kaleidoscopik

2010-05-04T07:53:00.001-07:00

i've been told time again that my blog has died, that it is now defunct, a barren wasteland of what used to be thoughts so cogent i could feel them condense in my head, the palpitations of their formation ticking like a little bomb. dynamite, that's what my thoughts used to be.

dynamite when they were created, dynamite when they were manifested.

it has been months since i last scrawled. things have changed since then. i've had to take responsibility and then evade it and then force myself to confront the fact that i am no longer a child and impervious to the clammy fingers of humanity. choices have been contemplated and made and unmade and remade and then forgotten, their consequences whisked into a bland batter, saturated with hardier, more potent ingredients.

i no longer write. i haven't written in ages. i feel/find words coagulate at my fingertips when they realise they have no place else to run. sometimes i think language is sentient; this is one of those evenings when i feel like i do not own myself.

i realise too many people i know read this blog, and then i stop.

i hear a metallic snip and know that the spark has died.

2009-11-27T17:41:00.001-08:00

it's been a long time since i've written, so i'm going to start again tonight, and i imagine it's going to be a very polite discourse as to why i haven't been writing solely about my south american expedition since i've started it.

2009-09-22T13:05:00.000-07:00

i just found out today that when you like someone - why does this sound so juvenile? it does sound like the sort of thing a 13 year old girl would say, doesn't it? - you turn other advances to you off, even anvil-sized ones. i guess one of the few things i truly regret is the fact that i once chose a clearly unsustainable relationship over a possibly much more fulfilling one due to naivete.

it's (all) sort(s) of depressing, really, when you think of what could just have been.

2009-09-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

my dad's been asking me as to why i haven't blogged for a bit, and it is true that i have neglected my blog for quite a bit, so i guess i shall make atonements for it this evening.

there's actually a really bad joke i have with regards to atonement, and it is directly relevant to (if not actually lifted verbatim from) dan brown's new book, but it is really bad and icks me out so i think i'll give it a pass. it really is that bad and i don't think it was meant to be a joke in the first place, but you know how mr. brown is when it comes to writing - it's a whole lot of garbage and improbable circumstances that become believable only after you've had 5 pitchers of ice-cold beer. as it turns out, logic is optional in a dan brown novel.

let me just say that i am glad i paid nothing for the book. just the other day i was at our terribly-understocked fishing village bookstore and saw it sitting on the rack for a rather hefty rm99.90. for perspective, i can get a meal for rm5. dan brown's book was not worth 20 meals then, and now that i have actually read it, i think i should have been paid instead for the time i wasted and the horror i endured scuffling with his almost unreadable prose. if this was the uk i'd have returned the book to border's the next day, but such policies do not exist where i live, so thank god for michelle, who gave me a link to the e-book.

there is a decent twist in there, but half the plotlines were rather predictable; also, i found the Ultimate Evil Plan (as in "I Will Destroy The World Ha Ha Ha") in the book to be somewhat unfulfilling. i like my bad guys to have actual tangible plans. i want them to engineer the imminent destruction of the world in a very concrete sense. buildings must fall and people must run helter-skelter as if they were chased by a pack of wildebeest. i don't care how intelligent or ironic or spirited or spiritual the plan is, i want something incredibly palpable as a potential consequence if i'm reading your sunday kitsch.

otherwise supply me with characters which are at least as thick as a cardboard cut-out and imbue the storyline with a modicum of emotion instead of bucketfuls of ineffective melodrama. (you know what, i don't even know how anyone can fail at creating melodrama.) maybe have your characters be slightly circumspect not only to the obvious fallouts of their actions, but the nuances that lie behind an incident as grievous as abandoning a child.

and don't even get me started on what the fuck a camera is doing undetected in a blonde wig.

i bought khaled hosseini's a thousand splendid suns the other day, and that was quite alright. i can't say it's amazing, because at some points the fishing lines between mr. hosseini's pen and my heartstrings and the vigour with which he was tugging at them were about as subtle as being slapped in the face by a trout or being dunked into a pool of sludge.

i don't know, man, but if one of your main characters loses her education, and then her best friends, and then her parents, and then her dignity by getting married off to a sadistic radical, i don't think you should have the other protagonist suffer almost exactly the same fate.

not that it was a bad book, really - i found it stronger than the kite runner, quite possibly because the protagonist in that one was a bit of an impenitent asshole. but then again here i am running my mouth off, especially since i delight in pointing out that i like my characters when they have that duality to their personalities, that they're good and bad, and that they're sometimes assholes and they're sometimes saints because i find that that makes them human.

so maybe it's to do with how you take your books. i take, perhaps unfairly and unnecessarily, hosseini's works as extended fairytales, replete with exotic localities and moustache-twirling forces of evil and on that basis decide that i prefer his second novel to his first.

all which i find arbitrary, really, although to be fair hosseini's a far better writer than You-Know-Who.

oh my god, i am doing booktalk again. i know people hate it when i do booktalk but i can't help myself. i love books and i love films and while i realise that people are slightly more receptive to the latter when i drone about them, i cannot neglect that i grew up on the classic tales of enid blyton and the novelisations of disney movies (um... what?).

there was originally a joke here regarding the people i know and the books they read during the formative years of their lives but i shall refrain from any of them, apart from pointing out that one of them had to do with you, rashid karim.

everyone i know knows that i love meiyin, bless her kind soul, but i do think she has some kind of a confidence in me and i really appreciate that.

actually, many people do. they tell me things like "you'll be fine" and "if you can't do it, no one can," and it all sounds so supportive and positive and nothing like what some other people have told me. some people say things like "you can't choose" or "you can't be picky" or "just take whatever comes your way right now" and while i get that they are technically right, they are also somewhat negative.

it's a bit like saying "don't expect such good grades for your examinations" or "maybe you should be prepared for expulsion" in response to i hope i score well this time round.

sometimes it really is good to give someone (false?) hope.

2009-09-14T08:54:00.000-07:00

if i could do anything in the world, at this point i'd probably open a boutique hotel in barcelona and spend the rest of my life running it.

i think rashid's mom calls this escapism.

2009-09-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

as it turns out - and it always does, this way - i have fallen yet again into the jaws of complacency. why come online and type when you can...

... do nothing instead.

it's all sort of true, really. if typing is catharsis, and there's nothing to seek a break from, it becomes a chore.

i have picked up belle & sebastian these few days. this girl i once dated recommended them to me and i wrote them off as being unnecessary saccharine. which is true, although the truth is that i do enjoy unnecessarily saccharine things.

i hope this post finds you well.

2009-08-21T14:12:00.000-07:00

am blogging from madrid. travelling has been immensely tiring, but i can't complain. madrid is amazing. spain - in general - is amazing. when i was younger and pretentious i remember wanting to pick up french because of how pretty a language it was and how classy i thought french people were. i know, right? you can shoot me now.

in any case, i was wrong. spain's the place to be, although so far i have only been to madrid and barcelona (but twice to the latter! also, i miss the la rambla market.)

have got a bunch of career fairs to attend in september in hong kong and singapore.

it's the sort of thing i guess i should be thankful to be given the chance to attend, and yet somehow things like these leave me cold. it's like a meat (meet?: is this a cliche? - i don't know) market where my credentials and personality are to be traded for my future. should i allow this to happen? what happened to the days when i had to dunk my head into a sink of cold water in order to clear my mind of the cobwebs that had found themselves strung across the crevices of doubts? have i struggled so hard to mark myself as different from my overachieving peers only to find myself mired in the same conundrum they have found themselves in?

do i really have to get my fingertips burnt at the altar of cold hard cash (i see expensive outfits, and the shoes, and the loft in a giant/nameless/vacant/replaceable city, the vulgar spending of a ripped-apart soul) before i learn my lesson? why is it that i lust not only for things, but in the contradictory knowledge that i am unwilling to sell too much of myself in return?

i know i always claim that a middle ground exists, viz not everything is black and white. everything is just set on this massive scale and the dials are there for you to find an equilibrium with which you keep your sanity and sustain your...

insatiable vices?

i think this time it's non-negotiable.

2009-08-10T16:01:00.000-07:00

"i think a little bit of therapy is good," i told my host mom. she gave me one of her usual what-sort-of-a-devil-are-you looks. i don't think my biological parents believe in therapy either. i think they think that (a) only wackos need therapy, or (b) in any case, it's highly abnormal to pay someone to listen to you.

i don't know, i think i quite like the idea that there's someone who is forced to take my crap without being able to say too much in return/retaliation. i wouldn't really want to subject anyone to myself (especially) when i'm bursting with some kind of a normally-misplaced righteous anger. a therapist solves the problem and allows me to manage my anger in a more productive - or maybe more importantly, safe - manner. now i sound like i'm always teetering on the edge of snapping for good, norman bates-style.

i assure you this is not the case. i say this because i know a lot of people whom i think should go for therapy, and on that list i probably place 10th or something.

i'm meeting my prodigal daughter-friend for lunch, a movie and dinner tomorrow. i have a feeling we'll spend the whole day gossiping.

you know what, i think gossiping is potent social glue. when thrust into a situation of potential awkwardness, a tale or two about a mutual acquaintance will lighten the air considerably.

unless - of course - the subject in question is closely related to the other party. that only breeds more awkwardness and you'd be forced to leave the party with a slouch and a paperbag over your head.

leech arrives wednesday night. she presents a conundrum in that she wants british food upon arrival. she doesn't believe that british food is shit. people come to london to get anything but local food. when i was 16 i took one bite of a steak and kidney pie and i swore it was the last time i would ever have any of it again.

when i come to london i have dutch pancakes or well-made chinese food or tapas or pasta, you know, whatever. i never ask for spotted dick (ha-ha).

the only british meal i find edible is breakfast, and that's because you get a platter of grilled mushrooms and tomatoes and baked beans and bacon and fried eggs on toast. it's not the sort of thing you can really fuck up. it's possible to make garbage-flavoured dim sum or nasi lemak; i'm not sure it's humanly possible to royally screw up serving a can of baked beans.

my future is annoying me again, the way it is wont to do when a self-imposed deadline looms.

2009-08-10T01:12:00.000-07:00

am in london now - severely jetlagged. no sleeping habits have formed yet. amorphous clouds of sleep and then i wake up and then i go back to sleep. incoherence has taken over my speech like an impediment i woke up with one morning. i need london junk food. the chips in london make me fall on my knees and let out a short cry of longing. roast chicken and thyme flavoured chips. steak. chutney and curry. i am salivating as i type this. washed down with a bottle of pressed apple juice.

this is too much for me, i feel my stomach performing somersaults.

2009-08-04T20:43:00.001-07:00

in less than 24 hours i'll be on a flight to london during which i'll be transiting in madrid.

it's so funny to think that i'll be leaving colombia for an indefinite period of time.

my room is empty now, my belongings either lying in my suitcases or sitting in a small box on the floor. it's really pretty fucking strange because this has been my room for the last 12 months. that's a long time. when i leave i imagine there will be invisible strands of cobwebs bearing the signs of me, like the gentle indent on the mattress and the glassy handprint on my little desk and the skeletons of unclothed hangers. an empty closet once too small to contain the bulk of my things.

the wastepaper basket has blossomed with wreaths of paper, documents which i once needed to get entry into colombia, to get entry into the united states, stubs of tickets that are sprightly and green and orange which curl like tendrils. i can see the cap of a water bottle jutting out; no, there are in fact two of them: transparent bottles with fat blue caps, empty and now disposed of. my blue towel is limp against the doorknob, tomorrow it won't be there any more unless i forget to take it with me. i have almost relieved the room of myself and my host mother was sitting at the edge of the bed today and i wonder what she saw.

the wooden beams which prop the entire closet upright are now visible, no longer obscured by curtains of fabric. you can see the wallpaper that lines the back, the thin brown strips bulge in some places and they look a little bit tumorous although not entirely malignant. my messy disposition has sobered up into an almost abnormal display of tidiness. the drawers are now clean and look untouched. little cubby holes into which i used to shove scraps of my existence are now naked squares waiting for someone else to take ownership of.

i can hear the clock in the hall tick. it replaced an older one that was in the shape of a rabbit - the latter had the name of my host mom carved into it and was a gift from a now deceased friend. it stopped ticking a month ago and no new battery could get it started again. the black hands on the face just chugged along for the last eight years until they felt like they could chug no more, and so they just started moving slower and slower, hampered by age and dust, until we realised one day that the clock was an hour behind. so we reset it to the normal time, and the next day we saw that it was now two hours behind. we replaced the batteries, but it never really breathed again. the ticks - like the palpitations of a heart - grew quieter and weaker. they stopped when i was in argentina.

i returned to a newer clock, a simpler, more elegant clock. it was round with metal numbers and a sturdy heart. there was no longer the faded face of a smiling rabbit, with a face creased and uncleaned, and black eyes which were chapped and grotesque (although only if you looked into them hard enough); you know what, the rabbit was cheap looking, to be honest.

i came back to something new on the wall, but the little corner of the apartment - the one i used to glance at every morning before i left for work - the one which told me if i should be asleep or awake - the one where a dusty imprint in the shape of a rabbit is now partially covered by a round white clock - that little corner of the little apartment was never the same again.

2009-08-03T20:27:00.000-07:00

all i want to say is that when leech and i join forces, we are unbeatable - we're sort of like the avengers, but without any of the sexual tension. we get free stuff, that is how amazing we are.

oh, goldilocks (remember the origin of this nickname? it is unspeakable), what would i do without you?

packing is truly a bitch, and the part which nearly broke me was having to pick a certain number of books to bring back to england to me - i have amassed somewhere around 40 books, and having to pick only 10 books to bring back is truly heartwrenching. it's sort of like sophie's choice but worse because you will end up leaving 30 of them languishing alone, unloved.

chabon is truly a god of sorts, his writing is lyrical and gorgeous and so beautifully and expertly paced- it makes me want to keep writing; wallace's writing makes my heart skip a beat in its ingenuity and genuineness, and lately my writing style has been modelled after his mix of formal and informal, somewhat impressionistic style; sedaris is an expert at twisting the most humdrum into a long and drawn out farce (my book project has been modelled after his collection of sweet little moronic tales); haslett's first every compilation of short stories i read when i was 16, and the book has leafs so yellow and marbled that the right thing for me to do is leave it alone - but i cannot: his stories of conflicted individuals forced to surmount obstacles with surfeits of emotional weight were more a bible to me than the bible ever was; satrapi's persepolis tells the story of a headstrong girl who, with her family, braves the oppressive iranian regime from the 70s to the 90s, and eventually emerges as a character i hope my sister will one day turn out to be: intelligent, sensitive and tenacious.

i hopped on the bus today and sat on it as it circled the city for 2 hours. i'm not sure when i'll come back to bogota again - soon, i hope, although i'm not entirely optimistic. there are some things i still hate about bogota, but after a year here i guess it has somehow burrowed a way into my heart and qualified itself as (one of my) home(s).

i'm not insane - clinically - i just enjoy being driven around town as i watch buildings/trees/things slowly grow larger from the horizon and then fading away behind me. i just need to turn on my ipod and let my mind wander as i sit in an almost comatose state on a red plastic seat and i feel liberated. liberated. liberated.

as if nothing matters any more and i'm a solo traveller who trudges around the world armed with nothing apart from soul food.

2009-07-21T19:27:00.001-07:00

i think this has possibly been the coolest adventure i've ever been on on holiday - travel partner was hungering for sukiyaki (in argentina. go figure) and after a lot of searching we finally found a place named sukiyaki near our place. we got the hotel to make enquiries on our behalf over lunch, but the guy who picked the phone up basically told the hotel to fuck right off and leave him alone. undeterred, travel partner suggested we walk ten blocks to the place and make sure the restaurant existed. in debt because i have been making t.p. walk up and down the place buying me lunch because i'm generally too fucking lazy to get up before midday, i acquiesced.

we found the place and it was this really quiet non-descript place in the middle of an abandoned street about a kilometre from our place. it was particularly freaky because there was no light coming from inside the place and the signboard consisted of the words sukiyaki scrawled on a piece of white cardboard (font: horror movie blood, rocky horror picture show style) which was placed inside the window frame. the door was locked, and then opened by an old japanese man (hereafter to be referred to as ninja) who looked ever so ready to slam the door in our faces. when i asked - in spanish - if the restaurant was open, ninja looked like he was about to jam one of those twirling ninja weapons down my impertinent throat. when travel partner finally managed to stutter a pathetic konbanwa, he gestured angrily for us to enter.

the place was done up in what i can only describe as a kind of serial killer chic: there were 5 tables and 1 single light source. a portable stove set in the middle of the centre table, and the room clearly served as a storeroom as well. a huge groaning/moaning/banshee refrigerator sat in a corner, all stripped ivory and rusted edges and quite possibly emitting what i imagine to be enough cfc to rid the planet of the ozone in under 1.5 minutes. there was also a computer before they turned all snazzy and pretty and flat i.e. a computer qua actual box-shaped machine you do certain things which are not entertainment-based on, and a bicycle, and an assortment of japanese knick-knacks, among which were a model of a geisha holding an umbrella and, a huge ceremonial drum beside a plasticky white recorder (the sort we were forced to play in primary school, which we did but very badly).

the menu was basically a piece of a4 paper taped onto the front of the counter. red words were scrawled on it in the same rocky horror font as that on the window signage. there were only 5 items on the menu, one of which was sake. the food names were written in a mixture of hiragana and kanji, followed by their pronunciations (note: this is not the same as an explanation or a translation. it's basically like having sukiyaki next to su-ki-ya-ki.) next to them were their prices, which weren't actually low especially if you took into account how grim/creepy/slightly macabre/off-kilter the place was.

the food was excellent, however - the sashimi was incredibly fresh and of the melt in your mouth variety. the sukiyaki was prepared before us with raw ingredients, which included top quality beef and half a bottle of sukiyaki sauce in a flat pan. there were only two of us at the restaurant that night, and so ninja took his time cooking the food in front of us and made just enough rice just for the three of us (i.e. ninja, t.p and me) to share. he started chatting with us as he made dinner, and the three of us ended up conversing in this very strange conction of japanese, mandarin, english and spanish. it should be said that ninja seemed a lot less scary after this point, viz. when he finally decided to make small conversation. prior to this, we had the unsettling feeling that the banshee refrigerator was where ninja kept the limbs of victims he found particularly pretty (i refer here to the limbs, although i suppose the alternate meaning works just as well), right between the soy sauce and the egg carton. travel partner calls this the murakami chills - surreality with a japanese twist.

as it turns out, ninja is old and eccentric and good friends with the japanese ambassador to argentina and a little bit anti-semitic and anti-chinese, which meant that there was a lot of ethnic masquerading going on on my part. he spends his time travelling the world (i don't know how he affords it - another point to serial killer theory) and trying to learn mandarin by using a bilingual dictionary and free falun gong newsletters. i am not fucking with you here: over dinner, a lot of time was spent poring over the newsletter and then trying to figure out what in bleeding hell certain words/characters meant and their spanish/japanese equivalent. ninja is incredibly learned: he was teaching us about the origins of the swastika and explaining to us how written japanese is actually a derivation of written ancient chinese; he also knows who mahathir is and what the look to the east policy is and how when he visited kuala lumpur it used to be a village. he apparently likes europe very much and finds it gorgeous, "notwithstanding the disgusting food."

[there should be a sidenote about how weird the falun gong newspaper itself was. apart from the nazi/swastika article, there was also an advertisement for plastic babies the size of your thumbs. they're like little dolls, except incredibly tiny. i cannot for my life figure out what anyone would want to do with such a toy baby. surely they'd be too creepy as keychains, and it's not the sort of thing you'd give anyone, not even at a baby shower. maybe a girl would like one as an addition to her dollhouse, but i would feel uncomfortable giving a child something she could easily choke on.

also i get the concept of giving a little girl for her birthday the complete set of barbie + ken + baby, but "happy birthday, charlotte! barbie got pregnant and here is her new baby" is just so fucking weird to me.]

i think ninja really enjoyed our company in the end. he gave us a pretty sizeable discount and seemed to really want us to stay for dinner. when we left, travel partner mentioned that we'd be in buenos aires until the 28th of july, whereupon it dawned on him that we were tourists and that it was quite possible that he'd never see us again. he gave a huge sigh and hung his head while saying sayonara, and that gesture was really quite moving and sad and broken - it was both a verbal and physical manifestation of disappointment (who else would juggle 4 languages with him?) and loneliness (travel partner and i are complete morons at restaurants and seem to have no dignity and not mind it, and we are actually quite funny people who have perfected the art of nodding and looking like we comprehend everything although we barely understand anything).

it was for him probably a couple hours around two seemingly lost young people who seemed to be able to help him in acquiring yet another facet of literacy, interested enough to listen to him talk about the things he's seen, patient enough to engage with semantic minefields and look through a religious newspaper with him.

we were supposed to go to a bar after dinner. instead we chose to get drenched on the walk home.

2009-07-19T13:06:00.000-07:00

so tonight i went to la cabrera, which everyone and their mothers say is the best restaurant in buenos aires and i have to say that this could perhaps be the best steak of my life. this huge 1kg tenderloin charred to darkness on the outside and kept tender red and bleeding on the inside was served with something like 14 different side dishes. you get two knives: one to cut the chunk into thinner strips (misnomer because i don't think 1 inch think meat strips should be called strips) and the other to cut the still kind of massive piece of meat on your plate into smaller pieces.

i can see why it's the top rated restaurant in buenos aires now. the bread basket came with sweet grilled garlic, an olive-butter paste and a tomato-basil-mozarella paste. desserts were in monumental portions. the meringue and mascarpone thing was a sculpted tower which made the american girls next to our table jump.

and btw, travel partner got drunk on red wine and so the walk home involved us nudging each other off the road. also, travel partner stole 4 lollipops of the lollipop tree at the restaurant; granted, they were free but still grabbing more than your fair share of free stuff is still tacky. reminds me of when i was a kid and tried to get an extra balloon for my brother after music class when they were having some sort of a party and the yamaha goodies/balloon-giving cunt told me off for being greedy. bitch.

i was down with a cold yesterday after walking in the pissy rain - you know, the london sort where it's basically a mist you emerge from without realising you're actually soaked to the core c.f. malaysian rain where each raindrop. bloody. hurts. - and i ended up in this completely tragic sneezing fit. so i stayed home to sleep in today, it was really fun though and the hotel is very comfortable and i popped like a small mouthful of antihistamines last night and so i'm all right now. surprise surprise it wasn't swine flu anymore (stupid travel partner kept telling me this was bad bad bad and that we would all die from it pronto).

palermo is amazing and things are so cheap, but only if you pay in cash. this is horrific because i'm the sort of fellow who survives on his credit and debit cards for fear of being relieved of wads of cash if he actually uses them. a leather bag which retails for 500 argentinian pesos goes for 299 if you pay by cash. the peso-ringgit exchange rate is practically one to one, just to give you an idea of how cheap goods here really are.

(although to be really fair, if you're paying 120usd per night for the hotel, it's not like the trip overall will actually be that much cheaper. consider also the price of flights from malaysia to buenos aires and time spent sitting in a tiny seat which barely holds you with only a 6 inch wide personal television to bide your time and then maybe argentina isn't cheap cheap anymore. paris is 12 hours nearer.)

2009-07-17T19:21:00.000-07:00

not sure why i'm blogging so much when i could be out engaging in epic debauchery at a club somewhere. oh wait, i know. it's because the person i'm on the trip with thinks it a better idea to stay home and lie in bed with an internet after the sort of dinner which could feed an entire village of poor people.

that's right, we went for a chinese dinner just now and i realise that i haven't had mapo tofu in a year. i know right - i have a complete weakness for mapo tofu, i am so useless that way. give me a rack of ribs smothered in barbecue sauce or whatever and i'll be able to eat 3 of them before my oesophagus clams up and refuses to receive any more food, but it is able to handle large quantities of bad comfort chinese food. tonight alone we had szechuan soup and fried wantons and rice and mapo tofu and yu xiang pork with aubergines. and i'm in argentina, fuck my life.

2009-07-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

what we did today: get a haircut because i have been in severe need of one (my hair tends to bunch up on top of my head and bear a resemblance to the nesting ground of certain birds), get ourselves more beef for lunch (i am getting really sick of beef, regardless of how amazing it may be or well it is cooked), and get a new hotel for the next three nights (which details will be revealed in the following paragraph).

we were supposed to be spending three nights in uruguay. two nights in montevideo and one in colonia, except that everyone told us that uruguay is possibly the most fucking boring place in the whole wide world - an old american lady tourist told us to have a good book with us when we go to uruguay. it wasn't some bratty 16 year old teenager who was bored of the world and prefered to isolate herself from reality with the use of apple brand earphones and some unspeakably wanky book about how death is beautiful and poetic. this was some old woman who looked like she'd been risen from the dead by an annoyingly loud set of clashing cymbals and now spends her time travelling the world, looking at art and architecture before retiring to her coffin each night.

so we did the smart thing and skipped uruguay. to be sure, we'll go to colonia for a day trip. apparently you can finish walking the town in 3 hours or something of that sort and then we'll hop onto the next ferry back. perfect, and i'll get the much coveted stamp on my passport. we'll probably tell our hotels in those cities that we came down with a case of swine flu - i hope karma does not bite us in the ass by actually smiting us with a bout of mr. h1n1. (even if i don't, i have this strange nagging feeling that i'm still going to hell.)

we'll be staying in palermo, instead. palermo is the bangsar of buenos aires except for the part where you practically have to step over homeless people on the way to one of the city's best grills. i don't know how it works, really, except that we're told that it's the same everywhere you go. i imagine you'd go to the four seasons buenos aires and find yourself carting your luggage over their cardboard shacks from the reception all the way up to your room. in any case, it's not like anyone actually cares.

maybe they do, it just looks like they don't so they have a huge smile on their face as they hop over the possibly dead guy sleeping under a tattered comforter on their way to work. that's how they roll. hardy people, these argentinians.

2009-07-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

i am blogging from buenos aires, typing from a laptop set on a black-topped table in a sushi bar 10 blocks awak from our hotel. argentina is both beautiful and run down; statuesque buildings the colour of stone are defiled and debauched by grafitti and soot. we spent a lot of time today running around the place in search of (in no particular order): evita peron's grave, a hair salon, a bus stop, hard rock cafe buenos aires because i am touristy that way, a shelter from rain.

for a party city it doesn't seem particularly partyish, as evinced by the empty bars swathed in lights of blue and red, strobe dots scurrying around the place to the 4/4 counts of synthesizers. warbled crooning is dense, lights speckle in the distance and are gold against the black sky. it is winter and hence, incredibly cold. it's not ice on the roads cold, but the wind is sharp and knives through cotton.

beef capital is beef capital, by the way: last night we had a 50 ringgit buffet meal at siga la vaca, and the grill alone was enough to make me/you/us sick. chunks and slabs and curtains of meat covered every possible inch of a grill, a congregation of various cuts and slices obtained from cows. the first slices are the tastiest, the meat practically bleeding before you, blood intermingling with fat marbled around meat and your white plate tainted with a red puddle after cutting through a rib (medium-rare, because any other way of eating meat is, how shall i put it, sacrilege).

our hotel is nestled in a corner of the tango zone, which is seedy (considering the nature of argentinian tango, although to be very honest - and i am really ashamed about this - i only learnt this from watching countless videos of so you think you can dance and nigel lythgoe always goes on and on about how a technically proficient dancer still has to be slightly sleazy in order to hit this specific dance out of the park) and ever so slightly dangerous. hobos line the street in their sleeping bags and i imagine shiver with every new blast of chill.

roads are cobbled and this place is an antique heaven - it's a bit like europe but with malaysian prices. a wooden carved horse with accoutrements is a very reasonable 150 ringgit. a set of 6 crystal glasses (black, clean, classy) goes for about 280 ringgit. carved chairs sit lazily in windows under the dim lights of chandeliers which look pretty damned old in a 'set for the musical evita' way. for all i know they were manufactured yesterday and then aged artificially. i don't know.

spanish mtv plays in our room all the time, because sappy lyrics are sappier and emotional yearning is hilarious. songs have titles like "without you, there is no me" and "falling in love for the first time" and feature enrique iglesias walking around in a tight t-shirt pre mole removal and singing about how this girl he's met for the first time has made him want to keep on living. i don't know if he was originally depressed or something, but the grey and blue shades of his music video suggest that this must be the case.

i think i know why there aren't many malaysians here - spanish is absolutely essential, otherwise you can't even bargain. you can't tell the taxi who takes you in circles to fuck right off and that you're not paying. you won't understand if a lady is trying to give you instructions to a hair salon located in the basement right next to the carpark (what?), you probably won't know what the password for the sushi bar's wireless is. they'll spell it to you and all you hear is gibberish, pure and untouched and unadulterated, a bit like going to the middle east and have someone tell you that it's a good day or the statue you're holding is 50 dollars or it is a cold day today or there are landmines in this area or what a sad thing it is that michael jackson is dead. they're all interchangeable, i imagine and you would look the picture perfect tourist, camera looped around your neck like a noose and a smile pasted across your face and your persistent nodding rendering you some similarity to a bobblehead doll and confusion is written written written in your eyes.

i, however, speak spanish and so i'm a-okay, although it is arguable that in the midst of rapid spanish my eyes still glaze over with the tiredness of having to translate every single word and making it comprehensible. it is the look of someone whose brain has been working overtime.

i see the little blue bar at the bottom right of my monitor shrinking, as if it were a thermometer and the air around me has suddenly gone downright cold and so i leave you with a lengthy post and a rather hasty (but apologetic) goodbye.

2009-07-06T01:18:00.000-07:00

i'll be leaving for argentina in approximately a week, and i'll be there for about thirteen days. am blogging now because i'd feel really guilty that i haven't done any updating any all this month in a week's time; plus - get this - my dad - dad - is telling me to blog more. i suppose this is a better read than the malaysian mainstream media, though.

i've been spending a lot of my time watching old movies. it's one of those sort-of-but-not-really emo phases, i think; i do occasionally enjoy being swept up in the drama and charm that seem so bottled and for sale these days, as if you could just pick a certain formula off a shelf and fashion its contents into a formulaic and mediocre piece of garbage.

i've watched roman holiday and sabrina and some like it hot and charade and the graduate, and i'm not sure if it's because i am feeling sort of melancholic or whatever, but i didn't know cary grant was so charming and that audrey hepburn was so beautiful and delicate and brittle and that dustin hoffman was the better tobey maguire when he was younger and that marilyn monroe was not only a bombshell, but one who managed to imbue her performances with a certain amount of heart.

maybe it's because i have not been slapped across the face with them every other hour via the tabloids and such - i find that celebrities in the media tend to lose their lustre. when they become humanised to the point that you usher them into your home willingly, be it through the television or the newspaper or the internet, their star quality diminishes. the charisma fades and what you are left with is reality: sad, lonely rich people who can be hellbent on self-destruction, surrounded with so many sycophants that their perception of themselves and life as a whole is tinted in hallucinogenic shades.

nobody reads when i talk about movies or music or literature, or if i offer some sort of a social commentary on something/someone like sarah palin. they'd rather read about my life and what i'm doing and what sort of funny things i've been doing today.

but i think you can glean that sort of information from the things i blog about. if i'm unhappy about a certain issue, you can probably guess that at the writing of that particular post how much rage i am filled with, or the sort of disappointment i harbour towards certain segments of society, or if i am pensive at the thought that a chapter of my childhood has been razed to the ground.

i don't even know why i write to please anyone else. it makes utterly no sense.

if all i have for catharsis is writing, and i write to please you, then what would i do to please myself?

(fap.)

it's true, isn't it? those who say that college were the best years of their lives can't be very happy now.

to be honest i find the thought quite horrifying, so i am rejecting it right now. i refuse to qualify my years at cambridge as being the best years of my life. and, somehow, i believe (or is it: i hope?) that i will be right - that as life goes on, it finds a way to make itself more palatable, gentler, kinder, better.

2009-06-25T17:50:00.000-07:00

when i was much younger, my dad bought us a segastation and with it came a slew of cartridge video games, one of which featured michael jackson - clad in iconic white and topped with a hat - who had to run through a massive mansion defeating thugs by hurling his hat at them. in the background, midi versions of beat it and smooth criminal would be playing in alternate turns, two ~~songs~~ anthems i will forever remember him for.

i recall days when my dad would bring home lcd copies of his music videos and concerts (i remember particularly the HIStory world tour) from the neighbourhood store, and we'd all sit down to watch them together. that is how i know that his remember the time video involves an egyptian setting and an adulterous queen who has fallen for the charms of a moonwalking, hip-swivelling michael jackson. my brother would make up the lyrics for the songs he didn't know the words to, snapping his fingers and trying to emulate the moves he saw on screen.

at college, his earlier repertoire formed a rich part of my listening experience. i want you back and i'll be there were transition pieces which allowed me to understand that music was in itself a medium of communication which could transcend time and express concepts that language by itself couldn't. heal the world and we are the world and black and white and gone too soon highlighted social issues, constituting emotional rather than intellectual appeals. their accessibility wormed their way through our radios to our thoughts and then our hearts, the way nothing else could.

i was talking to stacy just now, and we agreed that his death means something to us not because we were die-hard fans of anything or that sort. it's because we grew up listening to his music and humming along to their tunes. it's because american idol understands the extent and relevance of his repertoire in our cultural makeup that they dedicate entire weeks to him. it's as if a certain part of ourselves has been severed, our childhood dying along with the idols that defined them.

while he spent the latter of his life battling demons and lawsuits and debt collectors, the truth is that his influence was a pervasive thread in my childhood: uncalculated notches and scratches lodged in the deep of my memories, which existence has now been knotted into a dead end.

2009-06-17T00:14:00.000-07:00

diz iz n excuz 4 a PARTEE POST~!~!

happy post: (one of my) best friend(s) yieng is graduating on the 29th of june with a fuckin' first class from the university of strathclyde. now i don't know the exact number of students who graduated with a first, but it suffices to say that the amount should hover around the vicinity of: not many at all. i'm proud of her and stuff, yo. she's the sort of person who always asks for her successes to be pardoned: "no," she'll say. "i don't really deserve the first. so many others who have worked harder than i have do."

you know what, woman? just suck it and accept your amazingness.

even nicer of her was that she invited me to her graduation. however, being obligated to be around a bunch of giddy rascals until mid-july, i had to turn her offer down. i'm really disappointed about it, really. i've known yieng for about ten years now (oh, my god - another reason to have a party post! ten years of perfect friendship!*) and this would have been something i would have loved to have gone to. i would have bought her a huge bouquet and shitloads of candy and maybe a blonde stripper with a fake tan from chippendale's, because she deserves it so much.

i used to sit close to yieng in form two, and the rest of the class would call us pulau bintan (because, um, ben-tan. that's how sophisticated the rest of them were) and upon hindsight, i should have accepted this hilarity with far more gusto than i did. i think i was quite a huffy little bespectacled child then, actually.

oh, and i fucking made chicken fajitas together with my maid when i was 15 or something, and invited a bunch of friends to savour the results of my culinary expertise. apparently, yieng's never looked at chicken fajitas the same ever again, highly probably because the ones i made were tantamount to the pinacle of cuisinart excellence. heh.

also one of the few things i recall about yieng is that she was an amazing prefect. unlike some of the power hungry tools who roamed around school searching for students to victimise, she would always conveniently ignore the fact that i had long hair/forgotten to wear my name tag/forgotten my rule book/was basically a rule-breaking foolhardy moron. that's yieng for you: klassy with a k. also, she was treasurer of the prefects' board.**

well, i'm really sorry that i'm not able to attend your graduation, yieng tan - and considering the fact that you've bailed me out of crap close to a zillion times, i really have no excuse.

please accept this amazing party post as an unworthy*** substitute.

*yieng, being the downer that she always is, just told me: it's eleven.

**i'm not sure what the relevance is, but she probably thinks that it makes her look cool.

***worthless? i don't even know.

2009-06-16T20:14:00.000-07:00

so, i've booked my flight to argentina. that's one thing solved.

i have yet to book my flight back to malaysia. argh - i don't want to, though.

2009-06-16T00:19:00.000-07:00

i feel like the post below does not fully capture the horror of the situation, so let me just post you a few things i yanked off guardian online:

10.10am:
More pictures have been posted to Twitpic of injured protesters. They include a man bleeding from the stomach; police raids on traffic; a manlaid out on a make-shift stretcher; and most disturbingly a man who died in the protest together with tributes to him.

9.50am:
Twitter has delayed an vital upgrade because of the role the network is playing in the Iran uprising.

9.25am:
Prominent Iranian reformists have been arrested, reports Robert Tait, our former Tehran correspondent.

8.40am:
Anyone with a camera or laptop is being attacked on the streets, according to persiankiwi, on Twitter.

i feel compelled to draw your attention towards the current situation in iran, where democracy is currently being thwarted and circumvented under ahmedinijad's regime*. student dorms have been stormed and their inhabitants dragged out to the street and beaten (in some cases to death). notable members of the opposition have been incarcerated since the revolt started. protesters have been shot at. the news has been censored, and iranians are being deprived of access to the international community. satellite television in the country has been blocked. revolutions are being planned via twitter (of all things, although it finally gives this flash in the pan some sort of value).

i'm not saying you have to do anything about it; but maybe reading more about the matter would help you find some sort of a kinship between you and the iranians. after all, it wasn't too long ago that your government was attempting to reshape the democratic vote with (what i heard was) trucks of ballot boxes, specifically planted to undo the will that comes with the strength of the people. the difference between you and the iranians, however, is that you (sort of) won. they did not.

someone asked me what if the announced results were indeed true, and that ahmadinejad did in fact run away with 63% of the votes?

disregarding the clampdown on the freedom of speech, and the fact that the basij (iranian paramilitary force) has been brought out, the answer is simple: this is not only about who won the elections - it could be that it's not about who wins anymore. this is about a group of people who are fighting for a free election, for transparency, for the right to have votes counted and their voice heard.

if you're going to win, it is only right that you should win fairly**.

*if it wasn't one then, it certainly is now...

**although i understand that given the logistically shifty manner in which the elections are run, the usage of fairness here is merely relative.

2009-06-14T23:38:00.001-07:00

confirmed: argentina/uruguay, london/paris/madrid.

things are looking up.

2009-06-13T14:07:00.001-07:00

the internet is full of weird shit, you guys. take fanfic, for example - that shit creeps me the fuck out. in what way is it normal to take literary canon and twist it deviantly enough to the point where it becomes not only irreverent, but also deeply disturbing?

and the stuff i accidentally come across is pretty strange - you know what? strange is just the product of my inarticulation - it's pretty fucked up. (admittedly, even fucked up isn't enough. i don't think language in all its beauty and form can fully encompass the true horror of the mind that churns our such things.)

take the other day, for example: there was a woman who wrote about her passionate throes with, of all people, clay aiken. yeah, the american idol runner up with the strange haircut who now looks like a butch lesbian. i'd paste a current picture of him here but i'd get nightmares. it had to do with mr. aiken penetrating her sacred chalice (lolwut) with his sword of steel until they finally exploded with ecstasy (in tandem, no less). i just got shivers along my spine writing the previous sentence.

you know what? i get that you like clay a lot (and him being gay is not going to stop your rabid fantasies of riding him like you would a raging stallion, clearly), but doesn't it say something else about you if you chose to transcribe such a dream and then put it up on a public webpage? why would you want to share such things with anyone? why? it's sort of like meeting a stranger at a swimming pool who can't help but inform you about her husband's erectile dysfunction: why in hell do you think i would want to know any of this?

someone once showed me an R-rated story where hermione fell in love with ginny weasley and proceeded to take her to a bondage bar where i believe they spent the entire night having fun with wine, leather, handcuffs and a two-headed... never mind. i couldn't make it past the first few paragraphs. the permutations of relationship samplings involving harry potter characters are decidedly infinite. i have seen one where harry has sex with hogwarts (i.e. the castle, hogwarts) and that particular sojourn left me sleepless for weeks, fearing for the downfall of humankind due to their perverse minds. until i read the one where harry fucked his pet owl, hedwig.

okay, i don't think i can complete this essay; i actually need to lie down now. maybe i'll continue it later, but don't get your hopes too high up.

if you've made it this far, congra-fuckin'-lations.

2009-06-13T02:38:00.001-07:00

so, my travel plans have been mended and amended to the point where i just want to defenestrate a laptop, if possible from a 15th storey balcony. if it smashes the skull of a random passer-by, well, too bad for him.

so here's where it stands: i truly do not wish to spend somewhere near the vicinity of 8000 ringgit just to go to peru and argentina, because, well, machu picchu will always be there and the bulk of the amount will go specifically towards travelling to cuzco/aguas calientes. yeah. what i'm going to be doing instead is go to buenos aires and then head over to montevideo, the capital of uruguay, for a couple of days since the latter is accessible by boat. the final sum to be expended on transportation would be less than half the amount required to do peru/argentina. so that's that.

fun fact: did you know uruguay is known as the switzerland of south america? that's not because it's next to buenos aires, the paris of south america. it's due to the stable political (social democratic) system there. okay, that wasn't really fun. it actually sounded a little preachy.

and then after that i'll be going back to london where i look forward to the arrival of leech, whom i'm going to paris and madrid with. if everything goes along to plan, i'll just have enough money left to purchase a one way ticket back to malaysia and restart life (this is very depressing: it is wrist-slittingly upsetting and the thought makes me want to follow the laptop off the 15th floor.)

i hear my sister makes her friends read my blog for some contrived/abhorrent/reprehensible/illogical reason.

well, if you are one of them, let's play a game. make a list of the words you don't know and then compare it to hers. if you win (i.e. you know more words than she does/your list is shorter) you win a prize:

she will buy you a big mac.

2009-06-08T23:06:00.000-07:00

okay, so yilun's all like "what the hell is wrong with you. i don't want to know what you think of american idol/britain's got talent. in fact, i don't even care. why don't you write something i want to read, like the difference between colombia and malaysia."

which begs for a social anthropological essay to be honest. i sort of did like soc anth at cambridge - possibly because it was the only subject i was remotely good at in my first year - and dr. de waal wasn't as hardcore evil as my other supervisors were. but still, i'm not really in the mood to come up with one of those hardcore detailed discussions which deconstruct the social structure of families and communities, studying the complexities of human interaction in one place and then comparing them to the same in another in an academic/interdisciplinary dissection.

but okay, general waves of information i can come up with:

the most interesting thing i've noticed here is that there really isn't much of a difference between people here and people who are not here - the family structures, the ambitions and social stratas generally share some form of verisimilitude. the difference is more class-based than anything else, i.e. poor people have stupid amounts of children, ironically tend to neglect the welfare of their children more, and are highly religious. which really isn't that different from malaysia, if you think about it. except that the religious pie here is divided as follows: catholics 2 million percent.

i was going to launch a tirade in which i was going to echo karl marx's incendiary "religion is the opium of the masses," but i think i shan't, because most of you already know my sentiments towards organised religion. (sorry, sara. and abby. and meiyin. and yeah, generally most of my friends.)

okay, what else? the food. sorry, you can't beat the badassery of malaysian food: roti canai, curry laksa, prawn noodles... i need to stop now because i am fucking salivating as i am typing this. like, literally. dammit, how long has it been since i have been deprived of such amazingness - okay, don't think of any such things, don't think. think of unicorns. unicorns. unicorns. okay, done.

my meals here generally good, but i have been spoilt by the endless variety i get in london. it's hard to find good french food here, and i'm pretty damned sure that i'm not going to get arroz negro here any time soon. there are a couple of sushi restaurants which are incredibly overpriced, chinese food here is bastardised beyond recognition (brb weeping), and mcdonald's here do not serve fish o'fillets. how this is the case i do not know, and it actually hurts me so much that i can feel the physical manifestations of my deep-seated longing for a good fish burger sandwiched between two warm sesame buns and served with a dollop of tartar sauce and pickles. okay. stop. why do i do this to myself? this is cruel and masochistic. i am going to think of flying monkeys now. this yearning for forgotten food is sending chills up my spine, dammit.

oh, and food here is mainly rice, meat, lentils/beans/chickpea stew, salad - it really is quite good. it's just that the variety here tends towards none at all.

work here is... well, it's not fun. these foundations tend to be understaffed and underfunded, which really sucks. also the work tends to be quite depressing and dangerous. i've seen enough fights between teenage transexual prostitutes to last me a lifetime. never thought i'd actually be able to say that, but it's true. it makes me miss cambridge sans tripos, actually, although that is technically cheating.

cambridge sans tripos for me equals 9 months of pure holidaying and going down to london to spend frivolously on plays and exotic food. i don't go to lectures, i hand in borderline satisfactory work at my supervisions (except to jmo, because i love him and his pink vinyl suspenders with matching socks), and sleep 'til 2pm every day. tripos is the only thing which makes me sit at a desk for 14 hours a day, trying desperately to shovel every bit of information i have neglected for the last 6 months into my slowly atrophying brain.

it's a bit like saying: i like malaysia without the heavily fucked-up government and the rate of poverty and blatant racial discrimination and the low levels of education/cultural, historical & artistic appreciation and if my family were actually financial czars of the country. which, no. that would be cheating. you need to accept all parameters that come with the territory, because it's only fair/unarbitrary that way.

transportation in either country cannot beat the connectedness of the london underground. they have a bus system here which attempts to mirror that of london's but i don't think it's really working because (i) the system cannot cope with the number of users, and (ii) the breadth of the system is actually really, really limited.

and don't get me started on malaysian public transport because it's the sort of thing that makes me laugh so hard that i snort blood out my nose.

okay, that's it (for now). i hope you are satisfied, yilun er.

i'm going to sleep now, serenaded by the sweet, sweet falsettos of joni mitchell.

2009-05-31T18:25:00.000-07:00

and today's theme is: funny names! clap, everybody. clap.

the following video had me in concussive fits of laughter:

also, i guess it really sucks to be this guy. this is why it is really important to read the full name of your future child out loud and - if possible, depending on the effect of the epidural - really fast, many, many times, until you can be certain that he will never be made a national joke.

2009-05-29T22:42:00.000-07:00

one of the reasons i love american idol is idolatry, an entertainment weekly webshow hosted by michael slezak and kristen baldwin. they are fans of the show, are generally snarky and hold excellent interviews - all good reasons to watch it.

they also play favourites, and this year they were all anti-gokey, for a hundred different reasons, including that he has a messiah complex and is incredibly boring. i think their slogan for voting off the fellow was GOkey, which made me laugh so hard.

but whatever. this post is all about the macros.
apart from the fact that gokey sounds sort of, uh, challenged, it is clear also that he is painfully insufferable from slezak's face during the almost insufferable 25 minute interview.

2009-05-29T20:59:00.000-07:00

anyone who remotely knows me would notice this incongruence that defines a huge part of who i am:

a. i am an elitist

b. i love reality tv, omg

i'm not sure how to reconcile both statements either. i like high-brow stuff, of course, as well as the idea that i am being challenged and entertained simultaneously. but i also am deeply in love with kitsch. take american idol, for example. after swearing off this season (for the 78,392nd time), i ended up being lured to the screen yet again by the banshee-like screams of mr. lambert and the wholesomeness of goody-two-shoes-turned-eventual-winner mr. allen. i can't deny my love of being manipulated the hell out of, even when it's so transparent i should be ashamed for even falling for it hook/line/sinker.

i was just watching a couple clips of britain's got talent, and was shocked at the blatant craftiness of the editing: small kid/cute underdog + secret dream + self-effacing demeanour + above average performance + judges melting in response + simon cowell's trademark smile + inspirational music to end the vignette = the voting public basically financing your show. tears all over (cry, cry for me)/ let us give each other hugs/ant and dec are such kind, cute people/ "there is something very special about you"/ you blew me away/ beautiful amanda holden's botoxed face/ simon acts nice to people you know he really doesn't give a shit about unless they make him lots of money.

i love it to pieces, and i hate myself for loving it, but i still do, goddammit. when a 10 year old girls bursts into tears on national tv and youtube, my brain splits itself down the middle in self-antagony.

"dammit. they are playing this on live tv. people are watching her disintegrate emotionally under stress artificially induced by the heat of spotlights and the glare of swivelling cameras... look at her mom giving her a hug now... simon is so sweet and complimentary that it disturbs me - this is clearly rigged... wait, what sort of a demented family-oriented show is this? this is cruel."

versus

"oh wow, she is crying. poor thing. that's such a pretty pink dress she has on. oh, poor little girl. this is so sad. oh, amanda holden is comforting her. this is so sad. she doesn't get a second chance? oh, dear me. my heart is breaking. simon saved her! simon saved her! my heart is two sizes fuller now."

i hardly have an idea as to what i'm doing sometimes. torn in two over a reality competition show is a horrific admission to make. i used to justify it* with the knowledge that the almighty anderson cooper enjoys garbage like the real housewives of orange county, but that then became embarrassing because i realised that i was basically staking the choices i made (i.e. my self-expression) on the viewing habits of someone whom i didn't even personally know.

somehow i come back to it like fish voluntarily giving itself up to the wriggling worm at the end of the sharp, curved metal hook.

i used to think that it was masochistic, making myself guzzle down the lowest common denominator in heaps, satiating myself with heightened, manufactured drama, but then it hit me that it is okay to enjoy such stuff fluff; the masochism was in the punishment i would deal myself at the end of the season finale, when the final someone was parading the winner's anthem pageant-style - confetti cascading from the ceiling like silver rain and the audience on their feet, swaying along to the teary warbles of the next temporary media sensation.

*actually, i still do.

2009-05-28T23:26:00.001-07:00

let's see: what can i tell you about this week.

i have been having a collage of strange dreams that veer wildly across emotions. some have been patently horrifying, the sort where you wake up feeling like you've just emerged from a hot shower only to realise that your back/forehead/stomach is actually soaked in sweat; some have been saccharine/aspertame, the sort you wouldn't expect me to have, the sort that overflow with jars of honey and rainbows and fuckin' unicorns. a pretty mixed bag, i guess, and sometimes i wonder if i would prefer reverting to a time where slept just meant a 7 hour stretch of blank, as if you were just dead, isolated entirely from the world, encapsulated in a bubble which hovers over time and space and bends these concepts entirely.

i don't know - i actually can't answer this question. i can't pick between catharsis and imagination overdrive.

it's the old hackneyed version of would it be better to have loved, but embedded under layers of subconscious, and in a typical fit of indecision, i have no preference. which should be okay and stuff (i am what i am and all that, i guess) but the fact that i cannot make such a choice annoys me. it defies my immediate response to take what i know, analyse it all into a tiny bottle and then cast it into an ocean in a tackily symbolic action so i don't have to deal with it ever again.

i don't like the unknown - i don't like when i cannot classify what i have or who i am, in this case viz. through the choices i make. so many strange pictures came into my mind upon the completion of the last sentence; amorphous clouds and swafts of material as weightless and massless as fog. that is how my mind works, and so i spend days trying to contain myself so i can actually concentrate on what i'm doing right here right now, jesus.

work has been alright, but you know my attitude re work, i.e. fuck this shit, i have so much more to do with my life -- like logging on to the internet and immersing myself in random bits and pieces of the entertainment industry to the point where i lose track of the time.

who was it who told me that i was custom made for celebrity? must have been abby; no one else says such things to me. i'm not sure if it's true - i don't think i can stand being hounded by pappara... what? oh, she meant a lower level of fame. sorry, was being my conceited self once again back there. maybe... anderson cooper/larry king type fame? i don't know, perhaps.

i used to think that i would make a good tv host or whatever, the sort of guy who could trick people into plopping themselves right onto a huge comfy couch beside him and proceed to make them say things they wouldn't otherwise say on live tv. like, i'd make brad pitt come in and end up being best buddies with him while making him ponder what the inevitable end of his relationship with the goddess jolie would be like. charm their trousers off like silk.

interesting, and, uh, impossible for a myriad of reasons, not least my inability to see/hear myself speak or conduct myself on video/audio playback. i would obsess over my angles and my hair and the exact movement of my limbs and my posture and the pitch of my voice and my pronunciation to the point where i would deconstruct my performance and rip it to shreds single-handedly, if only so that no one else would have to do it for me.

oh, wow. as it turns out, i am merciless not only to everyone else, but also myself. not a hypocrite then.

today, i heard someone who was not rachael ray use the word delish and laughed at them for 20 minutes straight. i know a certain mr. karim who hates that word: "delicious," he says. "what a fucking stupid word. it sounds ridiculous and unappealing. to call a meal delicious is to subjugate oneself to the relentlessly stupid jargon of the current culinary zeitgeist. delicious is the foodie's version of nice."

i obviously paraphrased him a little. or a lot.

i do agree with the sentiment though, although with a lot less reason. i just don't like how it sounds. but, possibly more than that, it makes you sound like rachael ray, who already sounds sort of unintelligent with her goddamned rambling. she is talented, sure, but sometimes i would just like to hand her a nice warm cup of shutthefuckup. i'm here to watch your cooking, not that deep black void* which contains your straight teeth and plump tongue.

long-winded point is: if i tell you that you should never call something delish, it's for your own good. trust me. you don't want other overeducated bitches like me (but whom are not me) giving you a stone cold stare because you thought it was cute to copy someone off food network tv.

*not the deep black void you are thinking of.

what else can i tell you, um.

i wish i could say that i went on a date, but anyone who knows me would know that the likelihood of that happening is, ha ha. i need to start going out more often, whore myself around a little.

or a lot.

yeah, that's the plan, baby.

that's the plan.

2009-05-23T01:54:00.000-07:00

kris allen won. sort of happy about that. adam lambert lost. sort of unhappy about that.

oh the conflict.

2009-05-19T00:29:00.000-07:00

at midnight, from the top of the empire state building, the new york sky roasts red and purple, never black. sheer darkness wraps around the edges of the compact universe but then diffuses into damp fires that streak across the cotton clouds. it is beautiful and surreal - not so much the effect for dawn and dusk swirl with temperamental shades as well, but because i have never seen such a collision of colours at midnight. behind me, the spire of the building glows in a deep velvet red (like the magnolia bakery cupcake).

this is different from the artificiality of time square. my host mother, upon seeing the photographs we took of the place, gasped and proclaimed it a (synthetic) dream. not so much for me. yes, the colours do explode and flash and disapparate and transform from image to image, coke bottle to cigarette filter, airbrushed abs to legs that run down 40 storey buildings. but the air is dotted with the faint smell of hotdogs and shish kebabs; tourists mushroom on the streets, emerging from revolving doors and back alleys, melding with a colony that sashay down the street aimlessly, lost in the gleam and glisten of times square. it reminds me of the neon blue (ultraviolet?) lights you see on, well, really, bug zappers.

manhattan in day lacks lustre, but only when you compare it to how it burns at night. art deco buildings are phallic and decorated and stab the sky like the bow of capsized ships. and yet, a hole remains in the open fan of the city skyline. the site of the world trade centre/a phantom limb: in your mind's eye, it stretches still to the sky, its contents bustling with people and energy and activity. (although, to be quite honest about it, it still bustles - it is now just a construction site.) the sidewalks are swept by the sharpened heels of jimmy choos and dunhill leather - this is juxtaposed to: torn sneakers to which bits of scrap newspapers are stuck underneath, frayed trouser seams, bristles of an aging broom. accents are airborne: blackspeak, a spanish r, an english t, the french manner through which words are nasally squeezed out, the slurred vowels and diminished consonants from the south.

there is koreatown and chinatown and little italy (which i hear is undergoing a slow and protracted death), and chelsea of the tight t-shirts and the upper east side where you have the luxury of telling people that you live in a penthouse which costs somewhere in the regions of 6 million dollars. the burst of green in centre park and the ponds that congeal in winter - a massive, calm reservoir through which certain parts of the skyline are reflected. horses and carriages clack through the roads, the squish of rubber soles accompanying, the wind hums (its pitch rises and fall and in fact swerve to create not a melody, but some sort of a shrill siren); street lamps waste away in corners, a beautiful fountain lies somewhere in the middle of the park, leaves are green and maroon and pink and purple, and it really is quite beautiful if you can just park (unintended) your mind somewhere and allow yourself to wander through the groves.

which i didn't do a lot of: there was a lot of planning, and then flying from one spot to another. into the canals of the subterannean train system, where trains whoosh past without stopping. sometimes they fly over air, giving you a glimpse of a setting sun and a rustling cushion of treetops before it plunges you back into the ground. on a bridge linking manhattan to brooklyn (i profess to have forgotten its name) you are temporarily sent hurtling through the air past cars and traffic, as what you know of new york recedes behind you. murky water is under you and around you, shadows of the cabels/pillars holding the bridge up are cast into the translucent/gray surface. and then your sides swallow the vista up and you are in a tunnel, again.

coney island has a 1950 boardwalk and amusement parks you don't see anymore. 1920 roller coasters creak as they run along oiled rails, carousels spin on an axis. the modernity of walt disney world is rather distant, the craftiness of its stores and dolled-up princesses and snake queues a disparate thread. chili dogs are eaten on a beach with a pier which juts into the sea at an awkward angle, a wooden walkway which hovers precariously over lapping waves. i hear it is going to be torn down to make way for the gluttony of capitalism, its aging contraptions to be replaced with something more - i'm not sure my choice of word is articulation at its best - exciting, a newness which sparkles like a freshly polished jewel.

new york is beautiful, but not in the same way i find other cities beautiful. manhattan is gorgeous by virtue of its abundance: food, people, entertainment, lights, culture, emotion, life. it overflows with the leviathan that is consumerism, and yet in corners you find signs of something else: a hole in the wall cafe, an experimental play, an underground bar. there is sense and security if you want it, a little risk if you know where to find it. it is gorgeous, because, right now, at this moment, for me, it lacks nothing.

2009-05-10T22:18:00.001-07:00

quick rundown: to account for my absence (apart from the fact that i am a completely inconsistent and to a certain extent, useless) blogger, i would like to announce that i am right now in washington d.c., which must surely rate amongst my top favourite cities in the world (and believe me, i have been to quite a bit of them).

miami was alright, but after about 10 minutes you get really sick of just meandering around and getting your ass baked in the sun. on our last night there, we moved into a hotel at the highly overrated south beach. south beach is a painfully pretentious place - beautiful people, expensive clubs, gleaming oceans? i had a better time in barcelona*.

we then moved on to disneyworld, where we stayed at kissimmee - which is sort of - erm - how should i put it - um - tiny - um - and highly similar to a tiny redneck town you'd find along the bible belt. the people spoke in southern drawls and the quietness of the city was such that the air was perfectly still, practically stagnant to the point where we felt mired in the kiln-like atmosphere.

and in d.c., we sort of got hay fever. goddammit. we had an overpriced malaysian lunch, ran around stocking up on crazy amounts of antihistamines and distilled water, and then headed back to the hotel to sleep our allergic reactions off. thank god we were booked into the renaissance, because i'd have been in a really sorry state otherwise. a room with blackout lights and a 37 inch flatscreen hd television screen and a 5 pillow bed does wonders for your health. (quite shamefully, you'd have found me hanging from the kitchen fan of my 6-bedroom dorm otherwise.)

we walked for approximately 3 miles today, and so my soles feel like they have been bashed repeatedly by the trunks of young saplings, or maybe a rubber garden hose.

the capitol tomorrow, and then it's to new york we go.

*i like it so much that i am trying to con my parents into going there again with me this september. one can never get enough of spanish things and, to be quite brutally/pathetically blunt about it, spanish people.

2009-04-29T20:44:00.000-07:00

the fact that so many people read this blog means that a lot of what i want to say slips through the spaces between typed words and is left uncaptured due to the shortcomings of language. these thoughts are like invisible ink, spilt callously and then found racing through sentences, slowly finding themselves absorbed into the canvas of a screen: the first few words are sandbagged so heavily by incalculable density, so much that it feels like the frame of the letters themselves are teetering at the edge of a black background, careful to not tip over and fall off the screen and create voids that aren't meant to be.

i'm not a touchy-feely sort of guy - and i'm certainly not big on (stable/unshakeable) relationships - but this song makes me wonder if i've been missing out on something all this while. maybe something about love (or the notion of love, at least) sustains us, protects us and gives us something much more rudimentary than our identity.

maybe it gives us form; maybe it gives us our humanity.

i'm leaving for miami in something like 30 hours - fuck swine flu, really - and hopefully every single ounce of planning would have put itself to good use and manifest itself in the best of ways. 17 days of travel; god knows i need the break.

people ask me why i'm pro-choice. my question to them is: why are you pro-life?

part A

if you don't believe in abortion, good for you, but there are hundreds of unfit mothers out there who believe that (a) they have a right to do what they want with their body, and (b) that the the moment of conception is not equivalent to the moment of life.

which, honestly: how difficult is it for any of you to get?

some people believe that as long as the foetus continues being parasitic, then it does not constitute a complete life; you believe differently, we know, and we allow you to. this is why we are pro-choice: it embodies freedom of speech and belief.

part B

oh, i know - it's because abortion is exactly like murder! you don't legalize murder due to "personal beliefs," so how can you legalize abortion?

you guys, if it can't survive on its own and has to leech off a host body and is not even sentient, it's not a fully-fledged human being yet, so please don't give me the stupid argument of "if your brother is paralysed from the neck down are you going to kill him too?" clearly, he's alive and can appreciate the risk of dying.

also, please don't give me the other stupid argument of: will you kill off people with dementia and babies?

part C

also, when your uncle rapes you and you get pregnant, please make sure to keep the baby, alright? or maybe, i don't know, your sister gets date-raped and ends up pregnant - after sitting through the police reports and psychiatric sessions, why don't you try to convince her to keep the damn thing growing in her she hasn't asked for?

and there is no such thing as "pro-life except for in cases of rape." if you think so, you're pro-choice but are unable to live with that knowledge.

part D

if you understand my blog, you're probably part of the educated middle-class demographic. for you, abortion isn't exactly necessary, is it? you come from a good university, have a stable job, are intelligent enough to understand repetitive verbosity, etc. if you don't want a child, good for you; and if you want it, good for you too. what are you giving up? possibility of a promotion, maybe your career, some free time, money to spend on 1,500 dollar candelabras. important stuff, but not exactly life-wrecking.

if, on the other hand, you were a 15 year old prostitute who is completely unfit to be a parent, and knows it, the societal rules stop applying. if you're pregnant, you may spread whatever diseases you are currently suffering from to your child; you will be an unfit parent and your child will grow up in the slums, he will be uneducated and a juvenile delinquent, he will have no role models to learn from, you will have to support the both of you (this assumes he is your first child, which he may be, but he won't also be the last).

you will hate your child, you will loathe yourself - you cannot afford childcare, and so you pawn him off to your truck driver boyfriend/80 year old neighbour when you go out. some of those people shake your child until he breaks his clavicles when he refuses to stop crying. who's going to pay for his hospital bills and vaccination? nobody. maybe the state.

pro-lifers tend to forget that it's not just about them. it's also about society and repercussions that stretch so far through so many dimensions that you need to think twice before coming up with a law which makes abortion illegal.

part E

abortion is illegal. you have a child you know you cannot afford. what do you do?

a) you fly off to a country where it is legal and get it done there in a private hospital with doctors who look like brad pitt, or,

b) you go to an underground clinic where the instruments are rusted and the doctor may not be licensed (assuming he actually went to medical school) and your possibility of survival is greatly lessened.

when things become necessary, people resort to desperate (and sometimes, following from it, deadly) measures.

part F

let's say she survives the horrible childbirth, and puts the child up for adoption - he's going to have to spend some time in an orphanage before anyone (if anyone) ever chooses to do so. in developing countries, these places are underfunded and grimy and are run by people who have better things to do, like feed their own kids. the children are disillusioned, depressed and lack self-esteem. they probably haven't got much in the way of skills, and are kicked out of the home the moment they turn eighteen. some of them cannot tolerate the conditions there and choose to leave at age twelve. they end up living on the street and resort to petty theft and prostitution to carry on living.

now, tell me honestly: what are their chances of surviving past the age of 25?

part G

the taxes you have to pay to maintain the insufficient number of underequipped/staffed orphanages, jails, prisons, rehabilitation centres, juvenile detention centres, government hospitals and training centres, where the rate of rehabilitation hovers at 15% in the best case scenario.

2009-04-28T12:33:00.000-07:00

we were originally slated to put up at the doubletree chelsea in new york, a brand new 3 star hotel which was ostensibly supposed to open this month. it didn't, and we had to find that out through the website, which obviously led to a near coronary. abby called up the customer service centre of our travel website, spent one and a half hours negotiating with them and making sure we didn't get the even-rawer-than-raw end of the bargain, and the whole minor debacle ended up with us being rebooked at the rather posh, newly renovated crowne plaza times square at no extra charge.

just for comparison's sake, the ymca new york, on the other hand, costs 95usd a night; another friend of abby's ended up paying 100usd per night to shack up in a 6-bed room at a hostel in queen's or something.

2009-04-25T00:26:00.001-07:00

one of the many questions i tend to be deluged with happens to be: why aren't you going to be a lawyer?

which - i guess - is a reasonable question, considering my academic pedigree. i write/speak reasonably well, did quite alright at university, am able to digest large amounts of information and then distil them into manageable portions, and yet somehow i am completely uninterested in pursuing a career where the crux of the job involves glass cages and ink scrawls.

christ's was a pretty great place for someone like me to study law at (i had pretty decent supervisors, an international law supervisor notwithstanding - that woman still gives me nightmares). i had the sort of support i needed from just about everyone around me, by which i mean people like meiyin who would deign to teach me equity from bloody scratch, and abby/ryan who would send their notes to me at a moment's notice despite the very real fact that i deserved to be left in the dust just for skipping every conceivable lecture possible. the subject was intellectual stimulating, and the technical bits pieces of an incomplete jigsaw which perspective we struggled to grasp.

reality was an unexpected nightmare. i underwent a somewhat horrifying experience when i interned at an american law firm in the city; the work was mundane, the people were painfully boring, the system a fusion of tedious small talk and competitive calculation. (i must admit, however, that the building was swanky. also, the pay sort of financed quite a part of my colombian endeavour.)

in the end i simply don't give a shit about the sort of work you do at a law firm. i'm not the sort of person who works within rigid boundaries, and if it's the sort of work that i actually actively loathe, then i really doubt i'll be able to make it past three months without wanting to place the barrel of a gun between my teeth.

of course, there is the possibility that i may have to retract everything i've said and go through the routine as penance, but until the day comes, i'll languish in the thought (or maybe even, the hope) that i was built for something else.

only: which something else? sometimes i click on random links and am jetted from one webpage to another, each promising a certain sort of rudder i could maybe use to course my way through undiscovered terrain. just yesterday i found out that yale offers an mfa in playwriting. posh stuff, but what would i do with it apart from starve? hong kong university offers a masters in journalism, but how sure am i that i wouldn't quit 5 months in? do i want to go to uc san diego because i believe that i'd be doing something with myself there, or because i can still see the molten glasslights that dot the distance from across the bay when i close my eyes?

i realise that i enjoy the process of learning - it's very much the newness that i embrace, and not so much the utility of the knowledge. in the perfect world, i'd inherit old money and use my time to excavate through the patchwork of experiences that collectively make up life as we know it, a documentary in my head which shatters the glossier impressions that i have grown up with through the intermediary channel of the entertainment industry.

i'd wait tables for a few months, get sick of it and then go to the florida keys. perhaps i'd be a bilingual tour guide at iguazu or cartagena, write a novella about a malaysian audrey hepburn who unwittingly finds herself stranded in london, finish my play about the dysfunctionality of our generation, paint (very, very badly). soak in the frivolity: date, learn how to run a ruthless conglomerate, meet carla bruni, attend the tony awards and shake hugh jackman's hand.

but the backlog of job applications remain and the anchors of conformity peel away at the back of my head/ the fear of a lost opportunity lingers and the apprehension of experimentation swings like a pendulum between scorn and possibility/ the ideas stay closeted somewhere in my mind and the nib still waits to tear into paper.

the taunt of dreaming hangs mid-air, a condensation of half-baked threads unspun.

2009-04-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

not sure how true this is, but the idea that ryanair is going to impose a fat tax on overweight passengers is at once both hilarious and frightening. i've heard reams of, and have suffered, horror stories which involve dealing with the inevitable spillover across armrests, the most recent during my flight from los angeles to bogota. needless to say, it annoys me greatly.

in other news, does that mean you won't be able to fly anymore, mr. karim?

(just kidding. i think you'll pass the test they're thinking of setting, which involves measuring how wide you are from one side to the other c.f. front to back. no more greasy food for you.)

some things i personally don't get. sex, for example, and the idea that sex with another person is an idea so abhorrent that it should be relegated only to the whispers of gossip.

if it's alright to watch someone blow his brains out on stage, or to watch knived gangfights occur realistically through the glass screen of your television, surely sex cannot be as taboo a subject as we envision it to be?

it's this inability to deal with the realities of an epicurean lifestyle which glorifies games where men drive around shooting hookers and creates a fleet of children that are forced to grow up too soon that incapacitates us. we keep thinking, "right, they are too young for this" without realising that they know much more than we think they do.

britney spears is telling everyone that they should want to f-u-c-k her; paris hilton and kim kardashian are self-proclaimed celebutantes famous for displaying their assets in public; sexual activities are reinvented and reconstructed and disseminated under glossy chaste boxes which we seem to buy for our children. it is almost impossible to hide from the onslaught and yet we try, without realizing that another response is to meet it head on and wrangle it to the ground.

the things we cannot accept, we ignore. and then we sit and wonder: why is everyone running haywire around us? if we at least acknowledge that this is a generation which is fucked up beyond belief by seemingly innocuous corporation-sponsored packages under which run strong undercurrents of sexuality, then maybe we'll be able to understand that there is a problem somewhere in here that we cannot bring ourselves to face.

obviously someone will point out that it isn't appropriate to discuss such things publicly. which, obviously: if you don't want to listen to it, you can just click the little x button on the upper right hand of your page and go back to www.aziansexskandels.com or whatever rocks your boat.

people ask me why i don't blog about work. it's because it disturbs me and i don't want to come home only to spread the depressing news around. where i work the stories are like broken shards of glass; they come with jagged edges - you'd do well to leave the pieces where they lie.

when i stay home i feel like i don't have to drag my leaden feet out of the house, and in the solitary confinement of reedy wallpaper and glare of my tiny laptop monitor, i feel relief.

i realize how spoilt i am when i complain about not getting my weekly ration of exotic food.

"there is no good japanese food around here," i will whine. "or french. or italian. or indian. or chinese. i am sick of beans and lentils."

time was when french restaurants were scattered across the tiny town of cambridge, where chinese restaurants serving greasy chunks of meat were nestled tidily into the second floor of buildings and japanese restaurants sat on a riverfront which brimmed with students paperweighting their textbooks with beer bottles.

i spoke to marcela the other day about how much my tastebuds are burning for a morsel of wasabi, to which she replied: what is it?

and so i double-checked with the colombians i have encountered here in the last year - what is your favourite food?

they have never had anything else before.

thus, the bane of being overprivileged

2009-04-14T23:53:00.000-07:00

i think i first watched les miz when my dad bought a pirated version of the 10th anniversary on dvd - and i think we all found it really strange then, just people standing around in front of an audience, delivering emotionally-charged songs about prostitutes and dying people and the french revolution.

but then we all grew to like it; i remember for a month the dvd never left our damn player, and i would invite random friends over to watch the thing with me. (this of course had mixed consequences: some of them stopped talking to me entirely, and some joyously wept as - SPOILER ALERT HERE - jean valjean was marched the fuck to heaven by the ghosts of (a) his fallen comrades, (b) fantine and (c) eponine.)

just today by dad told me to google susan boyle, because of her "extraordinary" and "touching" performance of britain's got talent. now, two things:

1. i like britain's got talent like every other person, and paul potts and that little connie girl were really good examples of how fucked up the music industry and (to extrapolate in a blatant and unresearched sense) society is.

2. my father is the sort of guy who generally finds forwarded e-mails touching.

so i did him the favour: and damn, this boyle woman has ratty hair, is a 47 unemployed spinster with a cat named pebbles, and has spent her entire life looking after her mom*. she comes out, says she wants to be the next elaine page**, audience laughs, and then she proceeds to make them shit in their pants.

i'd say my bet's on her winning, but it's a bit too early to tell. on the other hand, she's definitely going to make it all the way to the finals. i've watched enough of this to tell - if you make amanda holden sort of cry and piers morgan sort of gulp and simon cowell shut the fuck up and the audience give you a standing ovation, chances are you will.

so anyway, i've heard about 2 million versions of the song that boyle performed, and it's called "i dreamed a dream." it's not a very hopeful song, even if the title sort of suggests so, because it's primarily about a young girl who has her life fucked all the way up to the point where it cannot be undone. then she becomes a prostitute, has her daughter sent away to a pair of abusive parents***, gets attacked when she refuses a client, and dies. all this in the first 20 minutes of the show.

and the point is that, if you want a really good (and incredibly hopeful) rendition of it, you will do well to click the link below.

even if you don't do it for me or les miz, you should at least do it for her royal highness, queen aretha.

*thank you, google news.

**most awesome grizabella ever, if only because she partially defined my childhood. oh, yes/also you can sort of tell the sort of kid i was...

***showe daughter happens to be lea salonga in the 10th anniversary version

2009-04-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

scriptwriting win.

ahahahahahaahahahahaahhahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahhaahaha

acting win. oh man oh god oh man oh god oh man oh god.

2009-03-24T11:53:00.001-07:00

i never thought i would one day like the killers: brandon "look at my pretty face" flowers is charismatic enough but i've never liked the whole... post-punk revival thing* they've had going on, and mr brightside was so ubiquitous from 2004 'til 2006 that i associated its opening riffs with a slow and painful form of suicide.

but then i'm here in colombia now, with absolutely no idea as to what is hip or not - my favourite artistes run the very strange gamut from rufus wainwright to pet shop boys to the magic numbers - and suddenly their latest album is sounding positively delightful to my ears. it's really not the whole screamy yell-ey** en vogue en 2004 thing they used to have, although flowers still has his penchant for incomprehensible lyrics and taking himself much too seriously.

this is really good pop/dance/rock, which as you would know i am a complete sucker for. i mean, these tunes are melodious and over the top and over-emoted and so damn theatrical that i cannot help but be thoroughly and surprisingly charmed.

random thought: do they still make cassette tapes anymore? someone let me know.

*wikipedia.org

*not too sure how this should be written, but when pronounced it sounds fine

nothing better to do and these made me laugh:

as you would know i had eye surgery again, but this one was pretty minor and not at all a big deal except for the fact that it did cost quite a bit. checkup's next week, and in the meantime i'm using it as an excuse to not go to work today hee.

2009-03-15T16:19:00.000-07:00

apparently the clubs in south beach run on this particular sort of logic: if you're hot*, you're in. this of course sent both abby and i into a mild state of horror this afternoon, which eventually turned into a prolonged source of stress by three p.m. for a variety of reasons. we are unmitigably vain and self-centered creatures and the idea that we may not be allowed into a bar due to genetic factors** is cause for well um suicide. and then i ended up on google, typing into the search box a combination of the various phrases: how to get into a south beach bar/how to get into a bar in miami/how beautiful will you have to be to be in miami/emergency cosmetic surgery procedures in miami.

apparently you have to be a runway model to enter south beach bars, especially the fancy schmancy ones. this applies only if you are a woman: if you are male you would need to either come in a stretch hummer or with several bodyguards or with ~~chlamydia~~ paris hilton.

which of course: what sort of stupid criteria is that? have they seen how runway models look these days? the victoria secret models are arguably the only ones who look somewhat normal when they go out publicly; the majority are emaciated 17 years old*** anorexics who throw up after their apple-and-milk diet and later die**** from kidney malfunction moments after descending from the catwalk.

so presumably what they mean are "models," the same way the hilton ilk and anna nicole smith and lauren conrad are: generically decent looking people subject to rigorous weight training and cardio exercises by their unforgiving gym instructors, their bodies augmented by thin and painful scalpels, the skin of their faces polished (ripped off?) by microdermabrasion, and their worth defined (dictated?) by the power of their celebrity and the whiteness of their teeth.

somewhere in my head the neon lights of the art-deco district scream: welcome to miami.

*clearly this applies to the more slangy definition of hot, otherwise anyone who has been in the open air for more than two hours (homeless people, sweating drunkards, street cleaners) would qualify for entry.

**definitely debatable: silicone breasts and pec implants and liposuction and facelifts and a slew of nip and tuck procedures are hardly au naturale, although maybe this should be overlooked considering how this is miami we are talking about.

***underage too, how haute.

****ana carolina reston, luisel ramos.

my host mom and i were making ham and cheese sandwiches yesterday with our new toy, the black and decker 3-in-1 wafflemaker/grill/griddle when i sliced my sandwiches diagonally. this delighted her.

"oh my god, look at them!" she exclaimed, her eyes smiling in surprise. "they look so cute triangle shaped!"

wait 'til she sees the waffles i'm going to make today. waffles with pineapple jam and butter topping. they will burst open her cute-o-meter.

what the fuck is with room prices in new york city. the ymca apparently costs 95$ per room per night, which, to give you an approximation of its value, is worth a room in a five star hotel in malaysia.

but then again, it is new york city: the touristy glare of time square and the pedestrian atmosphere of coney island and the metal/glass spires which stripe the distinctive new york skyline and the stone woman on liberty island.

it is where carrie fell in love with big and broke up with him and got back together again with him and, in the grotesque movie, ended up marrying him after he left her at the altar of the new york library; it is where holly golightly lived and left, her glass life ephemeral and fragile like the wisps of smoke that coil outwards, upwards from the tip of her cigarette; it is a leviathan of a city we have seen battered on the silver screen by global warming* and remain resilient even when attacked by, um, alien spaceships from outer space.

brooklyn, chelsea, the meatpacking district, fifth avenue, central park - it seems like i have always known these places without actually having known them.

*lolwut

2009-03-03T15:11:00.000-08:00

i need to wake up at 6 tomorrow because i need to be at work by 8, and i need to spoonfeed manuel his english lessons. he's this really interested kid, so full of vigour and the voracity to absorb foreign language that he actually knows about 4 french words and 12.5 english words*!

as always with such kids, and i say this with complete self-awareness that i was something like that when i was younger, he is an insufferable know-it-all, so much that no other child at the shelter actually likes him. take alejandro, for example (who can barely recite the english alphabet without suffering an apoplectic fit**), whom, when asked to seek manuel out for some help with his english homework, would rather walk up a hill with his face.

but this child is invariably the darling of the educators and is lavished with the sort of love and care that you only see evident on old barney the dinosaur reruns. i guess the point, really, is that these kids are everywhere, a pestilence that will continue to plague the younger generations for years and decades and centuries and perhaps even millenia to come.

*he actually pronounces morning "mo-nee" so he only gets half a point for that particular bastardization of the english language.
**let us just forget about his reaction to counting to 100 altogether, for that would predictably involve him requiring actual medical attention.

--

i need to book my flight to miami but i am just so bloody tired and i think my dad is still sort of recoiling from the horror-slash-damage that i managed to inflict on his piece of plastic when i was in california. but i need to buy it soon anyway, don't i? because if i don't i'll book it at the last minute and the damn prices will be even higher then so it is actually advisable, nay, prudent to get them now.

and then i have to go to the gym because i feel so lethargic otherwise. at least i should go run the ache away.

this reminds me of a slightly funny story when the incredibly hardcore instructor was making us (host bro and i) do weights which i believe were slightly less heavy than a dumptruck, which of course led to the both of us nearly fucking dying on the spot and the next four days after. he had to pop an aspirin, while i sat through the pain like a real man (primarily because i am allergic to aspirin).

oh, yes. i weathered pain like sylvester stallone in his younger years when he was still vaguely hot and stuff.

--

just the other day i went to a strip club for a beer - it was part of my job/haha i can see you jealous bastards seething with jealousy now well just suck it up why don't you? - and was bragging to everyone who would listen that i had finally been to a somewhat seedy vegas-style, strip show with real bouncers and hardcore porn playing on plasma screens and prostitutes who have had copious amounts of plastic surgery. it was my first time, i kept telling them. my first time!

and then nee reminded me of amsterdam.

oh, right.

not my first time then.

--

oh yeah so i bought a new phone yesterday. it's apparently the latest model in the market or whatever, with a whopping 4,000 colour screen and polyphonic (omg!) ringtones. most notable, however, has to be the flashlight which is attached to the top of the phone.

too bad i couldn't actually afford the one with a built-in radio or mp3 player or a voice recorder. i guess i'll just have to make do with my built-in calculator. but i have a ~~torchlight~~ lantern AND WHICH OF YOU HAS ANYTHING RESEMBLING ONE ON YOUR PHONES?

none of you? that's right. i thought so.

it's amazing what phones can do these days.

--

i got mugged today, which... i guess i had it coming. that's what happens when you work in the dodgiest area of the city. in any case this guy had his arm on my shoulder with a steak knife to my stomach when he asked for "your mobile... and everything else." son of a bitch.

i had on me my ipod, wallet, watch and mobile but i only gave the last item to him because i didn't think he would know that everything else i had on me was worth more. and then i think he saw how shiny it was and left. i guess it could have been worse - i was overcome by the urge to either try to fight him back or run the hell away and in the end decided that it wasn't really worth the risk getting stabbed for a 700 ringgit phone.

in any case, my phone was out of credit and has only four languages on it: english, malay and two modes of mandarin.

so take that, motherfucker. take that.

2009-02-24T20:49:00.000-08:00

i had to go climb a damn hill today. it was actually really high, and i chose to walk up a flight of stairs with my host brother because i am a stupid boy. my host mom and her friend hopped into the tram which took them up in something like 5 minutes, whereas i was sort of stumbling/gasping all over the place halfway (that itself took 35 minutes) because of how thin the air was. we reached the top about 1.5 hours later, either of us actually able to walk. we were practically hobbling our bloody way around the place.

when we reached the top the both of us were walking with what is normally referred to on incapacitated people as stumps. our chaperones were sleeping in the church, bathing in the christian atmosphere of love, joy and sweat. and then they told us that during easter week, people walk up this damned set of stairs on their knees, bare-footed. which of course begs the question: why take your shoes off if you were going to walk on your knees anyway? and also, why do it in the first place? what is wrong with you? why not walk on your face if you're into the whole self-flagellation thing?

and then we had a nice long lunch at a nice posh restaurant. we also met a llama on the way up. hello llama!

we also met a protest on the way to the hill. hello protest!

the end.

my ipod got stolen today, and we instituted an entire stripsearch at 4pm, with the boys in one room and the girls in another. we found nothing. after scouring the place from top to bottom we found it stuffed into a dustbin, wrapped in tissue paper and under the garbage bag.

2009-02-21T22:18:00.000-08:00

as some of you would have known, i wrote yet another full-length play because i have no life. so here is one photograph which i really like (credit to daniel k, btw), and it's from the scene where deborah suddenly just snaps into a million pieces after spending the entire night drunk, rifling through her bedroom to get to the gun they keep under their bed, or something. i'm not too sure myself.

in any case, congratulations on directing, kenrick. i'm suitably impressed.

2009-02-19T00:26:00.000-08:00

not sure about being appropriate, but i laughed so hard at these:

2009-02-14T23:10:00.000-08:00

some photographs. just some.

los angeles:

san diego:

san francisco

observations (now complete with irrelevant pictures!):

i woke up late. i was supposed to wake up at 4am, but then in a state of grogginess i hit all the wrong buttons on my alarm clock and radio that none of them actually sounded. i woke up by myself at 5, realised that i was going to be late, and practically flew through the elevator all the way into the shuttle bus which whisked me away to LAX in a matter of three minutes. i did reach with a lot of time to spare, and checked in two pieces of unlocked luggage (i swear i don't know what's wrong with me sometimes) which arrived in bogota unscathed.

i guess i really am a lucky person.

my hotel in san francisco wouldn't give me a late checkout despite my staying there for four nights, and so i did a survey which pointed out how unsatisfied i was: giving me the room for three more hours couldn't have really hurt anyone, could it? i made my displeasure known via e-mail and today i got a response from the hotel's general manager, offering me a free upgrade the next time i go back to the hotel.

which i will i guess; it's really affordable and well-maintained, as opposed to the sort of places which cover the mould on their walls with ugly pieces of tapestries.

it's just... when am i returning to san francisco again?

i was sandwiched between two obese men today on my flight from atlanta to bogota. i was going to say that i found it excruciating, but that's not quite accurate. it was difficult to even shift in my seat without finding my fist in someone's belly folds - quite a jigsaw puzzle of a situation, really. and the coup de grace: two lovely 4 year old girls seated right in front of me.

"give me back my pillow," one would scream.

"no."

"now." this followed by a piercing scream, moments later matched by a very similar second. they were in perfect harmony, these two little succubuses trying to outdo each other in terms of breath control. after what seemed like two eternities, they finally stopped to catch their breaths. and then they continued. i suspected that their mother was a deaf woman, which explains why she was unfazed by the siren-like wails of her children. i will not accept any other explanation - there is no excuse for allowing your kids to troll an entire air cabin without reprimand.

i was seriously contemplating wrestling the yoke from the pilots just so that i could fly the entire plane right into the ground. alas, the cockpit was locked.

the really great thing about delta airlines is that your personal entertainment set comes not only with an entire slew of films and music and games on demand, but also satellite television. on my flight to los angeles, i ended up watching home & garden television for four hours straight, alternating it with cnn.

on my flight home, the breaking news was the air continental flight which crashed into a home in buffalo, killing everyone on board and one person on the ground. they wouldn't stop repeating the coverage of this crash - and for good reason, i guess: this is the first aeroplane crash in the states since 2006 to claim fatalities, claims cnn.

in any case, it is not the sort of thing you want to be watching when you are 35,000 feet airborne.

i really love california. it is so drastically cosmopolitan and multicultural. the primary languages i have heard are english, spanish and mandarin, all three which i understand to some degree. i mean, malay is a very pretty language, i concede; it's just not a very useful one.

and then the food: the thai and korean and mexican and bad, greasy american food. the variety is a state-wide buffet spread, and the best restaurants range from overpriced fine dining to those which peddle cheap fusion sandwiches.

the museums can be free, the sights can be astounding, the activities can be endless - this is true also of many different countries, but above all, i think that my diet of hollywood films and disney merchandise has led me to feel so instantly assimilated into american pop culture.

i watched high school musical 3 on the flight back. oh, the shame.

i was embarrassed on different counts. i was embarrassed to be watching it for sure, especially at the end when there were close-ups of the faces of the main 6 actors, and they were all pimping it for the camera. i was really hoping that no one would look into my tv screen and see zac efron hamming it the hell up for my personal enjoyment.

and then there was the second-hand embarrassment i got when zac efron was falsettoing all over the place. that, and his highly ridiculous dances which involved high-kicking and chest bumping and going "yo dude" every 5 minutes. i think i turned red on his behalf when he was doing a solo dance which involved a lot of twirling and arm-flailing.

oh, the rumours. they have to be true.

2009-02-06T17:04:00.000-08:00

the idea that someone who looks like saffron burrows is dating someone who looks like fiona shaw confuddles me.

the stupid museum of modern arts was closed today, which meant that i had nothing to do after visiting the cartoon arts museum (which has a grand total of three rooms...), so i watched coraline in 3-d instead.

it was quite good, at least.

i'm not sure if i should pay 12 bucks tomorrow to visit the san francisco museum of modern art. i guess i should though, since it's the second largest of the kind in the states, after new york.

my hotel has this meet and greet service where they pair you up with a volunteer in the city and he takes you around the place. i got matched with a 40 year old hippie pot grower who studied at uc berkeley, who took me to see the huge parks and sunsets together with his dog, tiger.

lol irl.

hello from a cold and rainy san fran.

everyone's all like, "ew ben, why so random?" and let me just say it's because i've been tagged for these ridiculous things on facebook by people like yieng and yilun. and i really don't want to put the following up on my facebook profile.

16 random things about me

1. i hate doing this shit, i really do. i tell people that i find it an invasion of my privacy but it's primarily because i'm a lazy fucker.
2. i swear too much; the strangest thing is that i swear most at my closest friends. i think rashid gets it most, and let me just state for the record that he deserves every piece of it.
3. i'm getting quite good at oscar prognostication. i got at least 4 out of 5 nominees correct in every category and i think the top 4 are going to be: penn, winslet, davis and ledger.
4. i like the sun even though i know that it gives you skin cancer and stuff. i'm a sun person.
5. i've been to every continent in the world except for africa, which i plan to have visited by the end of the year.
6. i used to play the piano in church. omfg, and see what it's brought me to: paganism.
7. i have very dry skin.
8. my favourite city ever is barcelona, although san diego is actually a very close second.
9. i can make lemon chicken now. i learnt how to do it in colombia via the internet.
10. i like being alone; being around people too much pisses me off.
11. i have lost count of the times strangers have complimented me on my english, before adding "at what age did you learn to speak english?" it pisses me off too.
12. i'm a chronic gossip, and most of you who read my blog are willing conspirators. don't even try to hide it, you guys.
13. my parents read my blog.
14. sometimes my mind roams to weird places; i occasionally daydream that my parents are philanthropist billionaires who own houses around the world, and that we're all polyglots and wear expensive designer clothes and drive stupidly priced sportcars through paris and buenos aires and egypt. you know, the whole spoilt bourgeoisie thing.
15. i have an incorrigible, inconsolable, insatiable appetite for luxury. my mom thinks i picked it up from abby, but i'm not so sure that's actually true.
16. i think twilight is trash. it is misogynist, anti-feminist, unrealistic and the epitome of classless and insipid writing. screw you steph meyers for undoing everything young adult literature has strived to achieve in just the span of four books.

2009-02-05T23:03:00.000-08:00

where photos are concerned, consider these appetisers.

this is the view from my train ride to san diego.

my hotel.
hoho, free upgrade. i love you, cheap hotel deals.
one of the many museums that pave balboa park.
view from my balcony just after sunset.
--

in other, less self-absorbed news, san diego was amazing. went to the world-famous zoo, took a whole bunch of pictures (pandas are really fucking cute), and got upgraded to a room with a view. did things chinaman style (grand european tour: 9 cities in 5 days!!!!!!) due to lack of time, and i can safely say that it is really an amazing city, and that i prefer it more to LA, primarily because it feels so contained and much less sprawling. also ended up having to chat with an ancient old geezer who was really nice and welcoming and who kept talking about entirely irrelevant stuff, although i had to explain to him how the electoral college voting system works.

okay, you know what?

scratch the 'less self-absorbed' part.

"i'm actually really intelligent," i told my dad today with absolutely no sense of irony. "i'm really, really clever."

obviously he scoffed and then pulled some hackneyed phrase out of his book of mantras, like "self-praise is no praise," you know, the sort of somewhat unimaginative things you were forced to memorise in high school so that you would be awarded an A for your efforts and, with any luck, be made prefect.

"no, you don't get it," i repeated. "i'm actually really, really smart."

if you forget the terrible phrasing of the sentence, and the fact that i am famous for tooting my own horn, i guess you could surmise that i have been an incredibly lucky person. i've sailed past exams undeservingly, and accidentally ended up living in three different continents just because i felt like doing it. i was trained to be a lawyer, currently work with prostitutes, and make extra money writing for malaysia's largest english daily.

and the results: english is my first language, and yet i can speak a smattering of malay, mandarin and spanish. i've travelled extensively, and by the end of the year i would have been to every continent in the world (or so i hope). striking up a conversation with people is much easier and when people talk about the andes, i can unflinchingly say that i am living there. i've been forced to navigate maps in foreign languages and ask for help from strangers. i've learnt how to stay in five star hotels for less than half the rack price and been conned into paying too much for rank hostel dorms.

i think it's the sum of these experiences which has made me a smart person. sure, going to cambridge helped, but when i think about it, the strange and unlikely situations i have been thrust into have aided me even more.

edit: it's just occurred to me that the correct comeback should have been: yeah, too bad you're an asshole too. that would definitely have been what i would have said.

2009-01-31T22:31:00.000-08:00

hollywood was painfully boring. i'm not sure i'll be going there again any time soon. la is really a bleeding desert, and i was so close to death just trying not to wilt in the sun. but the mornings and evenings are actually chilly. strange weather, all of this. aunt says it's the desert, and i'm inclined to think it's true.

had pink's hot dog - supposedly world famous, as all guidebooks marked this place with a star. the line was long, but it didn't snake around the block like some people claimed. the chili dog was good, and i was too full of juice to bother with adding cheese and bacon and jalapenos. i guess it's a good place to go for anyone who comes here, although i'm not sure i could be arsed to go there all by myself. had to walk for an hour, and no hotdogs are worth that much.

ended up taking a bus to santa monica boulevard, and walked around the place for quite a while. not that much to do, but the place was full of rainbow flags. and then i went home for a well-cooked chinese dinner.

pretty boring, but it's all hollywood's fault.

tomorrow: either hollywood or downtown. i haven't made up my mind yet, which is not only completely dangerous, but also irresponsible. i have however, printed maps off the internet and performed my own research, which basically involves me opening a random webpage, closing my eyes and stabbing blindly at the monitor. if the tip of my index finger falls on, say, getty centre, then i go there. i have not made contingency plans if i end up stabbing the prostitution district of town, so i will have no choice but to visit that place because, you know, one does not defy fate.

i bought a guidebook today for the entire usa, so i hope it's useful when we get to florida and new york. it is also an incentive for me to get my ass to san diego, just to maximise the mileage i can derive from it.

i owe it all to my exceptionally kiasu chinese upbringing.

okay, in other news, i had a dimsum breakfast, and then i went to cheesecake factory, and then i went to in-n-out burger. in the last place they offer this thing called animal fries, which i think is absolutely inappropriate because there isn't much in the way of animal in it. what they should have named it, however, is heart attack fries, because they top the fries with thousand island dressing, mayonnaise, ketchup, and pieces of fried bacon. absolutely unacceptable health-wise; they should be documented as a form of suicide.

went shopping too, at those absolutely ridiculously priced designer outlet stores, and got myself a bunch of things i've always needed but have been too cheap to buy elsewhere. part of the thrill had to do with paying 10% of the original price of some items, but the best part came at the end, when my aunt bought me a kenneth cole watch. i died, you guys. i just sat down there with my jaw swinging and scraping across the floor as she paid for it.

"this is your angpow," she told me, as i struggled not to look completely struck by the enormity of her gesture. part of my family infuriate me, and part of them make up for the shit i have to bear with with the rest of them. such is the strangeness of this thing you normal people call life.

i got published today in the star, hohoho. "right page, omg," says michelle, and i sit there trying to figure out its significance. but it has to be a good thing, because i vaguely remember one of the advisors of echo magazine (leech: echo family, woohoo!) telling me that advertisiers belong on the right page if they pay more.

oh, and they gave me a whole page too. time to bring out the fanfare, i guess. or maybe not.

i just reached la. i had real thai food omgomg, and i was completely in heaven. and tomorrow we're going to have dimsum. what have i done to receive such good luck? i am the luckiest boy in the universe, and if you disagree with me - well, you're wrong.

2009-01-29T20:47:00.000-08:00

wah time passes really fast. in less than 2 days i'll be in LA. i will be doing trips as well to san diego and san francisco. sounds like shitloads of fun, and i hope it will be. i think it will. one of the educators from my foundation wants me to bring back a poster of obama for her. hee, so cute.

today one of the girls at the foundation mixed rat poison into her juice and drank the whole thing. and then she threw up and had to be sent to hospital. all this while i was at lunch. she's going to be fine, and she mixed something like a teaspoon of the powder into her drink, so i doubt she's going to die.

i think my dad's pretty shocked at how flippant i am about this, but like i told him, if no one dies, it's already a minor victory for us all. if she was on the streets she'd actually die of starvation, an untreated STD, or in a huge gangfight. i'm not saying one's better than the other, but the fact that she's going to be released from observation at 9pm tonight is a good thing.

laura taught me how to fight two weeks ago. she's really good at this. she says forget about any of the fancy moves. all you really need to do is learn some of those 1-2 quick combos. like, for example, when slapping someone, always use the back of your wrists. it looks effeminate, sure, but then there's where your knuckles are. as an added bonus, if you keep your nails long, they'll also leave scratch marks under the eyes, long thin lines ending just at the reddish spots where your knuckles have bruised the cheeks. also, if you need to attack anywhere near the torso, or southwards, just use your knees. more cache that way, it seems, and less energy expended too.

i've got more, but i'm not telling you any of it. just get me cross one day and watch how i... okay, not saying anymore.

2009-01-25T10:14:00.000-08:00

don't even pretend you don't like this shit, because i know you do.

oh, and i've booked my flights to LA.

does this work?

saturday: leave for LA

mon-fri: SF. screw vegas. go alone also not fun.

saturday: leave for bogota

alright, whatever - one week later, here are the photographs from my midyear evaluation camp at pacho, a town 3 hours away from bogota which is probably famous for something like having a grand total of two roads. it's not as high up as bogota is, but it's not exactly on a sprawling plain either, so the view from the place is actually somewhat spectacular, but only if you're not puking your guts out from food poisoning. true story this.

pacho also has one river, and little houses are just sort of slip-shoddily built off the ledges, which gives it this sort of a malaysian village look, and you expect these naked little indigenous kids to emerge from nowhere and then jump off their makeshift wooden balconies into the shallow river, thereby cracking their heads in the process. it's quite disappointing when nothing of that sort happens.

and this is one of the town's main roads. it's called the other road. that is literally its name, and i sort of spent the rest of the day hunting for the main road but to no avail. backpacker-explorer skills fail. i like the colours of the buildings, all cyan and bright orange. it's a typical colombian thing though, the place really looks a lot less depressing that way. i much prefer it to the gentrified malaysian way our buildings are constructed. white and glass and metal and tin cans.
our accommodation was nestled off the main roads, and the bus ride to the place was so bumpy it was enough to give most of us pounding headaches for the next few weeks. the roads needlessly branch and converge at random, since some of these paths knot themselves into a dead end anyway, rendering the whole exercise of adventure fruitless and unfulfilling.

this is the town square. it's not very large, but i do like how it is framed by the swaying leaves of wild trees. the entire area is flanked by small supermarkets, and when i say small, i would estimate it to be approximately 1/10th of sainsbury's cambridge. people stare at us wherever we go - a group of 20 foreigners wandering the place like stray animals, waiting for someone to welcome us into the warmth of their sundry shops.

this is the square itself, full with shopkeepers hawking caramel waffles topped with shredded coconut and almonds (my god, my god) and small bags of potato chips. the trees here are really tall, and make up for the lack of anything else truly impressive in that place. their landmark clock tower is this short squat thing that the round church at cambridge puts to shame.

my reading spot. the rest of them are generally sort of noisy drinkers, so this is where i would sit with my book in the afternoons while the rest of them run around shirtless playing frisbee. thank god a forceful bout of food poisoning put a stop to all their running around, although i got saddled with that predicament three days later.

campfire. i was sleeping when mia and claudia, both drunk, dragged me out to watch the fire burn in the night, gleaming sparks fizzling upwards into the night. the fire was made with bamboo shoots, and the air inside would expand before exploding, creating little booms unlike the sound of rogue vagrant firecrackers. had a 30 minute chat with christian about nothing in particular, and then i snuck back to sleep at one in the morning. the rest of them stayed up 'til five or something, when dawn was about to start the parade.
we left the next day, everyone sick and on the verge of death.

fun times.

in other news, thanks joni for the birthday card. very thoughtful of you and useless of the snailmail system to ensure that it reached me one month after my birthday.

2009-01-19T17:30:00.000-08:00

someone told me that bogota was the athens of latin america. lolwut?

okay i passed out from laughter after seeing this.

2009-01-10T22:47:00.001-08:00

oh guess what - i was chatting with my taxi driver on my way home from the embassy and we ended up talking about my slightly strange and itinerant life (chinese grandparents, born and bred in malaysia, studied in england, working in colombia) when i mentioned that i was doing social work in the country. the conversation slowly moved on to women (it always happens; it's this whole joint appreciation thing - they want people to acknowledge that colombian curves are the best, which i did, of course, with my clearly very extensive and in-depth knowledge on the subject).

he charged me a lot less than the trip would have cost.

more pointless stories in my quest for an american visa. bored? sorry. not going to pander to you. anyway the wait was from 6:30 and my interview, which lasted a whole of three minutes wast at 9 a.m. thanks for wasting my time. ended up spending the whole 3.5 hours with truman capote.

at least it was mostly in english though -- guy was interested in the sort of work i do here, and kept asking me why i chose to work with prostitutes. he was a chinese dude by the way. just thought it strange to suddenly see another 20-something year old chinese guy in colombia interviewing me for a US visa in spanish and english.

and then the sweet, sweet words: visa approved.

went to get things printed for my visa interview tomorrow, which is at a fucking stupid 5am. what the hell america, stop acting like the king of the world and demanding excessive - and highly pointless - formality. in any case, my dad e-mailed me a bunch of documents and i had to get them printed at some cybercafe (we were all sort of out of ink). every day the limits of my spanish get pushed - not too shabby, not too shabby.

brindamos por mi espanol entonces. heh, estoy solamente bromeando.

been binging on disney animated films recently, but i've bypassed what are generally known as the true classics of the repertoire (little mermaid, beauty and the beast, the lion king) and gone straight for, well, the ones which have been overlooked. these also tend to be the ones which mark the end of the disney renaissance.

of those few, tarzan proves to be most enjoyable. i remember watching it when i was much younger but not being terribly crazy about it, and i see why now. there are quite a few adult themes in the story, and the sexual tension between tarzan and jane is actually really palpable (as compared to, oh, i don't know, simba and nala, although to their credit it's a bit creepy to feel that sort of magnetism between two animals). i was quite surprised to find that the love story was the momentum driving the entire film. the villain dies from a pretty gruesome hanging, and there is a wild chase in the middle which actually is quite intense. the lack of people bursting into song sort of seals the fact that disney was trying to ease off its musical/comedy association - the furry sidekicks remain though, in some cases quite annoyingly.

as i was telling kenrick and abby the other day, the hunchback of notre dame is quite an inappropriate film for children - its overarching themes are genocide and unbridled lust. count frollo was singing about how much he desired esmeralda before wiping his face with her scarf; somewhere in there he was screaming about how she should be incinerated before he gave in to temptation, and all this time i just had a stupid smile on my face thinking, what the hell were these people thinking? how are parents going to explain to their children what hellfire really means? esmeralda also performs a pole dance at one point, and dear god, she is drawn with such effect that she could make grown men sink to their knees.

mulan is solid and to this day mushu still makes me laugh. when i was 13 i remember being able to recite all his lines from the film, which must have annoyed the hell out of everyone around me. mulan did look pretty good though, in the whole chinese porcelain doll sort of way.

am downloading anastasia now (i know it's not disney), and kenrick tells me it's one of his favourite cartoons ever. i liked it when i was a kid, although i do recall it being quite emotionally-manipulative. we'll see what happens. it can't be worse than that stupid sex and the city movie.

in other news, bogota is on sale. yay me.

2009-01-09T23:57:00.001-08:00

right, so we've got a new teacher here in the foundation called jhoanna, and she's really funny because she told me how to swear today, which, if you think about it SHOULD NOT BE THE SORT OF THINGS YOU SHOULD BE TEACHING INTERNATIONAL VOLUNTEERS.

anyway, so i was trying to figure out which compartment of my bag held my pens and i inadvertently opened the condom compartment. obviously sighting the 50 little tin-foil sealed packets, she gave me one of those elevator looks, where you look at a person from top to bottom and all the way up again as if it was an adequate form of evaluation.

"uh," i stammered. "it's for the acercamientos."

"right. you men are full of bullshit."

i wish she was right though. i ended up giving my fornicating host brother (come to think of it all my brothers - biological or not - are getting an immense amount of action...) at least half of them when he left for his girlfriend's town, which made me feel downright pathetic.

oh, the tragedy of my sexless life.

2009-01-03T10:14:00.000-08:00

lmfao. lmfao. lmfao.

watched benjamin button - finally. i think i agree with the reviews it's been receiving (somewhere between a B+ and an A-; it's god, but the first act ran too closely to forrest gump for my liking, and i hate that show. but after they bypass the necessary war segment and move on to the romantic dalliances of the eponymous character, things really pick up and the plot really starts developing.

i shall however say that cate blanchett was luminous in the film. she was ravishing in her entirety, and hit every note spot on. tilda swinton is there to booster benjamin button's liking for redheads, and does a fine job. henson plays the spunky matriarch, but is impossible to dislike. i don't think brad pitt is a weak actor, but i don't think his performance was as emotionally-charged as i would have liked it to be - there's a difference between underplaying a character and not doing much.

ah well, i guess i see why everyone is saying that it's going to be an oscar shoo-in though. technical merits and a luscious score bla bla bla (all worthy, btw). if only the plotting was more solid. i definitely prefer milk and slumdog.

we spent our new year at villavicencio, a town the size of kuantan which happened to be equally as hot. it was fun, because we went there with a business partner of my mom, jhon, who spent most of his time there wondering around in a drunk state haha. when the clock struck twelve we threw lentils into the air and ate 12 grapes a person, all the while making wishes with every single one of them. hopefully this year my dreams will become true. or something.

this is parque lineal, and reminds me a lot of taman gelora, it even has a pasar malam equivalent lining its corner. i had a chorizo and was tempted to buy for myself a pineapple filled with icecream, but decided that that would have ruined my appetite. should have bought it. oh, regret is 20/20.
this was at the parque de los ocarros, which is a biological park cum zoo. and... here you have me and gerly, paying 2 ringgit to pose in these cardboard cardouts. confession: i'm really not into this sort of thing, but my host mother is, so, you know. if you ever wondered what i would look like as an obese red indian here you go.

two monkeys swinging in a tree. in the other cage there were two brawling monkeys, which was quite lol as well. but i thought only one photograph of primates would be sufficient, and this was the more aww-inducing one (especially if you compare it to the other one, which was the animal kingdom version of domestic abuse).
green snake. nothing that special except that i know yeepin hates them. this is dedicated to you, you asshole, for drawing spiders on my birthday cards. i hope you accidentally eat one of them some day.
my host mom and jhon's aunty, nelsi. look at how happy we all are with the icecreams melting the hell off our fingers.

and... we end with a shot of parrots, for absolutely no reason at all. byebye.

2008-12-26T19:30:00.001-08:00

for joni, who never fails to remind me that thinking is better than showing.

i don't think anyone really knows who my dad is.

i remember the times when we would be talking rubbish over dinner at cambridge and eyes would flare up in recognition whenever i brought my mother and her latest hijinks up. my father, on the other hand, seldom happens to be a topic of conversation. to an extent, this is because he's generally done less remarkable things compared to my mother; my mother lugs dubious choices everywhere she goes in her luxury bags. she chooses to go shopping instead of attending my graduation lunch and occasionally manages to get herself invited to judge the local tranvestite beauty contest. these are the sort of things that stick in your memory, especially when you compare them to my dad's non-confrontational, strait-laced approach of doing the most politically correct thing atany given moment. he's not the guy who would skip a lunch with my director of studies because, oh, he needs a new pair of leather shoes and there's a sale at bally right this moment.

but if there's anything he should get credit for, it's how his moderation has kept my family from falling off the cartwheels of sanity. we've nearly run off the ledge before, in sometimes frankly spectacular manners: i remember how he got into a fistfight with my fourteen year old brother whom he had caught in the act of running away from home, and how disdainful he was of my mother's conservative parenting techniques. he wasn't the most liberal person i knew, but he was liberal when it was necessary.

my brother, for the sake of being provocative, once asked him if he could marry a malay woman. my dad just shrugged and said, if that's what you want. my mom had to pick her jaw off her lap. i think she would have summoned some sort of a protest from within herself if she could have found a justifiable opposition. my dad's principles were simple: if you're old enough to decide who you want to marry, you're probably old enough to make the decision for yourself. it could have been a smart on-the-fence response on his part - i wouldn't know, and i don't think so - but i always thought it a pretty reasonable line to take anyway.

he had insisted that i be sent to a malay school instead of a chinese one; i don't think it's possible to describe how much i owe him for this decision. apparently, they had been quarrelling over this for a long time - my mom wanted me educated in mandarin, my dad thought it was just the sort of thing that would have robbed me of my childhood. he was right in so many ways: if i had been sent to chinese school, i would have hated primary school, i would have been frequently slapped for not finishing my homework on time (a trait i still carry to this day), i would never have grown up so westernised, i would never have felt estranged from what people tell me should be my culture, i would never have been driven to seek comfort from books due to my perceived displacement, i would never have learnt to observe so keenly the differences between myself and the people who surrounded me, i would never have grown up inquisitive and non-conformist, i would never have gone to cambridge, i would never have come to colombia, and i would never have been happy.

when i was fifteen, i got caught up in this whole christian revolution which was supposed to be taking over the country - words like revival and glory and fire for god were thrown around and mistakened for actual spiritual enlightenment; social statuses in church could be bartered for religious fervency. there were books which lurked on shelves detailing the stories of martyrs who had died for the cause, and christian music had come to encompass screaming bands whose music dwarfed their semi-literate lyrics. suddenly, christianity was cool.

it was in the car one day, after i had been unwillingly dragged home from another one of those christian events where rolling on the floor in holy laughter came highly recommended, when he told me in the quiet drone of his voice: i think you're slipping into fanaticism here. he was right, of course - i was drunk on the holy spirit, so to speak. things had to be taken in moderation, otherwise you'd wake up one morning only to find yourself mired in a state of dissonance which pits a crushing religious guilt against a more workable, more pragmatic approach to apparently insoluble problems. i know people who are still searching for answers such gruelling dichotomies, but i think he gave me the tools to solve such crises by letting me know that it's possible to be so blinded by dogma that you're unable to do the right (or in this case, rational) thing.

we don't agree on everything - i believe in hiring an interior designer when remodelling instead of going about it via a DIY approach; i believe that better products cost more; i believe he should do something with his life when he retires apart from just travelling; i believe in gay marriage - but i guess that's alright.

we don't speak to each other all that much, and i'm not sure we really have all this while; my mother normally acts as a proxy between the both of us. the only e-mails i receive from him are reminders that i should keep my credit card usage to a minimum if possible. and yet this arrangement works for me; it always has. it would be painfully awkward if one morning i found out that he had turned into an excited parent brimming with affection - i have my mom for that, and one of those is quite enough for someone as aloof as i am.

but the things i've learnt from him though - they have been the ones worth learning.

2008-12-24T22:11:00.000-08:00

best film of the year, for sure: slumdog millionaire

very close seconds would be a tie between the dark knight and milk. don't think the rest will be able to come close to these three.

christmas time is oscar time! milk, revolutionary road and slumdog millionaire - life is almost complete, except for the fact that i'm lacking doubt, the reader, and benjamin button. i'm not sure if i should download the wrestler or not - it doesn't seem to be the thing i would like to sit through, and mickey rourke is mr. thugface. ditto with rachel getting married; anne hathaway is hot, but it really feels like i've seen the schtick done before in pieces of april and junebug. i know they're obviously not all the same, but...

maybe i shouldn't watch revolutionary road tonight. christmas night is not the night to watch a film about a depressed, dysfunctional and disintegrating family unit, although, god, i swear i love those movies.

watched while you were sleeping again last night though, and it brought back fond memories of childhood on a white rattan couch with grey and white striped cushions.

short christmas post -- i received this sombrero for my birthday. words cannot describe how happy i am to finally own one of these. i also got two t-shirts and a pair of socks (yay, no more cold feet in the night!).

a group picture, except i'm not in there because i'm camera shy and the one snapping the photograph. there are three families here, two of which are single-parent.
stuffed turkey! quite different from what we normally have, but incredibly satisfying nonetheless.
the cuteness of this little thing is rivalled by how annoying it is.
and maybe tomorrow morning: photos of christmas at the foundation! more cute kids! more trannies! everything you've wished for (you know who you are)!

travel itinerary

2008-12-23T20:27:00.000-08:00

june 20 - 30 colombia (11 days total)

bogota (1 days)

santa marta (4 days)

cartagena ( 4 days)

bogota (2 days)

july 1 - 8 peru (8 days total)

lima (2 days)

cusco (5 days)

lima (1 day)

july 9 - 15 chile (8 days total)

santiago de chile (1 day)

easter island (5 days)

santiago de chile (2 days)

july 16 - 25 argentina (10 days total)

buenos aires (2 days)

glacier park (3 days)

buenos aires (2 days)

iguazu falls (3 days) - 12 hour bus ride to...

july 25 - august 5 brazil ( 11 days total)

florianopolis (3 days) - 11 hour bus ride to...

sao paolo (4 days) - 6 hour bus ride to...

rio de janeiro (4 days)

2008-12-18T21:31:00.000-08:00

i was going to actually write something else, after the slightly embarrassing episode that was yesterday's post (it wasn't really much of one, i guess - it was more the product of random inchoate ideas colliding into each other in a tragic mishap than anything else) but then my parents read this blog. and i think a couple of my uncles do, too.

you know, my older blogs were just password-protected empty spaces on the internet where i could throw up verbally and have someone read it and tell me to stop emoting all over the place, and to at least use punctuation even if i was being all moody and self-centred. joni pointed out the other day, quite rightly, that these days i just blog because people tell me to, and that this obligation also comes with certain impositions such as self-censorship and a bagload of photos people aren't particularly excited about - except for lucy, i guess. (she likes the photographs.)

in any case, i'll just keep my mini rant to myself and lull myself to the sleep with chris cornell's ave maria. oh yes, you read that right.

i've been sleeping really late over the past few weeks; it could just be the sloth, but i'm having trouble falling asleep again, just like in my sps year. and anyone who knew me then would know that i... you know what, never mind.

good night.

2008-12-17T15:33:00.000-08:00

this meiyin damn bising la: if you don't update your blog, i will refuse to read it anymore. but truth is that i've been working for the past two weeks to sort of make up for my complete slackassness and my trip to the caribbean.

in any case, i think christmas will reveal itself to be a season which begs for posts of its own, and at the end of the year i'm going to villa vicenzio with my host mom, since her (real) son's going to visit his girlfriend in a city eight hours away. so i guess real updates will come... soon.

which sort of doesn't actually make this a REAL post, to be quite honest about the whole thing; it's sort of those "a real post will be coming soon" posts.

i have discovered the joy of torrenting, and have spent a lot of my time downloading films to watch at night. so far i've watch shitloads, and they mostly are really good. since i'm not a film reviewer, i sort of categorise them loosely: shows i would recommend to others wildly, shows i would considering watching again, and shows i wouldn't touch with the other end of a ten foot pole.

you can tell which group is which from the list on the right, and you'll realise that quite a lot of them belong to the first two categories. this is because i wouldn't willingly download films which belonged in the last group - it's a waste of my bandwidth, and time, and sanity. i can only stand so many bloody disney kid-oriented comedies before i subconsciously fashion a noose out of my cashmere scarves.

i've been picking up spanish through certain films though, which is a good thing. this weekend i'm going to visit this chinese restaurant proprietor - which necessarily means that i have to speak mandarin to him, at least until i can convince him to switch to spanish. i downloaded the wedding banquet for this purpose - food, restaurants, old chinese people - maybe i'll pick up some choice words along the way; hero is also in the queue, although somehow i doubt a wuxia film will be able to provide me with any relevant conversational trains of thought.

while we're on languages, let me just say that it is incredibly difficult to teach a game of chess in your fourth language. i don't think i could even do it in mandarin, and this morning i had to teach andres felipe how the game works.

"the horse can jump over other people, and the soldier can only move forward in single increments..." - i believe i replaced the phrase 'single increments' with 'one box' - "...and a soldier eats another thing diagonally. and when it reaches the end it becomes a queen. and the goal is to trap the king so he will die when he moves. no, put the pope (actual chess piece: bishop) down. how many times do i have to tell you that the pope cannot jump over the queen. no, the queen cannot jump over the king either. pieces of the same colour cannot eat each other so for god's sake put the damn thing down now."

que horror.

okay -- yieng, i now know your birthday is this saturday (i nearly forgot about it... sorry!), so, happy birthday!

i really can't believe we've been friends for ten years (technically nine because we were enemies in form one, do you remember? we would stick our tongues out at each other and then look away abruptly right in the middle of our exams. hahaha such stupid children we were). fuck, that is really long though.

nine years of gossip and driving out at night to the beach and sharing the most salacious secrets over the internet and e-mailing each other and then sulking because the other one didn't reply in the following 36 hours. hahahaha, and we were in the same class all the time right? and i remember you were a prefect, but somehow we were friends - and i said your a-line prefect skirt was nicer than chaw kuin's flared one. and then we were in st. john's ambulance and went for the nationals where you won something and i was damn proud of you for knowing how to mend a complete broken fibula or whatever.

moreover, i think you were the only one who bought me candy on those stupid ass "candy days" where dixie would get like 2 million of them and then donate some to me out of pity, seeing as to how i got more or less none. and then you bought me one and i was happy for the whole week! and this was in form two, because it was during the period where yee yen and i were torturing saida hussein together. (title for yeeyen's public speaking speech for class was: "saddam hussein sucks." and then i remember this kid called anas whose speech was: "today i'm going to talk about keeping quiet. it sounds like this." then he kept quiet for the whole minute HAHAHAHA.)

also, we both accidentally did well for our spm (okay la, you were expected to do well. mine was a complete fluke, until sindhu's mom - puan kala jenking - had to ask me "are you sure it's your name or not. how did you do it?" shit, she's damn evil, i hate her; she gave me B for kerajinan in our school leaving cert. i guess i deserved it, but still...) and then you went to imu and i went to sunway but every holiday we could come back and then meet up and continue our bitching.

which reminds me: lamchoppie told me this stupid ass secret about one of our former classmates, and i wasn't sure if it was true or not, so i need to double check it with you. but you're not online now, so i'll do it tomorrow.

ah, how i miss you yieng.

(i was going to put up a photo of the both of us together but it doesn't exist, unless you count our old 4 amanah photos. nine years and no photo of us together - pathetic! we need to take one when we meet up again sometime next year.)

2008-12-07T20:23:00.000-08:00

okay so we have this nativity scene at home right, and i've been looking up and down for baby jesus. everything is there: cows, ducks, mary, joseph, pigs, sheep, but no baby jesus. so i asked my host mom if anyone had kidnapped him.

to which she said, no. obviously not. it's just the 10th of december. the statuette of baby jesus comes out at 12:00am on the 25th of december.

haha - i was compiling a christmas mix cd and i found kylie's santa baby, which is so bloody vampy that i cannot leave it out of my cd in good conscience. fiona apple's frosty the snowman is quite good too, as is winter wonderland by the cocteau twins. like my friends tell me, it's a little bit like the destruction of christmas integrity.

sigh, i actually really love christmas (songs). i always hated the sort of things we would sing in church - i think the best songs are the more secular ones like have yourself a merry little christmas or i'll be home for christmas.

y feliz navidad a todos, otra vez.

quick post of pictures here, primarily about my trip today to corfieras, which is this sprawling crafts complex in bogota, which is officially my favourite place on earth now. i can spend hours in there - it has a food court and dessert stalls and stuff. damn you guys, that place is amazing, as are the caramel and milk waffles they sell there.

christmas in bogota is actually quite awesome. everything is lit up in red and white and gold, and the atmosphere is very festive. b in the middle stands for the bogota beer brewery.

random joke: so now i'm undergoing this phase where i'm listening to this colombian poprock musician called juanes, and he has a song called fijate bien, which roughly translates to look again, and obviously i wasn't really paying attention to the lyrics of the song and i thought it was just another love ballad, because well, it sounds like the song where you croon about how your lives have been destroyed but you guys will move on and look for love again or whatever the hell it is. right?

it's not. it's a song about landmines and the children who step in it. hence look again.
this is one of the EIGHT halls in the area, which charges a 30 ringgit entrance fee, but is well worth the payment.
all these are handweaved and can run up to 600 pounds for a huge woven vase.
i bought a scarf here! the guy was using this old school weaving machine that i felt that i had no choice but to just buy something that was made in it, haha.
so many toys for children here, there was this amazing 20 pound chess set which was made of wood, and where the pieces were handcrafted lions with fur manes. damn bleeding cute. i need to buy it when i go there next.
jewellery, all handmade. bla bla bla. and bags too. the bags in the end are really expensive because of how fine the weaving is.
I LOVED THIS SECTION YOU GUYS it was just a bunch of mobiles you suspend from the ceiling which move when you give them a gentle tug. they will slowly bounce up and down in the air, and they are really, really beautiful and intricate and sort of pricey.
this is another shop. the craftmanship here not so nice, but look at the amount of mobiles in this small space.
i bought something from this shop for my host cousin sister for christmas. look at the mobile on the upper right. it is magnificent. this shop has seriously cute stuff.
marionettes! the left one is a samurai, a christmas gift for my host brother. the one of the right is mine - some general from cartagena which did really cool things - i didn't read the box hard enough, sorry. but these are made of 1000000% awesome. i was like a five year old in that puppet store. oh, the times when i used to be a puppeteer for children church.
i bought this from the aforementioned mobile store :D for my host cousin obviously, but got fake teddy bears and stuff one haha so cute.
and that's all. merry christmas from all of us here in bogota.

2008-12-05T19:34:00.001-08:00

this post is entitled what i did today, and it's going to be about what i did today. surprise! surprise!

so today we went for an acercamiento again, because i practically begged for it since it was a pretty great experience the last time round, and this time we ventured deeper into the territory - we visited a rentboy at his room, and man, was he high as hell when he opened the door to us. his room was dark in the middle of the day, and we were listening at the door before we knocked since we didn't want to disturb him in the middle of his trade. he lives in a dingy room in a shophouse, and each floor is divided into countless rooms which are rented out to them. let me just say that it looks like the sort of place where you expect to find a lot of dead bodies stashed behind one of the many doors adorning the maze. creepy, with winding stone staircases in the centre of the building.

we also went to visit the other whorehouses (i'm so sorry i'm so politically incorrect) which were decorated in time for christmas. there were wreaths and garlands of holly and berries and santa clauses all over the place. it was actually a very incongruent sight. underneath the festive decorations would be a row of tranvestites decked in their underwear sitting in a row under the flickering lights, waiting for the next guy to pull up. and one did, actually - he was in a black SUV and glasses, and gesturing for valentina or whatever her name was to come towards him, which she did. and our conversation sort of ended there. her price was probably unsatisfactory though, since he drove away five minutes later after some slight haggling.

it's really hard to be discreet when you do these things. like, there is this temptation to see if she's done the entire package and is now a bona fide woman, or if some things/problems are still left - you know - hanging in the air. and this particular one who was posing at a crossroads was clad in a sea blue bikini and thong set, smiling at me as we were handing out condoms. it took all the goddamned restraint in the world to prevent me from verifying what i have been dying to know. sorry bb, she was right there in front of me: to sneak a peek then would have had dire consequences.

but then again, i managed to in the end in covert desperation. i win at life.

anyway, you know what, my new job title is condom mule. because i have the largest bagpack (not a euphemism) at the foundation, it is chockfull of industrial strength prophylactics meant to be given out to prostitutes. so i walked around the whole day lugging little round rubber pieces wrapped in tin foil from brothel to brothel, helping the social worker hand them out to those who needed them. the leftovers are still sitting in my bag, as i'm typing this post out at 11pm at night. i'll just hoard them for next week, when we set about giving these marginalised people early christmas contraceptives.

ah, well.

i must say it's one hell of a job, even if i don't get paid for it.

2008-11-25T18:11:00.000-08:00

okay i'm damn bloody lazy the bus ride nearly killed me okay? so i'm going to just put a bunch of photos here from santa marta and then go to bed. or read a david sedaris article (i love him so much i am borderline obsessive). oh also my mom says i can go backpacking around the states. yay! thanks mom! this is your shoutout since you always complain that i don't give you and dad enough recognition wtf.
okay. palm tree. nice picture.
background is taganga, attractive fishing village near santa marta. bb and yilun we are staying here in june okay? beats the real santa marta.
christmas lights are garish green hahaha i tell you this mia is damn straightforward. like she never mince her words one, like main tampar only. so she looked at the tree and was like WHY IS THIS GREEN THIS IS SO STUPID PEOPLE HERE ARE STUPID. and i died laughing.
damn cute right their christmas decorations. in this lousy town also nicer than oxford street. london sucks christmas time. the trafalgar tree is so tragic it makes me weep. no cutesy bouncy elves carrying starfish/the star of david (sorry i dunno which one).
another picture of taganga. this was on the hiking trail to the other beach wtf the hike got cactus one, lining the paths and stuff. damn weird.
okay this is our national park room. see the leather bag there? that's my replacement bag. yeah. the stupid carolina herrera one gave up on me and ripped open in the rain in cartagena. i dowan free perfume bags anymore, they nearly kill my laptop.
tayrona. this was in arrecifes, but obviously you can't swim here because of the riptides, even if it's on a much sunnier day. death toll here is like... i dunno how much, but must be damn high if stupid american tourists keep tempting fate and go jumping into the water as if they had undergone dolphinoplasties (haha south park reference, i think only rashid and yilun will get it).
tayrona also. it's actually really nice la, and then we got to ride horses also. dunno what that island is doing in the middle of nowhere but i like watching waves collide against it in absolute futility.
me and mia at playa grande. bb that is my fishbone necklace i bought on a whim - my first accessory ever (*beams* lololololol i know you get that reference). once i get sick of it i'll give it to my bro.
this is the super huge juice. can die drinking it, but then because i'm so damn cheap i end up dying every time i visit this restaurant.
the empty santa marta streets on a sunday, where everyone just hides and does nothing. boring town this one, not like cartagena. in cartagena sunday is beach day. here, it's like do nothing and stay home and watch tv and binge on popcorn day.

okay no more already i'm so obviously incoherent and cant even punctuate baibai.

--
okay right so tayrona sucked because because we were all getting beaten up to pieces by the rain. which sucked.

the good news is we had to ride horses through the hills to the other bay because it was too muddy for us to walk, and as it turned out it was pretty goddamn awesome - we had to learn how to steer our horses and turn left and right and how to make sure our horses didn't throw us off the cliffs into the leafy chasms, which i'm sure were much deeper than they looked. so there you go i learnt how to ride tame horses, which is a pretty pathetic sounding achievement.

let's see what else. we were overcharged for food and drinks, but that as to be expected. the night was a mosquito and sandfly festival, we watched the waves collide with the shore tumultuously - that was quite fun, actually.

okay la, i'm going backpacking from june to october next year and will probably cover both americas. if you want to join me on a bunch of legs you better tell me fast. kenrick is coming for the brazil and argentina and peru legs. or something.

maybe it will just be abby and me, but that will be fine - just fine - with me.

2008-11-23T16:29:00.000-08:00

reached santa marta today - no more free internet. about 40p per hour, and i'm too cheap to pay more than that per day. we're going to the national park tomorrow, yippee! lot of walking and searching for natural lagoons formed in the sand. the day after we're going to a fishing village which lonely planet says is attractive. no idea wtf that means.

the hostel we booked was horrible, so we moved out on the spot and had to pay a night's rent. lady was shouting at us as we left, so maybe it was a good idea to go anyway. she would probably have poisoned us had we decide to stay put. there were mosquitoes swarming the area, and there was no door to the toilet - what the hell is this fuckery? it was just a room connected to a chamber which housed a toilet. dear god.

so we moved to this other hostel which was much more expensive, but actually seemed a lot less of a nightmare. to be fair the former wasn't entirely mavi onur, but i don't know, it seemed like a horrible touristless place where madmen would chop you to pieces in your sleep and we weren't in the mood for that after the brilliance of our accommodation in cartagena.

dinner made up for it thought. i paid about 3 pounds for this amazing seafood stew at this local joint our hotel manager told us to visit, and mia paid the same for her prawn rice which had more prawns than rice. and the fresh juices didn't come in mugs. they came in jugs. at 50p per jug. and the jug could hold maybe 2.5 litres of juice, or perhaps more. they were the size of my face, you guys.

okay that's all. tomorrow need to go national park.

2008-11-21T18:47:00.000-08:00

okay, i just came back from playa blanca, so i'm really tired as hell, but due to popular demand --

below is the mud volcano - it's a real volcano, but it spews mud instead of lava. sometimes it spews sulphur bubbles which really stink.the volcano.
this is the top of the mud volcano, and inside it are a bunch of floating masseurs who do a really bad job but charge you only 1 pound, so it all sort of evens out in the end anyway.
mia and i both covered in mud - when we were done we were took down to this lagoon where we were all stripped naked and had our faces and bodies scrubbed. they also washed our bathing suits in the meantime. some random australian guy was freaking out because he thought the woman would scrub his privates too.
this is playa blanca, which jonitha says looks exactly like tioman.camwhore schmamwhore.
another sunset picture.
the hammocks in which we slept - the island has neither electricity or fresh water supply, so it was really something to spend a night here all sweaty and sandy and sticky with the strange mixture of mosquito repellen and sunblock.
the guy who ran the hammock place, hugo, was amazing: he loves the sea and does fishing at four in the morning, and cooks the seafood for dinner the next day. for dinner he made us this massive plate of lobster, octopus, crayfish, fish, salad, potatoes and rice which was bleeding amazing due to the freshness of the ingredients. the price was minimal, and i had my dinner with pina colada.

and he charged us a really low price and had me feeling bad the whole day. and then he elected not to charge me for a soft drink the next day, to compound it all. sigh. i feel indebted enough to want to go back to atone.
this was taken when we were on the speedboat on the way to the island, our hair streaming in the wind. okay that's it. i'm damn tired already. the end. bye bye.

2008-11-18T18:51:00.000-08:00

when we reached cartagena, it was pouring cats and dogs (but not real ones, yilun) - and it really sucked because we had no place to stay. we were supposed to stay at the home of a friend's friend, except that the person apparently died or something (i'm sure he didn't, but considering the outcome of the whole thing he might as well just have) and so we ended up just picking a random hotel out of our guidebook. to our surprise, it was not only comfortable and excellent but also offered free wi-fi. lemons - lemonade.cartagena post-rain. cartagena is an extremely beautiful city you guys. it's divided into old and new town, and this is the old town; the new town looks probably what i expect downtown miami to look like, and the combination of the both is quite something rare. this is obviously old town, which reminds me a little of venice. when it rains, the roads get flooded all the way to the sidewalk, and it actually even looks like venice, although with sailing cars and buses.
street vendors along one of the oldtown roads - my goal is to go around scouring for street food tomorrow, right after my volcano mud bath.
this is plaza santo domingo at night, which is inundated with tourists and tables and tablecloth and touts. you can't see it here, but right in front of the plaza is a troop of dancers which are performing some sort of a tribal dance - which is a pretty cool way to have dinner.
mia and i wondering through old town, searching for a replacement shoulder bag since the one i was using practically tore into half as i was running through the heavy rain this afternoon; thankfully all my things just cluttered out onto the cement floor of a local restaurant instead of overflowing sewer water. i would have seriously cut a bitch had the latter happen.
sunset picture, as requested by my dearest abby. this was during the 3km walk from old town to new town, which we did out of complete boredom. it was both a scenic and exhilarating trek, our boots muddied from the aftermath of the rain and our shirts dampened with sweat and salty sea mist.
dinner - we were too cheap to go to this posh place which served 50USD meals, so we did extensive web searching and ended up in this seaside restaurant (or more accurately, shack) run by an ex professional boxer which served right about one of the best seafood soup (cozuelo) i've ever had in my life - there were crab claws and crab fibres in my soup, among the prawns, fish and calamari.
the end. notice the coast of sculpted rocks and jagged buildings and how they blend into each other, as if intended by nature.

2008-11-14T19:21:00.000-08:00

just an announcement you guys. i'm leaving in 12 hours and i will have the above album to accompany me for all 24 hours of my bus ride. SEE YOU AROUND YOU GUYS AND MERRY BRITMAS '08!

--
random stuff:

1. i'm going to cartagena and santa marta from monday onwards with mia - it's going to be a two week long trip which will involve sleeping in hammocks by the beach and lounging lazily about in the caribbean.

2. i think i want to spend my january in LA, and i'll probably take trips all the way to vegas and san francisco, as well. now, if i can just get past the horror that is the visa application.

3. i thought there would be hope for grey's anatomy. there isn't. don't pretend, yilun: after hunt sexually abusing cristina and izzie seeing nothing but the love of her life who died two seasons ago and the interns having their own underground stitching workshop and sadie, who has to be the most horrible addition to the show since lexie, it is officially sort of trash. but i have the feeling that i'll watch it anyway.

4. my quarterly evaluations went well, even though i tend to be reserved at work when i have nothing to do. on the other hand, i have learnt how to manage children (male, female and tranvestite) whose primary goal is to seduce me. i'm officially used to being sexually objectified.

5. i'm working on a small project these days, during my free time. maybe in the end it will all collate together beautifully and be borderline publishable.

6. we went to the park again today, and i felt bad about my caribbean trip since i won't be around when emmanuel leaves the house. he can't wait to go back to his family and boyfriend, apparently, and they're all leaving the country soon. i think they're moving to spain illegally.

7. i gave relationship advice to my cousin yesterday in spanish. consider: spanish, and then relationship advice.

8. breakfast at tiffany's is one of the gentlest, most wistful books i've ever had the opportunity to read. kavalier and clay was a spectacular novel of epic proportions, of course, which made the retreat into the personal and neurotic world of holiday golightly and fred (surname: capote, or so it does feel) such an excellent reprieve from the sweeping prose and lavish machinations of mike chabon.

9. i taught math the other day, and i had to spend 15 minutes trying to figure out how long division works. oh, the bane of the calculator! and today i spent another 15 minutes trying to recall how to divide fractions.

10. sun, sand, sour sea. three more days.
11. pushing daisies has been cancelled. my life as i know it is officially over.

2008-11-07T20:48:00.000-08:00

okay i know you guys have been whining a lot for photographs of the place i work at and the kids i work with, so here are some pictures, finally. and i would just like to post a gentle reminder here that we not resort to name calling, alright? i actually work at this place and i don't want to get fired. let us leave the overt nasties to a less public forum - although if you manage to sneak in a seemingly innocuous phrase which turns out to be a sharp jibe you score brownie points - because i know what you people are capable of (you know who you are…). if you are that desperate to make fun of people do it via msn with me and we can have a ball of a time.

but not here: i sort of have a reputation to keep.

anyway above is the shed in which the computers are housed, and i sort of like the leafy overhang as well as the cyan paint, but let me just say that this is where i have my english classes i.e. a converted garage. not that i was expecting anything more glamorous, but a shed and a makeshift whiteboard is a bit of a downer to teach in.

here we have america and maru, who are a teacher and a nutritionist (or something), and beside them are diana, who loves clinging to me, at times literally, and it makes me want to pull my hair out and beg for privacy in alternating oscillations. but girl is fierce, you people - she cut her previously long hair herself with a pair of kitchen scissors over the weekend because she wanted to. i wouldn't trust myself to do that to be quite honest, which always surprises me how willing weijin was to let andrew do him the favour.

i walk past this every monday and thursday to work, although the novelty's worn off. that happens when you have to walk 20 minutes up a hill in the morning and then down it at the end of the day. this picture was snapped when we were out taking the kids on a walk, which was a complete nightmare. a d-grade commercial centre to these kids is like an amusement park ride sans seatbelts - you go around a bend and suddenly, poof!, these children are gone, and you have to spend 20 minutes just locating and then collecting them from accessory stores and the bottom of park benches.
this is sara, who is really nice and leaves me the hell alone when she sees that i've had a bad day. also, unlike julio, she doesn't keep asking me for my dictionary so she can ask me for the translations of words like s3xuality, s3x, s3xy, s3xed and s3xual. the numbers are there so that my blog does not pop up on google (the horror!) if some oversexed moron decides to google them - i don't think i want to look as if i'm pimping these kids out. WHICH I AM NOT.
martha, who is another one of the nicer ones. the girls in the house really love camwhoring though; i'm not sure i should bring my camera there again. they made me snap as many pictures of them as possible in different positions. after a while it just got boring for me.

and dyed hair at 12? geez.

although this reminds me of this tragically cruel (though not exactly for me) incident when i was twelve: my friend's mom was a hairstylist and she dyed his hair, and when he told us "my mother dyed my hair!" my other friend went "your mother died?" and then the both of us nasty things laughed for 20 minutes. i was such a horrible kid, you guys.
clockwise from left: laura, diana and johana. they insisted i take this picture for them, having been inspired by what i believe was a shampoo commercial. or maybe it was for tampons. you can't really tell with these things - all you see are a bunch of women with long hair donning what i believe are marijuana-induced smiles and prancing through green flowery bucolic fields looking as if they have been liberated from either the dandruff or heavy blood flow which has been plaguing them for the last ten years of their lives, and now their life is finally and impossibly complete. clearly, euphoria comes in a plastic bottle sometimes.
alejandro, the resident cook. well, they actually have a cook in the house, so he's probably the assistant or something - he's always in the kitchen. he's actually quite funny, although i only understand about 50% of his jokes; he makes me draw pictures for him and to date i've probably drawn more or less six or seven pictures of the most random things i can think of (including: wolves, turtles, the alphabet); he probably wants to make them into a massive collage to hang in his room, and i don't have the heart to tell him that my drawings are worth as much as toilet paper.
this is carlos villalobos, which is one of the most amazing surnames i have ever come across in my life, since it actually means village of wolves. i'd tell you a lot more about him, but most of the things he says to me are basically unprintable. i guess i could tell you that he does a pretty mean copy of the hollywood dance, which had madonna frenching both britney spears and christina aguilera to, though. i try to get him to stop before he snogs anyone; i succeed most of the time.
and i am ending this post with a sunset of bogota, because this is what i come home to sometimes. it's not like it makes my day or anything (by that time my day has not only gone, but has also done so in an unsavoury fashion), but a vermillion sky (i realise that this is not the case in the above photograph) at the end of an hour long bus ride does stifle the stress of dealing with difficult children somewhat, although it probably isn't a replacement for panadol and/or lithium and/or alcohol.

p.s. i managed to camouflage a couple of low blows up there - let's see if you can spot them.

2008-11-03T10:18:00.000-08:00

another super picture post time - fewer words, more pictures, as per popular demand (bastards!). but we shall anoint the beginning of this post with a special dedication to abby, whom this particular brand of bread reminded me of.
okay, now to the real stuff. we had this international dinner thing on halloween night, for us to sort of just meet up with each other and chat, and we were supposed to bring a typical dish from our country - i had fried rice delivered to my place from a chinese takeaway and passed it off as my own since it got superb reviews. i know, i know: i'm totally going to hell.
mia and i, and i think we could be taking a trip to cartagena in a couple of weeks time if i can decide whether to brave the 24 hour bus ride there (and then back, bloody hell!) or not. also, as is evident from the photograph below, i've obviously grown darker and fatter.

short edit: kenrick was all "are you sunburnt? why are you black and red?" when he saw the photo below; and the answer, plainly, is that i was not sunburnt, kenrick.

i was only drunk. myriam, from austria, who came all the way from mesitas for rock al parque, which is the rock version of jazz al parque. i didn't really bother going for the thing, since it has been raining for the past three days. not even the lure of bloc party can drag me out of the comfy snuggle of my computer sofa.
hannes, who's swiss and apparently met his new-found colombian girlfriend on a bus in bogota. their eyes met, and they laughed, and he asked her out for coffee, or so the story goes.
halloween's really big here in colombia; people do dress up for the whole day, and my host brother told me that the university was inundated with sarah palins and jokers a la heath ledger, which made the costumes these guys had pretty tragic. right here you have claudia, who is apparently some sort of a devil; mia, who is herself; and tino, the man in black. we were apparently supposed to go to some absolutely amazing house party after the dinner...
...which turned out to be disappointing and horrific. it was full of americans who were drunk and unwilling to do anything else but snog each other in dark corners or on the roof. their costumes did border on awesome though, unlike ours, although i must say that christian did a decent job dressing up as a cross between jesus and a hippie. somehow, i don't think that was the desired effect.
and here we have loda, who rented a superman outfit, or maybe he made it himself since it does look a little bit too straggly, design-wise, with kitchen gloves, a tablecloth cape, and black boxers worn on the outside. he probably made it himself, now that i think about it.and we end with kristien looking pissed off! poor girl was having the flu, and didn't enjoy herself at the halloween party, although that could be said for all of us, except for maybe superman and hippie jesus up there.
epilogue: i was browsing through my favourite gossip site (hoho!) and found the below cartoon, which i think really summarizes a lot of my sentiments towards organised religion. since i decided to give up an organised religion myself - which had done nothing more than disappoint me repeatedly - altogether, a new perspective has been starting to emerge from my agnostic viewpoint. when you're on the other side of things, you see how aggressive, intrusive, patriarchal, totalitarian and intolerant organised religion in general can be.

i still love you guys though - to borrow a line from a certain famous book: love the religious person, hate the religion.

2008-10-30T19:27:00.000-07:00

now let me tell you what benkoh and lucy said, okay?

lucy: ew your blog sucks. i read stuff for 12 hours a day and your blog is like more stuff to read and it sucks. i want pictures.
benkoh: after i finish trawling through 200 pages of european union i have no time for your crap okay. i want pictures.
(all paraphrased by the way, i'm sure they were a lot more diplomatic when they were telling me this.)

i am deeply hurt and shall bow to peer pressure, you guys. but then i won't regale you with stories of the sara postcard predicament or the tranny with footprint story. serves you right.

anyway, i went to maloka, the largest science centre in south america or something with my host family.
maloka is this subterranean place, and this is the dome which houses the cinema.
a nun on an electric chair. i didn't think i would live to see this day.
the infinite tunnel. yeah, that's pretty self-explanatory.
oh look. our galaxy and stuff.
oh look. the world.
my host brother, julian, and his girlfriend johana.
my host mom, who was really traumatised by this trip, but i'm not telling you why (i'm on strike). here she is in this hamster wheel which serves basically no purpose whatsoever.
my host mom and me.
after the trip, this sweet little woman with a motorised scooter handed us free bottles of coke zero - all the taste with none of the sugar!

--

okay fine, i can't resist telling you about the sara postcard predicament. but i'll keep it short and in an unembellished manner.

so sara (you are lovely, by the way) sent me a postcard of a topless guy doing a handstand. and i used it as my bookmark because sara is lovely. this is not a good idea in a home filled with homosexual and tranvestite children. it is actually pretty difficult to explain away such a tricky situation in broken spanish.

i tend to be dumbfounded when slung a question like, "why did your friend send you naked pictures of himself?"

2008-10-25T23:46:00.000-07:00

ah, i finally got to stream mamma mia! online, which was great because that means i don't really have to go to the cinema anymore. i thought it was very decently cast, though: amanda seyfried (i actually typed amanda sommers - daughter of fey sommers! - the first time round, i'm so full of crap) is incredibly charismatic; meryl streep never fails at anything, including flourishing an abba song with tears; and the three dads fit the bill very well. male mannequin cooper doesn't do anything for me though, he does nothing but spend half his time on screen parading shirtless.

anyway, it's much better than the stage musical (lo siento, meiyin, se que gustas la obra musical), although i do think phyllida lloyd could have done a much better job with the set pieces and editing. i mean, 50 million bucks to have them basically do nothing but belt abba songs by the beach? seriously?

thank god for the music, then.

--

and it's true: pierce brosnan sings like a strangled racoon, or whatever it is the guardian labelled him.

2008-10-17T21:47:00.000-07:00

okay, picture post, since i know some of you are all "ew, more words? but i hate words." and prefer the simple way photographs are worth a million words or whatever. plus, you get to see the real horror of the place, so please don't complain too much about the deficiency of photographs, regardless of how poorly taken they are: i braved through the most dangerous area of bogota with a camera in tow, just for you.
so we start at the centro ambulatorio, which is where i spend my tuesdays and fridays at. in the foreground on my table are my bag and book, and you can see how gay (hee!) posters decorate the walls of the common hall. i tend to do my work here since it has a skyroof and i do like the sun in my face, although to be quite honest it doesn't come out much these days. on the walls are inspirational quotes which i swear to god some of the children come up with themselves, because one of them goes along the line of: search for the deepest desire of your heart, it is closest to the voice of your heart, in it is desire and desire is the guide to your heart.

sorry, that just about makes no sense to me.

(on a slightly more tragic note, you'll realise that a lot of these "quotes" are made by a single person, and they are almost always about how love is the single missing element from his life, and i do feel bad for him so i try not to think too much about what the posters actually mean, because that will just make my head hurt, and then i can't brim with sympathy any longer.)
this is where the legendary brawl took place. the multipurpose hall is where the kids finish their homework, paint on the desks, have dinner, scoop food off the floor and put it into their plates, so on and so forth. it is bright and cheerful, and on the walls are songs with titles like "the welcome song" and "the farewell song," and i know for a fact that the teachers have no idea what their melodies are, so they tend to just mumble the songs in a tuneless manner in hopes that the children will be able to discern (arbitrarily) some form of a musical structure, and sing gaily to whatever is playing in their mind at the moment.
the peluqueria, or the hair salon. the girls have self-taught hairdressing classes here every monday and friday. i love the blue chair in the foreground, because it's actually one of those chairs you sit on when you wash your hair so it reclines to a full 180 degrees - just like magic! - i love the popping sounds my backbone makes every time i decide to flatten it (the chair) and give my tightened back a good stretch.
this is the reception, where i spend most of my time reading or script-writing. okay, i seriously hate halloween, because that is when the celebrations come out and that sucks like hell because part of halloween decorations are pictures of spiders and toy spiders in cotton webbing, and these things make my heart stop when i'm ambushed with them. but that is not as scary as the time where i went on this acercamiento to a school in suba, where the kids managed to trap this fucking gigantic thing in a pringles jar and thought that i would be impressed by their adventurous and doubtless nimble feat. and of course i was, if you count me almost passing out as an acknowledgment of their superb pest-catching skills.
i had a real chinese dinner with marcela, a colombian friend of mine whom i met in the uk, and we ended up chatting for 3 hours in spanish - i am so awesome - about issues as diverse as abortion, the rights of a women, and stupid mathematics teachers. well, to be sort of fair, she speaks excellent english, so she understood the rubbish way my sentences were structured, and also taught me quite a few words over dinner. i am embarrassed to announce that i have forgotten half of them.

also, this is the first real chinese restaurant i've been to - which means none of that arros china rubbish. in bogota, many chinese restaurants serve food which are nowhere close to actual chinese food, and they trick others into marching through their red doors with fake chinese inscriptions by qualifying their menu with the word chinese. their menus hence tend to read somewhat like the following: chinese rice, chinese chicken, chinese duck, chinese beef, chinese soup, ad nauseam.

what's worse is that the food isn't even really chinese. sure, i miss fried rice, but i really doubt fried rice alone constitutes chinese food. i also particularly hate it when i am slapped around with statements like: do you eat rats in china? how about cats? snakes? ah, i know - you eat lots of chinese rice!hey, lookie here - it's mapo tofu! i know how all of you know i can't live without this; i gave a howl which was equal parts surprise, delight, divine gratefulness, and relief when i saw the item on the menu - i am so pathetic that way.
roast duck, which was not exactly amazing, but more than adequate for a deprived man - this is the first time i've had duck here. the portions in this restaurant are huge, though; three dishes for two persons stretched the seams on our trousers.
a fortune cookie: prosperity will come in all you do.

yay!

and thus ends this entry. i'm really fatigued after being out of the house for fourteen hours. remind me never to do this again.

2008-10-14T20:28:00.000-07:00

there was this fight in school today, between a team of three boys, the oldest of which had to be circa 12, and this team of 4 girls, the youngest of which had to be circa 12. and when i said fight, i don't really mean that they hit each other on the hand with a ruler and pulled at each other's ears. today, it was an all out brawl, where chairs were sent flying and i was sent hiding for cover (tengo mucha verguenza), and where bodies were sprawled on tables, furiously attacking whatever was in their way. it was amazing the same way you watch a train crash into a truck in the middle of the railway tracks in slow-motion, or impressive the way you see someone actually perform jet li-like flips in the centre of his room during a dinner party - but it was also a bit of a sharp reminder of how brutal children can be.

when we (ricardo, professional footballer, and i, wimpy volunteer) were trying to separate this boy from this girl, she was clinging on to his hair, virgin strays tangled and twisted in her fist, and his hands were around her throat in a deadly grip, for an 8 year old at least. and when books were flying around the place as weapons, this bastard child - oh how i hate him so, at least for today - grabbed at my novel, ostensibly because it was a heavier, deadlier missile than mere soft-paged exercise books. i tugged back and gave him a death stare, which i don't think was very effective, but i had my book so i wasn't too bothered about him.

oh, and prior to this goddamn melee, bastard child was climbing on top of other children, putting their heads between his thighs, and hammering their skulls with his elbows. and i never thought i would actually say this, but sometimes, i really cannot stand these kids. so mom, if you're reading this, don't bring them candy. they don't deserve any.

which is strange, because i normally really like children, and normally i get along quite well with them. i remember reading a webpage about this frustrated teacher who said that sometimes she wanted to just strangle these children with an umbilical cord and thinking, "oh dear. woman is violent. she shouldn't be near children." you guys, i totally get what she means now. it's not really about tolerance thresholds as much as it has to do with actually giving the children what they deserve. at ten, you should know that attacking someone is wrong, especially if you're not related to them (hee, a little bit of an in-joke there). i totally understand what l'enfants terrible means now.

--

why is it that children named christian have to be the worst of the lot? is there some sort of an inbuilt irony into the name which is actually indicative of his sociopathic tendencies, the same way a child named victor will ultimately turn out a loser?

maybe indicative is the wrong word; maybe the right articulation is prognostic.

never name your children christian, regardless of how strong the urge is; and i'm speaking to you, ryan.

--

i went on my first acercamiento last friday, where i had to scour the street for underaged kids together with two social workers from the foundation. we walked through the different neighbourhoods, and there are quite a few: homosexuals, tranvestites, normal prostitutes (gee...), and children, although it must be said that members of the last group do feature throughout the first three groups as well.

i met this lovely lady named lucha, who goes by valentina at night. i did not ask her where she got her breasts done, but she seemed very comfortable with herself in a tight white bra and a pair of patent leather hot pants, so maybe i should have. i don't know. i'm sure at some point in time i'll actually have my photograph taken together with her, just perhaps not so soon. her make-up was incredibly dramatic - a lot of black and white and red, sort of geisha-style, but perhaps much more hardcore in terms of daring.

i learnt something new: don't underestimate the number of male hookers out there, and don't underestimate the number of men who would pay boys for sex. it's tremendously sick, and the mere thought bursts with horror: it's one thing to pay another man for sex, but another to pay a 16 year old boy for sex. in the same vein, it's one thing to pay a 16 year old boy for sex, but quite another to pay an 8 year old boy to allow you to do certain things to his body.

fuck it, i really don't understand why it's so difficult for men to keep their dick in their pants sometimes. or their hands to themselves, for that matter. i am haunted by a lot of the things i am privy to in the office; is it any wonder these children grow up to be broken, stunted adults - people unable to make sense of both their life or the world?

--

on to happier things:

i finished in cold blood today, and it is excellent - i started the book with nothing but abject disgust and abhorrence for the merciless murderers, and i ended the book rooting somewhat for them. the brilliance of the book i think lies less in the prose - it is good, but nothing consistent like the sort of lyricism which permeates cunningham's the hours, for example - and more in the gradual development and humanization of inhumane antagonists, so that by the time they have visited the big swing, you are filled with so much sympathy for them, but just enough so that you don't actually wish for them to be absolved of the crime. if you ask me, i think that's a really difficult feat to pull off, and an incredible goal to pursue in the first place: very impressive, truman capote.

right - that didn't seem like especially happy news - sorry.

--

i have three more books waiting for me at the bookshop, just as i'm starting on my third (of six) books - yay!

--

and last, i'm writing a play. again. for the university. that should take up some of my time and stave away the book hunger.

ah, the title: stranger things have happened here.

2008-10-13T18:55:00.000-07:00

watched this film called cansada de besars sapos (tired of kissing frogs), and i realise that i'm gradually dropping damn pronouns from my sentences, spanish-style. creo que no esta bien, but whatever. i watched it with my host mom, which was cute but ultimately horrifying because it didn't cross my mind that this could be an R-rated romantic comedy, so by the time the credits rolled, i'd seen the protagonist in various lingerie countless times, her ex-boyfriend caught with his trousers down twice, and dreams involving nothing but tanned men clad in white towels or white briefs lounging around her room once. also there was this scene where she dated this dog lover who proceeded to seduce her by licking her face, so that was also a bit of a sticky scene to sit through with her.

but it was the first spanish film sans subtitles that i have managed to sit through, and even understand certain phrases - also i learnt a whole lot of new swear words, which will prove to be useful if i ever feel the need to get stabbed in the streets of bogota and then bleed to death.

ah well, always a time for everything.

---

ah, also: today was apparently a public holiday, and i was told that it was, but it somehow slipped my incredibly fragile and weak mind, so i waited at the transmilenio station ridiculously for a bus which wouldn't show up. for twenty minutes. oh, how stupid am i? incredibly so, as it seems.

i'm sleeping at 9:30 pm tonight you guys, since i spent my whole day doing nothing. thought i'd catch up on lost hours sacrificed for the purpose of showing up at work on a day which required nothing of the sort.

2008-10-11T22:00:00.000-07:00

this is hilarious like you wouldn't believe. it makes me think of michael scott as a young imbecile, which he, of course, was. but i do agree on the comments of kevin scott (entirely unrelated to the former, who is, unfortunately, fictional) on the over-sexualization of children, which i find extremely disturbing as well.

someone once told me watching pornography was like ingesting moral garbage, and while i'm not sure i know how to respond to that comment (oh, the shame i bear upon my chest!) i do think hooker dolls are morally reprehensible if only because they are made specifically to appeal to little girls aged 5 to 8. it is entirely different from, oh, i don't know, some of the music videos you see on mtv or vh1 or whatever, because i doubt prepubescent girls were their ultimate demographic target, whereas i don't really think anyone above the age of 10 plays with dolls anymore. i think what pisses me off about this is not the fact that sex sells - obviously, it does - but the fact that it is directly marketed to children who have not developed that specific capacity yet. that is pretty screwed up, you guys.

oh, but this isn't some soapboxy platform about the pornification of the current generation, this blog is just a silly little time-killer.

2008-10-10T18:43:00.000-07:00

5 things i'm passionate about
exploring bogota
good food
writing
reading
the 2008 american presidential elections

5 things i say too often
que? (what?)
si, senor/senora (yes, sir/madam)
claro que si (but of course)
espero que si (i hope so)
fuck.

5 books i’ve read recently
in true blood, truman capote
the line of beauty, alan hollinghurst
the road, cormac mccarthy
on chesil beach, ian mcewan
the wisdom of whores, elizabeth pisani

5 songs i could listen to over and over again
mi confesion, gotan project
don't panic, coldplay
bombay, timbaland ft jim beanz & amar
the rainbow connection, kermit the frog
grace kelly, mika

5 things i learnt in the past year
japanese food is almost universally expensive
the stablest jobs are also most probably the least fun
quite a bit about sexual harassment (harhar, abby)
i am, socially, incredibly left-winged
anyone can become the vice-president of the united states. anyone.

2008-10-08T18:07:00.000-07:00

q&a time:

so what did you do today?
generally, not much. i showed up, chatted with the kids, played basketball with them at 11 in the morning, got riled up at 2 of them who decided that their goal in life would be to breach my tolerance threshold, had a pretty foul lunch at the centre, went to speak to a few of my programme directors, and then went home. oh, also, i finished the line of beauty, which i have to say was much better than i imagined it to be.

it won the booker prize in 2004 -- why did you think it would have been rubbish?
hurhur. primarily because james read it and said that it was quite good, and this is the same person who thinks that hancock was the best movie of the year so far and that no country for old men is rubbish and that kung fu panda should win the academy award for best film and whose favourite song is tanning in your sunray (the horror!) by edison chen from the really kickass movie initial d, so it suffices to say that his recommendation worked against itself in this very encapsulated, paradoxical manner. i am thankful that his praise was only middling in a very self-conscious way, as if reading a booker prize winner would be literary liberation, and in the end i decided in favour of giving the yellowed pages a try, even though the spines of its neighbours were brighter and more lustrous and seductive.

secondly, i felt that the booker prize didn't really mean all that much. ian mcewan's on chesil beach was nominated for the award this year, and i didn't like it very much; thank god it didn't win. it was a very adequate book with sweeping prose, confident without the tentativeness of a doubtful author, but i felt that while there was sufficient build up and that the psychological profiles of the protagonists were carefully studied and that the cause and effect mechanisms of the relationship was explored generously, there was a general lack of giddiness. i found the prose too polished, without risk, the story so meticulously plotted that there was too much restraint and calculation in its exposition and denouement.

why do you sound like finishing the line of beauty is bad news?
i need to stop finishing 500-page novels in three days. english books here are expensive, and if i devour their contents so voraciously, it is going to be an expensive addiction. maybe what i'll do for the rest of the week is plough through the book again, and maybe go through it the same way you watch a movie for the second time to collect the clues you could have lost along the way. perhaps now that the entire plot (which is vast, because of the different themes the novel explores) is unravelled, i can plough through the pages once more, this time savouring the journey and the prose and the contradictions and the explorations instead of incessantly obsessing over the backbone of the story.

i'm getting really sick of booktalk.
right, sorry.

tomorrow is basically going to be the same as today, i guess, but with my added conniving plan of sneaking off by 3pm (please don't balk at me. my real work normally ends at around 2, and i always try to stay until 5 in the evening out of discontented politeness) that i may run around town for a couple of hours, meeting neighbourhoods i have not had the pleasure of introduction, maybe sitting down for a cup of coffee and watch as the world orbits around me, a stagnant core intoxicated with caffeine.

do you have plans for the weekend?
no. would you like to ask me out?

no.
but why not?

because i am an imaginary character which you conjure up for the sake of projecting what you think people think of yourself onto.
that was a very long and awkward sentence, but thanks for the psychoanalysis.

you're welcome.

2008-10-04T19:19:00.000-07:00

today warranted a walk to the high-end shopping district, and when i say today, generally i mean my lack of new books and my thirst for something to fill the afternoons when the ambulatory centre is barren (childless!) and buzzes with the tepidity of afternoon. el retiro, as you can see, seems as if its only reason for being was so that abby could visit it when (if?) she comes to visit next year. the rows of designer perfume punctuate the air almost nauseatingly, and the anorexic mannequins guard their storefronts fervently and fashionably, and the top floor houses this black and red cafe where a cup of coffee there looks like it would cost you the price of a cartier bracelet.
wok was the restaurant i serendipitiously end up being outside of when the drumming of raindrops switched modes from gentle to tribal: i was looking for a chinese restaurant anyway, because after 1.5 months without it, i feel like i'm in some serious case of withdrawal where i need to be sustained by an iv drip replenishing my blood with msg and/or chili. am thinking of going to another restaurant tomorrow, but i'm not sure if my pocket can take the torture.
miso soup, which i believe i miss more than sushi. the strangest thing though, was how there were chicken and noodle pieces in it - it didn't taste too bad though, and i guess was worth its price. it came with a strip of banana leaf sandwiched between the bowl and the plate, which was a nice - but admittedly incredibly useless - touch.
pad thai, which i have also missed. it's not the oil-laden, cholesterol-filled monster from market square which yeepin loves, and so it does not glisten with second-hand oil or reflects light when lifted from the plate. it was quite good, although i must say that in terms of authenticity it probably didn't score exceedingly well, but whatever: beggars can't be choosers.
and it was a day well-spent (look zen, michael chabon! just like you said!). i am thinking of going to chapinero tomorrow, the artsy neighbourhood of the city. i've chosen to start on the line of beauty, which has been excellent for all of the 4 pages i have read so far while chewing pad thai.

2008-09-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

it's ebbing. the cold and the fever and the clenched disposition my nose decides to adopt every time it feels threatened by a deluge of predatory airborne virii are slowly dissipating into an airier past, less bogged down by the humidity and the - oh, dear god - confused, alternating weather. i have been slowly dragged up the shore of eventual lucidity by copious amounts of agua panela, a drink made with unrefined sugar, and lemon juice.

which means i can resume work tomorrow. there is so much to be said about work: it is enjoyable. while there is a certain joy which can be unearthed through the brute force of tunnelling through books and judgments, and a certain satisfaction which can be derived from completing an essay two minutes overtime despite the manner in which the thoughts and cases and ideas are callously crammed into this... bit of parchment, it lacks the spiritedness and boundlessness which characterises my work here in colombia. it is exhilarating in the tiniest ways: which surprises will the children spring at you this morning (who is going to coerce you into teaching them mandarin with their rehearsed face bathed in sympathy? or is the sharp, practised stare really a manifestation of flirtation?), who will i get to meet today (a retired professional football player who has represented the country internationally, again? unlikely.), what sort of responsibilities will i be given today (watch the boys put on a camp stage show modelled after the infamous madonna-britney kiss. mindblowing.)

but i was speaking to my mom yesterday - or was it two days ago? fever normally acts like a strainer to my mind, allowing only the loose bits of oddities to fall through the gossamer netting and embed themselves into my senility. the things i need to retain are never there. - and she said that this year out was a decision which upon hindsight was fairly a brainwave. unorthodox, as well, but a necessary distraction from the calculating and cannibalistic tide of (anti-)humanity.

tomorrow, work recommences. as will: the mornings when the sun has barely hoisted itself above sculpted clubs. the way the day dribbles past deceptively. the crowds which fill the stations with their sleepy presence. the scathing expletives they keep under their tongue. the treacherous hike up the hill which is softened only by the presence of a decaying town square.

the brazen images of the city which have not changed. they stand like forgotten vanguards of history, gentle giants with shortened mortalities.

2008-09-25T17:48:00.000-07:00

you guys, my laptop committed suicide last week by deciding that the only way it could gain spiritual fulfilment was to refuse to be turned on forever.

e-mail me or something and i will reply. the posts, on the other hand, they will have to wait. to be completely honest, there probably is a lot as well i can't really blog about.

--

update: okay, you guys. problem solved by getting myself a new (and somewhat affordable, i guess) laptop. yeah. the posts will resume.

--

in other news i'm down with one of the worst colds i've had in a while.

2008-09-17T19:39:00.000-07:00

i was trying to extricate myself from the maze that was the high-end shopping district of town, which really wasn't very high-end when you actually see the place, when this teenager my age selling bracelets on the ground stopped me and tied a band around my hand.

for a visitor, he said, his girlfriend watching from two feet away. i didn't tell him that i wasn't really one, only that i had no money with me. then he handed a matching bracelet to me; for a girlfriend, he said, and he led me to the red tartan cloth laid complacently across the warm pavement, homemade jewellery neatly arranged over it.

i'm really sorry. i only have enough money for the transmilenio. you can have the bands back.

no, they're for you. you can keep them.

i think i am being guilt-tripped into going there again tomorrow.
i needed a haircut today, as well. and i thought it would be interesting to see what sort of cuts barbers gave here. for starters, they are very affordable cuts. apparently barbers here specialise in military cuts, and so i was given this slicked back look, my hair held in place with enough gel to immobilise a water buffalo. i should say that my salon looked a bit like a hooker bar, with bright neon lights flashing in the window, garish and loud, a burst of colour in the night, cheap tinsel cutting through the darkness, their jagged stray rays illuminating the otherwise empty sidewalk.
the result, which involves about a tub of gel. i had to wash my hair for quite a while to get it all off:

2008-09-16T21:32:00.000-07:00

an update on my spanish exams: i hope i don't fail. i spent the whole of last night talking rubbish with yilun - woman, you are a very bad influence on me, especially with the things we talk about and your deviant schemes - and i was too lazy to, you know, memorise the past tense conjugation of a handful of verbs.

fuck, we had to write an entire essay in the past tense today.

fuck, i wrote the whole thing in the present tense.

seriously though, i figured that they would have slash more marks off if i had made up words on the spot which i thought were the past tense conjugations of other verbs. i should, however, thank the completely exam-oriented manner we have been taught to approach such papers. i didn't even understand half of the comprehension text (which i believe concerned either some mythical non-catholic creature called el patas or migratory ducks), but i think i managed to circle the right answer(s, hopefully) through sheer intuition alone.

honestly though, i don't think i'll literally fail, but i don't think i would be beaming with pride if i scored only 40 points out of a possible 100.

--

note to self:

pecadora = sinner
pescado = fish

--

i simply cannot muster any motivation to mug for my spanish examinations tomorrow, although its probably a highly perfunctory test. estoy muy perozoso, you guys, and i don't know why.

what i do know, however, is this: i need travel partners to cancun, chichen itza and tulum sometime... soon.

--

do you know what just occurred to me? the more i promise to write about a single, specific event, the more likely it is for me to just forgo the task altogether; the promises we make are the ones we have an irrepressible urge to break. they are a tower of wooden blocks we build for the very purpose of destroying.

2008-09-14T17:22:00.000-07:00

i decided to break free from my sunday shackles today and so, accompanied my host brother to a jazz festival at a park. for an international event, the turnout was somewhat disappointing: i'm not sure if there were more than a thousand people lounging on the grass, all nonchalant listeners as different musicians took turns to perform in front of a dismal crowd. a small area of the park was cordoned off in yellow tape which additionally functioned as tracks for policemen running along like clockwork trains. like other wound-up toys, street vendors took to the park like vultures.
at about half past four, the chill started to creep across the grass, swallowing on its way deep green blades and chipped stray pebbles. it accosted my feet at first, tunnelling its way past my soles into the ankles. the wind came in short, sharp doses. the cloudy overhang was collated by a gentle hand into a corner of the sky like gray foam at the end of a colossal drain, and at five o'clock it was wrung tight like a dirty dishcloth left for days at the edge of a sink. umbrellas mushroomed in rainbow clusters and the music which soaked the air was tampered by the quiet whispers of water droplets.
when we left the park, the sky had lessened in murkiness and the rain had ceased, leaving behind fresh imprints in the form of a ground swollen with moistness. it was a ground which squeaked under our rubber soles, a ground which softened like soggy sponges under our heavy treading. the trees were stark against the sky; sharp, tired spires puncturing a sea of slowly darkening blue, their needles tearing into a gradually receding white. we left as the canvas stretched quietly the endless ceiling became wet in indigo, but the show went on, as it always does, as it always must.

2008-09-13T15:43:00.000-07:00

so i did something somewhat cool (somewhat literally) today - i went to the catedral de sal, which is a cathedral situated in a salt mine 180m inside a mountain outside bogota; it was a road trip with my host mom, one of her best friends and my host cousin. you know how you watch movies about crazy women and think that these things are rubbish and can't be true because women do not make stupid jokes for 2 hours and get lost at every other junction and scream when they have to drive a manual up a steep slope while listening to colombia's version of country music?

you guys, it's true.
we had to trudge through tunnels of salt before we could get to the cathedral, and this is a snapshot of the entire tunnel, including, to an extent, the floor. apparently, salt is very slippery and forms stalagmites when introduced to underground spring water. we were also allowed to taste the salt off the walls, although i wasn't sure if i should or not considering the number of people who may have decided to take ludicrous photographs of themselves licking the salt off the walls.
this is the choir chamber of the church, and the inside of the entire cathedral is lit with green, blue and white lights. if you look carefully, you will see a sculpture of an angel with a trumpet to your lower left, its silhouette illuminated by a dim and almost eerie green light. the cross at the end of the church is not really a cross: it is a 16 meter high optical illusion, and is actually a carefully back-lit hollow indentation carved into the salt walls of the mine. claustrophobia inducing tunnels run freely through dark corners, leading to a collection of smaller chambers in a manner reminiscent of russian dolls.
the floor of the cathedral carries with it a sculpture modelled after michaelangelo's sistine chapel. weighing approximately three tonnes, the hand of god is three times larger than the hand of man, and if you look hard enough, you can spot allusions to the four elements - the lightning bolt running through the centre of the sculpture symbolises fire, for example.
this is what lurks behind the inky corners of the underground cathedral: be exploratory enough and you will inevitably stumble across a nativity scene (or at least that's what i think this is; i wasn't paying enough attention to the tour guide, sorry). the sculptures are made of sand stone, but the backdrop is, like the rest of the mine, mineral salt coloured by cleverly placed lamps. the size of this scene is astounding: it is one of those floor to ceiling installations i normally find slightly vulgar in ostentatiousness, but the fact that it is placed right around a quiet corner makes the first sight of it quite breathtaking.
this part of the cathedral is a baptism chamber, and the wall on one side of the chamber bursts freely with salt - it is simply chaotic and looks like a solid waterfall, it is also symbolic of the activities that take place here. the three stepped floor symbolises the trinity, and the structure in the centre draws water from a stream which flows under the platform. the lit pane in the foreground is a window from which you can watch the trickling water curl its fingers around what looks like ephemeral white rocks which sporadically gleam under artificial light.the best coffee in colombia, at the deepest point of the country.my host mother is on the left, and irene - who has taken to calling me her nephew, is the one to the right. oh, how we have irreverently defiled the sacred sculpture of a miner. irene is terribly (and hence, hilariously) politically incorrect - after receiving a call from her father, she proceded to point out that unlike my host mother, her parents are still alive and can still make her inopportunely timed phone calls. to emphasise the state of my host mother's parents, she drew her index finger right across her jugular while emitting the sound of what she must imagine to be a person slowly choking to death. then she jerked her head leftwards, downwards -- as if the invisible strings holding her head in place had been severed by an invisible hand holding a pair of invisible scissors.

i more or less died laughing.
as we were deliberating what to have for lunch (irene insisted we had to go to a beautiful, elegant restaurant for absolutely no reason at all), this stack of meat simply placed over a line of charcoal trod along and made our minds up for us. you can see a car in the background, indicating that it is entirely possible that the richness of our meat not only came from it being painstakingly roasted, but also from being slowly smoked in passing clouds of carbon monoxide. but my god, the food was excellent.
the end product, also known as el plato mixta: chicken, beef, pork, boiled potatoes, guacamole, basil dip, garlic deep, roasted bananas, and the piece de resistance: bull intestines stuffed with rice and corn. this is seriously possibly the best thing i've eaten all year.
the restaurant, which i had to put up because of how lovingly inviting it was towards copyright infringement lawsuits. the menu consisted of the theatrical poster of the film printed out on a desktop colour printer, embellished with the dishes, their respective descriptions (font: arial black) and off-white labels with messy handwriting touting now updated prices. the inside of the restaurant, which was absolutely empty (it was 3pm then). the only reason i'm posting this picture up is because of the sombrero in the upper left hand corner of the picture. just so you know, abby loves sombreros, and has made it her goal to wear one together with a poncho while riding on a donkey into the desert sunset with a cactus in one hand and a bottle of tequila in the other, tumbleweeds in the background scurrying across the burning sand -- living up to the ultimate stereotype of central/south america.

thought she'd appreciate this.

p.s. i think one of these days my host mother is going to take me to a makeshift studio where i'll be dressed up in antique colombian clothing and be shot (with a camera, not a shotgun - i understand it's difficult to tell when you consider the geographical location of the country) by a professional photographer against the faux-backdrop of a country house, replete with props such as bouquets of sunflowers, a cowboy hat, pistols, a wagon and a fake horse.

2008-09-09T15:53:00.000-07:00

i brought my camera to la candelaria today, where we decided to hunt down a sushi parlour as well as dessert. we also wanted to visit the gold museum, which, as we later found out, would be closed until the 2nd of november for renovation. and then we went home, because we ran out of things to do, and also because my host mother had cleverly hooked me the day before with promises of prawn and chicken paella, colombian-style, to be served with the fresh juice of some local fruit i have never heard of before.
this is what you see when you exit the la candelaria stop: the brick monument dedicated to some war hero, now desecrated with graffiti and stray pigeons. the entire bario, or neighbourhood, looks like this - it is old and beautiful and carefully-aged, but bears the marks of rebellion and repression. the place is laced with tourists and pickpockets - a friend of mine was robbed here a few weeks ago, and pickpocketed today on the transmilenio.

this place is unforgiving, quite like its weather. the sushi bar - or more accurately, as it wishes to be known - the japanese kitchen - which wasn't so difficult to find after all. appreciate the slight differences in the spelling.
tino, the swiss guy who has been working in thailand and australia, enjoys telling me about the ladyboys he has met and the ping pong shows (don't ask) he has watched. he is also the unfortunate aforementioned pickpocket victim. as you can see, the restaurant is a converted shack, with a mixture of colombian music and aerosmith piped in at random times. we sat on the floor and ate off a wooden table and coconut shells, and if it wasn't for the faux bamboo shoots in the corner, it would have been impossible for us to discern that we were actually in a japanese restaurant.
loda, a belgian who spent his last summer cycling around south-east asia. he likes teh tarik and roti canai and laments the lack of indian restaurants in bogota. you can see the upstairs foyer of the restaurant here, painted yellow. if you look closely there is also an old metal candelabra placed in front of some greenery on the bar which separates the room we were in from the common dining area.
mia, who at one point was quite pissed off that her food hadn't arrived. we all couldn't start our meals as well, considering how we had pledged to split the sushi we had ordered, and her expression was mirroring ours quite closely. the restaurant didn't serve green tea, que horror!, although i must say that the fresh lemonade we ordered instead was quite good despite seeming entirely incongruent with the idea of japanese food.
lea, on the left, is a german girl who happens to be vegetarian. serena, on the right, is swiss and moonlights as my regular translator who charges sushi slices for every time she helps me tell the waiter that he got my order wrong again. they are dragging me to santa fe tomorrow, some posh shopping complex up in the north because one of them - i can't remember which - has a need for dangerously high heels. so dedicated is she to purchasing brand new sexy stilettos that she has ascetically (oh, the irony!) vowed to eat only bread for lunch for the next few weeks in order to afford those glorious shoes, which i hope will change her life for the better forever because i wouldn't demonstrate that much desire for a pair of shoes, even if they were all magical and stuff.

i keep thinking that i shouldn't give in to their constant cajoling though, because once i do, they'll proceed to make me go salsa dancing and clubbing and drinking with them and lead me down the path of debauchery and drunkenness.
after lunch, which was not ultimately very fulfilling, we had dessert at the very creatively named crepes & waffles, which of course sold mostly crepes and waffles. it is the colombian equivalent of the haagen-daz ice-cream parlour at leicester square, and its menu is far more extensive although unfortunately much less experimental than its famous comparison. i mean, nutella and banana crepes? - ooh, how avantgarde of you, mr. crepes & waffles.

anyway, the above is green tea ice cream, garnished with mint and a 'biscuit' i suspect is made of solely cameralised sugar. i have to admit that it was really good though and possibly even better than its haagen-daz variant, which i find to be slightly too heavy, either green tea-wise or ice cream-wise.
the product of our walk around the neighbourhood. this is the palace of justice, located right in the centre of plaza bolivar, next to the oldest cathedral in the country and right opposite the very impressive parliamentary building (pictured below). the girls are posing reluctantly and the smiles on their faces ring false because i didn't want to look touristy, since apparently this place teems with thieves (or so serena told me in exchange for another piece of sushi).

you read that right; bogota's centre of thievery is situated right in the centre of a parameter consisting of: the national courts, the parliament, and a church. i'm sure the remaining side of the quadrant must be a police station or a prison for hardcore criminals or the home of the president, anything to up the irony of the industry of vices operating so efficiently in this city.

2008-09-08T13:56:00.000-07:00

my recent acquisitions, somewhat hefty though inevitably, necessary. i chose to start on mcewan's because... well, just because. it now lives in one of the many velcro-sealed side flaps of my slingbag and, daily, braves the imperious nudges of the commuting crowd as well as the heady cold.

i imagine it must feel quite important, being ordained as first to be read; in the same (autobiographical, slightly off-kilter) current, i can only imagine how nervous it must be as i plough through its pages - rapidly digesting them - knowing with solid certainty that once i have rid its final page of any meaningful content that it will be relinquished to the second drawer of the nightstand, also known as the land of finished books, doomed to a year without sunlight or the hungry darts of scrutinous eyes.

--

you guys, i am dead from laughter at the titles of the telenovelas my host mom watches every evening on the exclusive spanish language telenovela channel - they are, in order from 2pm to 5pm, weekdays:

te sigo amando (i keep loving you)
amor real (real love)
prisonera de amor (prisoner of love)

no, seriously. i am not making this up. i'm not good enough.

2008-09-07T16:25:00.000-07:00

this is not the bookshop - it is an extension of the museum of modern arts, a strange corner of the museum which is at once both a second-hand bookstore and a garage sale. the books are arranged in rows of course, although not just quite; they are stuffed into corners where they do not belong, together with books which either came from a different country or told distinct stories altogether. outdated biographies of russell crowe and brad pitt are callously stacked in a corner, their faces a reminder of the early 1990s when their lives were not quite so complicated, and when our lives were just starting to begin. i'm not sure if the framed pictures above the shelves are for sale - it does seem so, just like everything everywhere here.

the man in the corner stares at me as i unzip my bag to reach for my camera, probably wondering if i would be another one of those deficient youths who would take off with an ancient book about tom cruise - surreptitiously forced into my nondescript grey bag - when he was still, well, sane and non-scientologist.
the candelaria area, which is a cross between blossoming modernity - there are reflection pools... or broken fountains - and stifled poverty. this is evident once you wander into the back alleys of the precinct, and see how much greyer the roads are there and how much more dirtied the walls are and how the shoes that tread the ground there are different from the ones which grace the carefully laid pavements above.

it was a very good day, though, seeing as to how the sun was out until about four in the evening; i could walk around in just a shirt, and that was quite a welcome change from the rain which has plagued us for the past few weeks. this picture was taken around 2ish, and already you can see the clouds form themselves into shapes of cotton candy, dulcet with bitter undertones, harbouring the smell of impending rain.
we found a park right behind the museum, and it is just like bogota to conceal the randomest of secrets in its belly, keeping them only for the most desperate to discover, for the most weary to stumble upon, for the most lost to find.

a reprieve from the granite and tar - both as gray as the evening clouds, both as abusive as the colombian wind, both as stony as the faces of children who prowl the dour streets at night.

it was, like most pleasant surprises, welcome.

2008-09-06T18:07:00.000-07:00

okay, so obviously i went to the bookstore today, but looking for it took me all of an hour and i was already way behind time when i arrived at the place, so i didn't have time to sit in the cafe and snap pictures of the converted house and its cute little sidewalk cafe. also the bookstore is opposite juan valdez, which apparently serves extraordinary coffee, so i'm looking forward to going there (possibly monday or tuesday) just to bum around alone.

the above ordeal made me 15 minutes late for lunch, and off we went to some vegetarian restaurant recommended highly by lonely planet colombia: boulevard sesamo.
i had the menu ejecutivo, which cost about 7000 pesos: along with pink guava juice and lentil soup, i had spinach and mushrooms, fried rice, fried platanito (some sort of humongous banana widely available in colombia) and pasta. the girls went for the vegetarian hamburger.

i have to say that the food looked much better than it tasted though. it wasn't by any means rubbish, but i have been spoilt to the core by the culinary expertise of my host mother, whose goal in life is apparently to fatten up anyone who sets foot into her home. dinner, for example, comprised tomato and lemon salad, a huge chunk of fried fish marinated in spices, rice cooked with vegetables and chicken stock, and pineapple juice. and that was all sorts of amazing.

how can i eat out ever again? my tastebuds are soiled with the richness of homecooked food.
this is kristien, a vegetarian belgian, who had the courage to order some strange fruit juice instead of guava - her drink is the muddy looking one at the bottom left of the photograph. it was better than my guava juice, so whatever she did must have been right. her very cheerful thumbs-up sign can be explained away by the fact that she hadn't touched her food by then.
this is mia, a danish girl who seems really excitable and shares the same plans as mine with regards to travelling to cartagena and cali over christmas. she is also really great, because when i said that i couldn't lie on the ground because of my white shirt, she offered to let me lie on a black jacket which did not even belong to her! proud owner of the lonely planet colombia book, we both ended up reading on a brick wall while waiting for the rest of them to finish with the museo de arte moderno. such are efficient art connoisseurs.
and this is freddy, the german guy with a stud at the corner of his mouth. he finished the pineapple and strawberries (in some strange liquor-tasting syrup which i believe is the product of other accidentally fermented strawberries) which came with his meal, and was the guy who engineered the visit to the modern art museum, which was actually very worthwhile. he ordered a tomato soup which "tasted nothing like tomatoes" and elected to cross the road for brownie ice-cream at crepe & waffles.

i'll post the art museum entry up tomorrow, or whenever i feel the urge to do so. there was an exhibition entitled los desaparecidos (the vanished) which documented the number and lives of people who disappeared overnight from latin american countries ran by dictatorial military junta regimes which disregarded flagrantly all notions of human rights.
it was really quite creepy - the inside of the building looks like an abandoned warehouse, which gave the exhibition a very atmospheric anchor - and depressing. i couldn't take photographs of too many of them, but i tried my best to preserve the poignancy of those i could.

2008-09-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

mental note time:

una libreria = a bookstore
una biblioteca = a library

--

tomorrow i'll be going to an english bookstore (such a rarity here) at about nine in the morning. it will be the first time i've ventured into the depths of the city alone. i'm not sure i know how to get there, and i haven't got a map. quite an adventure i would think, armed only with a camera and an empty bag; i'm getting really sick of pushing daisies and grey's anatomy reruns, and i don't think there are any films i am dying to watch at the moment. there aren't any books i am planning to read at the moment either, but it is the physicality of books - the stiffness of their unbroken spine, the raspy scratch of crisp pages, the blackness and permanence of ink - which makes them comforting: they carry with them a metaphysical existence, the weight of the paper matched by the strength of the words they carry.

then i'll meet a couple of friends for lunch and we'll go to the museum of modern art. i wish i had brought my camera to the botero museum though -- that was quite fun.

2008-09-05T16:14:00.000-07:00

i see him almost every day when i trudge home from university, clad in different clothes depending on the day: sometimes a smock and a fedora, sometimes an over sized t-shirt and a pair of jeans, sometimes, like today, a straitjacket.

most of the time he'll be doing something strange like pawing at the walls or lying face down in the grass or rolling into the bushes while his mom will be somewhere twenty feet ahead. today he made it his goal to walk solely on the lines of the pavement.

unfortunately for him, i had my camera with me today.

2008-09-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

the main entrance to the university is cement and trees and street lamps. in the mornings, the plaza teems with people - not just students, but young men peddling junk food, cigarettes and free minutes on their mobile phones.

parada universidad nacional: the stop at which i get off the transmilenio every morning just in time for me to be late for class. the yellow cars are taxis, and they are the only ones you are supposed to take in the country if you haven't got a death wish.
parada mandalay: the stop at which i get on the transmilenio every morning, just in time for me to be late to class. you can't see my apartment; it's right behind me when i stand at this point on the bridge. this is normally when i reach home after my spanish classes.
the mandalay transmilenio stop. each stop is broken into many different vagons, or stands, each one for a specific bus to stop at. the modernity of the stop belies the viciousness of the morning commuters, each of them clambering desperately for a place in the bus despite their state of grogginess.
one of the paths in the university which leads to absolutely nowhere...
... like this random slope of green. it reminds me a little of the lawns of st john's, which we used to creep into in the summer to study and picnic (the latter almost always subsumed the former) - except that at the national university the weeds run wilder and the unmanicured grass forms deformed shapes in the grass, very different from the almost clean and mechanical manner the lawns at cambridge are tamed.
plaza che -- it used to be of a different name, i cannot remember what. an antiquated feeling of revolution still stagnates in the air when you walk past it. the bricklaid floor is as uneven as the spread of students which stride through it. closeup below.
plaza che, and a boy with a guitar and mobile phone. the concept is that cases of musical instruments have to be coated in a layer of graffiti, a further manner in which the owner of said instrument can stake his individuality and state his mentality.
not a musical instrument, but it seems that nothing here can escape the vagrant attacks of permanent ink.
this is where i have my spanish classes. if you zoom in you can see what we learnt today - i've forgotten.
the postgraduate building, or el edificio del posgrados. this is undoubtedly one of the newer and prettier buildings on the campus, equipped with a library and a reflection pool. this is not to say it escapes the scars of the pen, hidden corners bear the marks of seemingly revolution-minded (and yet somehow, i feel, cowardly) students.
for life, culture and liberty, study and struggle for national liberation. i'm not sure what building this is, but this message caught my eye on the first day and was the impetus for me to smuggle my camera into the city.
i thought you medics would appreciate this. the building is red and old, by the way, but not dilapidated like the faculty of dentistry. that one is a real mess and reminds me of the kuantan general hospital before it was finally bulldozed and replaced with a structure which did not look like it used to be a prison for death row inmates.
and where are the prisoners of the revolution?

a bit of nostalgia here, since i studied social and political sciences in my first year. practical manifestations of what we academically studied, or maybe just the romanticised musings of an adolescent who wishes he was a part of something bigger.

that's all for today.