Kwik-E-Mart's all night service

1. JN didn't catch any fish today off the pier though his neighbours hooked three miniature sharks and tormented them rather cruelly. On the way home, he stopped by a pet store and saw that they had kitties for adoption.

On our way to "Nacho Libre" (a not-bad movie that could have been uproarious, somehow), we visited with the kittens who were now napping. They were a cosy muddle of fur and whiskers totally indifferent to our admittedly rather nauseating cooing and mimetic mewing. I'd been told they had been "frolicking" a mere half-hour before. Three of them had little white feet (which now remind me of was it Sandburg's ? fog).

2. Any trip down to Hearst Castle in San Simeon should include an overnight of camping in Big Sur. I'm nervous about the bears. A and T were interested as well and T didn't seem to be afraid of bears. But he did pretend to see one behind me and I almost fell for it. A little.

3. Just received my birthday present through the mail: near-broadcast quality DVDs of a favourite childhood Japanese-French animation series about the Spanish search for Incan gold spiced with mysticism and science fiction in equal measure.

Watching it again is as rewarding as I thought it would be--the artistry of the backdrops is reminiscent of old Hollywood sets with the perfectly painted daybreaks and jungle vales.

Even more exciting is the discovery of the "capture" option for frames--I could make wallpaper out of any moment--how wonderful is this technology sometimes. It pacifies as it entraps. (At least.)

Could it be...

When I stepped out for some peaches and watermelon, the night was cool and lovely. I thought of my parents and their fondness for evening walks by the river. All the barges drawn long in the water, their string of lights, and the dark bank.

I looked up suddenly at the sky to see how many stars were showing and--it might have been a trick of the eye, but I thought I caught a shooting star. The moment was so perfectly timed that it seemed even a half-second before or after would have felt staged. It was so brief I thought I had imagined it, but I choose to believe I got lucky.

I made the wish I'd forgotten to make at the blowing out of my birthday candle.

Wishful thinking

Sleep.

Peace.

Quiet. The heart's bursting forth with an image.

Powerfully projected over this life till it runs tandem over it, giving colour where mere shade was due.

Revivification of old dreams and ancient friends.

Sleep.

Watermelon.

New addiction

JSTOR is distending my already untidy whale of a paper and its entrail-like footnotes.

I can't stop finding new articles (of god knows how much respectability) and skimming them (as procrastination of actual writing of content) and inserting things that at a sidelong glance fit into the greater picture (if that picture can reach off indefinitely in the ten directions and encompass the tired cosmos) because if you've got 200,000 different colours in your mosaic, who'll notice that little-off peacock green in the burning brush?

Ah, these 4 AM rambles. I'm almost sad to see them go in a few days when a more normal diet and sleeping schedule shall be restored. Almost.

Incidentally, Lu Zhishen is a serious alcoholic. Note the craziness that overtakes him on a scenic hill beneath the monastic setting: withdrawl symptoms, nods my high school counselor somewhere in the dark corners of a smoky theatre, his breath fleshed out in the light of the projector.

They all are. Bastards.

A True St*rbucks Story

The research paper craziness continues. I can feel my face settling into the next minute, year, decade of my age. This happens when one imposes self-exile in one's darkened room with nothing but a glowing screen and piles of paper for company and then ventures out into the sun to forage for food.

I enter the only coffeeshop within walking distance on my way to the American answer to Purity, and playing on the stereo--could it be--the real article: Toots and the Maytals? I'm impressed, but then wonder whether the reggae gods had been co-opted into the St*rbucks universe. Perhaps the clerks were playing this to promote "The St*rbucks Collection of Classic Yet Cool Tracks to Play in Your Vehicle to Show that You Are Neither Square Nor Culturally Irrelevant". I look around while waiting for my deliberately uncomplicated order. There are post golfus-looking men and khaki-clad women with high waists tapping their feet, almost on-beat, to Toots' stellar cover of "Country Roads" set to Jamaican themes. Confusing. There was only one way to find out.

"Hey," I said casually to the all-American, corn-fed-featured sandy blonde girl behind the counter, "is this... Toots and the Maytals?" Riding on an inchoate smile, my tone strove for genuine curiosity mixed with awe and appreciation.

"Oh, I don't know [what this is]." She sounded bored.

That answered the question, more or less.

The good news is that probably, no, Toots has not been slurped up by this emporium empire and if anything, has staked out a little room in the heart of whichever barista put them on the stereo and made those Eddie Bauers rock out in their own special way.

At a certain hour

You hear bells that aren't really ringing and thoughts move smoothly, but more slowly across the room like glacial barges cutting their way through frozen canal.

Is it time to stop? The music is coming from awfully faraway and that last note hangs in the air longer than it should. It's pretty and vacant. What language is this? Can I have another sip of tea or is this melting down of the eyes a serious matter, serious as the moonlight outside which you can't see because there are artificial moons strung up inside?

Let's continue this paper chewing, eschewing, espousing-mouthing of words tomorrow. My bed is covered with chalky papers in thick stacks. My nails feel too long on the chintzy keys. Sleep would be so welcome. Sweet if I could just ease down into the blanket. But there are lights to turn out and teeth to be polished with mint and the room smells like the soup bowl.

There are, as always, too many things to consider.

Google is evil...

... in its ability to sap away valuable time and energy better spent on writing papers.

BUT I did find a picture online of an uncle I didn't particularly like (whom I haven't seen since puff paint rose up all over t-shirt bibs like a plastic pox).

George Orwell once said: "Everyone deserves the face he has at age 50."

Well corked, Orwell. Let's just say he is a rising Jiang Zemin impersonator (with tandem optician and slightly modernised barber). And appears to be quite important because he seems to be always making speeches (which makes the photos even less flattering because the eyes and lips are in what my friend Ve. calls the "dead cow" mode) and the pics are notably high resolution.

Still, his mouth is substantially less ambitiously scaled than Premier Jiang's, whose gape now makes me think of that line "flies enter a closed mouth". Is it Neruda or Sartre? Can't sort the mental soup at this hour, but the pretension just never flags :P

I also found some pictures of old classmates from elementary school. I'm not too sure it was actually them because it has been nearly two decades. Some look like they could be their namesakes. Some relatives I can't search for at all because I only knew their names phonetically. Funny how we come to know people and assign workable "names" to them that are not "official" in the eyes of objective documents and surveys.

How do you search for Auntie Zhang or Li, or Kim Lee if you're Korean?

I once searched for my childhood friend Peter Park, who is Peruvian-English-American and I got all these pictures of Hankook pastors. Honestly!

llorendo

Sometimes I really dislike the publicness of this kind of journal. It's relatively anonymous, yet I still feel the glare when writing anything down. There is an awareness or pressure to produce a certain kind of thing. Of course, those who know about it and are kind enough to read it are near and dear; however, sometimes one just wants to throw up a big, wet towel even knowing it will coming smarming down after a good mop up. I'm also not comfortable with using a more blatant/deliberate community-oriented public-ation like Livejournal. There are people who have thrived on such things, but I like a small, neat, and secret garden.

I don't cry often, but it does feel better afterward.

Last night I had a wonderful party--one of the best birthdays ever and a lot of people to thank for it. The latter half of the week had been full of specific conversations and great food. I was delirious on company. Preparing for the fete was quite stressful (especially when the elephant-shaped cake lost its articulate tail and split off into sections because I'd made it a marble cake *and* tried to move it from tray to tray too much), but it turned out in the end. One major shortcoming was that I did not really make the rounds and talk to all the guests in detail. It did occur to me, but somehow I couldn't help but be pulled into enjoying it all like a guest. My dream had materialised: there was dance, dance, dancing throughout.

There have been so far three Great Birthday parties:

A) When my mother came back to China to take me to the US, we had my last birthday in my grandmother's old house with real-cream cake. There may have even been two cakes, one for each side of the family.

I was so happy to see her again. I remember the moment when she first stepped out of the sober-coloured car my grandfather had sent to the station--her white-print dress of summer cotton in the afternoon sun, achingly familiar lengthy limbs and beaming face--still young. I don't remember the actual moment of embrace or touch after the two years of none, but I recall the way my heart expanded suddenly when that glossy door swung out and my heart's desire was fulfilled.

B) My 22nd birthday in Tasmania was celebrated with three other Geminis. We'd invited all our art school/uni/bushwalking school friends and everyone ate, drank, and danced pretty much till dawn. It was and still is one of the happiest memories I have from that already happy time. I had put up a roll of brown paper on our (otherwise undecorated) living room walls and everyone left something he wrote or drew. Things were so clear and easy, then. The mind was unthwarted--who wouldn't love a place (made possible through others transiently assembled by chance and fate) that made one a part of lucidity, let one live in pure giddiness and real manageability of a man-sized world?

C) The highlights of this past evening: the company, the various geeky ideas I put to my guests and were take up enthusiastically, beautifully, artfully--the diving contest/swim races in our ridiculously small and well-loved pool where the few brave and obnoxious put on quite a splashy show, the water-side discussions about plot devices and R's use of religion in his sci fi story, the awesome pink wind-up fish R & Mi brought me that we let submarine about, the crazy energetic opening swing dance to Rektango which turned into Russian revolutions, the unadulterated possession by African drumming beats, the 7th Grade Dance Imitation, the Bollywood musical cameos, the confusion resulting from real flamenco and tarantella tracks, funky Kung Fu Fightin' that embroiled the most shy and dignified of us, hip-swiveling disco with the Bee Gees and Marvin Gaye, a series of twists that rehashed Jack Rabbit Slims, the disorganised yet totally fun Zoolanderish Walk-Off (H clearly took top crown while D the former model merely watched from his 6'3 tower) set to Ethiopian jazz, the faux-salsa lessons played to Afro-Cuban All Stars, a pseudo-Russian moment when F plugged in his non-iPod (cool) device and we did some crazy folk dancing moves that involved going around in tense circles and switching partners at the elbow, the late-night Gypsy Kings' rendition of "Hotel California", and Oh-We're-Hungry-for-Cake-Again gorge fest that polished off Jo's delicious Japanese mango jelly roll, made short work of H's tasty banana chocolate chip cake, and my 5-spice chicken. It was very flattering that Fr, Jo, and her roommate reduced the carcass down to a very petite pile of sheer bone.

I wanted the evening to last forever.

Today was spent sluggishly. I sat through an over-long, mildly interesting documentary about an indie rock festival in Taiwan. I was called on the telephone. I let the dragon out. It's hard to stuff him back in so you just have to make him dissipate through simple moisture.

It struck me while hearing about my niece's evolution as a 3 year old reformed terror that I would like to have children before too many years have fizzled. Time is unkind and key. I have a feeling that when all that begins to happen, it will happen very quickly in succession: the A, B, and C of it will be according to a natural rhythm. I am very grateful that it didn't happen with any of the exes, bless their hearts!

Oh, and G said hilariously when she finally met Penguin: "*That's* Penguin?! I was expecting something else entirely! I thought he was going to be at least a foot tall--I think you're projecting a little too much onto this thing [meaning my non-threatening looking little animal of about six inches]..." I explained to her that he had been recently been promoted to Chairman from Team Leader (or as JN wittily quipped "shift leader") of the Potato Patch, but she just kept shaking her head, clearly no recognising the inherent leadership skills in such an impressive, diminutive package. I mean, look at him--it's understandable how because he's really small that he needs to overcompensate by being extra assertive, right? I thought that was what most short people did? Kind of like a gender-neutral version of M's all-too-true "Short Woman Syndrome". Now before all 2 gentle readers write letters of complaint, rest assured that I recognise myself as a short woman, but this is about something bigger than one individual (like work ethics on a potato commune). Anyway, here is Penguin himself. You can judge for yourself.

Penguin and Dustbuster J. Hoover