A pair of wedding bands. An interior designer. A dowry. A nice hotel room. A tailored suit. A marrying man is a man with a light wallet. At least over here. The date's 16 Jun. Then it's official. I'll be single no more. I'll have a wife. I'll be able to have sex that's moral in the eyes of God and other obnoxious people.
Woah. That's fast. Before I know it shopkeepers would stop saying: "Boy, what you want?"
Because when you have considered plonking down $40,000 for renovation, you are no longer a boy. Once you bust that credit limit, you are no longer a boy. Once you have to answer to a woman who's not your mother, you are no longer a boy. You are a slave.
Hopefully a happy one.
I am paranoid. See the last time the office asked for a declaration of all blogs I declared this blog which of course is the right thing to do - I think? Do they have any right to demand such a thing? Why is it that rightness so often equals submission? But obedience is reflexive.
So this blog is probably is in some file, readily accessible - but is it often read? I doubt it. Still, it means I can't say much of anything about my work, that insatiable wolf that chews up all my time and essence and youth. It also means that I can't really say anything of a truly private nature, things that really matter, because who wants the bosses to read it every once a while when they are idle.
There leaves only politics and God and TV but who cares.
Well, I do play lots of computer games. Maybe I should change my subject to that: Adventures in virtual space.
]]>Hate.
Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you.
Hate.
Hate.
- Harlan Ellison, from the short novel and the computer game of the same name
Current hate levels:
1. Saudi Arabia
2. Bunch of countries in Africa I assume are fucked up
3. Myanmar
4. Everyone else
Channel surfing landed me on the BBC World Channel, during Hard Talk, which I hardly ever watch. But they had Gore Vidal on, with his walking stick, his face like a raisin squeezed out of a collar. And I was fixated. Gore Vidal is such a pure cunt, but what a clever man!
He seems to be the grandpa from hell who'd destroy your self-esteem with constant sarcasm though.
She is so cute and funny. Like a cute and funny cat. I am a dog that woofs for her love. Woof Woof!
]]>While other people are writing about the arts - literature, the moving picture, music, North European, avant garde, stylish, ironic stuff - I am currently a translator at a tabloid. That means reading loads of gore and trash and death and rape of all sorts and rewriting them for an audience that is actually willing to pay to read these spewings. In the course of my work I have discovered that Malaysia/Taiwan have the best killing and murder down the South China Sea way. We do have limits of course. We don't report on suicides because we don't want copycats. But rape is peachy. As long as the victims don't kill themselves afterwards anyway.
But sometimes even your everyday rapin' and murderin' pales in comparison to the amount of newsprint that good old mother Nature can generate in the span of a moment. She nudges a tectonic plate one way and boom half a civilisation goes down like crumbs and Charon has to start paddling like a motherfucker. What's one dismembered girl compared to thousands buried in concrete and dust? What's a single or even a dozen corpses compared to - I quote a China newspaper story I translated - rows of dead children wrapped in white cloth, like silkworms in their cocoons?
Normally I embrace the fact that I am the definition of not just a pleb, not even merely a non-intellectual, but a counter-intellectual, though I respect genius. Give the people their blood gore and guts man! It's real, at least more substantial than the utterances of economists, the blabbering of politicians, the bleating of reviewers and the mangling of science by idiotic journalists. Face it, shitloads of us are, from the top to the bottom. I know I am criminally stupid though I like to believe I am gifted at recognising a moron when I see one.
But man sometimes it's too much. You know? This is just a long way of saying I'm quite tired of reading and writing about the China Quake. There's only so much sadness you can put down put down what you can. Then it's time to move on to other things, like Britney's underpants. At least those stains aren't tears.
Dominique Bouhours, Academic and Grammarian. "I am about to - or I am going to - die; either expression is used."
]]>Post-modern academicians use words to strangle them
]]>Last year I bought mum a foot massager. My father regularly buys her massage tools. And a few years ago a client gave my mum a giant Osim massage chair. For this Mother's Day we're planning on getting her an eye massager.
I think subconsciously we all think she needs to loosen up.