i left my heart

i'm going to be in san francisco (again) for a week starting tomorrow. yayz!

a ghost from the past

i don't kno if i've mentioned her before, but one of my t.a.s looks like she came straight out of 1980s mainland china RITE after the open door policy. she wears these hideous tapered jeans along with the ugliest shirts i've seen in a while. seriously, most of them are sweaters with horrible patterns that i've seen in photographs of my parents and their friends from the 70s. she has a big puffy mainland mullet that looks like she did herself, and to make it worse, she wears these huge blocky glasses (and they are not socialite chic huge). one might think she was going vintage, but i think that's highly unlikely.

during class she answers the prof's questions that he poses to the class under her breath, but she's not very good at speaking under her breath.

she's more or less useless during quiz section too. half the time it seems like she's learning the material along with us.

i hate her accent in english, so i always speak to her in chinese, so that she won't reply in english, but she still does.

she's a nice person tho.

the uglies

i'm unfriendly to ugly people and i can't help myself. all i want is for them to stop talking to me.

in black

guess what i got!

it's laundry day

on sunday, i went to see jason mraz in concert. it was awesome! he's great live, and i always enjoy myself a lot at his shows. but what i don't understand is what's up with the seats? i think this type of show is more enjoyable when everyone is on their feet and feeling the music. of course, a lot of people stood up anyways, and i certainly did too, since the people in front of us did (most of them anyways), even tho a couple poopers behind us kept telling us to sit down. what the fuck, you're at a concert, so why don't you just shut the fuck up. it was funny tho, cuz jason told everyone who was sitting down that they weren't really fans, and that they must be here with their friends who are. booyah fuckers! they stopped complaining after that.

jason played most of the songs i wanted to hear, but he didn't play the single! it's not as if it's the best song on the cd, but you'd think he would at least perform the single. i like the song a lot, but i guess i wouldn't have traded any of the other songs for it. well, he coulda played another couple songs, rite?

of course, it wasn't just jason that rocked. his lady friend tristan prettyman and british guy james blunt opened for him, and they were pretty awesome too. i admit, i missed most of tristan's performance, but i'd seen her earlier in the year at a smaller venue, and she sung beautifully then too. anyhow, great performances all around. unfortunately, we didn't do any mraz-hunting this time around, but we still have fond memories of meeting a drunk jason at a bar after a show last year.

vote for the monorail

people of seattle! why is the monorail up for a vote again!? this is fucking ridiculous! we've voted for it like four fucking times already! just build the god damned thing! if you haven't already voted (by absentee ballot or in person), go fill in that fucking YES circle, now! if this doesn't pass, there will be no monorail, and that pretty much sucks for everyone who's tired of our horrible traffic and our slow and inconvenient public transportation. i want a rapid transit system, dammit!

also, people of washington state! vote NO on that stupid tim eyman initiative 900. it's a waste of state money! why can't this fucker just go the fuck away? what is that fetish called where you get off on thinking up stupid initiatives and then attaching some sort of tax cut to it so that people will vote for it? we didn't want slot machines everywhere last year, and we don't want this shit this year. i hate tim eyman and his idiocy, and i wish i didn't have to hear his name every fucking year. please, tim, if you're listening, move to canada or something!

it's really up in the air with i-901, the smoking ban initiative. i think it goes too far in marginalizing the smoking population even more, and if i were a smoker, i'd be really vehemently against it. what do you mean i won't be able to smoke within 25 feet of not just the door, but any window or vent, of any public establishment? that's beyond stupid! where the hell am i going to smoke!? but then again, i'm not a smoker.

finally, people of king county! keep ron sims in the county executive job. he's doing a fine job, no matter what they say, and he supports the gays and their rights. and we all love the gays, right?

rain

yes, this is korean pop star rain, a picture from a recent issue of vman taiwan. i think he's hot. like many pop stars in asia, not only does he act, he also sings. so far he's only been in some k-dramas, like "full house" (in which he plays... a pop star an actor), and released three albums, the latest of which ("it's raining") i picked up cuz the single "i do" was just too catchy for me to resist. plus, he wore a white jacket in the mv for it, so...

i like what he's wearing here, tho i could do without the cargo pockets. it's also almost enuf for me to reconsider belt buckles.

i'd love to have met him, but not all of us are as lucky as life in "the kong". sigh...

you would have done the same

i was gonna write about how this guy with a deformed (is that pc?) head popped out in front of me and scared me so much that i almost screamed, and how i felt really bad about it afterward cuz he probably goes thru enuf without me being frightened by his sudden appearance, but i still felt bad about it and decided not to. well, i guess i did anyways.

happy halloween.

schooled

well, it's been about three and a half weeks of school now (that's like a third of the quarter already gone!), and it's about time to complain about all the people in my classes who annoy me. actually, i probably should have done this a couple weeks ago instead of now, cuz i feel like i don't dislike them as much as i used to, as happens when you get used to people.

at first, my first class of the day was a little intimidating, cuz the prof sent out her syllabus a week before classes started and her list of requirements seemed like a whole lot to take in. of course, after a few weeks, i've gotten used to the routine and it no longer frightens me. the prof herself is a really small old lady who's lost what seems like most of her hearing. she also has a habit of ignoring your answers if they're not what she's looking for, so sometimes when you answer her questions and she doesn't acknowledge them, you don't kno if it was cuz she didn't hear you or if you didn't answer it in the way she wanted you to. we're all a little hesitant to repeat what we said in such cases. i don't particularly dislike any of the other students in the class. sometimes some of them can be annoying at times, but definitely not worth bringing up (at least not anymore). any cute boys in this class? no, of course not.

my second class is taught mostly by a t.a. whom i had previously taken a couple classes with last year. he really annoyed me in those classes, cuz he always asked the prof really weird off-topic questions, but as a t.a. he's not actually too terrible. i think it stems from the fact that he's actually a pretty nice guy. his knowledge is a little spotty sometimes, but at least he doesn't act like the class is something he hates doing (like some t.a.s i can think of). or mebbe i don't hate him, cuz he's pretty lenient when grading quizzes and tests, who knos? there are some really weird people in this class. one of them mumbles to himself like he's giving a running commentary on whatever he seems to be focused on, and another talks like one of those nerds who think they kno everything, but then you listen to the actual words coming out of this guy's mouth and you realize he doesn't actually. there's this one girl who seriously acts like she's 10. she uses a "cute" voice when she talks (that's in quotes, cuz it's not really cute, it's grating) and exaggerates all her movements (like her gestures and her head wobble). i dunno what would possess someone to act like this in college, but at the end of every class (she spends a lot of class just talking to her friend while the t.a. is trying to teach), i want to throw her out the window. not really. maybe. again, no cute boys in the section. there are a few freshmen in the lecture who are kinda cute, but they're freshmen, and ew...!

as for my other class, a lot of the people from my first class of the day are also in this class, since the subject is related. the prof is pretty good; i like the way he teaches. sometimes he makes students feel really stupid, but i don't have a problem with that, since he hasn't done it to me yet. there's this one older woman in the class who is both homely and not very smart, and it wouldn't bother me so much, except she tries to pretend she knos what she's talking about (which she doesn't most of the time). it baffles me how much she just doesn't understand in class. it's not a bad thing to get the answer wrong. i mean that's how we learn. but under the prof's guidance, she still can't arrive at the rite answer. i don't think she understands basic grammar, in fact, since her answers tend to come out in incoherent phrases. you'd think someone would ask themselves "does what i'm saying make any sense whatsoever?" before saying it. or perhaps her answers actually make sense in her mind, which is equally frightening. again, no cute boys. i don't think they frequent this major for some reason...

all-in-all, school isn't all that interesting, is it? and yet it takes up so much of my time.

november's what?

as some of you already kno, jay chou is releasing his next album on the first of november, and yes, it's really called "november's chopin." why? i think he's trying to stress the fact that this album is heavily influenced by classical music and its... italian flavor (see, look he's in venice), whatever that might mean. but then... wasn't chopin french-polish or something like that? whatever, i don't question; just listen, like and then subsequently buy. if i preorder the cd in taiwan, i can get a free poster with it, or if i preorder from yesasia, i get a 2006 calendar and postcard(s). the only problem is i think both options are obscenely expensive, and my only hope might be that i find someone coming back from taiwan after the first of november willing to brave the hordes of jay fans to satisfy this jay fan's needs.

they also played his first single "nocturne" on the radio, and i have to say it's not bad at all, tho i can't say it sounds all THAT different from his old stuff. well, the first isn't that far away so i don't feel like i'll be waiting long, but even so, i have to say, "i can't wait!" purely figuratively, you see.

postscript: more pictures!

rhydian vaughan

if there's anything i love as much as wet boys, it's sleeping boys. this is model (slash-actor) rhydian vaughan, shot by photographer leaf yeh for the august issue of chinese gq. isn't he just the cutest? nothing brightens up the day like an adorable hapa. in fact, nothing would make my days brighter than to wake up every morning with an adorable hapa. anyways, here he is looking cute while narrowly avoiding a bus, and looking cute while a little lost.

i don't kno much about him, but if you would like to see him in action, he apparently had a role in a sci-fi short called lamb that came out what looks like never in wide release, so good luck with that. actually, there's a trailer on the site (that reveals the movie to be one of those poorly-subtitled, weird artsy meditations about the existence of god), and i think you can buy the dvd from eslite books.

what can i do

last nite, i went to a nan quan mama autograph-signing event at the gongguan rose records, like the 12 year old girl i am. i was disappointed that i missed their free show at ximen last week, so i had to take this opportunity to see them up close. the channel v pop music concert just wasn't enuf. plus, back then, i had no idea who they were. thus, armed with the cd booklet, i set off with a friend to gongguan.

when we got there, there wasn't really much of a line, unlike the event yesterday at the same location for boyband 5566 (i think all the little girls in all of taipei showed up for that one). hopefully, this was because of the fact that this was nan quan mama's fourth of five stops around taipei city, and not because people don't love them, cuz people should love them; they're great. they arrived unceremoniously a little after 7 in a small gray van. after they got situated, they started letting people in, so we all slowly filed into the little shop and gave them whatever nan quan mama materials we had for them to sign. when i got up to the front, i couldn't help but grin like an idiot. what does one say to pop stars as one is whisked quickly by them as they sign their name for the 1000th time? do i tell them that i really liked their cd? how many times had they already heard that? do i tell lara she's too cute, and dantou that i think he's cool? plus, how does one convey these things in chinese without sounding stupid? i had no idea. i just said thank you and smiled as zhang jie and dantou finished signing their names. all of them looked absolutely exhausted from their day that started at 1, but when i got to yuhao, he pointed to my hair and was like "you have very cool hair." tee hee! after lara finished signing my booklet, i grinned and waved a goodbye to her. she's so adorable.

and then it was over...

they have these sorts of events every weekend, so i wonder who'll be in town next week.

a little too funky

so on the nite previous, i made me first foray into gay taipei; i visited the club known as funky. the boutique-owner i asked about places to have fun in the area said that this is the main one that everyone goes to, so i figured i had to go at least once.

when we got to the intersection of zhongxiao east and hangzhou south after midnite, it was already apparent we were in the rite area. the sidewalks surrounding funky were occupied with a multitude of gay men, sitting and standing around, cruising, smoking and drinking. why were they doing that outside, you might ask. well, we found out why after we went in. the place is packed fucking beyond full. there is really no room to reasonably move around or even breathe in there, and to get from point a to point b, you have to squeeze between too many sweaty men. it seemed pretty much like all the gay men in taipei were there.

the music they played were basically just pop hits from the charts of taiwan, but "remixed," that is they were sped up two or three times over, which is really unnecessary on some songs, cuz they're already really fast. the drinks were good and strong, tho the bar was far from full. also, to order a drink, you had to go to the door and pay the cashier, who would then give you a ticket with which to take to the bartender in exchange for whatever you ordered. why? no clue. it was like going to a food court in mainland china.

the crowd was mostly taiwanese locals with a few smatterings of (old) white foreigners, but i did run into a schoolmate i had not previously talked to while there, answering my question of whether or not there had been another gay guy doing the program i did. i think most of the people there were in their 20s, but there was a good number of older men too. the percentage of attractive men was just about the same as any club i've been to... low, but some of the boys were truly very cute.

overall, it was pretty fun. we both got pretty trashed, tho one more so than the other. i dunno if i'd want to go back again during this visit to the island, but i'm definitely glad i went.

i don't eat stinky tofu

because it smells like poo.

the longest 15-minute bus ride

oh my god, what the fuck. typhoons really suck. even tho those two sentences rhymed, they are still completely true. when school was going on, it was alrite, cuz we got days off, but now that there is no school, it seems like an awful waste of a day. then, i was fine with staying home and doing nothing for an entire day. determined not to let talim ruin my wednesday, i set off into the city. the way there wasn't so bad, but...

the traffic on the way home was absolutely horrible! fuck you talim! we literally moved a meter every five minutes (hey, look i'm using the metric system!), and if you kno the buses of taipei, they can't brake normally. no matter how fast we are going or how little distance we've traveled, when the bus driver brakes, he makes all the contents of the bus lurch forward, like the passengers and my just-full stomach. i felt so fucking sick after the bus ride. bleh! but really, that was a combination of the constant braking and the sight of the really gross-looking guy sitting in front of me. he literally looked like he was wearing a set of very ill-fitting skin, kinda like buffalo bill from silence of the lambs, but even nastier. i dunno if it was a disease or if he had been horribly disfigured in some accident, but i wanted none of it. not only that, he kept running his hands thru his ugly hair, as if he was trying to poof it up, over and over and over again, and it didn't do anything, and then he'd pat it down and start all over again. it was driving me crazy, and i wanted to tell him to stop, but i didn't want him to spread his skin disease onto me.

however, the most exciting part of the ride was when our bus was trying to change lanes in front of another bus. the driver of the other bus started honking cuz it looked like our bus was going to scrape up against it, so i turned to look to see if we would make it. we didn't. our bus went up against the other bus and crushed its rite side mirror. at this, the other bus driver became enraged and did what any furious bus driver would do: hold his hand on the horn to create an annoying and continuous honk. our bus driver opened up the back door and stormed out and began yelling at the other bus driver, who also yelled back. this exchange went on for a good ten minutes or so, but i couldn't understand any of it, cuz it was all in taiwanese. it was so heated at one point, i thot the other bus driver would get out of his bus and there'd be a hand-to-hand between driver of route 648 and driver of route 905. imagine if 648 called all the other 648 drivers and 905 called up his posse. there would have been some serious trouble. as it was, after they were done arguing, our bus driver closed the door and drove away as quickly as possible. either he was afraid of 905, or he was afraid of the angry honking drivers behind the buses who were on the verge of forming a mob and maul 648. just kidding, taiwanese people love to watch a good fight. they were captivated and didn't realize their way was blocked by two buses.

in the end, the entire bus ride took just over an hour. keep in mind, it's usually a 15-minute bus ride. it's a good thing i brot a good cd to listen to. or i could have died. really.

dirty old drunks

so on the train home today, this unusually stumbly guy got on. he wasn't entirely red like a lobster, so i didn't immediately assume he was drunk, but i should have, cuz he was. at first, i watched him "accidentally" run into a girl while the train lurched to a stop, and then a guy pulling him away and giving him a stern "stop it" look. at first, i thot they all knew each other, but soon realized that they didn't, when the girl went to another portion of the subway car and the stern look guy's girlfriend told him not to get involved. he started making gestures at a young couple (they must have been in highschool) and then trying to push them together. i think he was trying to make his own amateur porn? i dunno, but he was really creeping me out, and i could tell my friend was feeling the same. luckily for my friend, he got off the subway pretty early on.

what made it all worse was when mr. drunk started glancing over at me. i tried to avoid eye contact and pretend i didn't see him, but he started tapping me and trying to pull me towards him. i was like "what are you doing?" to him, but that only elicited more from him. he started pointing at a girl near the door and tried to push me toward her. i backed away and looking for support, turned to the guy next to me, who said to me, "he's drunk." to which i responded, "i know." really? was he drunk?

not wanting to deal with him anymore, i moved to another subway car. by that time, someone had alerted the security and a security guy came by to handle him. i didn't kno what happened exactly, but i think he made the drunk guy sit down until the next stop, after which he escorted him off the train. it was all-in-all a very uncomfortable situation, but at least he didn't kill me. rite?

hello and goodbye

this week has been a lot of fun, even tho it stinks to have to say goodbye to people. it was the last few day of classes (our final was even cancelled, a goodbye present from our teacher?) and we kicked it as much as possible before people had a chance to leave.

i'm definitely going to miss this...

c-pop overload

of course, i just got back from a pop music festival thrown by channel v (the local music video channel that's not mtv), and i had to tell someone about it.

but first, before i got there, i went to zhongxiao east road in search of someone to cut my hair. i actually just picked the first salon i saw that looked halfway decent. it was like $190nt for a hairwash and $450nt for a cut (a combined cost of about $20us), which sounded like a splendid price for a haircut at a fancy-looking salon in dongqu. i told her what i wanted, and she did what she wanted, and i ended up with a decent haircut, but definitely not the one i asked for. i would have stopped her had i noticed she'd taken so much off the top, but she was talking my ear off about her kid in malaysia. i didn't really care about what she had to say, but i was afraid that if i said so, she would stab me with the sharp object in her hand. all in all, i guess i was happy with it. afterwards, i headed to the city hall area where the concert was being held.

by the time i got there, it was raining like bitches and meows. i was not excited at the prospect of having to stand out in the rain while the concert was going on, but i figured when's the next time i'll see yuan wei juexing live? the concert was scheduled to "begin" at 7pm, so i got there at 630, and saw that it was already full of the typical crowd of high-school-aged-and-younger kids that usually come to these things. it looked like there was a line to get into a sectioned off middle area in front of the stage, so, already wet from the rain (yes, i was carrying an umbrella, but in rains this hard they don't work very well) i stood in line and waited.

and i waited a really long time. a little after 7, they finally let people into the middle, but the line was useless. everyone just crowded to the front and squeezed their way in. honestly, i don't think i could have not gone in, since everyone behind me was pushing me that way. of course, after we were all in there, we had to wait another hour during which they repeatedly played channel v commercials (the same commercials) on all the video screens on stage. i didn't really want to watch them the first time (except for the part in blackie's show where yuanwei juexing's jay and wesley kissed, that was kinda fun), and to have them battering us with them for so long, i almost went crazy.

but that was nothing compared to when it looked like they were about to start, but instead, the nite's primary sponsor, le tea, got a bunch of ribbon dancers (of both sexes) dressed in pink to come and do a too-long twirl for us. what the fuck? why can't they just start the goddamned thing? at this point, we'd all been standing in the rain for hours. granted, the rain finally stopped, but we were all still soaked (my shoes were filled with water, and they will never be the same after tonite). after the dancers, and some more commercials (free concert, my ass), the thing finally started.

first, the channel v vjs all came out and talked for a little bit, which was fun, cuz some of them are just as famous as (or more so than) the performers at the concert. we got to see them all on stage at once, and before the concert really started, the mayor of taipei (and newly elected chairman of the nationalist party) ma yingjiu came out and welcomed us too. awww, what a nice guy! intermittently thruout the concert (during commercial breaks for the tv recording), the vjs came out a little closer in the crowd to throw free stuff like pens and stationary at people to keep us from rushing the stage and tearing it apart. the above pictures are from left to rite: first. the channel v vjs and the mayor of taipei; second. vj henry, jiayi, and jason; third. xiaoxiang the gay newsman (i don't kno if he's actually gay, but his listed favorite movie in his profile is formula 17, and that's pretty gay), rongjia, and vj henry again; fourth. jason again with blackie.

before i go on, look at the massive stage! there were a lot of performers. most of them played two or three songs, except for the more popular people/groups. the caesars played what felt like a full set, which is fine, except i don't think most of the audience knew any of their songs except that one ipod one. it is unfortunate that many of the singers came down with a bad case of lipsynchitis, but what are you gonna do, rite? but on with the pop stars!

first, it was stanley huang. i didn't really kno of stanley all that well, except i'd heard his song "who's your daddy?" at some point. he used to be in a boyband with his brother and his cousin way back in the 90s called "l.a. boyz". his brother's now in "hip-hop" group machi, and his cousin... i dunno, i think i saw him on a talk show or something as a guest. don't kno why tho. he was a decent performer, but i didn't really come here to see him, so i wasn't unhappy when he was done. vivian hsu was next. i wasn't really familiar with much of her music, but i'd heard all the songs she sang before (like "vicious love," you kno the one, "say, say, say you love me! bugu yiqie, henhen ai!"). i just didn't kno that she was the one who sang them. she was really pretty, but she's also a dirty white slut. i think i heard that she used to do soft porn, but i haven't had the motivation to go find any of it. her cd cover's already pretty naked tho. she's already 30, which means that her star as a female vocalist should be fading soon. it sucks, but not everyone can be faye wong. then came the caesars with their unusually long set. they played at least 3 times as many songs as any of the others, and they were probably the least well-known. i guess if you're gonna come to taiwan from sweden, you'd make the most out of it and perform for as long as possible. i didn't really give their cd a good listen when i was in the states, so i didn't kno most of their songs. that ipod song ("jerk it out") was good tho.

the first of the boybands (tho that term can be rather ambiguous in the mando-pop scene) was k-one. i don't like boybands. i didn't like k-one. and neither did most of the people who were standing around me, cuz they were all heckling them like high schoolers often do. one of them was kinda cute tho (the one in the middle in the picture, j.r.). moving on, the cutesy girl duo sweety did a couple songs. i don't like sweety that much either. their gimmick when they first came out was that they were like 15 or something. but that was a few years ago, and they're no longer little girls, so now they're just another girl duo who used to have a gimmick.

nan quan mama came afterwards! to be honest, i don't kno their music all that well, but since they're the band that jay chou helped create, they can't be bad, rite? i really liked their music, and i think i'm going to go get their cd. then finally, it was yuan wei juexing. i don't think their music is all that (it is super catchy tho, with great song titles like "happiness download," "bikini," and "how are u?"), but i think they're adorable, especially jay. i'm a sucker for white jackets too. he was doing everything rite. too bad i missed their beach concert and any signing events they might have had; i would really like to get up close to them. ba ha ha ha... well, it just kept getting better, cuz alive was next. i kno i said i didn't like boybands just a second ago, but this is daniel wu's boyband! you kno daniel wu. he's the hottie from gen-x cops, bishounen, and most recently new police story. i've had a celebrity crush on him since i saw gen-x cops some five years ago! well, i just about died. but it's a good thing i didn't, cuz i ended up taking a lot of pictures. his bandmate and costar in new police story, terence yin is hot too (you might have seen him in tomb raider 2. i didn't cuz i didn't watch that movie). abc pride, yo! if you wanna hear what their music sounds like, i think you can download it off of their site, along with their music videos. they're really not very good, but you're allowed to do whatever you want.

cyndi wang was next. this is the girl with the ultra-catchy (and ultra-annoying because they're so catchy) songs "da da da" and "baby baby tell me," both of which she unleashed upon the audience. she did her silly dances too. anyways, moving on, wilber pan was next. i kno he goes by "will" now, but i'm going to call him wilber still. i don't like wilber very much. i kno i just wrote "abc pride, yo!" a couple lines previous, but wilber annoys me for some reason. he used to be a vj on channel v (he was when i met him years ago), but then he decided he wanted to do music, so he became a musician. anyways, he performed his ubiquitous "can't help but love" ("bu de bu ai") without the girl that he usually does the duet with, opting instead to use a recording of her singing. we think she wasn't there cuz she fucked up so badly at his other performance a week ago.

korean pop star se7en came after. he was pretty good, but i can't say i'd ever heard of him before. by this time, i was so tired, i just wanted to see jolin and go home. but first, i had to go thru the other boyband (performing. make no mistake, there are more than two boybands in the whole of mando-pop) 5566. they suck like k-one, except k-one didn't do a riverdance-inspired jig for one of their songs. but one of the members was pretty hot, again, the one in the center, jason. he didn't look like he was having much fun, but i wouldn't be either if i had to spend much time with those other jerks. finally, jolin tsai showed up and did a few songs. i'm really pretty ambivalent about her, but since she's so popular, i wanted to see why. to be honest, i don't really kno why. is it cuz she can dance better than your average pop star or what? it looked to me like she had no personality whatsoever. she was like a robot who said what she was programmed to say and nothing else, never showing much emotion. i'm saying there wasn't life in her eyes! no wonder she's on bad terms with jay; he must have found out she was a pop music robot!

with the concert over at midnite, i had been wet for a good six hours, five hours of which my shoes were full of water. after i got back home and took off my shoes, my feet looked like they belonged to a corpse. it was gross. anyhow, i had a lot of fun, even tho it was a physically trying experience. i was a little sad i wasn't able to meet up with a couple friends, but they were on the other side of the partition and there was no easy way across it. at any rate, another c-pop concert under the belt.

all you can puke

last nite, i went to this all-you-can-drink nite at some trashy club (called vs, i think), and that was such a bad idea. not because i had a hangover in the morning (cuz really, when don't i have a hangover in the morning), but because no one else there seemed to be able to control their drink intake. the locals were throwing up left and rite, and the men's bathroom was a complete and utter mess. will i never go to an all-you-can-drink again? of course not, but i still don't think it's a good idea.

i can't help but...

i went ktving for the first time since coming back to taipei for a classmate's birthday, tho i think we had more fun than her. she ditched out on us to go see wilber pan perform live in ximen ding.

it was another classmate's last day, so we went out to room 18 for some fun. honestly, i don't remember much of the nite, except all the shots i took of various mystery liquids of many colors. afterwards, i think we went to swensen's, and i think i got bacon and eggs. there might also have been hash browns. i also remember heading back home (home being the hotel) a little bit after daybreak. when i woke up, i discovered i'd also stolen salt and pepper shakers. you can't find enuf uses for those little things. i think we all had fun. i miss hanging out with her already.

so this is what my room looks like

i think i will be leaving my liver here, and just get a new one at the market after i get back.

adventures at the lava bar

friday nite, we checked out the lava bar, which, like room 18, was in the neo19 building. it was pretty nice, but the music wasn't as good as 18, and there weren't quite as many people there. after several jack and cokes, the nite becomes a little hazy, but i was told i grabbed too many girls' asses and almost got into a fight. well, whatever. it's all in good fun, rite? i do remember someone breaking my umbrella tho... "you don't knooo!"

the day after, i spent some time with a classmate and his friend with a heavy hangover and went shopping at the various malls and department stores in taipei. in the warner village area, we managed to see huang yida and thousands of little fangirls, while he was there for a signing event. afterwards, some pop star girl whose name i don't remember was also there for a short performance, all to promote some online computer game. after that i went home for a desperately-needed rest.

oops, i fell over again

last nite i went to a classmate's boyfriend's hotel suite to party. the last thing i remember is sitting on the couch with my beer after a couple shots of jack.

then i woke up in another hotel room. feeling a certain sense of responsibility, i went to school with a hangover even tho i had apparently told everyone that i wasn't going. i had also drunk dialed someone. i'm not quite sure what else happened last nite, but i was told i may have done something i shouldn't have...

in other news, i mourned the loss of my four-year-old locals, with which i had been around the world. i left them for some reason at the suite, and i'm pretty sure i'll never see them ever again. so goes life.

room 18 revisited

the last time i was at room 18 was about four years ago, i think. at the time, it was situated at warner village and it was a pretty nice place, if a little expensive. now, it's moved down one block to the neo19 building rite next to warner village. the set up is still good, a big dancefloor for hip-hop/r&b in one room, surrounded by tables and a long bar, and then a loungier area in another room where mostly techno and remixed pop are played while people sit around the tables there, which surround the bar in that room.

since i had gotten pretty wasted the nite before, i wasn't sure if i wanted to go out again, but after a little rest, i was feeling restless once again.

i met up with a bunch of classmates there and partied the nite away. the cover was pretty unreasonable at 700 nt, but then we got a punchcard type thing with 800 nt worth of drinks on it. a beer, shot or well drink is 200 nt, with some cocktails and stuff getting up to 350 nt ($10 drinks, are we in new york or what?), so if one were to want to get trashed, one would probably just get 4 shots. i ended up getting a well drink first and finding out that it was weak-ass, so i used it as a chaser for the shots i took.

it was a really fun nite, even tho afterwards, when i went home, my cousin had deadbolted the door to our apartment, cuz he thot i was in taoyuan, so after explaining to the security guard that i really did live there, i laid down on the couch in the community room to nap until my cousin woke up... in the heat and the humidity (yes, it gets really hot at 7 am).

well, i guess it gave me time to chuckle about how i knocked a guy in the head on the subway with my own head when i dozed off on the way home. whoops!

like a sophomore for the very first time

i hadn't gotten that drunk on a school nite since 2002, i think. the dorms sure were fun, weren't they?

last nite, after hitting a bar (roxy jr. cafe on shida road. don't be fooled by the name; it ain't a cafe) with my classmates to do homework (oh yes, the best place to do homework is where there's plenty of drink...), i went to another classmate's hotel room (his family owns it, so he lives there. spiffy, huh?) with a bunch of other classmates and got trashed playing drinking games. i think it's the perfect icebreaker to get drunk with people. i don't think i can really be great friends with someone until we all get trashed, reveal our innermost secrets and then embarrass ourselves in front of each other. that didn't happen last nite, but it was still fun... mebbe because i ended up in bed with a cute boy. not that anything happened.

today, we only had two people in the class, including me, excluding the teacher. there are a total of five students in that class; two of them went off on a school-sponsored field trip to the beaches of kenting; and then one of them skipped to go shopping with her mom. class with only one other person besides the teacher, hungover and exhausted is not fun, but i think we struggled thru it nicely. i still can't believe the teacher didn't just cancel class tho.

snow or never

well, what would you do, if you had a chance to see snow in taipei? yesterday, i went with a few classmates to nokia's totally board event, cuz we were promised snow and pop stars. the snow was a little disappointing, but the pop stars were alrite.

i met up with people from my class at the chiang kai-shek memorial hall in the afternoon to check out what was going on during the day, and when we got there, we saw a ski ramp and a little snow slide where people (mostly kids) could slide down on an innertube. that was it for the snow.

as for the music, the person we saw in the afternoon was zhang zhenyue, tho i didn't kno his name at the time. i called him "that guy with the beard" and no one believed me that he was actually taiwanese. after his set, nothing much was going on, so we left to get something to drink.

after much trouble finding a coffee shop with any room, and after meeting up with yet more people, we headed back into the memorial hall to see if there was something else going on. we watched the skate competition for a bit, and then they had some music. it started off with an unknown called alan kuo, who no one really cared about. i personally didn't like him cuz he was unattractive and couldn't sing well. his album was supposed to come out later or something. i dunno, i tried not to listen. after him, it was huang yida, whose songs off his newer cd weren't quite as bad as i might have imagined, having listened to his entire first cd. then, the man we all came to see, lee-hom. he performed a few songs and then left to a crowd of screaming teenage girls.

i think this was the first time i'd actually attended a c-pop concert, and it was a lot of fun. hopefully, in the months to come there will be more... and hopefully jay will come back and perform too.

please die, taiwanese news media

this morning, i woke up and turned on the news. a news report on harry potter! great! i can see if they said it sold out yet or what... first headline printed on the screen: *note: harry potter semi-spoiler follows* "harry potter hits the market! _____ dies!" WHAT!?! WHAT THE FUCK!?! WHAT KIND OF RESPONSIBLE NEWS MEDIA ORGANIZATION WOULD GIVE AWAY THE CONTENTS OF A BOOK NO ONE'S READ YET!?! the answer is no responsible news media organization. taiwan's news media sucks! i hate it! but wait, there's more! second headline: "_____ dies! killed by _____!" OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK!?! i can't believe it. i absolutely can't believe it. it's just too stupid! i was almost okay with knoing who died before i read the book, cuz, you kno, i don't kno who killed him, but no, the taiwanese news took even that from me. i'm absolutely disgusted! DISGUSTED! i'm warning any tv reporters over here, that if i see them on the street, i'll punch them in the mouth.

and now, i'm off to secure a copy before the typhoon hits so that i can sit inside and read all day. not that i'll enjoy as much as i could have, stupid news.

stupid buses, stupid school, stupid me

i'm not the most aware person when i'm running on less than 4 hours of sleep after an entire day of walking, sweating and using my brain. i make excuses, but i'm sure a smarter person wouldn't have made the same mistakes. two days in a row, i've taken the wrong fucking bus and had to get off cross the street and take it back to somewhere familiar.

yesterday, i mistakenly got on the 624 instead of the 642. already, pretty stupid of me, but it wasn't until 4 stops on the wrong route before i realized that i was on the wrong bus. then, after i got off the bus to cross the road to wait for a bus to go into the other direction (back to where i knew where i was), there was no way for me to cross the god damn road! it was y-shaped, where one road turned to two, and i had to cross at the point of diversion, except the traffic light alternated between allowing each direction of the road to go, which meant that where i was, there was a constant flow of cars. i don't kno why they bothered putting a fucking crosswalk where people couldn't really cross safely! i stood by trying to frogger my way across the 4 lanes and watched bus after bus after bus go by, buses i could have taken. when i finally made my way across, no more buses came for what must have been at least 30 minutes. i think they're just making trouble for people with two buses 624 and 642 that stop at the same place, daring people to not pay attention or read the number wrong, or remember the number wrong. fucking bus!

because i had learned from my lack of awareness the day previous, the public transportation system decided to show me that i had a hold of nothing, that they still owned me. seeing a 642 bus come, i waved my hand for it to stop and got on it. i made sure that it was going on the rite route by seeing where it was going, since, while i thot 642 was the rite number, i'd been wrong before when i thot i'd been rite. after a few stops that were familiar, i spaced out and started thinking about how much trouble my whole day had been. after a few more stops, i looked outside and didn't recognize the surroundings. i went to look at the posted bus route and noticed that it had made a turn i hadn't wanted to take, and that i had to get off the bus, cross the road, and take another bus back. what the fuck is up with that!? well, i'm not exactly sure what went wrong tonite, but i think it was that there's a green 642 and a red 642, and while most of the route is the same, it's different exactly from where i get on that bus. fucking bus! fucking bus system!

i'm sure anyone who is already familiar with the system knos to pay attention to these sorts of things, but i had no idea. at least now i kno, rite? no! wrong! now, they're just going to throw something else at me, like green 642s that you pay-as-you-enter go a different route from the ones that you pay-as-you-leave, or i dunno, a green 642 with an odd number of passengers goes one way, and one with an even number of passengers goes another way, and it changes as people get on and off the bus. hopefully, i have a good grasp of taipei public transportation and won't have to suffer thru more frustration.

speaking of frustration, taiwan normal university has a horrible method of putting people in the rite sections, and an even worse method of switching classes. first of all, after a proficiency test that didn't test my proficiency, i was placed in a class that was way too easy for me and at a time i didn't select. in order to change classes, you need to wait until the 3rd day of the quarter. except, when the third day of the quarter came, there were no open spaces in any of the classes i wanted to get into. in fact, i was not the only one with this problem. dozens of other students also had trouble getting into a class they wanted. the only solution, it turned out, was to commandeer an already-existing class and make the teacher teach the material we wanted to learn. well, whatever works.

as a result of the shitty system, i spent a better part of the day on the campus. i woke up at 6 to make it there by 8 in the morning to see if i could switch classes and/or attend the class i was signed up for at the time. then at 10, i sat in on a class that might or might not have had an open space... for 10 minutes before the teacher told me that i probably wouldn't get into that class. then i ran into this other girl looking for another class, and we spent the next 20 minutes trying to find a class that had open spaces. whose idea was it to make each class 10-person maximum? at 12, i went to the fun cooking class, and then at 2, i had a 3 hour class. exhausting, i tell you, and then i have a lot of homework to do. actually, i should prob get started on that.

another fourth away from home

it's still hot. really, really hot. i cannot express just how hot it is; you just have to come and experience it for yourself.

taipei is a consumer whore's paradise. there are malls and department stores everywhere. in some places there are 3 or 4 of them rite next to each other, like near the city hall. there's the old warner village and new york new york that's been around there for a bit, but there's also a new multi-building shin kong mitsukoshi, and of course the new taipei 101 (the tallest building in the world!), all of which is connected to each other with a network of bridges to assure that you won't be tempted to leave the area without having loaded up on the latest fashions from around the world. as if the prices for designer labels weren't already way out of my price range, the fact that the exchange rate is about 30 new taiwan dollars to the american dollar so the numbers go up into the 10000s frightened me so much i yelped and fainted.

this is hot

i'm in taipei now.

the plane ride here was mostly uneventful. in the 13 hours that i spent on the plane, i ate some pretty terrible food, watched a couple movies (hitch and robots, oh yes and i started seoul raiders, but i wasn't able to finish), slept, and tried to stop thinking about much my knees hurt. i dunno if it was sitting in the same position for so long, or something having to do with the pressure or whatever, but halfway thru the flight after i woke up for the first or second time, my left knee started hurting like it was about to pop off. i tried to get rid of it by walking up and down the aisle, but it didn't go away. using it might have just made it hurt more. eventually i got to sleep again and after i woke up, my left knee stopped hurting, but my rite knee ached. this happens sometimes on the plane, but usually it goes away after i stretch my legs. i think by the time we landed tho, the problem went away.

i ate two meals on the plane; one was a breakfast of fried noodles that was actually okay, especially compared to the other meal of chicken with rice, which was so unbearably bland that for the first time i used the salt that comes with your utensils (which were metal! weird, huh?).

midway thru the flight, it finally occurred to me that i was going to be spending 3 months in taipei. ahhh!

all in all it wasn't that bad a 13-hour trip, not just because i slept for most of it, but also cuz china airlines is equipped with a personal video screen on which you can watch movies, tv, play games, listen to music at your leisure. you can watch movies for the entire flight if you wanted to, or play blackjack or solitaire or mahjong. it was the best improvement on air travel i've seen yet.

after arriving, i didn't do much the first day. all i really accomplished was exchanging money (which was a chore, because a lot of banks didn't buy hundred dollar bills that were minted before a certain year. what the fuck, rite?) and taking a couple naps.

today, i went to the school to register. while there, i met this dork of a guy who looked at my form and saw my email address and asked me if i went to wasu. at first i couldn't understand what he was talking about cuz he called it "wah-soo" instead of "wah-zoo." when i was looking too confused for too long, he said, "the huskies, rite?" and i was like "wasu isn't huskies. huskies is u-dub." and then i stopped talking to him, to let him kno that his attempt at starting conversation was a giant failure. i also met the mother of this half-japanese girl who's from taiwan, who introduced me to her daugher. isn't it fun when your mom tries to get you to make friends? oh yes, oh yes. well, the most important thing is that there were actually a few cute guys. one of them was...

wait a sec, i'm in an internet cafe, and they just started playing that old enya song, orinoco flow (you kno, sail away, sail away, sail away). blast from the past, huh!?

anyways, like i was saying, one of them was... wait, i don't really remember what i was going to write. fuck you, enya! oh yeah, one of them was a tall white guy with brown eyes and hair, who was really dorky adorable, and would have been even better looking if he didn't smell of asian fetish... and pussy (his gf was with him). i don't think i'll have any classes with most of these people, so i'll refrain from making my usual pre-judgments on the people i saw today, and wait until i kno i'll be spending two months with them. tee hee!

after what took the whole morning, i went shopping, first on zhongxiao road (eslite at dunhua, and sogo at fuxing), and then at ximen ding. it's nice to be at these places again, but it's also kinda disappointing, cuz 80% of what i remember from four years ago is gone. but i guess they make up for it with new cool stuff i'll remember in five years, but won't be here anymore. and also the enormous underground mall that has appeared under zhongxiao road.

hopefully, i will go see initial d later this week, cuz it stars my favorite hk hotties edison chen and shawn yue, plus brooding hottie jay chou in his first starring role. hot hot hot!

hey, if you kno what's hopping in taipei these days, drop me a line! my info's like years old. it's old like the money i have from my last visit that is no longer accepted at all places of business.

okay, it's time for dinner. (and sinead o'connor's nothing compares 2 u.)

chofest 2005

fa-bu-lous! all of gay seattle congregated at the paramount for two shows of margaret's assassin tour to kick off pride weekend. she was hilarious, and it was so worth the fawking $45 we all shelled out for it. it was funnier than revolution, and just about as good as notorious c.h.o. and i'm the one i want. i hope she comes back soon, cuz i really can't get enuf of her. please, margaret! come back and take my money!!!

wet hot summer

i like water. i like boys. i like wet boys. this photo was taken by sølve sundsbø for the latest edition of vman. i like this picture.

i've been busy doing nothing lately. well, it felt like nothing, but when you put it all together it's definitely something. spring quarter ended and i did quite well. i'd like to say it isn't because i didn't skip one class, but cuz i'm super, but there just might be a correlation between how many classes i don't attend and how low my grades get.

the film festival also ended, and after seeing so many movies over the course of three weeks, it felt a little empty when i wasn't looking forward to seeing a movie the next day. i also saw revenge of the sith (a while ago) and batman begins (last week) and they were both pretty fun. look forward to a whole lot of movie reviewing in the coming days.

i'm currently in the process of moving out of the apartment, since i'm not going to be in seattle for the next three months. yes, that's rite, for nearly the entire season of summer, i'll be in taipei, schooling and hopefully relaxing... well, as relaxing as it can get in the oppressive heat and humidity of a tropical summer. i wish i could write one of those oh-my-god-i'm-living-in-another-country blogs, but three months isn't really all THAT long, and i don't anticipate very much culture shock. that being said, i'm sure i'll still make stupid observations about how different things are, just for the sake of making them. my friend is having somewhat of a similar experience in kunming, china, so check out his oh-my-god-i'm-living-in-another-country blog at bitsculptor. i am leaving saturday nite.

a very long stop-and-chat

so last week i went to some class reunion activities (but not the reunion itself, since i was busy meeting ben mckenzie). i didn't originally intend to go, but i found out that another one of my friends was going to be there, so i thot to myself, "why not?"

it was nice seeing some of the people, and others i really couldn't have cared less about. it was very overwhelming at first, because i felt like if i didn't say "hi, how are you, what have you been up to?" to someone that i was somehow neglecting them, and then they would feel offended and start rumors about me. and then i remembered that they weren't the bitchy queens i usually have to deal with, and that i didn't really give a shit if they felt offended. so after i came to that realization, it was better.

everyone was essentially the same as i remembered them to be, and so it was not as fun or exciting as i had hoped. after a while, it just got tiresome, because really how much did i have to talk about with these people? every fucking conversation was about what everyone had been up to, and after repeating myself for the 10th time, i started switching it up, but even that wasn't entertaining. also, once we were past that point, i had nothing else to say. i wasn't going to see any of these people (god willing) for another five years, so what was the purpose?

i also realized that while i didn't feel like any of them had changed much, i think i have to a certain extent, and it was harder for me to relate to them. i sorta wanted to go away with the caterers (one of them was pretty hot), and chat it up with them rather than the privileged lot they were serving. for the first time, i felt bad being served by other people in the privacy of some rich girl's house. "wait, i'm one of you!" was what i wanted to say. that being said, at the same time, it was all very oc, and i felt almost like i was at one of the cohens' parties.

i'm glad i went and talked to and saw the people i saw, but i would die if i had to do this any more often than every five years. okay, who am i kidding, i love (almost) free food and alcohol, and if i have to suffer thru laborious conversation for it, that's a relatively small price to pay. when's the next get-together?

hot celebrity sex dream

oh my god, guess who appeared in my sex dream last nite?

i kno! isn't that totally weird? it wasn't until i was taking a shower today after i woke up that i actually remembered that i had had a sex dream. but once i had triggered the memory, a smile came to my face. these sorts of dreams come way not often enuf and, tho it might be sad to report, the memory of the dream made me happy. it's disappointing, but i think this is the first time an actual celebrity has appeared in one of these kinds of dreams. usually they're very hot, but not famous, hot, hot, hot men. i haven't had a sex dream in such a long time. it's a good thing that the wrong number that woke me up this morning happened after the events of the dream were over.

i hadn't seen him in anything for a while, and i haven't watched his show since early last year. it was very random, but it was really hot all the same, and i can still vaguely feel him all over the dream version of me. how sad is it that the dream me is getting more action than the real me? i guess that actually makes sense tho. well, whatever. one day it might come true. but i'd have to get past his hot wife.

i'm really just a little fangirl

oh my god, guess who i met tonite!?!