sick

Bad cold or flu, not sure which, blindsided me and had me bedridden all of yesterday and half of today. Feverish dreams of unending copy-and-paste prevented me from having a good night sleep. It was much like Henri Fuseli's "Nightmare."
Now I am at the tail-end suffering through some of the remaining symptoms.

Friday night

The Question of the Day was: why was I watching "Species" at my grandmother's house on a Friday night?
Truth of the matter is, it was good fun. Grandmother and I stayed up until midnight watching the better part of three completely inane films. The first, which I already mentioned, was "Species" an erotic sci-fi movie that came out in 1995. Afterward we watched a movie about a quadriplegic who has a telepathic connection with a monkey and every time he gets mad at someone the monkey will kill that person. Lastly, we caught the tail-end of a second-rate Hong Kong production featuring Tony Leung and some other famous HK actresses- it was a blend of action, thriller, and crime with the most atrocious English dubbing. I must say it was a very enjoyable evening spent with my granny.
That's my update

The News

With my new Freddy Krueger Nikes and my long-board which I have yet to give a nickname I went out across Barbur Blvd to the network of empty parking lots and wove an invisible web around the place, swooping in and out along the parameters and filling them in like water in a container of any shape and size. I surfed down some nice hills and after the curve in each at the bottom straightened out for a long time and didn't have to keep pumping because my craft carried me far as I could hope.
Now I am drinking iced tea and planning to watch some "Curb Your Enthusiasm," season 6.
Work has been boring, but I have to give a presentation a week from tomorrow. I'm pretty nervous about it even though I haven't even started preparing. Today at work I entered academic standards into a database entirely in Arabic. That might have been the highlight of my work day, except for my lunch break when I browsed fiction at Borders on 3rd and Morrison.
Last night I finished reading "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy. I have a new favorite book. It blew me away. Aspects of it remind me of Herman Melville in its expansiveness and biblical quality. It also reminds me of Mark Twain in terms of his use of vernacular. And then maybe bits of "American Psycho" when it comes to the violence which seems to blow up every page. It was brilliant though. Cormic McCarthy has his own writing style entirely that I haven't seen elsewhere, regardless of things that seem familiar (as I just mentioned above). Those analogies were made for a lack of better description. Awesome book.
I try to write creatively here and there when the opportunity and inspiration both allot. I am inspired many times, but I cannot form words to go with the emotions. I'll capture them sometime. There have been moments when I capture in writing a feeling I had long long ago tha I once could not put into writing. Then the feeling, or a similar one, would return and in a form that is very amenable to cast into letters. Those are good moments.
This next year is still pretty unclear. My work seems to be considering a place for me, but I do not know where I would fit in and if I want to go through another winter here. In fact, I don't, especially if I don't start doing some brainwork, or at least something slightly more interesting than countless permutations of the Copy-and-Paste tasks.
I found out yesterday that my cousin in Shenzhen is getting married next month. So much for going there for their wedding. I don't think there will be much fanfare though. I'll try to get around to mailing a card. Turns out his girlfriend is 2 months pregnant as well, which means 任之 will be father this coming year, 2010.
Now I must watch 1.5 hours of what Alexei and I call "Curbage"...

holiday anecdote

Something I wrote back in December after arriving home from China, probably late into a timeless night for me as I lay awake, jetlagged:

Walking through Jewel-Osco in tandem around 10pm, Dave and I were dressed to the T, both wearing nice suits and looking sharp as a razor. Down the alcohol aisle we plunged like Draino through a plugged sink and we came out of there with a Crown Royal gift set that included two glasses, one for me and one for him.

Looked too nice to be carded at the cash register and went back to his house with the intention of drinking whiskey sours and watching “Leprechaun 3 in Las Vegas,” but much to our chagrin, the DVD (part of a Leprechaun 1-3 set I had given Dave for Christmas) was bunk, or rather it didn’t work in U.S. region DVD players. I think its proper region code was the one corresponding to Germany. I bought the DVD set in China on my second to last day there. I went to the DVD shop across the university campus, but I was not familiar with this particular one. I came across, first, the “Sleepaway Camp” series, 1 through 3, which would be perfect gift for Seth. So I pulled that out of the stack and set it aside. Then, less than 10 seconds later I came across the Leprechaun series which was the perfect gift for Dave. Just as the two are next-door neighbors in real life, so the gifts I would get for them this holiday season were nearly beside one another as well.

new shoes

It is almost time to retire my white Cartelo shoes with the red and blue stripes and the small illustrations of Beijing's famous Tiantan Park pagoda (天坛公园) on the sides. I bought those the first evening Shawna and I arrived in Suzhou after we took the speed train from Nanjing after my classes were out. We went to a shoe store and I thought for a while as to whether I wanted to pay the equivalent of ~$35 USD for a decent pair of shoes as opposed to ~$7 USD for a bootleg pair that fall apart in a matter of weeks. I decided I needed a pair that would last for some time, and I really liked the Tiantan design on them, they were pretty nifty. I typically rate shoes in my mind based on a scale of whether or not they are "nifty." This rating system came about the first time I went to China, when Alexei and I were in Century Mart in Shanghai. I bought a similar pair, white with red and blue stripes, that at the time struck a chord with me bc they looked like the cover of an Elliott Smith album entitled "Figure 8." They didn't have any other designs, but I remember thinking how nifty they were, and ever since that descriptor for worthwhile shoes has stuck.
Now I don't really like Elliott Smith so my decision to buy those shoes in Suzhou was based on entirely different values. I was wearing a horrible pair of flower shoes (bootlegged Nikes) I had bought with my friend Simon the preceding year in Beijing. Those shoes were quite miserable. I still have another pair I bought in Beijing, which in spite of inferior quality I still enjoy. They have a map all over them; the map is, of all places, belonging to a location in Florida called Carol City. Why? I don't know.
But I found a new pair of shoes I can settle for and although I am buying them on the internet, based on other buyer comments I believe they are legitimate. They are of a special edition release by Nike with horror movie themes. This particular pair I ordered are the Freddy Krueger edition Nikes, the infamous nightmare killer of, you guessed it, the "Nightmare on Elm St." series. They should be nice for long-boarding...

People in the City

There was the guy who stands near Pioneer Square and sprays his entire body with silver paint and stands like a statue all day for some money that people may drop in his box, or maybe he does something, but I was thinking maybe he just remains a mute statue. I saw him preparing for his gig the other day, sitting in the shade of a tree and spraying himself down. Everything was silver on him except for his arms, and just as he started on his left arm, the spray can was out, emptied. He was taken aback, and this was obvious in spite of the sunglasses shielding his eyes. The man paused thoughtfully for some time, seeming near the brink of a silent panic. Maybe he had come a long way from home that morning and there was no money or no spray paint to buy anywhere around. Perhaps he had thought about why he didn't buy an extra can the last time he went out and shopped for it; he remembered standing in line at the hardware store debating whether or not to get an extra can "because he'd have to get another anyway sooner or later," as the cashier line slowly inched forward and he decided against buying one more.
The man's arms dropped, slouched down slightly in defeat. What to do? I kept walking.

Later in the early evening, the city was cooling and the park on Salmon between 3rd and 4th was sparsely populated. A guy with mangy long hair and a weathered face wandered with a delicate lack of coordination, probably wasn't drunk, but simply woozy from the heat wave that struck town earlier in the week. He finally chose the right patch of grass to lay down in after a few moments of inspection. "This is a good place," he must have thought. He sat down at first and put forth what seemed a bit of energy to do so. And then extended himself to lie down and with his upper torso still bent upward, stuck his already lit cigarette into one end of a long green straw. He put the other end in his mouth as he put his head back to the earth and lay his arms outstretched on either side. He took a drag, and lifted a hand to pull the contraption out of his mouth. "What an innovation," he thought to himself.