falling victim

....to so many things. lapsing on my writing shouldn't be one of them.

the past two weeks have been a study in social saturation, gearing up for sending trevor off to beijing, trying to find that life-work balance, trying to understand how things are working in my head. shit hits you when you're least expecting it - that i have learned in these 29 years.

trev dropped me off at the shangri la on the way to the airport, where steph, marc, albert, drew, scott, and sherry were for brunch. i was going to skip - deadlines loom for my article, there's sleep to be had all over the place, and another day of food insanity wasn't what i needed after a week of failed attempts to go to yoga - but i decided to be social over being productive and showed up. i'd seen scott the night before at constellation so i got called out for wearing the same clothes he'd seen me in last night - oops - and still lugging around the laptop and the stuff i bought at h & m with sherry yesterday... but coffee arrived and we went prancing around and assembled the most finely-curated buffet meal ever!

ok, i'm exaggerating, but it was good and the shangri la has a chocolate fountain extravaganza where we went buck wild with the fruit and profiteroles and nougat-on-a-stick and crazy gummi candy bar that you can raid and stuff the fruit of your labors home in small orange boxes they provide. cool, huh? besides a dark chocolate fountain there's a milk chocolate fountain, a white chocolate fountain, and this weird green-tea (chocolate?) fountain to dip everything into. we went a little ape shit.

last night, as we left constellation at around 3 am, as we walked to the end of the road to find taxis and this woman dressed in a bizarre housecoat and sunglasses is striding past us and glaring. she stands in the middle of the intersection with her arms crossed, facing us, completely glaring. we were all expecting a kung foo hustle-esque superpowered lung expulsion to send us flying backwards, but instead she started scolding us, accusatory - 'you're learning bad things!' trevor answered her and she looked at him, 'i'm not talking to you. i'm talking to them' - indicating sherry, cyn, and me. 'they're bad eggs!'

i guess it was a pro-chinese thing because we were three chinese girls with three white guys who all happened to be our friends, but to the ignorant i guess it could seem that we'd landed us some foreigners to buy us out of our miserable existence or something. it was so crazy tho. in our cab a couple of minutes later we passed her, still stomping angrily down the street. at 3 am.

my day yesterday started off with sherry and a whole tableful of dim sum at crystal jade. we ate until we were ill and then ordered xiao long bao to top it all off. h & m visits are never fun after a huge meal, but i found stuff to buy anyway. feeling guilty about not spending trevor's last dinner with him, i went instead to thai house, which lives up to its reputation of excellent food and is even worth walking past the Most Rank Garbage Pile in Shanghai. experienced the slightly-fermented north east thai sausage, which was fascinating but greatly improved by the addition of thinly sliced raw garlic and sauce rolled up into a lettuce leaf. met up with trev and boys at the spot, where every foreigner in the city appeared to be gathered for a complete lack of air conditioning and some random soccer game. we later switched to the mansion and sat out on the terrace - outstanding - and then wandered over to constellation at around 1 am.

and now i sleep.