Week_Wildstar

This weekend is actually 2 weekdays.

Quick thoughts:

1.
When I was little my dad saw that I always saved my favourite food item on my plate to eat last. He said, "Oh, so you're that kind of person. There are two types. One type goes straight to the best, the other type saves for the best." It was true, I nodded solemnly. I've tried to be the other kind of person, eating the good thing first, and it never feels natural.

First, what kind of person are you? And second, extrapolating, what effects does that kind of attitude have on your life?

I was thinking this today in the Town Car home that I felt, as I sometimes do, that I'm putting my life on hold as I burrow back and forth like an ant, trying to get enough work done so that I can sit back and relax at the end.

2.
There's a grocery store around where I live called "Western Beef" which is obviously already funny. The huge bright orange block of a store has a big orange neon sign out front with its mascot, a green cactus with a cowboy hat on its head. That's a second funny. Under "Western Beef" it says "The Meat Supermarket." That's 3-0 for Funny, right? Finally, in double quotes, it says: "We know the neighborhood." I think the double quotes add to it but ...can anything be more cannibalistic? And Funny? So that's another point for Funny with an assist by Hector.

3.
Do you think subways always go round and round? I was thinking about how the F train at 6 PM would be real necessary to ship all the commuters out of the city and into their neighborroughs. But where do all those F trains go? Those babies come every three seconds. I don't ride the F train but once I got onto it (last Friday) simply because it came so often I had subway envy (I take the V). Anyway, so do all those Fs come full circle and come back, empty, from the neighborroughs back to Manhattan? Or do they change labels and go as another train on a busy route not far away? So they take off their hats, and go to the end of some nearby route that needs more people?

Oh train.

4.
Here's what I don't like due to its disconcerting nature. You know those public bathrooms that is just one toilet and not a stall, the size of... sometimes a Manhattan sized bedroom? Like at some Starbucks? Okay, so sometimes if you'll notice, the locks on those things are not a latch or a knob that you turn, but instead maybe just a button that you press in the middle of the doorknob? And if you want to check to see if it's locked, you can't, because when you turn the handle it just unlocks? Well???

Don't they just drive you insane with anxiety when you're at the toilet, three meters away, and you're never sure that the door is exactly locked? I tell ya.

Oh bathroom locks.

As a side note, I ranted about this to Josh a long time ago when we just met, and then later he committed the absolute faux pas of telling it back to me a few weeks later AS IF IT WAS HIS MATERIAL. Yes. My jaw was on the floor. I mean it's embarrassing to get caught recycling someone else's schtick, but then to use it on that person!! Ha!

5.
I can't believe three months ago my job was to try to balance a raspberry on the tip of my tongue and now I'm, like, oh nevermind.

Game, Tip, Boost

Game

On another note, I have been stalking a pair of wrestling-inspired Reebok boots on Zappos.com for at least a month. I have the page saved in my favourites folder and I look at it every night. I don't know why it's so captivating. The shoes are sort of ugly because the foot part is so long and skinny and the boot part is similarly so. They are lavender but not pink. I don't know. I noticed they are always on 18% sale but now they are on, like, 23% sale. Here they are:


It's limited edition. I've never bought something limited edition on purpose before. Except for a piece of the Berlin Wall mounted on a magnet, in Berlin, for my mom, now on a fridge holding up nothing last time I looked. If you didn't speak English natively (i.e., sloppily), you might have this image in your mind after reading the last sentence:


So anyway I was thinking about how I'm stalking the shoes then I thought of a game: try to think of instances where you are [verb] [noun] where the verb = the noun at least homonymously. For example: I am stalking a stocking.

Insert mental image.

Okay, here's another one: I am fanning Fanning.

Insert mental image involving a fan and Dakota Fanning. (Who looks weird but not bad in the new Vanity Fair, which should be called Creepy Fair with Tom Ford at its helm this issue.)

Another one?

Tip

If you are a tourist traveling alone and you are afraid that small-time crooks will see that you are traveling alone and target you in their crimes of some sort, and if you want to dissuade them from thinking that you are a tourist, one incredibly easy way to do this without elaborate miming or learning The Language is to buy a small plant from a shop and carry it around with you. It has to be in a pot!! Trust me, no one does this unless they're bringing the plant HOME, unless they are on their way home. Thus, armed with a potted plant, you will look like a domestic. Even if you look lost, others will just think you are flakey. It's an easy and cheap way to look local. I thought of it when I was in Europe for five weeks and had a lot of time to think up of things.



Boost

One look in the closet will show you all the embarrassing fashion trend bandwagons you hopped onto. The list of fashion trends you avoided is more elusive. Try to make a list. It's fun and you'll feel very individualistic after this exercise. Do it, everyone else is!

For example, my list would include: Uggs and ugg like shoes, the opaque textured tights that make you look like you have a skin disease of the legs, the round toe shoe backlash to the extreme pointy shoes trend (which I had succumbed to), and those big peasant skirts from summer '05! When I have time I'm going to find an image of it and put it here so you can be like, "popozoa, I remember that."


[Images from zappos.com and flickr.com.]

Four

One.
A few weeks ago, I ordered highlighters in three different colours from the Supplies Department without specifying the colours because I didn't care, or so I thought. Sure enough, an envelope arrives on my desk containing three different colours: baby blue, pink, and lavender. Now, with highlighted documents and print-outs spread out all over my workspace, it looks like someone bled a My Little Pony to death on my desk.


Two.
I almost had a heart attack tonight when I thought I had walked by a red neon sign that said "Pope Yes" until I realized what it actually was... guys, am I the last one to notice this?? ---> Popeyes = Pope Yes ??!



Three.
On my old blog I had written about how it's okay for companies to try to sneak money out of us by, for example, telling us how much detergent to use. Link. Games are healthy. In the same vein, you may have noticed that although grocery store signs that say "2 for $5" seem to imply that you must buy two to get the $2.50/each price, you actually do NOT have to buy two. Check it --Duane Reade does this all the time. That's all fine with me, because it's cheeky and coy, just how I like my retailers. "Oops, did you think that we said you have to buy two? But why, we didn't say so, teehee!" Okay, cool.

But Key Foods is really, really, really crossing the line with a practice that I have not encountered anywhere else. That is, SOME of the products will register as the sale price even if you buy 1, but OTHERS will ring up at the regular price unless you buy the specified amount. Check it: every week their OJ special is advertised as "2 for $4" but when we buy one, we get it for $2. BUT today I bought a motherfuckin' box of cereal that was "2 for $5" and it showed up as $4.69 on the receipt. !! It's not just the principle of the matter, which in itself is deplorable enough. But there are a bunch of people shopping at Key Foods who can't afford that sort of unfair gamesmanship, and it really sucks... I would rather somewhere fancy like Whole Foods did that. But I guess those places don't need to resort to tomfoolery when they can appeal to the elite's quest for immortality through organic croutons.



Four.
I think I'm going to post quickies like this on the weekdays and work on a few longer, more linky, more imagey drafts that will eventually get posted on the weekends. I might also go back to posts and add links and images or edit the content. Also, did you know that blogger spellcheck doesn't recognize "blog"? Google, thou shameth.

[With images from shapefit.com and flickr.]

Today I

Today it was very warm in New York City and I felt funny wearing Josh's spaceman superhero boots with the glow in the dark piping and clunk clunk sound. There was hardly any snow left on the ground even though we just had the biggest storm ever on Sunday.

I took the subway to work as usual and for breakfast I could not think of anything appealing so I [insert adverb] got three oranges and a banana from the fruit seller right outside the entrance to work. Today he charged me 35 cents for a banana but yesterday he had charged me only 25 cents. The sign says 35 so I'm not complaining, it's just that yesterday I thought we had a bond, you know? And it turns out we don't, not worth a dime any way.



At work I was sleepy and sometimes bored. That's the trouble with not being stressed: sleep deprivation finally hits you right in the eyelids and make them fall down.

I called Josh at 7.30 PM to announce that I was leaving work early and that we could have dinner together! We were excited. I got home and we did a survey of our kitchen and gathered up a mental grocery list. Then I changed into old school Reeboks that had once caused my brother to say that he was ashamed to be seen with me when I wore them. I had not taken it very well. Look at them, soft like puppies, where is the shame?



We went out into the creepily warm night and Astoria was happening in its Astorian way. We went to the Indian store to get smoothies because it was warm enough to drink cold stuff outside. The smoothie men are so nice and they always make extra and wait for us to drink from our cups, then pour the rest from the blender into our cups. Mine tasted like a cup of freshly mowed lawn, one of my favourite smells of all time.

Then we went to Duane Reade and bought Entenmann's Softee Variety doughnuts, a dozen for $2.99. We went to Duane Reade because usually they are $2.50 at Duane Reade and a whopping $3.79 at Key Foods, where we would be buying the rest of our groceries that night. But today both places had them for $2.99. This is how we do:



After we bought the doughnuts we walked to Key Foods swinging our plastic Duane Reade bag into the soft and dark. We forgot to get a shopping cart outside the store so we had to overload a poor plastic Key Foods basket with two boxes of OJ and a half gallon of milk, among other things. Josh bought ingredients for his planned chili creation: black beans, chili sauce, ground beef. We also got sausages and we got two cereals including Raisin Bran Crunch. I think "Crunch" is cereal code word for "negates any nutritious value of the aforementioned cereal." Raisin Bran may be a health conscious cereal, but Raisin Bran Crunch is pure heaven drenched in sin. We also got a chocolate of German origin with rice krispies in it. Notice no fruits or vegetables.

Oh, a jug of pre-made pasta sauce. That's vegetative --look at it, it's barely moving:



The total came up to $24.14.

Anyway then we went home and I called China House. The girl who works there recognizes me but we always go through the same things: my address, brown not white rice, etc. Once she blurted out: "did you make an order yesterday?" And I said yes and she pocketed that with a soft "oh" and we continued with our usual litany --my address, brown not white rice, etc.



Then the food came very quickly and it was $10.40 or something. Usually a Latino guy delivers food from China House and we have become familiar and do a lot of nodding and beaming and stuff that friendly immigrants do to each other. Anyway, today it was a different guy, a Chinese guy, and I wondered why. I gave the same amount of tip but beamed 10% less.

We had dinner and talked about hockey and other stuff, mostly nonsense. After, I helped knead Josh's shoulder "along the grain" where he hurt it playing hockey two Sundays ago. We're trying to prevent scar tissue from staying there permanently. Once I got a bruise from soccer on my calf and it turned into a hard cartilage shield that stayed there for a year and my doctor alarmed me by saying it would start to grown out perpendicular to my leg, like a unicorn but not on my head and I'm not a horse. The last time I went back to my doctor over Christmas he was kind of quiet like we weren't friends anymore and I wondered why and then he blurted out this big thing about how lawyers are always suing doctors for malpractice and then I thought, Aha.

Afterwards Josh went to work on his music and I washed the dishes and read a little bit of a book called Googlewhack and then internetted a bit on the couch and then Josh came and sat down beside me and played NHL 06 on the Xbox and now he went off to bed and I'm still here.



And that's my "today I" for February 16, 2006.

Poor Sticks

Poor sticks to your bones like a bowl of gruel. Every morning on my way to work, I catch myself scanning the piles of garbage in front of people's houses, making the familiar cost/benefit analyses: Which surfaces can be covered, sanded, or tolerated? Which defects also sort of look like abstract art? Imagining how things would look beside the couch, reasoning that a broken mirror is not bad luck because I wasn't the one who broke it.

I don't do it because it's trendy, I do it because it's genetic. I don't look for valuables, I look for usables. A few nights ago I almost picked up a revolving eye glass case stand outside a store but got spooked by someone walking behind me. The lamp on my nightstand had been lying in a pile of coat hangers outside of an empty building before we found each other.

I used to be terrified that my poorness would show. (Now, much less so.) Back then, smack in the middle of the Canadian prairies, there weren't a lot of rich asian tycoons setting up their next generation of satellite kids in posh apartments with expensive cars and Gucci cell phone ornaments. An asian in Winnipeg in 1986 was one of two things: a graduate student on a scholarship with a promise to bring one's western expertise back to the motherland, or that graduate student's kid.

They did not buy stuff new and were probably born on the mainland. I carried my school books to and fro in plastic shopping bags and tortured my mom about how the Canadian girls "all" wore stirrup pants and couldn't I get a pair too? Why did I have to be stuck in the 70s wearing garage sale clothes? (Obviously, years later looking back at photo albums, I am relieved that I missed out on the colourful geometry that was 80s fashion.)

Twenty years later in New York City, my new frustration is that while it still sticks to my bones on the inside, my poorness will not show, and that the initial impression people have of me is that I'm a rich pampered asian girl who has soft hands, likes God in a very Hello Kitty way ("Hello Kitty, it's me, Margaret Cheung"), has neat handwriting learnt at an overseas boarding school; and never runs out of travel pack Kleenex.
The idea of being miscategorized is worse than having one's true identity "found out": it makes me want to announce the holes in my Salvation Army cashmere sweater from atop the Empire State Building.

In both cases, people see others who look different and make up a backstory about how they are different. The backstory in 1986 Winnipeg is different from the backstory in 2006 New York City. That's why walking through Chinatown is nice --the backstory that people make isn't about how I am different, it's about how we're the same.

So what if those stories are also inaccurate and I can't speak their dialect and have never participated in acupuncture?

[Pictures from VirtualMuseum.Ca and NewYorkSocialDiary.com.]

Today is Valentine's Day

When I went to Duane Reade to buy a jug of water at 3:20 PM, the Valentine's Day rack was ransacked with random pink merchandise lying about like stragglers in the race to Her Heart. A few people were standing in front of it, scanning desperately. On the subway at 8:30 PM I saw several men holding flowers getting up to look at the subway map between stops, revealing a teeny bit of their antsy-ness. Around Cooper Union at 10:30 PM I saw a couple fighting, she threw her jacket off vehemently and it fell to the ground. He picked it up, hard, and followed her as she tried to leave him. They looked like they were in their early 20s and he had a tattoo along the length of his neck and almost as wide. She had a lip ring and told him that they were over while looking down on the ground. Josh and I walked by the elementary school on our street at 11:30 PM and noted that the pink lights they had left on inside as a Valentine's Day gesture ended up looking very spooky, like ectoplasm.

My Excuse is that I was Raised Communist... What's Yours?

I was raised by a society that thought it was too good for entrepreneurs --those slippery opportunitists devoid of decency and honour, so much so that I used to think that it was a bad word and calling someone an "entrepreneur" was the same as calling someone a "jerk."

We looked down on entrepreneurs because they had opted out of contributing to society and were like islands, working for no one but themselves. They did not belong with us on the Mainland --people like them would eventually defect to where they belonged, stranded on the geographical islands of Taiwan and Hong Kong.

In first grade:

• Without being told to do so, a few classmates and I would
  stay after school and sweep and clean the concrete floor
  of our empty classroom after our teacher had left.
  
  
• When the class bully broke his arm in recess and was
  getting his things from the classroom on the way to the
  hospital, he offered the class the leftover candy in his
  pocket. The teacher praised his selflessness in a time of
  adversity and in an instant he became the class saint.
  
  
• The ultimate punishment, which was served on the class
  derelict, was to be excluded from the class test average, the
  mean by which all classes at school were ranked. Once
  excluded, his failings could no longer affect us --he's on
  the outside now; we rejected forever his contributions and
  possibly thought that we had thereby robbed him of any
  incentive to do well, to live. To symbolize this, his desk
  was taken away and he had to sit on a bench in the back of
  the room.
  
  
• My teachers warned my mom that I was reading unassigned
  material, and that morever, it was fiction.
  
  
• In civics class we were taught that it was bad to joke with
  our elders. I went home and told my mom that all the joking
  we had been doing for the last six years were a sin, baiting
  for a reaction from her because I had no idea what my take on
  this new rule was.
  
  
• At the end of class one day the teacher picked me to stay
  after school to tutor one of my classmates. Seeing me sigh
  and be visibly disappointed, the teacher gave me a quick and
  harsh tongue-lashing criticizing my selfishness that made my
  face burn with shame.
  

Twenty years later and the streets of Beijing are flowing with self-made millionaires being driven around from one high class residential compound to the next by tight-lipped black-capped drivers who had been forced into early retirement in their forties by state-owned companies.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, I am sitting in a partner's office while he ruminates on whether so-and-so associate is a "work shirker" and all I can do is smile and shift uncomfortably in my seat hoping that I will not get branded with the same sword, and committing right then and there to do more.

I was raised communist and that's my excuse for why I feel guilty for not having a busy week at work, why I have pangs to take on other people's burdens, why other people's poor opinions of my willingness to contribute to the group not only smarts, but feels intolerable.

But what in the hell is your excuse, you Americans? You who were raised to recognize opportunities and to value your freedom, individuality and self-direction. You glorifiers of the enjoyment of life in your land of Cribs, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, American Idols, and alleged awareness of the tragedy of being Willy Loman.

What is it that makes you, too, shoot a 9PM email asking "is there anything you need me to do tonight?"

(Clearly there are others who do not have this affliction of ours. Most of them are probably Europeans, western.)

Again, I repeat: my excuse is that I was raised Communist, what's yours?

Walking Home Last Night in the Snow

Last night I was walking home in the snow. It was pretty cold, especially when the wet wind was blowing in my face and snowflakes stuck to it and melted there and then tried to evaporate by stealing face heat.

I am growing out a perm and I look like Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich. I was hoping that was not true, that it was an unnecessarily harsh self assessment, but whenever I make the comparison people always giggle quietly then fade into an agreeable silence, as if I've said something very funny, but accurate.