Eroding Upwards

I have the uneviable category of shorts-weather legs that evoke winces in those that witness them: they are knobbly, sporadically haired, highly-splayable and porcelain white. They more resemble the legs of an albino infant giraffe born near an undersea geothermal vent than those belonging to the suave champion iconoclast you've all come to know - AND LOVE. People gawk and gasp when they see them, they reach for sunglasses/garlic-rubbed wooden stakes, lean down to children and point while muttering under their breath, immediately feel the urge to call loved ones or inexplicably crave cheese curds. I'm fairly fond of how awkward these sticks can be, especially when paired with leisure summer clothes.

Other anaTOMical stragenesses involve:

• smaller than average ears; one is a bit lower than the other, meaning that when I wear aviators it looks like one leg is about 3 inches shorter than the other. i'm thinking about augmentation
• startlingly fast-growing fingernails, about 4mm of growth a week. if i don't clip them biweekly, i wake up looking like a racoon attacked me in my sleep. they're quite strong though
• very good vision. though, i'm thinking because they're blue, they're supersensitive to light
• false teeth. i have inch-long screws going into my skull to attach two ceramic incisors at the front. i used to have them mounted on a retainer when i was an adolescent obviously needing yet another thing to feel self-conscious about. strangely, people would step on my retainer a lot, so i'd go weeks at a time with two gaps where my smile should've been
• oddly bulbous biceps. they'll pop out at you like fermented yoghurt when you least expect it. FUN!
• prehensile toes. i can write with them, use chopsticks (but nowhere near my mouth), play tetris (for a few levels). they really impress goths
• facial hair that flows down to the ol' choda. how wicked is that!? not very
• a demeanor that most people readily recognize as at least bi-curious, but i'm actually really pretty straight. i often wish i weren't

how about you lot? got any bodily weirdnesses you'd like to share? go on... GO ON!!!

ps. sorry about the choda comment...

Which bulge are you looking at?

I'm starting to feel that blogspot is hurting. Likely it's my perceived and unshruggable sense of creative sterility throbbing forth, but still I find myself admiring the 'wordpress' crowd's crisper format and self-respect. The 'spot just seems so rudimentary and half-baked now...

I would've tried to assemble a post about recent personal comments made about my emotional candidness, or lack thereof, but I've been a secretkeeper for years and there doesn't seem to be any starkly visible eggshell to crack, just a quiet, near-unnoticable rhythm that holds fast - especially under inspection. Others can readily spot it, and it seems to bring out neuroses in their reaction to me. What's hard for them to 'get' is that it is my M.O., not a verdict on their character, and so potential times for open discussion and my own blooming sense of contemporal trust are usually occluded by frustration, pressure and then emotional kneejerk repellence. I am a deer, don't stalk me, I'll run. Stay still, and I'll nuzzle the moss you hold in your hand. Though I like cookies and Spiderman comics and charbroiled fish as well. Come to think about it, I don't like moss that much (except to put barefeet on).

Oh, this is reasonably funny. A pretty grim glance at gender relations and gross.. (but funny...)

He emerges from Facebook like Boba Fett didn't from the Sarlacc pit (except for in a short-story I read when 15, but it seemed unlikely)

I'd like to comment on the state of the world, but my mouth is still dangling open in shock. I'm just gonna ease back into this whole confluent-thoughts-forming-sentences-and-then-paragraphs exercise slowly here. Phew, tiring. I'll write again soon.

An E-mail from "Ge la mu"

Knowledge of the word "why" is necessary if you are to find this funny:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlG2f9TAbEk&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fholywardanceparty%2Ecom%2Findex%2Ehtml

I just love the dudes they picked as dancers.

Elsewhere in the world of political activism, a certain blog captained by the author S'mat has recently been banned in the notoriously repressive peoples republic of china. Not a word of a lie! I used to be able to read it, now I cannot.
Well actually I more recently realized that its the entire blogspot site thats been banned but for a while I thought that for sure my personal activity was being monitored and my frequent visitations to a site that makes many references to depaneurs and the singularity was deemed too subversive. So Tom can you please email me your entries. Thanks duder. And you to steve, if you're still keeping yours going.

(I guess y'all wound not be satisfied if I sent out a group-ish email with nothing more than a link to a retarded and only mildly humorous youtube clip?...so now Im trying scrambling to beef this up.)

While I was getting a 2 dollar foot massage yesterday, I saw a story on the news about a woman who refused to sell her house to developers that were planning a large project on hers and her neighbors land. (This story followed the story of a chef that was once so poor and depressed that he spent his last few yuan on shrimps which he braised in a decadent sauce and laid on top of fresh rice wine infused noodles and topped it off with enough sleeping pills to kill an elephant or even John Merrick...he narrowly survived and now is rolling in a BMW and has one of the top kitchens in Peking.) She refused all offers while everyone else accepted so the development company went ahead and dug out all around her house, about 3 stories deep and about 50 yards or so on all sides, leaving her potty old house surrounded by steep cliffs and a huge empty moat. I read today that all media coverage of this story has now been outlawed. Here are some pictures... but please: shhhh!

I recorded a radio interview on tuesday for the campus radio station. The campus airs an hour and a half of programming every weekday and the sound is boomed all over campus through sidewalk speakers disguised as landscaped boulders.The two hosts that interviewed me were so comically amateur about the whole thing. They came equipped with only 3 questions, one of which I incidentally answered in my 40 second intro. The goal that they had in mind was to do a compare and contrast of campus life in China vs. in the West. I am not the person to ask about this. They wanted me to speak about all the clubs that I had taken part in and all of the events that the student union organized (at this university they organize a speed text messaging competion!) and I could think of nary. Architecture, leisure time and summer jobs were also asked about. I was about as thrilling as the natural rocks that were used as models for the mock-rocks that will soon be broadcasting my rapid-fire pipsqueak english that will be heard by many but, thankfully, understood by few. The one plus is that I brought in some Can-Con music tracks--so for about a total of about 11 minutes next friday there will be relief from the god forsaken pop music that they love over here.

Ive been to shanghai and scaled some inner-city peaks here in Wuxi. Eaten meat on a stick and been called a chop-stick by a 70 pound Chinese girl who thought I was too skinny. Going on a trip organized by some of my students to the historic town of Suzhou next weekend to go to amusement park (what else?). Went to a club last night and watched creepy white men with pot bellies and balding patterns go fishing for epiglottises (epigloti?) in the mouths of girls so good-looking they could be Vin Diesel's girlfriends. Beat a Chinese guy at ping-pong. Beat my way through 100 Chinese guys to get on the bus. Beat my way through 1000 Chinese guys to exit a market. Will be beating my way through 10,000 Chinese guys when I attempt to purchase a train ticket to Beijing for the May 1st holiday (am going to meet up with my old pal Tom McCabe).

I dont know what else. I'm having a great time but the work has been very time consuming and so haven't had a lot of opportunity to really explore a whole lot.

Yours,

Ge la mu

By the by, my mandarin is probably worse now than it was when I left montreal but a change is gonna come. At the radio station I met this really cool person that bizarrely speaks this near-immaculate and nuanced french (learnt in Shanghai over 2 years) and wants a chance to use it, so we're going to do some language exchange thing and maybe play some ping-pong. Go habs!

2 Memories

1) When I lived in London, our school chartered a coach as a schoolbus (cheesewagons don't exist there). We always had the same driver, a hindu, and I liked him so much that I'd sit at the front and chat to him in the mornings (also, the view was better out the giant bubble windshield than the side windows). He cracked me up, so funny was he, making heavily accented fart jokes and other slapstick attempts to provoke furrows of ire from the chaperoning teacher. One of his fingers was half-way around, as if it had become loose at one of the digit knuckles and begun to unscrew. Being young, I'd no problem asking him about it and each time his answer was different. From: it got chopped off by a lawnmower and then resewn, to a waste disposal unit and then resewn, to bitten off by his wife and then it grew back. I loved the trips to and from school, it was either him, the Top Trumps that I OWNED or the kissing games at the back.

2) Once, while installing hardwood floor in Victoria, I had to inform the 80 year-old lady we were working for that we were almost out of the product (only half-way done) and would have to order more. So she kicked me in the ass. I hadn't liked her until then.

what the blog do i know?

not a lot.
do i care?
yes and know.
was thinking about how action adverse I am these days. and why. perhaps because i feel that confronting something legitimizes it?

i'm not lazy, just a.a.
sometimes thinking is best done without thinking about it.