when i was 13...

i had mariah carey's self-titled first album, and i fuggin LOVED that album. i'd almost forgotten how good down 'n dirty cheeseball that album is, until i was thinking of remodeling my bathroom this past spring and went to this bathroom fixture place in chinatown that played that entire album, accompanied by cheesy vietnamese karaoke videos. i was reminded of it again tonight while watching the 'american idol' auditions. some girl did a horrible rendition of 'without you' (different album). there's nothing like hearing a fucked-up version of a song to make you want to hear the real thing. i'm listening to 'all i want for christmas' right now. buy that for a dollah.

we are BOOKED for vietnam. i even booked the rock-climbing and trekking tours in da lat. i'm so proud of myself. and i am, this moment, backing up all the shit on my hard drive that matters on the new 2 gb usb data key that i bought today for $25 usd... and i got a 1 gig memory card for my camera (i hadn't realized i was using a 256 this whole time). and a ipod converter charger thing. all for less than $56 usd. back at home the usb alone would have been that much unless you were intrepid online relentless bargain hunter. i guess there are some good things about being here... hehe.

so i thought tonight would be the first day since saturday that i haven't been drinking, but me and cyn and ulf just split a bottle of prosecco. i'm trying to get to bed at a decent hour tonight, like before 4 am would be ideal. it's already 2 am, tho, so it's not looking good. i just feel so much more awake at night. my brain works better, more clearly. people who witness me trying to think before caffeine and at any hour before 11 am realize that i'm not fit to make decisions or even have relatively decent recall ability with either of these two factors involved. zzzzz....

so i talked to my parents yesterday. besides announcing they were refusing to celebrate christmas until one of their offspring produces their own procreated little bundle of screaming red-faced joy, my dad gave me a cat update. (for the uninitiated - my family will talk endlessly about two subjects - food and their pets.) my furry ball of allergens (i discovered 6 months after i got my kitty cat cat that i'm allergic and she triggers my asthma) has overcome a lot since she moved in with my folks - she developed a relationship with their rottweiler, she learned to go outside without freaking out and hiding in the compost bin, she worked her way into my mom's affection (as it were) and is allowed to sit on her desk, 'with her butt on my papers,' as my mom would so eloquently state. or huff. scarlett has also put on about 30% more body mass because my mom's solution to the cat rubbing on her ankles - which she views as harassment - is to dump food in her bowl for a moment's reprieve from the cardinal sin of affection. my cat is a pig, but she's not stupid, so she caught on to this rather quickly and i think her body mass ratio is quite alarming. when she runs, her belly swings violently from side to side. when i was home, we resumed our daily ritual of doing the humpty dance for visiting relatives or my grandmother's entertainment, but that didn't seem to suffice for additional cardiovascular activity to the extent that it would lead to weight loss.

the cat update consisted of the news that my grumpy little animal has made herself some 'cat friends,' as my dad says. they apparently sit in the garden, about a foot apart, and stare at each other. i'm told this goes on for hours. and i have to deduce that since scarlett isn't busy trying beat the holy shit out of these other cats (like mama, like kitty) that they are indeed friends and this is how cats socialize. i mean, i guess if you sleep 20 hours a day, going for lunch at the country club and maybe a bit of shopping on the avenue is just far too taxing. sitting amongst my dad's snow pea trellis and herb garden is probably far more appealing. maybe blinking once in a while, you know. wouldn't want to strain oneself.

i smell like smoke

as always.

we had sichuan food tonight for linda's going-away. i've decided not to go to hangzhou tomorrow because i have to concentrate on booking hotels for vietnam. i've gotten dinged and cancelled and everything else you can possibly imagine because of tet. sucks.

i love all the different things you try in sichuan food, plus the spiciness. but there's this little, very strongly-flavored spice they use (alvin says it's called mala) that looks like a mini caper but explodes in your mouth and makes your tongue numb. i called it nasty shit berry. i really dislike the flavor, i have an aversion to it. it's like eating a solid ball of bathroom cleaner-flavored listerine. we had some good dishes - duck blood in hot spicy oily soupy sauce, fried chicken pieces buried in chiles (you literally have to dig them out), pork slices with cucumber that you dip in garlicky oily sauce, rabbit with chiles, eggplant stuffed with goose (that was really good), mah po dofu sichuan style (aka dusted with crushed mala), and i tried tac's sea horse with bull penis soup. tasted like chicken soup like mom used to make (no, really). sichuan food is really tasty, but as you may have noticed, most things are drowned in hot spicy oil, so it's definitely not for people on a diet or who can't eat hot stuff. i couldn't even eat the dan dan mian because there was a huge dollop of crushed mala paste on top and i couldn't hang.

tomorrow i have to call vietnam and book hotels, run to xintiandi and buy a usb flash to back up my files, and work more on my short stories. i decided that i would try writing a collection of short stories to get published. after hemming and hawing and waiting for the writing addiction to hit me again, i decided that i should just... start writing. and so i did, and here we go. let you know how that goes.

one more thing

if ya don't know, now ya know...

i'm addicted like hell to www.perezhilton.com (listed on the right under 'chisme chisme') and if you click on it within the next day or so you'll see the most unnecessary picture of harry potter, aka 'hairy' potter. whoa. that was uncalled for.

as an adult...

you have to consider things like what to do with anger. as a child or an adolescent, there was no question. rage was rage and you reacted, consequences be damned. an an almost-30-year old, i find myself considering absently if what i'm about to do (impulsive aquarian) is going to make life suck for me later.

that's the big difference, of course. i wonder briefly and still do what i do, although even i will admit that i take it down a notch. there's less cursing and more often than not i find myself disappointed in people and not even that angry. reacting more because that's why i've always done.

no big point here, just sort of musing. i had a rather disappointing run-in with that guy tonight, and i still held out some hope that he would handle things maturely, but he didn't, so oh well. it's kinda sad and his behavior was really unbecoming of an adult - fuck it, a human being. linda actually heard him asking one of our female friends, 'when will i see you again?' lmao, poor girl. i had to call him out, and i did, which is probably one thing i excel at and usually get some sort of gratification from, but this time it was just lame.

i'm heading to vietnam on saturday. i can't believe it's almost here! from now on, i'm just going to say, 'pho-kit' to anything that bothers me....

work hard, play hard?

a while ago i got a rare email from will which consisted of more than 2 - 3 lines and only 1 or 2 smartass comments. to be fair, he's in his second (uh, i think) year of residency and combined with a terminal condition called procrastination it's a heady combo. anyhoo, i digress. in it he made the observation that i - like him - seem to either be running around like crazy, partying hard, or laying around hella tired. it's funny when your close friends make observations about you that you don't expect. it's an interesting surprise to see how your people view your life.

i think about this comment on days like these, where i've spent the majority of the day on the couch recovering from the indulgences of the night before. i don't know what it is, but drinking in SH is a lot different from being at home. i'm sure it has a lot to do with the fake liquor or whatever gets served here - drinks can still taste strong but you just don't get as truly black-out, smash-through-the-plateglass-window fucked up that you get at home. at most the night seems to be vaguely fuzzy and one a rare night i'll not remember portions of what happened. but last night i knocked back quite a few (more than 10, less than 15) beverages and felt relatively ok, just really full. however, today has been a vicious exercise in futility to recover. it's the hangover that just won't end! i've eaten every carbohydrate in the house and then some, and i even took the dog to the park thinking that the cold air will do something magical and restorative. i still feel like a pancake.

mmm... pancakes....

saw frank last night at velvet. he's the kind of person that fuggin cracks you up just by existing, much like chris rock. i was wearing my white down jacket and a hoodie, and i kid you not he spent about 4.2 minutes smushing my coat and calling me fluffy carolyn. i don't know why but things like that really make me laugh.

ok, next subject.

so you - like i - may be a total romance cynic. i think that valentine's day and anniversaries are the biggest wastes of time and money, plus i worked in retail for 6 years so i know for a fact that they're just marketing ploys. being in the states really pile-drives the notion of ROMANCE and COMMERCE home, like you would not believe. one thing i like about SH is that the bottled-american sentiment aspect of society is blissfully absent. stupid stuff like some medical study getting published about the positive affects of green tea and suddenly green tea is the second coming, fueling product sales from the tea itself to fuggin moisturizer containing green tea essence or whatever the hell. anyway, valentine's day here is suddenly seeming like a big deal to people, probably because every club and restaurant (and there are far too many) is pushing valentine's day set menus and parties and crap like that. i've got my female friends here - with the exception of cyn bc she's like me - asking what my plans are and that we should have some single girls' celebration.

if there's one thing i don't understand, it's holding a separate celebration in defiance of a holiday, tradition, or mindset. it smacks of mimicry and false sentiment and i feel like you're just giving more strength to an idea that you are rebelling against. anyhoo, i gave weak 'um, maybe' responses to any propositions to a single girl valentine celebration. i'm not ashamed of being single or and i don't feel that it's some condition i'm fighting or needing to hide. i actually fought to be single, so there.

i learned on friday that in korea on valentine's day, the women give the men chocolate or candy. then, on white day - march 14 - the men give the women chocolate. then, on april 14 for black day, those people who didn't get chocolate get together and eat 'black noodles' (which i think is soba) and try to meet someone so they don't have to participate in it again the next year. for some reason i liked the idea of getting together to eat soba for a particular reason.

is this a joke?

my blogger sign-in appears either in german or chinese.

can a girl catch a break? i mean, damn.

here's a fun (and ill-lit) picture of alvin's feet. we were playing with settings on my camera.

harbin....

the rumors are substantiated... harbin is verrrrry cold. the inlet where harbin sits is nicely situated between mongolia and the former soviet union. helLO freezing coldness. there's a main street where a lot of architecture still exists from the days where it was a huge russian enclave in the early 1900s. we tried a russian restaurant our first night there - a bit odd but the borscht and cabbage rolls were good.

so the ice and snow festival is split into a couple different locations. the snow-carving festival is north of downtown (where we were staying) across the songhua river (sight of the huge benzene chemical spill in november 2005), about a 25 yuan cab ride in a park. the ice carving part was walking distance from our hotel, and is best right after sunset because all the sculptures are lighted and it's pretty neat.



snow carving park


dog sledding at the snow park




sofia church, one of the famous examples of russian architecture


ice sculpture park


ice sculpture park