a couple of bruises they can't remember getting.

This past Saturday morning I started a beginning photography class at the Expat Learning Center beside Abbey Road. The classes run every Saturday and Sunday between 10 am and 12:30 pm from now until the last weekend in June. I've already made some super friends who I assume I will get wasted with in the extremely near future, and a few of us have already decided to take the advanced class in the fall to learn studio photography.

Meanwhile, there are ELEVEN teaching days left before the end of the semester. WTF. The time has completely flown by, and I'm SO happy I'm coming back for more. This week is the last full teaching week...we have next Monday off, and the following Thursday and Friday are final exam days, which means, essentially, that I'm FINISHED and welcoming the summer with open arms and a huge bonus.

Beyond all this, nothing much has happened. I'm off to the robot store tonight to get some robots for my depth of field assignment, and am probably also taking myself out on a date.

News Bulletins

2008-05-13T00:27:00.004+08:00

1. A lot of people have contacted me with concerns, and I just wanted everyone to know that I wasn't in the earthquake. A couple of people said they felt it here, but I was in class and apparently too distracted to notice. Either way, I'm fine, and so is Shanghai. (Though the earthquake happened in Chengdu, where I'll be going in a couple of months to see the pandas. I hope those pandas are alright.)

2. I'll officially be home on the morning of July 11!!! I booked the ticket using dad's credit card...hopefully he'll understand for the couple of months before I pay him back. It's not like I didn't try like hell to get in contact with him, but that's dad for you. Anyway, I'll be in WV/the US between July 11 and August 5, then I go to CR until the 13th, then I'm back to the US until the 21st, when it's back to Shanghai and new apartment with me. Speaking of which...

3. I'm really excited about the new apartments. My new place will be on the opposite side of the track from where it is now, and will be about 1 1/2 times as big with an enormous shower. That, and a community room, a storage space, and a big shared balcony with a view of Xujiahui and the Pearl Tower (which doesn't make logical sense but we could totally see it when we snuck onto the construction site the other day).

4. This Saturday, our friend is throwing a joint Bacchanalia birthday party on an honest-to-goodness replica pirate ship that goes up and down the Bund on the Huangpu River. We're all having togas, gladiator costumes, and Greek goddess dresses made especially for the occasion, and on Saturday, Cindy and I are going to have fresh flower wreathes woven in our hair. Remember...this is the costume crowd.

5. I'm back on facebook...have been for a few weeks. Expect Bacchanalia pictures.

Romance

2008-05-08T14:28:00.002+08:00

Okay, so I was online and what should I spy but THIS, the Tiffany Bubble Ring. Just saying, for the bargain price of $9000 and a proposal in a private gondola at WaterFire, I could be yours. And this ring would be mine.

Vitamins C and D

2008-05-05T09:01:00.002+08:00

So my hair is bright orange and the sun is shining. How can life, honestly, get any better?

The four-day holiday was a massive success. All was kicked off on Wednesday with a sleepover at Cindy's family's luxurious Pudong palace and an all-day barbeque on Thursday which ended with our friend Dave passed out on a toilet with the door open. Friday was spent at a delicious cajun restaurant called Cafe du Monde for brunch, followed by hair dying and nails did. Saturday brought the fabric market for summer clothes, lunch at Whisk, and a huge shopping spree at Ikea to outfit my kitchen (I have a salad spinner, ya'll). I slept all day yesterday. Like, all day, really. Until about 8:00 pm. It kinda sucks, actually, and I have to wonder if I was secretly ill or something to be able to physically sleep that long.

So that was my weekend, and with every passing hour I'm more and more happy that I'm staying on for another year. I can't wait to go home and visit everyone this summer, but really, life is so much bigger here.

I'm here...

2008-04-21T09:50:00.002+08:00

...for good. I must thank both Donk and Horace for your gracious attitudes towards my flake-tastic lifestyle. I'm sorry. I'm never there when you want me to be, it seems.

So yes, decision's made, I've signed the papers, I'm coming back. Wow. It was abrupt. It wouldn't have been so if it weren't objectively the best decision I could have made. But it is. So much more is available to me here. I've got to learn to let go of things, but I'm a collector you see. Once I have something, I have it forever.

It's time to cut that shit out.

panic! at the elementary school

2008-04-15T10:08:00.003+08:00

I'm thinking of staying in China. I have three days to decide.

I've been having waves of panic about this for about seven hours, but I talked to my boss and it's possible. Let me just try and articulate what I'm panicking about.

I have nothing to go home to in the states. Yes, I miss family and friends. A lot. A bunch of my friends are getting married in the fall and I wouldn't be able to go to their weddings. My baby brother and sister will be growing up without me and it's heartbreaking. Speaking of which, I'll be separated from my bff and brother Tristan and good friend and once-future roommate, Donk. But as far as employment is concerned? Nothing. And what about relationships? Ha. Meanwhile, I've set up an adult life for myself here. The opportunities in Shanghai are TRULY endless and overwhelming, and I. am. panicking. about giving that up.

The pros of staying vastly outweigh both the cons of it and the pros of going home. And I want to go home. I do. But objectively, it isn't the best thing for me, and thus far, nobody's arguing with that. I either go home and waste a year bartending or telemarketing in a town that I may have, at this point, outgrown, or stay at my high-paying, stress-free job and work on my personal development as an adult. I have a great job right now. I have a free apartment right now. Going home would be fabulous, but a rather bad decision in the end. I need to start thinking about things in terms of what's best rather than what I want the most. And it would be one thing if I were constantly unhappy here, but you know what? I'm not. My life is awesome. Maybe I should chase that feeling instead of chasing things half a world away.

Gawwwwwhhhh.......I feel nauseous. This "growing up" thing's a really sonofabitch, no?

Who is Tungsten?

2008-04-13T00:26:00.003+08:00

Tungsten, who are you? I cannot check your identity, for I have stunted access behind the Great Firewall.

Who? Who?

Documentary Day!!!

2008-04-10T20:54:00.004+08:00

I spent this afternoon eating pizza, de-pussing multiple pinky-toe blisters, and watching three documentaries, which, I'm sure you'll be happy to hear, I've decided to blog about.

Documentary One: Prostitution Pornography U.S.A. Okay, this wasn't so much a documentary as interviews and sexploitation porn from the 70s, but as I'm both nerdy and pervy it suited my tastes quite well. Included interviews with a call girl, a hooker, a pimp, a fat hooker, an exploitation model, and a lesbian junkie who gave bjs in public bathrooms back in like 1975 or something. The movie went into a brief history of each woman, displaying childhood photographs and trailing the events leading to their inevitable placement on the market, and each interview was followed by video taken from behind a two-way mirror of hairy mustachioed 70s dudes purchasing their services. I've just got to say, and I may be off here or something, but there really is NOTHING less hot than a prostitute or the act of purchasing sex. It's just...so...mechanical. I mean, I understand that people need some. I know that it's the oldest profession in the world and I totally think prostitution should be legal. But after seeing this film and reading Sex Slaves: The Trafficking of Women in Asia, I can honestly say that I JUST do. not. get. it.

Documentary Two: The Boy with the Incredible Brain. A five-part YouTube gem, this one tracks the extraordinary abilities of Daniel Tammet, a savant from England who learns languages in seven days and once recited the first TWENTY TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN DIGITS OF PI, with NO mistakes, in just over five hours. He doesn't even do the calculations in his head...instead, his brain simply reveals answers to him in synesthetic shapes corresponding to a numerical value. To him, sixes are almost invisible, nines are large and intimidating, and ones are a bright light. The only way I can even remotely compare anything in my life to this is my synthesthetic association of 72 degrees Fahrenheit with the shape of a somewhat rounded, upside-down triangle, but that isn't really useful at all, now is it?

Documentary Three: Out of the Blue. Another YouTube recommendation by Jesse. 9 parts. Basically, UFOs exist. It's essentially fact to the point where it's almost boring. It takes only a certain number of ex-Majic/Majestic/Pentagon officials from the late 40s testifying that they all saw stuff and were told to cover it up with official explanations of swamp gas before you really just have to say, "Okay." According to a more modern variant of the Drake Equation, which calculates there are ten thousand intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy alone, the probability of life capable of contact with Earth from somewhere else in our known universe is indistinguishable from one. (And because I trust mathematicians and scientists over politicians and military officials, that's a pretty big deal for me.) Plus, I've, very factually, no bullshit, seen a UFO with my own two eyes, but that's an entirely different blog altogether.

Finally, poetry.

2008-04-09T10:39:00.005+08:00

I've finally reached the poetry unit with my fifth graders, and while it turns out that trying to get my non-native English-speaking tweens poetic feet at this stage is a bit of an exercise in futility, it turns out that I'm pretty good at teaching the subject. At least when it comes to form and function. Figurative language, on the other hand, is proving to be a little more difficult. Here are some of the better comments and conversations regarding the following literary devices:

Hyperbole
Student: "It's a bowl that spins around really quickly."
Me: "It's pronounced hy-PER-bowl-ee."
Student: "Then where's the 'y'?"
Me: "It's English. Why does pneumonia begin with a 'p'?"
Student: "That's that bad smell Jane likes."
Me: "What? No. That's ammonia. It's not the same thing."

Onomatopoeia
A type of pasta, presumably served with meatballs.

Idiom
"You're an idiom."

Irony
Me: "Have you ever heard the phrase, "It's like the pot calling the kettle black" ?
Student 1: That's racist.
Student 2: Ms. Mo is a racist!
All students: A racist! Ms. Mo is a racist!
Me: (Indignant, to fifth graders) "I am not a racist. What color do you think the pot is?"
Student 2: White.

Miracles, and also things that are not miracles.

2008-04-08T09:39:00.002+08:00

This weekend was the best and worst of pretty much all the times I've ever had.

Friday (day): Went to the photography market with Cindy's photographer neighbor Steve and spent my budgeted $800 on a Canon 400D digital SLR, or as Canon likes to say, EOS (whatever that means). With it, I purchased a UV filter, a 2 GB memory card, a goat hair lens brush, and a bitchin bag which is also the bag that Cindy bought because we're in love and I can't do anything independently of her. (And it was a really cool bag.) Celebrated with lunch at Whisk where I accidentally once told Cindy's mom (and the whole restaurant. Very loudly.) "that's what she said!" after she exclaimed, frustrated, "I can't pick up this coffee cup...my finger doesn't fit in the hole."

Friday (night): I met up with Ben, Tarrell, Tarrell's friend Ben from high school, and Cindy on the Bund after they had all been to Barbarosa. We rollerskated on the slippery walkway for a while, then went to I Love Shanghai and had more tequila shots than was necessary. Met up with some other teachers at Cotton Club. Michael, who is one of the new teachers here, happens to be a Michael Buble-esque crooner in his free time, so I made him my best friend forever for about 10 minutes as we talked about old jazz standards and I told many people that "he sings pretty." The night gets fuzzy after that, but at some point I fell in someone else's vomit, and my friends kept me from stripping all my clothes off in the middle of the street. Ben (the new Ben, the Ben that doesn't know me at all) lent me his sweater so I could take off my vomity clothes, and me, my leggings, and Ben's sweater were all packed away in a taxi for the long, drunken ride home. When we arrived, I rolled out of the taxi, leaving my phone inside, and passed out in the grass in front of my building for a while.

Saturday: I spent most of the day in Cindy's bed, where she, Tarrell, the new Ben and the old Ben and I all watched Family Guy and talked about the embarrassing things that happened the night before. They mostly had to do with me.

Sunday: (The old) Ben's mom is in China and we all went to champagne brunch at the Renaissance to meet her. The crew was Glenna (Ben's mom), Gale (her sister), Ben, myself, Cindy, Alex, Andrew, and Natalie. As none of us are particularly savory characters, and Ben's mom is a supercool hippie from northern California, things got ridiculous pretty quickly. Especially with me. Highlights of my Sunday drunkenness include:

me picking up and humping Cindy in front of a wedding party
me telling everyone about that one time I did coke in a brothel
me saying that we should go to the bar so we all could "find people to do it with"

Luckily, I have good friends that know and love me no matter what. At one point, though, I would get drunk and do things that I know I wouldn't be brave enough to do while sober. Now I get drunk and do and say things that nobody, anywhere would ever do or say even under the influence of heavy drugs. Maybe it's time to reign myself in.

Oh, and the miracle that is mentioned in the title of this post is that, yesterday, I got my phone back. Kiah called my phone and a Chinese English-speaker answered and said she'd get it back to me. I called her from Cindy's phone and went to meet her. Keep in mind, Shanghai has anywhere between 13 and 20 million people depending on who you talk to. People lose their phones all the time and NOBODY EVER gets them back. Except me. Maybe the universe felt bad because I spent Friday night covered in someone else's barf.

Happy April Foos Day!

2008-04-01T10:18:00.010+08:00

It's a magical and wonderful experience to be a teacher of non-native English speakers at an international elementary school on April Fool's Day, the specific reason being that while the kids are enthusiastic about the suddenly called-for trickery, none of the them actually understands why or how it works.

In my ESL class, my student Polina was quick to point out, "Teacher! You have spider on your head! Hahahahahahaha!" This was followed by a prolonged silence in which my students stared at me, faces taut with the anticipated rapture of a prank well pulled, with me finally exclaiming, exasperated, "You have to say 'April Fool's!' afterward or it doesn't count!" It would help if any of them understood what "fool" meant, or how to even spell it, but mostly it comes out like the first syllable of "foosball."

Cindy left her 6th grade English class to find a note secretly placed in her pocket that simply read, "eat my tshirt happy all fools day."

A little attention?

2008-03-24T21:59:00.003+08:00

Anyone?

Things I'm Totally Into: March 24, 2008

2008-03-24T08:45:00.002+08:00

South Korean armed border patrol robots
Okay, when I first heard about this issue at lunch a few days ago, someone said that it was actually North Korea that had the armed robots. But after looking it up just now, it appears that's not the case. Since I'm eagerly awaiting the robot takeover much like my friend Cindy is busy assembling an arsenal of chainsaws and flamethrowers in anticipation of the upcoming zombie apocalypse, I'm totally psyched to hear about this first great leap forward in the direction of Total Robot Domination. As an added bonus, Kim Jong Il is sure to retaliate with his own army of autonomous killing machines to battle those of South Korea. Fingers crossed it's available on Pay-Per-View.

the possibility of a third Charlie's Angels movie
Dude, have you seen these in a while? They're awesome! By "awesome" I mean "horrible," but in a really fun way. I like these movies like I like The Core.

junk-emphasizing undergarments
My friend Morgan wrote an article last month about this season's hottest in the arena of Shanghai men's intimates--the Sling, underwear that puts your dude business into an elevated ring and hoists it breathtakingly into the limelight. Fuck the WonderBra--it's time to teach the ladies a thing or two about flaunting some bits all up in your face. Guys, this is totally the coolest thing to happen to you since Guitar Hero.

roller disco
Costumes. Open bar. Roller skates. Limbo. Everyone comes out with nasty bruises and fond memories. What fucking isn't to love?

The Untitled X-Files Sequel
If you're reading this, you probably know me well enough to know that I was a PHENOMENAL X-Files geek throughout the majority of my adolescence. In the seven years since the final episode aired in the spring of 2002 (the Ally McBeal series finale was the next night. It was a bad week.), rumors have circled the internet, ever hinting at a possible reunion movie, but for the longest time nothing was official. Well, it's finally happening. The pictures are up on IMDB and it's categorized as "post-production." There's no plot synopsis so I don't know what it's about. I don't care. Expect me to dye my hair red and wear my finest mid-90s power suit to the premiere.

Photography + Roller Disco = bffaa

2008-03-19T22:01:00.004+08:00

Hey. Just popping in to say that SmartShanghai has put up a Roller Revival gallery from last Friday night. I'm not in any of the pictures (what can you do?), but I was there. This is just a taste of the kind of thing I'm into on a weekly basis, and a sneak peek at all the hot cool people that boogie in this town.

Mix-up by Michael, 6th grade ESL

2008-03-16T23:50:00.003+08:00

Question # 14: Christianity is an example of a swamp.

Question # 17: He sank knee-deep into the muddy religion.

Huh.

Get sprung.

2008-03-12T12:50:00.002+08:00

Couple of quick things:

-Got a massage yesterday and the ankle feels like a million bucks. Since Andrew threw out his back and nobody else wants to play tennis with me today, I'm going to walk to Xujiahui and BACK with Cindy. It should take up the majority of the evening.

-I'm more ticklish than I thought I was. During the aforementioned massage (around 20 USD for 2 hours and lots of oil) I could not stop giggling. Apparently, my toes are really sensitive.

-Today. is. BEAUTIFUL. I'm taking my cartooning class outside.

-Happy 21st birthday shoutout to the bro, who's visiting in June, fingers crossed.

Things That Cindy and I Do That Are Gay

2008-03-10T09:30:00.003+08:00

We take long walks together side-by-side, listening to our separate iPods.
We sit and smoke hookah in silence, listening to love ballads.
We sit on the same side of the otherwise empty booth at brunch.
I double her to the gate on the back of my bike while she puts her arm around my waist and carries our parcels.

I guarantee there's more where this came from...

Meanwhile, inheritance may be coming through. Tristan MAY be coming to China and traveling with me this summer! Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Balls.

2008-03-07T11:58:00.001+08:00

Mary got me crutches from the clinic today so I can get around. Fuck sports injuries.

In other news, my nails are growing back.

I do not love poetry.

2008-03-06T21:25:00.003+08:00

That is false. FACT: I love poetry, but whoever posts poems under my name on Ilovepoetry.com is NOT me, lest you wonder. I found this out by Googling my name with the quotes Boolean operator (are quotes around a search a Boolean operator? I just wanted to try and use the phrase in a sentence. Is that how you would even use that in a sentence?...), and found a few entries by a poet who happens to share my first and last names. I'm not surprised...there are, after all, FIVE of us (on Facebook). I just didn't want you to, now that I'm off Facebook and disappeared, Google my name for news of my most recent adventures/embarrassing old pictures and websites and come across my own, personal Ilovepoetry.com page. (But if you ever want to remember how fucking deep you were when you were fourteen, I highly recommend it.)

Meanwhile, it's 4 hours since playing tennis and my recently healed ankle is once again a stiff knot of horrifying joint pain. For those who don't know, I was out about a month ago in heels and I...well...folded. I walk on the extreme outside of my feet, which I blame on a hip deformity I was apparently born with, and if I don't pay extreme attention to what I'm doing in heels I tend to fall. Which I did. It was kind of like I fell into sitting Indian style, but involuntarily, and directly onto the outsides of my ankles.

Plus I was on stairs. I am always falling down stairs.

It's raining sunshine!

2008-03-06T17:16:00.002+08:00

Spring has not sprung, but it's certainly springing.

I know this because of "my good sickness," which is how I told my ESL class that I have allergies. No matter. The sun has started shining, and the gloom which always seems to wreak havoc on my winter months has lifted, leading me to sing very loudly with my iPod in public places and give out far more praise notes than usual.

Also, I am a lazy teacher. A lazy, lazy teacher. All I can say is that I'm happy I work in the primary school where I stimulate young minds with bright colors and pretty music and never have to worry about things like "literary analysis," "SAT prep," and "the essay." Yesterday, I watched three different episodes of Planet Earth. In cartooning, the assignment I gave was to "draw whatever comes to mind" while watching "Deep Ocean." I drew the separate pieces of clothes I plan to pack with me when I go on my Pan-Eurasian Festival of Madness.

And that's not all! I just finished playing tennis! TENNIS! My constant pleas to the powers that be to let the expatriate teachers use the new courts beside elementary school have been heard by the right people, and now we're allowed on the courts between 4 and 5 pm, even though school doesn't let out until 4:10.

I love spring.

Awesome Attack

2008-03-05T11:35:00.004+08:00

SING IT WITH ME!

Beijing
Moscow
Kiev
Odessa
Istanbul
Sofia
Prague
Brandys nad Labem
Amsterdam
Brussels

Tim, this is an awesome idea. Thank you so much for this awesome idea. Does anyone else think this is an awesome idea? I think lots of people think this is an awesome idea. Now that the sun is out and shining and I take long walks in the afternoons I'm free to think about things like traveling the world in the summertime.

Cindy and I are walking to Xujiahui today. It's going to take 4 hours.

Epiphanies

2008-03-04T23:41:00.005+08:00

A few days ago I had two epiphanies. One was bad, one was good. (I never said I would always be an entertaining writer.)

First, earlier in the day it hit me like a brick that I can't be counted on. I was frustrated at my fickleness for something or another, and because I like to boil everything down to one simple sentence, I was searching for a way to pin down the trait in that way. Then it came to me: I can't be counted on. Like, pretty pathologically. This would be a suitable honest-to-goodness answer in a potential employee application: What are your weaknesses? I can't be counted on. What a horrible trait for someone to have...I am making serious conscious strides towards changing. At the very least I recognize it as a huge problem (or rather a major pain in the ass for all my friends) and am in the process of taking baby steps towards improvement, like keeping dinner plans.

Cindy and I were discussing this at dinner at Element Fresh later that evening when I had the realization that I have become who I've basically always wanted to become: a silly kid living in one of the largest cities in the world, moderately well-to-do, having fantastic warm and fuzzy moments in a nice atmosphere on a daily basis. Afterwards, we rode through Xujiahui complaining about traffic when we looked around and realized that we were in the middle of a twelve-lane intersection. Twelve. And this is a daily thing for us. We don't live outside the city, in a suburb or smaller community. We live in it. The closest Starbucks is in a seven story mall surrounded by other malls that are larger than seven stories. It's rare to wait more than five minutes for a taxi outside the school gates. On a late night we can hit four or five different venues. No matter how much I may complain or how homesick I get, my life here is incredible. China ain't all bad.

Beer and karaoke to celebrate.

And by the way...

2008-03-03T16:00:00.000+08:00

Don't think for a moment that I don't know I'm crazy.

Something I Said to Kasey On The Phone

2008-03-02T23:41:00.001+08:00

"Light is pouring out of my eyeballs, rainbows are dripping from my nostrils, and kittens are coming out of my butt."

Did I mention I no longer have a quotes page?

List of things I'm into at the moment:

2008-03-02T17:16:00.002+08:00

After getting off of Facebook, which I've found a marvelous move, by the way, I am sort of left with a hole in the fabric of my social interaction. (Awesome metaphor and great sentence.) I still kind of want to share when I get into new things, but now I don't have a simple "Favorite Movies" or "Music" box within which to update my ever-changing tastes. So here's an update of entertainment I've grown to dig over the last week...I'll probably be doing this a lot from now on:

-Sweeny Todd. Sometimes I don't expect movies to be musicals, and if I'm not ready for it, I spend the first half of the movie laughing and feeling awkward. But then I re-watched it, and I can't get the "Johanna" song out of my head. I also have lesbian crushes on both Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp, so the casting gets my seal of approval.

-The Rolling Stones. I think I've found my classic rock band! I don't know if that's a good choice or not among music connoisseurs, but I've never had good taste in music so I'll go ahead and consider this an improvement. If you think not, go ahead and shoot me an email.

-The Pixies. The Pixies...have you heard The Pixies? Fuah. Why didn't anyone tell me they rocked so hard? Currently, my Favorite Song of All Time is "I've Been Tired." It makes me feel like I need a big sailor tattoo and some fingerless gloves and chain smoke like I. don't. even. give. a. fuck.

So I was having a chat the other day, and...

2008-03-01T20:03:00.008+08:00

...I've been talked into circumnavigating the globe. Whaterya gonna do?

So as of two days ago, Cid and I had every intention of flying home together on the 1st of July. We were simply waiting for the paychecks to come in and the money to clear the Pacific and make its way into our bank accounts (at least I was). But then I got into a conversation with Joe. It went like this:

Me: Hey, I think I'm buying my ticket home tomorrow.
Joe: Really? Which way are you going?
Me: By plane, over the Pacific.
Joe: Oh. Well I think a bunch of us are gonna take the Trans-Mongolian Railroad west, through the stones of the Great Wall, across the vast dry spaces and sun-kissed steppes of the Gobi, hugging the glistening shores of fresh-water Lake Baikal, then on to Moscow, from where we shall head to Europe for an escapade so full of mischief and wonder that the gods themselves shall surely weep with uncertainty! You can come with us if you want.
Me: Okay.

So instead of east, I plan on going west, traversing Eurasia, flying back to Pittsburgh over the Atlantic, and finishing my journey having circled the entire world. (Which would put me at least in the top 5 on the Most Awesome People You Know list.) And I'ma do it in 31 days.

***A big thank you to Tim, who I just got off the phone with and was a great influence in getting me stoked about this idea. He also planned mostly every little detail of the following, using his Enormous Brain of Travel Information:***

The Trans-Mongolian Railway is cheap, a very cool thing to talk about at hippie parties, the first of the three life goals I get to say I've accomplished on this trip, and gets me to Moscow, which just happens to be a one-day train ride to Kiev. If all goes according to our planned best-case scenario (and doesn't it always?), Tim will be able to get a few days off and meet me there, where we will frolic with glee in his ancestoral homeland and make our way down to Odessa, where we will catch the overnight ferry across the Black Sea to Istanbul. In Istanbul, I get to FINALLY visit the Hagia Sophia, the most architecturally brilliant cathedral/mosque in the history of the universe and number two of doable life goals in July.

From Istanbul, I can take the night bus to Sofia, Bulgaria and catch a 30-ish Euro plane to Prague, where I want to adventure out and find the family plot in Brandys nad Labem (goal number three). Maybe I'll go back to Hungary while I'm at it. From there, a short flight to Holland...to, uh, see the tulips...then finally to Brussels, where direct flights to Pittsburgh are moderately inexpensive and easy to book. Plan is to book my plane from Brussels (or whichever European city is the cheapest) to Pittsburgh for July 31st. I'm going to do this relatively quickly because if I get a ticket home now, I can't back out of it later, and we all know I have a tendency to do that. I really don't want it to come down to go time and back out with some hollow reason because I'm scared to adventure. I'm never going to get another opportunity presented to me like this again, and I like to think that if I do, I'll be on board.

See you in August.

The In and Out of Cellular Detox and Colonic Irrigation

2008-02-29T09:01:00.002+08:00

***Mature (ish) Audiences Only***

“Putting it in the hiney is fun. It’s rude and harsh and God hates it.”
-The Vice Guide to Guilty Pleasures

I, moplumsy, have put water in my butt. A lot of water. 60 gallons, in fact, give or take a dribble. And it didn’t start out as a way to pass the time, either. It just ended up that way.

But let’s start at the beginning. All this came about with my decision at the beginning of 2008 to spend my Chinese New Year holiday break in Thailand. But instead of shrooming at full moon parties or accompanying groups of creepy expats to ping-pong shows (everyone loves a trafficked chick), I made the spur-of-the-moment decision to go on a fast for ten days. I started how anyone starts anything these days: Google. I searched for “fasting retreats in Thailand,” “fast programs Asia,” and “beach fast Thailand cheap.” I read reviews about various health spas on various travel sites, ranging from the extremely luxurious to the we-may-sell-you-into-human-slavery risky, and finally settled on a place called Health Oasis Resort on the picturesque island of Koh Samui, toted for the effectiveness and solidity of its no-frills detox and colonics programs.

Once I made the decision and booked my tickets, the first reaction I got from people was an extended, horrified stare, eventually followed with, “Why?” After all, it’s a widely known fact (by me) that Thai food is the super duper best food in the universe. And I wouldn’t be eating any of it. In addition, many expats in China use the Chinese New Year holiday break to, well, party their balls off. My reasons were plentiful, and ranged anywhere from getting out of Shanghai to losing weight to clearing up my skin, but beyond any of that, my main reason was because Shanghai is disgusting, and I needed to get that out of me.

The second reaction was from some of my savvier international friends, who quietly took me aside and asked the key question which I had, up to this point, avoided bringing up. “Do you have to do enemas?” A key, and I would venture to say the most important, element of a detox program is the colonic. And, yes, I had to do them. Let me make this clear now: I was fully aware that this was going to be a part of my program. I avoided bringing it up to people when telling them what I was going to do over my winter vacation, especially with my American friends. Americans are prudes. Even I kind of thought it was dirty thing to do. Which eventually became all the more reason to try it out.

The first part of an extended fast is the “pre-fast,” which, once I got to Health Oasis, I discovered was pointless and entirely optional. Through the month of January, I began cutting things out of my diet. Starting on the first, I gave up anything that fell under the umbrella of “junk food,” meaning chips, candy, pizza…anything that conjures up the phrase “empty calories” and pretty much all I had been living on in China up to that point. On the 14^th, I gave up meat of all kinds, which I nearly stuck with without cheating save for the lox bagel I had immediately before leaving. On the 22^nd, I had every intention of switching over to a full vegan diet, but uh, that didn’t work out, as cheese and I are tight likethis. But I did drastically reduce my consumption of it. By the morning of the 28^th, I felt almost ready.

My orientation at Health Oasis was an informal meeting with Graham, the manager of the resort who kind of reminded me of Bo from the Heaven’s Gate cult. We sat down and he told me what I was going to do, when I was going to do it, and why. The first day included “juice-drink” (25% fresh juice, 75% water) and magnesium-oxygen shots taken every three hours, which gets anything out of your body that you consumed in the last day by giving you pleasantly cramp-free diarrhea (See? There’s always a silver lining). The second day included the start of the nutritional regimen that was to be followed for the duration of the fast, and on the morning of the third day, colonics were to begin.

Every morning thereafter, a nice Thai man would come to my door and make me my first psyllium husk/benzonite clay shake of the day. Psyllium husks are fibrous, well, husks, which expand in your stomach and make you feel like you haven’t not eaten for several days. Benzonite clay is essentially flavorless mud. It absorbs up to six times its weight of toxins in your intestines, which is really cool I guess. Those things are mixed with a little bit of juice drink and chugged down as fast as possible (if left sitting for more than a few seconds the mixture turns to the consistency of oatmeal). This was done once every three hours until 7:00 p.m.

Starting at 8:30 a.m. were the herbs and potions. These were taken in different combinations every three hours until 8:30 p.m. and all were to be held under the tongue for a minute for sublingual absorption. These things included, but were not limited to:

Colloidal silver, a New -Agey antimicrobial which can cause an amazing skin condition called argyria in high enough concentrations. I suggest you Wikipedia it.
Chlorophyll, for photosynthesis.
Heal Detox, a witch’s brew of stuff that tasted like death.
Spirulina capsules, the one thing I wasn’t convinced would end up killing me eventually. It’s a kelp-like superfood from under the sea that contains all 22 amino acids. The contents of the capsules were put into a tiny amount of water and held under the tongue for one minute. It tasted like the inside of a pet store smells.
“Female tonic,” which I can only assume contained vaginas.
Ocean minerals, which may or may not have been seawater in a spray bottle.

On the evening of the second day, I was taken into one of the colonics rooms and given a tutorial on how to effectively get all that water into my butt. It’s a simple process, really. A big fiberglass surface called a colonic board is placed like a tabletop on a stool and a toilet seat. On the toilet end, there’s a big hole with a roof over it for your ass to go. A five-gallon bucket of water hangs from the ceiling, and a tube runs from the bucket through the roof of the ass-end of the colonic board, so it sticks out a couple of inches. A clip on the tube keeps the water from flowing. For now.

This is where you come in. Before each colonic, the room is prepped with a pitcher of hot water, half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a plastic glove, a colonic tip, and a wee bottle of Vaseline. As an extra dash of awesome, a colander was available to put IN THE TOILET for your post-colonic shit-gazing pleasure. Call me a square, but the colander just wasn’t for me. Sorry.

So there you are: you’ve entered the colonic room, nervous, perhaps clutching your ipod. You make sure the door behind you is double-locked, and you disrobe. This is it. You take the hot water and hydrogen peroxide and pour it into the bucket of water hanging from the ceiling. Breathe—time to break out the Vaseline. The colonic tip is a thin tube about ten inches long. One end fits neatly into the tube leading to the bucket. The other end, rounded and with three holes in the side, fits neatly into your asshole. How far into your asshole, you ask? A finger length is the recommendation of most colonics professionals, but you can give or take a few millimeters depending on your comfort level. This next part doesn’t really apply to those who enjoy putting things in the booty on a regular basis, but for those who aren’t accustomed to what-all in the posterior orifice, I’ll tell you that insertion is uncomfortable. Kind of painful, actually. But once it’s in, it’s in. It’s okay. You’re okay, and I’m okay. Spend a couple of moments taking some deep breaths. Chant “om.” Go to your happy place. You’re ready.

At this moment, you’re on your back, head resting comfortably, hands massaging your abdomen, feet high and against the wall. Of course, your ass is nestled into its little ass-area, and let’s not forget the tube tucked neatly inside. All in all, fairly cozy. You sit up for a brief moment, and pull the clip.

The first thing you’ll notice is a cold, prickling feeling of water splashing on your inner thighs for a few seconds. I have no idea what the fuck that’s about. It must be a nerve thing connected to your colon, because at no point does water actually splash on you. It’s alarming nonetheless. No sooner have you thought, “Oh shit, did I put the thing in right?” than you have the urge to poop. And it doesn’t stop. But there’s this tube in your ass so you still feel kinda weird about it. Don’t worry…you were told this was going to happen.

At no point do you, ahem, “push out.” The colon and lower intestines simply fill with water until they can’t take it anymore then…release. Then fill and…release. Imagine momentarily experiencing the worst diarrhea of your life every 20 seconds for about 40 minutes and you’ve got a good idea of the sensation. Essentially, the absurd amount of water that’s now coursing through your pooper is triggering the last phases of peristalsis, the physical action of smooth muscle tissue pushing food through your digestive system. While some water is released, some is retained, so by the time the bucket is empty, you’re nowhere near so. The first time is entirely unpleasant, and as luck would have it, you’re not done yet.

Meanwhile, the emptying of the bucket takes time. Around 40 minutes to an hour. Use this time to your advantage. Read a book. Do a crossword puzzle or some sudoku. Listen to soothing music. Don’t start thinking about freak occurrences like tsunamis or earthquakes. Make sure there aren’t any spiders in the room BEFORE you begin this whole process. Eventually, all the water will drain from the bucket, and you will be left confused. “What now?” you may ask. Before you answer, disengage from the colonic tip (phew!), throw the tip away, re-clip the tube (you don’t want the dregs in the bucket leaking all over your stuff, do you?) set the colonic board against the wall, and sit down on the toilet as quickly as possible. You may not feel like you need to, but I promise, you do. For about 20 more minutes you’ll continue to go through moments of…uh…drainage. And once you’re finished, you get to answer the be-all, end-all Question of Colonics: Just how full of shit AM I?

As I said, sifting through fecal solids filtered through a colander in a toilet bowl isn’t especially for me, but that’s not to say that natural curiosity doesn’t lead one to take a gander every now and again. For the first couple of days, it’s not all that different from what you’d normally see coming out of you: it’s just a bit…waterier. It’s around the fourth or fifth colonic that you really start noticing some alarming things. Remember, you haven’t been eating this whole time. Nothing digestible has gone through your system, so whatever starts coming out around colonic number five has been in your system for years. Essentially, compacted fecal matter is dark and looks like intestines, explained by the fact that it’s been in your intestines for so long that it’s taken their shape. It’s filthy and unpleasant and completely and utterly satisfying to get it out of you.

All the fasters talk about, in fact, is shitting and eating. And with all that free time on their hands, fasters talk a lot. As new people came and made it through day three of the program, it became a sort of initiation ritual to harass the newly-violated faster about his or her first experience. Brian, a (I found out later, world-renowned) chef who apprenticed with Gordon Ramsey (not under him, but was rather like, his co-apprentice as two young UK hooligans growing up in the rough-and-tumble world of chefery) spent endless time describing to us, his rapturous audience, the crème brulee he made float for Bill Gates and a 12 NASA bigwigs using liquid helium and a balloon made of sugar. Yasmin from Greece recalled her daughter’s favorite homemade meal, blackened salmon seared juuuust to perfection, in agonizing detail. Later in the week, several of us piled into Brian’s rented jeep to go to see some Muaythai Kickboxing, only to all at once drift off in the middle of a boisterous conversation for an extended, communal “*sniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiif*…aaaaaahhhhhh” as we passed a seafood restaurant.

It isn’t until the second and third days that you begin to feel fatigue, which is fine, because all you have to do is lie around on the beach anyway. On the fourth or fifth day, your tongue develops a thick film of toxic discharge, which according to your lifestyle, can range in color anywhere from white to vivid canary yellow. It’s around this point that you get energetic. With all that energy, it gets hard to sleep. On the bright side, it’s much easier to put the elbow grease into scraping all that stuff off your tongue. Periods of fatigue and emotional distress follow sporadically after that. Nightmares are commonly experienced.

As a part of the program, we were allowed as much vegetable broth with salt and as much ginger tea with honey as we wanted, and could drink the milk of one coconut per day. This meant that our blood sugar levels never reached a nauseating low, and any salty or sweet cravings we may have had were dealt with. This made the physical reality of not eating for eight days much more bearable. In fact, at no point was the actual fast a struggle. From time to time I did feel actual hunger, but never was it overwhelming. The hardest part was the psychological shock of the absence of food. You never notice the importance it, but everything about food—the taste, the textures and smells, the social gathering that mealtime generates, the ritual of sitting to eat, the timing of meals and the breaking up of the home and work days around them—most of your day-to-day life is structured, somehow, around eating.

With all this not-eating and participating in regular mealtime socializing, I had lots of free time. I did yoga in the beachside sala in the mornings when I felt like it (exactly twice). I finished re-reading 100 Years of Solitude, which made me love reading again. I got a bit of a tan. Luckily, there were a couple of evenings in which free workshops were offered. One was EFT, or Emotional Freedom Technique, which from what I could gather was somehow related to acupuncture and kinesiology. (I also paid for a 100 baht mediation class which was fantastic and well-worth the money and something I haven’t practiced on my own since.) The other was “An Introduction to Tantra,” an awkward group class on peaceful communication and how to have multiple orgasms taught by a crazy woman who looked like a frightened bird. In it, she first taught us the techniques behind non-violent communication. If you’ve ever seen the movie Shortbus, you’ve seen it in action, and it was absolutely too retarded for me to get into here. (Looking deep into your partner’s eyes and saying, with conviction, “The divine in me respects the divine in you. Namaste,” is one of the least gay things it involved. Bbbbbbuuuchhh.) But nobody was there for that anyway. I transcribe for you now the steps I outlined in my journal when they were still oh-so-fresh in my mind, so that you and your loved ones may practice Multiple Orgasm Technique in the privacy and comfort of your very own home:

Step one: Put your hands near your genitals. (Your “crotch chakra” if you will.) Breathe in through your vagina. (Pretend.)

Step two: At the same time flex the PC muscles in order to “pump” that breath up to your head chakra.

Step three: At the same time, thrust your pelvis forward.

Step four: Trap the breath in your head for a moment, holding it in with your hands. (Physics doesn’t really explain this one.)

Step five: Breathe out, making a sexy noise.

Step six: At the same time, imagine the breath circling through your limbs and coming back out through your vag.

Step seven: At the same time, shiver or quake (while screaming). Even if it makes you feel uncomfortable.

Step eight: At the same time, thrust your pelvis backward.

The class climaxed (HA! ZING!) with a delightful and horrifyingly awkward demonstration with the lady on her back on a yoga mat, moaning and shaking and screaming and the rest of us standing in an awkward, silent circle wondering what, exactly, an appropriate response for viewing such an event should be. After it was all over, there was a loaded silence, followed by a timid smattering of applause, as if to say, “good job?”

I decided to break the fast two days before I left so I could go on a drinking binge immediately upon returning to Shanghai. Breaking the fast should take as long as the fast itself, but if you want to be economical about it, you can be finished with the post-fast experience in as little as two days. The first day eating, you can only eat fruit, as it’s easily digestible and mostly water to begin with. The second day, you can have fruits and vegetables, and it was on the second day that I really, really enjoyed my first real meal—a green papaya salad. (My first actual, non-vegan retox meal was vegetarian phad thai at the airport, which I had been planning and fantasizing about since day 3.)

When people broke their fasts, those of us still fasting grabbed our juice water and chlorophyll and sat around the table, staring at their food and asking if they felt a difference. The answer one woman from Holland gave was, “I feel great. I feel lighter and stronger, like I can move.” It’s completely true. Afterwards, you feel unbelievable. Friends in Shanghai told me there was a noticeable difference about me. I noticed my eyes became brighter and clearer, which may or may not be interpreted as kind of creepy. All-in-all, I highly recommend fasting and detox to anyone who’s interested, for whatever reason they may be interested in it. I think all of it was very good. Thank you for listening for my story!

(In other news, I’ve started writing and speaking like my 6^th grade ESL students.)

This is IT: Explaining the Facebook Decision and Moving On

2008-02-27T11:17:00.003+08:00

Hopefully by now you've forgiven me for leaving Myspace and Facebook for greener, less updated pastures. In the end, it all boils down to the bittersweet sentiment that "every spring that's past cannot be recovered." It tears me apart (really, I don't throw phrases like that around lightly...), much because I've spent my whole life living in the months prior to the present, and mostly because it's brutally true and I need to stop doing it. I'm trying to find a healthy and productive way to change myself. As someone who's opposed to complication and been prone to some really stupid and self-destructive behaviors in the past, it's been a challenge.

So I've decided to disappear. This doesn't mean that you'll hear nothing from me for several months until I come home covered in tattoos with a barbell through my face. (Actually, it totally might mean that.) It just means that you're not going to get feeds about my minute-to-minute activities, and it'll be harder to discover what my favorite movies are. As a plus, I always thought it would be neat to have an air of mystery about me, and you can't be mysterious if your big dumb face is plastered all over everyone's wall. Facebook was a means to make myself very easily available for everyone (a personality slut, if you will), in hopes that everyone would never, ever forget for a moment how awesome I am. It was also a means to keep the relationships I had with people...well...dynamic and alive. The main problem with that thinking, however, is that it's retarded. I fucking live in China. So if you want me, I'm here, but now effort has to be made. If you forget about me, it's your own dumb fault.

This is just one step in my current, proactive drive to be healthy and happy and an independent, mature and loving adult. I spent about 3 years in serious therapy before I arrived at the conclusion that "hey, I'm pretty okay." And, really long story short, that was getting over being totally batshit f-u-c-k-e-d up. But now that's over, and I refuse to let things that happened determine who I'm going to become. You know who I'm going to become? Awesome like an awesome blossom with extra awesome. That's who. Do you want to miss out on that? No. (Maybe.)

So here I am, and I can't read your responses, because China won't let me. If you'd care to comment, shoot me an email. Google or Skype chat with me. Talk to me on the phone. (Skype is free, and I pay for call forwarding. I'm always available on my cell unless I get drunk and lose it in a taxi.) But I'm at a point where I want real, personal interaction with people, despite the difficulties that may arrive in that. In order to start getting what I want, I need to start telling people what I want. And what I want is you to value my friendship enough to send me a personal email once in a while. Sorry. It doesn't mean I don't love you...it just means that I don't love nearly enough of you to continue to be an omnipresent dufus.

So there you go. You know where to find me.

Cocaine and cornfields just don´t mix.

2007-08-08T03:49:00.000+08:00

Sorry, Sam, but I couldn´t, in good conscience, not repost this story:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=464320&in_page_id=1770

¡Hasta lauego, Costa Rica!

2007-08-08T02:57:00.000+08:00

I return tomorrow from my two weeks of glorious sweaty jungle travel, and I´m really sad for the first time about my upcoming departure for Shanghai. C´est la vie.

Let´s see...what´s happened since last we spoke? Pues...

1. I wrecked the motorcycle. Keep in mind that when I say ¨wrecked¨I really mean ¨fell over while riding quite slowly¨and when I say ¨motorcycle¨I really mean ¨motorscooter.¨ But potato, poTAHto, my injuries still made me look relatively badass for a couple of days. All in all, I came out of it with my right leg a little banged up, a couple of cuts on my shoulder, and a massive knot on my head that forced me to sleep on my left side for a couple of nights. Speaking of which--

2. I got the most killer neck crick from hell the other day. Shit, I thought I was going to have to buy one of those attractive neck stabilizer things. Turns out, I didn´t.

3. I went to Golfito and played with dolphins. Dad and Sil went to the Deposito to buy Charlie some birthday presents (which is about an hour boat´s ride away), and on the way there a pod of bottlenose dolphins swam up to the boat and stuck with us for about 5 minutes, during which we got some great videos and some mediocre photos. I´ll get those posted upon my return.

4. I built a house. Okay, so it was Charlito´s playhouse--a present for his fourth birthday. Still, I put the fucker together myself, complete with skylight and working doorbell. I guess all that experience I have putting together particle board furniture really paid off.

Dad apparently bought an orange grove on top of a mountain since last I was down. He and Charlito and I went up to it and ate some oranges in the middle of the jungle. And at Bob´s (our neighbor and dad´s best friend) house, I spent the usual amount of time strumming a ukelele and watching Ed the enormous marine iguana and George the old and lonely howler monkey climbing around in the yard. Actually, over the course of the trip I only went into town twice, so I´m a little disappointed (but not too much) that I didn´t get to see the usual townies before I head to China. But oh well.

Get ready for facebook pictures, a few of which I´ll post on here. I´m off to the states at ass o´clock tomorrow morning and am without an alarm clock, so fingers crossed I make my flight.

Hasta mañana, baby.

Hola y all that jazz

2007-07-30T08:27:00.000+08:00

Hey guys. Sorry I haven't blogged in 300,000 years. I know, you're probably upset with me. We probably can't be friends anymore. It's sad, but I guess I'll have to move on...

Okay, so Costa Rica. I've been here for a few days, and will be here for a few days more. First things first: my torso hath been attacked. There must have been a spider in my bed or something because the first morning I woke up in Canaza, I discovered I had become the proud new owner of about 100 angry, red, itching bug bites all about my sides. Just my sides. Not my legs or my arms, or even my belly or my back, really, but when I look in the mirror, all I can think of is a horrid, warty toad. And they haven't faded in the least. Charlito even asked me today, "Why your picas (bug bites) not get better?" and the only answer I could give was a feeble, "I don't know, child, I just don't know." Though I guess I can't expect too much--Costa Rica has never been kind to me in the looks department. I now have a bee-oo-ti-ful sunburn and with my short black hair going all curly in the humidity, I've come to think of myself as looking like some crazy escapee from clown prison.

Not that the babies mind. Charlie and Naomi are great. Naomi is a massive fat toasted marshmallow baby who doesn't do much except sit around and be pleasant and agreeable (though I have to say, she's nowhere near where Charlie was in the looks department, but then again, nobody is). Charlie is a cherubic almost-four-year-old with the capacity for movement of a hummingbird whose diet consists soley of sugar water and crack cocaine. His favorite thing is to start banging on my door at 5 a.m. with the ever-enticing question: Do you want to play? We nearly went through all the sidewalk chalk I brought down on the first day I was here, tracing each other and drawing dinosaurs. Oh yeah, Charlie's gotten into dinosaurs. Neato.

On an unrelated note, I've finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows after slowly reading the story over the course of 7 hours of plane trips, 1/2 day hosteling, 8 hours in the death bus from hell, and several consecutive hours locked in my air-conditioned cave garage whilst Charlie screamed over and over again from just outside my door, "MORGAN, WATCHOO DOING?!" I really enjoyed it, and found myself rather satisfied with the resolution of the story on the whole. This comes as a nice Potter-related surprise after the recent release of the fifth movie, Harry Potter and the Mutilated Plot Points.

Now I'm sitting in Anna and Tom's house (crawling with geckos-a-plenty) in town in my underwear and a shirt I made myself solely from calamine lotion. Tom's in the States, Anna is in Canaza with Johan and Maggie, and I'm alone manning the bike station today and tomorrow, which is great--their room here is air-conditioned, they have hundreds of bootlegged movies AND internet access, and are moments away from a number of bars where I can get plastered at reasonable prices. I've also been spending a lot of time driving around Silvia's Yamaha scooter-Vespa thing.

Other than that, it's just been the regular day-to-day pura vida and its associated onset of isolated jungle madness. More to come...

Happy Endings

2007-05-31T03:38:00.000+08:00

So, all were present for a sunny week of spending far too much money, eating a lot, getting pretty drunk, and watching our beloved Jon-a-thon (and Kat and Shawn and Leora and Hanna and Allyn and on and on...) graduate from Brown University. The group is SO hot, in fact, that they made Brown's homepage. (Scroll down to "About Brown.") In case the picture is removed any time soon, here she be:

(Original size was much bigger. I don't know why it shrunk in the saving.)

Here's a day-by-day play-by-play of my vacation's festivities, you know, if you're like, having a slow day or something:

Thursday: Get up at 5am and are almost too late to catch the plane. See Aaron randomly in Harvard Square and stash our stuff in his room while shopping in Boston. He's just finished Harvard Law Review competition and is out of his goddamned mind. Makes a bat out of lettuce. Stay the night with Mandy's lovely friend Rachel from Quaker Cottage and get to meet Kylee. All play Wii.

Friday: Providence in the morning. Mall. Barbeque in the backyard with the families of Shawn, Kat, and Jon. Mostly, Jon's family, Jon, Sam, Mandy and I sit in the parking lot smoking cigarettes and talking about boobs. People leave, we get all dappered up and head out to the Alumni Campus Dance, a Gatsby-esque festival of alcohol that's hard to wait in line for. I manage drunkeness, and we all go to a house party where I meet Ben, my new colleague in Shanghai, by busting in his bedroom door and demanding that we create a code word for cool people that will be allowed in our friend group. That word? "Pelican."

Saturday: During the Baccalaureate, Sam, Rose, Sherry, Mandy, Emily, Josh, and I head to Horseneck Beach. I fall asleep on my tummy and get horrible leg/lower butt sunburn. Lunch at restaurant located by GPS. Excellent chowda. Got the stink eye from old Rhode Islanders. Then Water Fire, a festival themed for and decorated with Salvadore Dali's exploded brain. Got mesmerized by androgynous statue man who gave me a note that says, "Choose to be forgiven. Confession is good for the soul."

Sunday: Graduation hullaballoo. Cut out on the Latin part to get some more chowda, but missed B.B. King. Lots of merrymaking. Angry old ladies. Huge root sculpture. Dog usurped my ice water. Returned to see Jon receive his diploma. Got cheese and cookies. Nap.

Monday: Slept in. Most of day at the mall. Mandy slashed her face pretending to be Tinkerbell. Haircuts. Dinosaurs 3D. Group picture with Alan Shawn Feinstein at Alan Shawn Feinstein theatre. Saw the WV relatives off. Italian dinner in Federal Hill. Decorative cakes. Fountain. Later, Betty Boop.

Tuesday: Lunch @ Zog's. Shopping. Plane ride home. Direct TV on Jet Blue lets me see exactly 1/4 of the season finale of House. Crashed with Tristan in Motown.

So that's pretty much it. About 6 new albums will be on Facebook soon. Get ready.

Stuff on my mind.

2007-05-22T21:54:00.000+08:00

1) Jonc always tells me to update my blog. "Update your blog," he says. But he hasn't updated his blog since Thursday.

2) I get to see Jonc and the lovely Sam Klugman here in the next few days as my homies and I are orchestrating a week-long mass exodus to the northeast.

3) One of the peeps that is teaching at Shanghai High with me is actually graduating from Brown when I'm up there, so I get to meet him. Small world.

4) I'd forgotten how great the movie Super Troopers was until a couple of days ago. Then I remembered.

5) I went to Columbus two days ago and ate a burger made out of a buffalo. It was delicious. Also, I ordered Reno 911: Miami in my hotel room on Sunday night. Great movie. Good times.

My Cat Hates You

2007-05-18T03:59:00.000+08:00

So I just found this site for anyone out there who thinks cat faces are silly.

Meanwhile, the following is a little disturbing. Cats should not have wrinkly armpits, and no one says different.

"Goodbye, Jerry" --an ode to the late Rev. Jerry Falwell

2007-05-16T03:53:00.000+08:00

"Goodbye, Jerry"

Goodbye, Jerry,
to you and your blob of chin fat.
Goodbye, sweet Jerry,
You rocked the socks of Liberty University.
Goodbye, Jerry.
You blamed feminists and liberals for September 11
and also the gays, and that purple Teletubby.
Goodbye, darling Jerry.
You said the Anti-Christ was a Jewish dude.
Goodbye, Jerry.
You had a heart rhythm abnormality.
Goodbye, Jerry.
You were pretty crazy. I mean, seriously.
Goodbye, sweet Jerry.
Jerry, Jerry, goodbye. Goodbye.

Happy Mother's Day!

2007-05-13T23:04:00.000+08:00

So I had a dream last night that I went to some quarter slot machines at this weird bar/movie theatre. And I put a quarter into the machine. And it gave me back two dimes. So I put one of the dimes back into the machine and out popped 1600 DOLLARS. Money dreams are awesome.

I know I shouldn't find this amusing...

2007-05-12T04:38:00.000+08:00

...but have you ever tried to file paperwork in San Jose?

An angry man has taken 8 hostages, including the Ambassador, at the Russian Embassy in Costa Rica. "The Costa Rica TV network, Telenoticias, reported that the man was apparently upset over the embassy's failure to process some undetermined paperwork."

THE Tattoo!!!

2007-05-12T03:14:00.000+08:00

Here's a picture. Hope you like it:

I like it because it looks like a prison tattoo, but with a positive message.

How do you stuff a wild bikini?

2007-05-09T21:09:00.000+08:00

After months reading up on the subject on the back of VHS boxes and more than 10 hours of intensive research half-asleep on my couch, I am of the opinion that if the Beach Party movies of the early 60s were to be re-released today, unedited, they would be create a unparallelled comedy breakout-hit phenomenon.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Beach Party series is a set of seven movie-musicals, most of which star pop icons Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello as a couple that makes very little sense. Titles are:

-Beach Party

-Muscle Beach Party

-Bikini Beach

-Pajama Party

-Beach Blanket Bingo

-How to Stuff a Wild Bikini

and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini

And because I have friends with cool parents, I've had the privilige of seeing five of these fine films. Complimenting the basic plot (DeeDee saves hand-holding for marriage while Frankie is as much of a whore as one could get away with in the early 60s) are elements like extreme sports, magical creatures, slapstick biker gangs, rapists, and a woman who's so sexy that when she dances, her hips raze the laws of the natural world. Dualities that occur naturally on Earth, like actions/reactions and causes/effects for instance, don't necessarily work the same way in the Beach Party universe. Mostly, it's just one rip-roaring, half-naked, sun-bronzed and oiled, totally platonic and sponatneous good time after another. In the end, it all boils down to this: if you like technicolor and stupidly hot people, but aren't really into plot continuity or social sensitivity, check them out. After a while, I'm sure you'll be glad you did.

Welcome to the Federated Emerates of Mo's Kickass WWII Platform

2007-05-07T20:58:00.000+08:00

I'm assuming that everyone else uses the words "MySpace," "Facebook," and "Wikipedia" as verbs. My question then is what is the past tense of the infinitive "to Wikipedia"? Clearly, the answer is a word that sounds like "wikipedi-uhd." But how would you go about spelling it? Wikipediaed? Wikipedied? Niether of these look right.

So, somebody, come up with a standardized spelling, becaused I just Wikipedi-uhd "micronation" (thanks, Jonc!), and it may have changed my life. Pictured below is the nation of Sealand in the North Sea. It is a constitutional monarchy with its very own ruling family and permanent population of less than 20, and it's up for sale. They're wanting 8 figures. As far as I can tell, it'd be totally worth it.

Domo arigato, you crazy kids!

2007-05-04T23:25:00.000+08:00

Alright, so after a few days, I still find myself fixated on the video in my previous post. Perhaps it's because I'm bored. Perhaps it's because I'm a vocal proponent of open and honest pervitude. Mostly, though, I think it's because it falls smack dab into the last of my three main categories of Supercool Interests That I can Resarch Endlessly Without Getting Bored. These are:

1. Serial killers.
2. Conspiracy theories.
3. Nutty fetishes.

I don't really have too much to say other than this: We really do need to hand it to those Japanese loser guys for coming up with one hell of a creative outlet for sexual frustration, as totally batshit bizarre and creepy as it may be. At the very least, Air Sex is about a billion times more interesting than listening to your nice guy friend go on a bitter diatribe about how he doesn't get any.

Kudos, Japan!

Air Sex

2007-05-03T23:26:00.000+08:00

I hope everyone can enjoy this as much as I did.

Nice Tat

2007-05-01T02:25:00.000+08:00

I've been getting a lot of questions about my new (and first) tattoo, so here are some of the details. I got it at Thinkin Ink on Saturday. It's probably 2x3" on the left side of my back, right below my waist. The actual tattoo is the cherub and words below, without the gravestone outline or the grass:

I could've uploaded a picture of it, but unfortunately I lost my camera battery at the Flogging Molly concert on Friday night. Bugger me.

Oh yes, and it hurt. A lot. Ironic, yes?

Memories

2007-04-27T10:41:00.000+08:00

In the end, my life will be defined by some completely ridiculous shit.

Like, totally.

Upcoming Events!

2007-04-26T21:47:00.000+08:00

April 27 & 28: Deja Vu: It's Mother Fucking Booze Time again, folksies! We've got Flogging Molly, the Collective, the Greens, and the Poverty Neck Hillbillies in addition to jungle juice, beer bongs, and a big yard to pass out in. Perhaps we'll have a house party. We don't know. We're 2 damned crazy.

May 24-28: Jonny's Ivy League Graduation: Going to Boston and Providence and hanging out with Susan Sarandon and Dustin Hoffman. Activities will also include getting tanked in the pH building.

Sometime in July, probably: Costa Rica: I get to tow boat parts down to the land of the wanted and unwanted in order to see my baby siblings and rock out in the western hemisphere before taking off for China.

August 20something: CHINA: I got the job in Shanghai, so I'll be off and up out around August 20th to get ballz deep up in the Orient.

Thoughts

2007-04-26T04:37:00.000+08:00

on Jessica Lynch:

Does she talk to Fox News? I know I wouldn't if I were her.

on Westboro Baptist Church:

Apparently they got airtime and cancelled their VT protests. That's nice. Fucktards.

on the Argentine Wide-Mouthed Frog:

Did ya'll SEE my previous post? Those frogs have HUGE mouths! And they'll just like, eat anything that moves. On the show, they had a shot of one of them trying to eat another one twice his size. The big frog just looked bored as the other just continued to bite him, motionless.

on my writing:

Dont'cha worry, folks. I get writing momentum that I'm just starting to build up. I will spend the next few weeks continuing to get faster, stronger, flexing my wit muscles. In the meantime, you get to sludge through this shit. I'd suggest you check back in about a month.

on Basset Hounds:

They are so fat and short. They move like dinosaurs and smell like rotting meat. And yet, they are beautiful.

Big mouth

2007-04-26T00:04:00.000+08:00

So I was lounging on the couch the other day, eating a bowl of Chili's salsa with leftover tortilla chip particles from the Tostitos bag all mixed in with a spoon, when Animal Planet's Most Extreme came on, and what else should it feature but the most hardcore crazy mouths of the animal kingdom.

Now, nothing in the eating category should really come as a shock to a culture that invented hotdog-eating contests in which regurgitation results in disqualification. But being the amateur Animal Planet naturalist that I am, I decided to stick around. Of course, there were the usual specimens: the snakes, the sharks, the hippopotomi. What I wasn't expecting, however, was the choice for Most Extreme Mouth on the planet. Ladies and gentleman, meet the Argentine Horned Frog, more commonly known as the Argentinian Wide-Mouthed Frog.

Owmmph.

This ugly fucker has earned itself the nickname Jabba the Hut, probably because its mouth accounts for around 50% of its body. Members of the species will frequently eat themselves to death, continuing to shove massive, often times impossibly large, foodstuffs into their mouths until their stomach ruptures.

The Argentine Horned Frog is known for attacking and attempting to digest anything that comes into its territory, be it a mouse or a horse or another, slightly pissed off and much larger Argentine Horned Frog. Once it bites, the frog won't let go of a possible meal, even if that possible meal is still alive and well and doesn't seem to notice that a frog is trying to eat it.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

2007-04-13T23:27:00.000+08:00

Kurt Vonnegut is in heaven now. (My joke in tribute to you, sir.)

I've realized that it's the times that I want to blog that I really have nothing to say. This is just another one of those times.

Hi ho.

I'm just wondering....

2007-04-06T01:50:00.000+08:00

Are there any real reasons why I should be using the Blogger blog instead of the MySpace blog? Other than bloggeristic credibility? This system is a lot less user friendly than MySpace, but the content is generally better. I can't seem to figure out how to subscribe to anyone else's blog. What am I doing wrong? And where am I?

A Tale of Woe.

2007-04-05T06:10:00.000+08:00

Housewife Convicted of Frying Husband

Mar 23, 10:38 PM (ET)

By STAN LEHMAN

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) - A Brazilian housewife was convicted and sentenced to 19 years in prison Friday for killing her husband, chopping his body into small pieces and frying it. Rosanita Nery dos Santos, 52, drugged her husband in his sleep, then stabbed him to death two years ago in Salvador, about 900 miles northeast of Sao Paulo, said police spokesman Idmar Bonfim.
She then hacked Jose Raimundo Soares dos Santos' body into more than 100 pieces, which she boiled and fried before hiding in plastic bags beneath a staircase in her house, Bonfim said. He said police discovered the body parts after receiving an anonymous phone call.
Bonfim said the killing was either part of a black magic ritual or an attempt by the wife to collect life insurance worth about $34,000.

Citing testimony from the woman's relatives, he said she may also have committed the crime "to avenge many years of humiliation from her husband." He did not provide further details.
Santos denied killing her husband but said she chopped up his body, Bonfim said.
"She claims masked assailants entered her house, killed her husband and then forced her to cut up the body and fry it because that would prevent the stench of a decomposing body from alerting neighbors," he said.

China

2007-04-05T04:06:00.000+08:00

I see no reason why this shouldn't be my first *real* post.

Except it's not really a real post, is it? Not by blogging standards. After all, this ain't no damned diary.

Or something.

Anyway, for those of you who don't know, I've applied to the Appalachians Abroad Teach in China Program through Marshall University. I should be going o'er there in August and staying for a year. If I get into law school, which would be a miracle, I'll defer for a while. Law school can wait--the Olympics can not.

"The Olympics?" you say. Yeah. the Olympics. I love the Olympics like none other, and when in China, I have every intention to volunteer. Jealous?

So, today I got my placement options. My choices are:

1) Shanghai Jing An Education College in Shanghai. Salary: 4,800 Yuan per month (somewhere between 500 and 600 dollars). But I'd have a shared kitchen in my apartment, AND it's in Shanghai (where the Olympics are not being held). This is my third choice.

2) Sinopec Management Personnel College in Beijing. This is my only Beijing option. I'd make around 500 a month, with a free and completely to-myself apartment with free internet access. And it's in Beijing. I am, however, slightly wary of teaching employees of a company called "Sinopec," so, alas, this had to be my number two choice.

and finally

3) Shanghai High School International Division. This place, despite not being in the Olympic city, would be RAD to get a job in. It's a public international school with grades 1-12, so I'd get to teach the little ones. I have my own very own free apartment with private everything. And the final factor that tipped the balance of my decision in its favor is the fact that I'll be making about 1500 USD a month. In China. With a free apartment. That's exciting.

Welcome to Blog.

2007-01-15T22:30:00.000+08:00

I think I may make the switch from MySpace to Blogger. MySpace is starting to get annoying. That is all.