british colony, sex shop Right now i'm still in Hong Kong. The last post about the tower, shoe and the sky is a small portion of my trip in Macau.



The reason I've been so busy with life is that I'm starting a new business. Besides my internship posterrrrrmakin', I've also been doing a lot of other Illustrator work--logo and product designs. I've already referenced some of this work in this past post, but I have yet to introduce this business that I'm starting. What it is is a chain of retail shops in Shanghai selling masturbation aids, raunchy novelty ornamental products and other sex-related goods in an open, friendly and comfortable atmosphere. Its median Chinese customers are mid and upper class women from 25 to 35, and 40% of the total customers are foreigners. The sex toy market in China is growing 30% per year and China herself is expected to see a growth of the middle class into the hundreds of millions during the next two decades. The upper middle class will also expand dramatically, albeit on a lesser scale. Right now my partner has one shop open almost one year, and in September I will invest some money to open the second shop in a different area of Shanghai. We'd like to start manufacturing our own products for export and domestic sales.

Labels: amy's bedroom, news, shanghai, vulvic

  ¶ 4/30/2009 11:39:00 PM 1 Comments

  the trajectory of thrift nikes with yunnan mud stains and neon tangerine laces oh and me too. from the 61st story of the macau tower.












the star with the line extending southward is the range where my shoe landed. it was recovered eventually from the grips of traffic, near death. the circle has the shoe inside it and the arrow is pointing at the enormous landing zone, which was a forty by forty by eight feet high air bubble landing pad.

i don't know what to say about the experience in writing. you'll have to ask me about it sometime because it is an in person story.

Labels: a m a z i n g, hen hao wanr, intensity, new, pictures lots, travel, worthless words

  ¶ 4/30/2009 10:11:00 PM 3 Comments

  no offence. i remember a fantastic time in my life when myself and my peer group first discovered the phrase "no offence." it was when people had just begun to appreciate the savvies of secrets and niceties, to the face and behind one's back. it quickly became the most widely-used saying because you could say things like, "she's got the nappiest poop-colored hair and i think she wipes her butt with it. no offence, or anything y'know," and it would let you off c o m p l e t e l y off the hook. you didn't mean maliciousness, you were just telling it like it was. m a g i c k.

in recent news, the 2009 runner up to miss america, a very conservative biblicist miss california, was asked about her views on states legalizing gay marriage by one of the miss america judges, gay rights activist and infamous celeb blogger perez hilton. she was destination conflict from da get go, but her answer sealed her own god awful fate.

"I think it's great Americans are able to choose one or the other," Prejean answered. "We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage.

"And you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman.

"No offence..."

Labels: gay, news, nostalgia, shock

  ¶ 4/24/2009 01:19:00 PM 1 Comments

  earth. with a capital E. Earth. so the other day i was in Chinese class and we were studying about something when earth was mentioned.

many chinese words are made up of multiple characters. for example, the word homosexual, 同性恋：

同 tong means
[1] same; similar; equal; identical; common
[2] share; agree
[3] together

性 xing means
[1] nature; character; natural property; disposition; temper
[2] a quality or property
[3] sex

恋 lian means
[1] love (one of the other sex); be in love
[2] feel a persistent attachment (for a thing)


okay, so you get the point. it makes Chinese a fascinating language to study because there are often so many cultural biases embedded in the language, subjective descriptions by individual characters that all together makeup a name that signifies something completely different. for example, most of the chinese minorities have either the "female" or "animal" radical in their minority classification name. carol adams, suck on that. a radical is even smaller than a character, a radical is one of the individual symbols that make up a character. wikipedia gives this example:




"采 Cǎi ‘to pick, pluck’ is an associative compound comprising two elements or components, a hand 爫 (zhǎo or zhuǎ) picking items from a tree 木 (mù). Later, a redundant hand 扌 (shǒu) element was added in the character."



moving back on track. so how does Earth play into the multiple characters that you were talking about first in the homosexual example? well, lets break apart Earth, 地球。

地 di
[1] earth
[2] land; soil; ground
[3] region; territory; belt; place; locality
[4] position; place; situation
[5] an adjunct after a word (usually adjective) to form an adverbial phrase

球 qiu
[1] ball; sphere; globe; round
[2] the globe; the earth

all sports that you play with a ball have the 球qiu character in them, usually at the end. anyways with the knowledge that 球qiu means round, this was what got me thinking:

how long has the Chinese name for the Earth been 地球？how long have they known the shape of our planet? keeping this knowledge for thousands of years with no interaction with foreigners? in the 1400's Christopher Columbus decided to act on a "hunch" and prove the world was round. novel idea...

Labels: china, chinese, words

  ¶ 4/23/2009 08:42:00 PM 0 Comments

  sso i've been i n c r e d i b l y busy. i've been designing quite a few art show posters for the gallery i'm interning at, as well as quite a few things (logos, products, ads, graphics) for a new venture i'm getting involved in. i'd post them here but i've just about had my fill of adobe programs and my g4 laptop, baine, struggling to process two feet by two feet 300px/inch posters. soooo instead i'll just link you to my friend laur's blog entry, about one of the items I put together with her generous and genious help. our program is leaving soon to do a 1.5 week trip to hong kong, macau, and some other places. apparently i really should know where, as a classmate pointed out, "did you r e a d the intinerary?!" i guess it never occurred to me that you're actually supposed read them. you just give them to parents or something. and since i'm lacking in that department right now its probs laying neglected with tea stain rings or drawings on the floor under dirty underwear. anyways, it is advised that i leave my computer at home. fat f ing chance. i have to finish two papers, finish journal entries for class and internship, and do a midterm post-mid term. ay yi yi. i should be writing a paper, which is a shame because i've been wanting to write a blog about chinese characters. i've got some interesting ideas for droppin'

Labels: busy, stuff

  ¶ 4/22/2009 12:28:00 PM 1 Comments

  . when i was looking in my lonely planet for recommended bars, i spotted this gem embedded in one description: "...frequented by americans and eurotrash." (the current authors of the lonely planet's guide to shanghai are british.)

Labels: books, random, shanghai

  ¶ 4/18/2009 09:19:00 PM 0 Comments

  a pet peeve when people who work cash registers are disconnected from humanity and that manifests itself in their putting your change on the counter instead of touching your inner palm and you're forced to slide it off of the edge of the counter into your other palm in a dicey, delicate maneuver. the latter part is especially true if the counter is ledgeless--which it usually is.

Labels: random

  ¶ 4/16/2009 07:24:00 PM 0 Comments

  煎饼 Jian Bing, a love story So one day I was gchatting with one of my favorite buddies, cool breakfast. As per usue, we began slowly about things like sweet youtubes of kittens licking foxes when we somehow transgressed into Chinese street food. Chinese street food. I cannot believe that i've never given y'all the down low up high on this fascinating subject. After an hour of lustful descriptions, Adam suggested that I write about this on my blog, and I agree.

So today I'm going to hopefully kick-off a long succession of blog entries about China's "small eats 小吃" by featuring my favorite of all eats: the 2.5元 Jian Bing.

The Jian Bing is supposedly from Shangdong province, but I've had it or seen it in almost every province I've visited. When I lived in Kunming I would have it in the back alleyway of the Kunming Minority University near the train tracks. I've heard a classmate say that they had it almost every day while studying in Beijing. Right now I'm typing this from a lame cafe and just writing about Jian Bing makes me salivate and wish that I would have snagged one before coming here to consume a twelve kuai ($1.50) two egg and toast breakfast. Alas. The great thing about Jian Bing is that each area reduplicates it to fit it's own region's taste pallet. I think it has become a Chinese treat without a home. So what makes a Jian Bing?

Okay, wait. We have to go through the first three bases before we get to the real loving. Foreplay and witnessing moments of extreme non-violent excruciation are probably in my top five list. So let me begin by taking you through my morning. First, I wake up and I think 煎饼. Then I look at my watch to calculate what type of morning it will be--Jian Bing before class or Jian Bing after first period. Most of the time it is the latter because from under the sheets I usually see 8:25 on my timepiece, and at that point I still have to get dressed, find those books and pens and room key, put knotted hair into a pony tail, and somehow get to class on time--8:30. I never do the last part right, but during first period all I can think about is break.

In class our desks are shaped in a horseshoe with the inner-belly of the U facing towards the door. Our classroom can hardly accommodate a U or as many people as we have managed to fit, so when "下课 xiake" comes I throw/slide my desk forward into the other stem of the U so that I may have the fastest gettaway. On the back street I race through hordes of small babies with crotchless pants, the fat middle-aged shanghainese lady who only plays cards and shouts simple english phrases at you, and the old people out in masses for their too leisurely morning stroll. Four minutes later, my Jian Bing woman is in reach, but only barely. She's usually got a few other fans keeping me from realizing my reality quickly. I stand there and wait as one, two, and sometimes three Jian Bings are made before I am able for mine. My sweet, salty, spicy, hot, crunchy, soft Jian Bing.

When that time finally arrives, I usually say "one egg 一个鸡蛋." She takes the bottle with a punctured hole in the cap and turns it upside down so water droplets hit the stop of the cylindrical steel stove and instantaneously vaporize into thick smoke, which keeps the crowd back or her food clean. She uses a brush made of sticks to scrape the flat, steel, foot-point-five in diameter griddle clean. She then dips into a plastic tub full of what looks like pancake batter with a huge ladle. She pours the batter onto the top in one sweeping clockwise motion while using its bottom to spread it about evenly and no more than a few millimeters thick. The her helper--she usually has her father or son assist her--will crack an egg on top. In my case, it is always one egg unless I'm starving and she will quickly break its yolk and slide it about, covering and strengthening the thin layer of now crispy wheatstuff.


She then asks you if you'd like cilantro, so you say yes 要。She asks about the green onions, and that's also a yes 要. After you pipe in "i want it all 都要都可以”, because at this point the smell is actually in your brain and chemically you just can't contain your self or your speech. Her male helper switches to the adding of the seasonings on his side of the trolley and asks about the spicy pepper, and you try to say "i want a bit more 辣更一点" then what you've already given me, but you are completely verbally impaired at this point and all you manage is "i want a whole lot 我要很多." So you end up with two heaping spoonfuls of spicy pepper, and it always turns out so [explicative] good. He puts on the spoonful of chopped pickled garlic. which they also sell for a pretty penny by the jar, the whole clove version, at the Pike's Place Market in Seattle. They then fold this creation in half and put mysterious brown goop onto the folded side. It tastes slightly of molasses, peanuts, and good. The last, but oh-so necessary part, is the rectangular-shaped extra crunch. The only thing i can say to explain it is that its consistency kind of resembles a pork rind. It doesn't taste like anything, but soaks up all of the flavors of the spices. It is purely for texture, and a Jian Bing with out it, isn't a 煎饼.

Labels: china, food, love

  ¶ 4/12/2009 10:22:00 AM 1 Comments

  freewillastrology.com "
Sagittarius Horoscope for week of April 9, 2009

(November 22-December 21)
At a Buddhist sanctuary in Khun Han, Thailand, monks have used a million beer bottles and soft drink bottles to build their temple. Bottle caps have come in handy, too, serving as the raw material for numerous mosaics portraying the Buddha. Your assignment, Sagittarius, is to draw inspiration from these geniuses. How could you take some profane elements of your life and turn them into a hotbed of sacred inspiration?
"

Labels: astrology, shouldn't be posting this

  ¶ 4/10/2009 04:44:00 PM 0 Comments

  So I'm kind of thinking about staying in China and going into business. This would probably mean that I would spend my entire graduate school education money on starting a venture during the worst economic time in the past twenty years. The good part about it would be that it wouldn't initially focus on export, but would have an opportunity to grow there. It would initially be focused on domestic sales.

I would partner with a person who has already gone into business and she's looking for a partner. I almost dropped out of school a year and a half ago to begin this with her. She's beginning to make revenue and she's got the first foot prints into breaking social barriers and capitalizing on a previously non-existent market. She is virtually creating the market.

Everything about it tells me to go with it, but it is a huge commitment.

Labels: amy's bedroom, between boat and dock, threshold

  ¶ 4/08/2009 11:12:00 PM 1 Comments

  a gay and magical week not kidding.

vermont, after massachusetts, connecticut and iowa, becomes the forth state to legalize gay marriage.

you can read about it here, or pick from one of many google articles about it here.

Labels: gay, news

  ¶ 4/08/2009 06:49:00 PM 2 Comments

  insomniacnic so the other night i couldn't sleep. under the sheets, with late great aunt meal's frilled, satin and stained eye-mask, a hunched and madly typing roommate ten feet away, three podcasts about science and a sag's vedic astrological report for 2009 finished and still no reprieve from a racing mind, i got up. i turned on the computer and stared. read wikipedia for awhile, listened to a four-computer skype call between family members and faded out as it was four am and i couldn't speak aloud. somewhere in my tiddling around, i found a document that i had forgotten existed. pushed away in time, between that small collection of porn with actors who only look fourteen and pictures of celebrities shopping at home depot. i suppose it was a year and a half ago that i made a point to save my entire email correspondence between myself and a person i dated for about two years. even though at the time it was hurtful to have to re-look at those emails as i copied and pasted them into word, i knew that in the future i may find insightful gems on that specific stage of mind.

the strangest part was that it wasn't the content that was illuminating, but the fact that inside this five-hundred-and-forty-six p a g e document (single spaced, size 13) of one-hundred-and-twenty-seven-thousand-five-hundred-sixty-nine w o r d s, i had probably written five-hundred of those pages, or one-hundred-and-fifteen-thousand of those words. that is incredible(y misguided energy). this means that if i were born during the seventeen hundreds, and i had good penmanship, and i wasn't saying "fuck-you" in so many of them, i would have been a "woman of letters". that's elegant. reee-gal. maybe they would resurface in some new england house basement and be auctioned on ebay to pay for a honda prius or solar panels.

some of the dates were from two years ago to date and in that weird, exact time parallel, it made me realize how much my mentality has changed and how differently i would have reacted inside a similar situation. what saddens me are not typical feelings of regret, but the fact that even though knowledge helps one improve and mature, and is inevitable, hurt is not as easy as nescience to overcome and continues to be disabling long after one's rational mind has learnt its lessons.  ¶ 4/06/2009 09:11:00 PM 0 Comments

  gay news. so gay, man so if anybody wasn't already paying attention, this week was positive for (HIV, damn!) glbt equality.

the bible belt iowan supreme court has ruled that a ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional and gays iowan and non--as they don't require proof of residency--will be able as soon as three weeks to legally wed.

the pop-country band rascal flatts, whom texans adore, has released a song with "non-gender-specific lyrics" called love who you love. in response to the southern gay heyday over this song--cause you know no one north of mason-dixon cares--rascal flatts replied that they were pleased dat dem hoemoesexshuals find it so inspiring.

of course, they weren't all pflag about it, just tolerant, as they don't want to pull a dixie chicks. got to be smart business men, too.

Labels: gay, love, news, shock

  ¶ 4/05/2009 07:57:00 PM 0 Comments

  da bund
it was sunny and stuff

Labels: hen hao wanr, pictures lots, shanghai

  ¶ 4/04/2009 07:43:00 PM 0 Comments

  vulvic

vulvic vul·vic adjective

of, relating to, or resembling a vulva

================================================================

i don't like that penis has phallus and vulva is without what is hers respectively. technically phallus could refer to the clit, but that is only the clit; what about the centuries of vulvic imagery out there?

www.vulvic.com

new project. check back in a few weeks for a more elaborate site which will include links, mission statement, goals, etc.

Labels: love, new, she's got ideas, vulvic

  ¶ 4/03/2009 12:20:00 AM 1 Comments

  dormitory the structure that stacks neatly dark and milk and white chocolates, yellow meringue, coconut cremes, and strawberry milk flavors into twelve layers isn't as delectable as it sounds. it was a product of once-grand schemes of a cake-architect in-training, one that didn't choose the tastes, only sketching out the frame of his fairytale in the coca-cola that spilled on a drafting table. talking about, or taking shape. maybe the maker looked up and spotted a boomerang with a pencil juxtaposed perpendicular to the apex of the obtuse side, and said, "ah-ha!" maybe he looked down at his hands resting symmetrically on the area of upper inner thighs meets convex sex, and in the excitement of new creation, noticed he had become an enormous boner, the triangular configuration made by poised hands and straight arrow, and said, "oooohhhh--eee!" maybe b(m)aker rolled to his right, and laying in an entire field of four-leaf clovers, noticed the single three-leafed, and said, "by jove, i've got it!" we can't know why this building was built differently, but we can presume.

unlike most buildings in China, this one is bereft of the popular chinese architectural trend bathroomexteriorius. to achieve this endemic aesthetic one must: 1) build as many bathrooms as one can; 2) disassemble all said bathrooms and sell all the parts except the floor; 3) remove all of the tiled bathroom floors with as little breakage as possible; 4) line them up against the exterior walls of the building; 5) epoxy away.

this methodology has a surprisingly loyal following, and most of the structures in china flaunt this beautiful exterior that may bring back wonderful memories of cleaning boy leftovers around toilet bases, bare and blue-d feet freezing in the morning during winter, or vicariously as any of today's tech-savvy, online-networking-obsessed youth sneakily capturing their next calling card. the best part about here is that if noticed from the viewpoint of nearby airway station, it's not just another straight line stabbing at the dwindling horizon. rather lacking the formulaic prose of its neighbors, by a slight difference, perhaps a bad case of acne during its adolescence, or a slip of the hand during a rogue-n stir or pour, left the building by happenstance a step apart, even if only in the name of scarren face or clumsy hands.

neither of these ideas are true of course. well, t e c h n i c a l l y, i haven't asked, i don't know, so i hope i'm not unjustly trite in my reminding that this is metaphor; maybe if i licked its side, through the resilient cement dust and grimy fingerprints of the wind, i would taste the floor of the bathroom and all of the flavors alive inside. the spices that managed to seep through and place their transient mark on the shell are something worth tasting. i meet them everyday in that box that pulls me up nine levels, some from many African countries, South American, of European and Chinese, every portion of the tongue is covered. when i am lowered back down and out, it is the same, i meet them again.  ¶ 4/02/2009 04:40:00 PM 2 Comments

  indulgent and i know it my roommate is sitting to my left uploading pictures of our yesterday's excursion to the shanghai bund, singing beijing opera to herself in a barely audible voice but loud enough to to make my armpits sweat hatred and my right knee twitch, cartilage reverberating acceptable off-tune notes, protecting it from my heart, safe from explosion. if china hadn't blocked youtube, i'd surely post a link, but basically chinese opera is plagued by gauche costumes and makeup, exaggerated and snail-like movements, and a high-pitched nasal singing aesthetic that render the words unintelligible even for the mandarin-fluent and most avid "jingju"-goers.

the bund is that place that shanghai in pictures is known by, especially at night, because it is the sparkling Yellow river meets endless tall electrically lit buildings in full technicolor buffered by curving cement shore line. we visited in the day time and it was about a nice stroll with some sun and wind, expensive water and strawberry icecreams. borrowed a camera from roommate's friend and roommate posed for infinite pictures like every chinese woman does; curving back, profiled body, head cocked turning startled with a smile to face the camera, legs dangling, feet crossed at ankles, etc.

lately i've been riding the wave of emotion. i need to get over the idea that i can ever find a calm, isolated bay and stay there, and if i ever do find that still pool, i'd fear that i had morphed into a farm-raised catfish and my doom was immanent. (oh wait! i already have, and that was pharmaceutical medicine. somebody did have to pull me out, dumb and blind, too.) of course this is very general knowledge, the idea of a world of impermanence, but for a person who enjoys finding ways of breathing and thinking, it sucks when that allen wrench you just bought doesn't work on that new motorcycle you traded in for your old bike. it's great to learn new things, find new tools and ways of going about life, but i just wish i already had the antidote to every situation sometimes. vain wish, one that in reality wouldn't be so great.

the other day somebody mentioned that human beings couldn't comprehend perfection, and i find this idea to be very intriguing. i've never heard anybody say that before. i mean, it's probably been said before, i just probably happened to be doing the dishes, smoking a cigarette on the front porch, or in an airplane with a crying baby sitting behind me when it happened. anyways, i agree with this sentiment.

next order of business. i'm currently making a mental database of antidotes for certain emotional states that will help me digest all the different types of energy into being productive. this work for mental database is great because it eats up my idled energy. i am being slightly sarcastic right now and pointing out failure ideas that are trying to be rectified and exhumed by continuing along failure ideology all in the face of self-deprecating humor that is in fact a coping mechanism placating my mind and ensuring mediocrity. but hey, if i can figure out how to eloquently and interestingly describe it in one-hundred and twenty five pages then that would make me "productive," if only by another selfish, twisted act committed by an artist deferring the commonly romanticized human state of base or l o w, from it's once and for all departure from the human diet. but oh, indulgence! so beautiful, so unifying! so ready, nicely packaged, and easy to imbibe.

okay so last item to discuss with my now dwindling but loyal set of readers: current opportunities that make me wait. lounging around in bed, wine in hand, perfectly posed chocolates in synchronized stoic patterning, in my red silk and lace nightgown...
i've applied to go to this uc berkeley summer architecture program designed for students with no prior experience in architecture, from this late june to mid august, with no follow-up as of yet. i'm also still waiting on the antarctica janitorial or kitchen job that would span the astral summer season of october 09 to april 10; won't find out until mid april at least. right now i'm keeping busy with homework and my internship at a shanghai art gallery.

it is wednesday night and i will now go out, drink a beer and attempt to meet foreigners who speak inglés. for the crowd that i'm immediately immersed in can only be entertaining when i choose to don that three-pound microscope, and i'm just not into lugging that around the entire time.

sorry, none of the above is april fool's.  ¶ 4/01/2009 04:13:00 PM 1 Comments