if you want to sing out

Well, if you want to sing out, sing out
And if you want to be free, be free
'Cause there's a million things to be
You know that there are

And if you want to live high, live high
And if you want to live low, live low
'Cause there's a million ways to go
You know that there are

Chorus:
You can do what you want
The opportunity's on
And if you find a new way
You can do it today
You can make it all true
And you can make it undo
you see ah ah ah
its easy ah ah ah
You only need to know

Well if you want to say yes, say yes
And if you want to say no, say no
'Cause there's a million ways to go
You know that there are

And if you want to be me, be me
And if you want to be you, be you
'Cause there's a million things to do
You know that there are

Chorus

Well, if you want to sing out, sing out
And if you want to be free, be free
'Cause there's a million things to be
You know that there are
You know that there are
You know that there are
You know that there are
You know that there are

self control is the new black (friday)

I am trying to exercise self-control today by not taking advantage of most Black Friday sales. But after all I am a shopper at heart (you know, that tale about the scorpion riding on the back of frog to cross a river and then stinging the frog because it cannot change nature...) and bought the following:

- 2 Old Navy crew-neck sweaters, about $13 each.
- Nikon camera lens, about $140 - a great bargain from Staples; hope it ships (fingers crossed).
- The new Swell Seasons cd that comes with bonus live cd and dvd - $9 (it's been around $15).
- Canon printer, about $32.

I am borderline on a Cuisinart mini-chopper for $30 from Amazon. Don't do it!!!

Update: I didn't end up buying the mini-chopper before the price went back up. Woohoo!

fowl language

Word of the day:

spatchcock



I've heard this word over the last couple of weeks as much as I've heard people on tv mention "brussel sprouts."

in the year 2010

In the year 2010, I am psyched for new cds from:

Hot Chip
Vampire Weekend
MGMT
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck
The National
and
LCD Soundsytem!!!

+

Shout Out Loud!!!!!!

That's a pretty promising line-up.

the thanksgiving post

The 25 things I am grateful for in 2009:

1. Haruki Murakami
2. That Chi Young is a really, really good kid
3. Amazing Race
4. Glee
5. La Roux
6. Discovery
7. No work travel this year
8. My Samsung and Sony tvs
9. Meeting Fran Healy and Andy Dunlop of Travis
10. Meeting Tom McRae
11. Star Trek reboot
12. Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel
13. Annie's return and her dance-tastic cd Don't Stop
14. Modern Family and Cougar Town comedy hour
15. Strawberry shortcake jelly recipe from Martha Stewart and learning to make panna cotta
16. My free magazine subscriptions
17. Cat Deeley on SYTYCD
18. The comeback of Tom Brady and the Patriots
19. Youtube video of the SF Muni fight between black woman and Chinese woman
20. Youtube video of crazy Chinese woman meltdown at HK airport
21. My apple tree surviving
22. RPatz's self-deprecating Brit-ness
23. Tivo
24. Discovering In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
25. Family

chinese pop

Random old Chinese songs I like:

達明一派 忘記他是她


王菲 執迷不悔


草蜢 世界會變得很美


陳慶祥/阿牛 哭


林憶蓮 早晨


軟硬 廣播道Fans殺人事件

vampire weekend

Holy werewolves! New Moon's Friday box office take actually broke Dark Knight's opening record. This is a huge vampire weekend.

Speaking of which, Vampire Weekend's new song Cousins has a kickass video to go with it. I am psyched:

Cannot wait for their new cd Contra coming in January.

My vampire weekend will consist of me shopping for Thxgiving dinner and Paul and I taking Wins out for his birthday. Not idea where dinner will be, but dessert will be at Ghiradelli Chocolate Factory cuz Paul wants a real milkshake.

ah precious: straight out of ping yuen

Sometimes I forget who I am, what my name is. Here in the Ping Yuen, we just try to make it to another day. I look out at all the laundry hanging on the clothes line next to the dried out bok choy, and I dream one day I am gonna make it outta here. It's a race, between God and the man who tries to keep me down. I have faith most of the times in God, but I tell ya, somedays I have my doubts, like when my mama is beating me down, I have my doubts. One time, she was so angry that she shoved me against my bookcase, knocking down my CP3O model. It went crashing down to the floor, and its arms went flying. My mama don't care. She stomped on the pieces when she went storming outta my room. I sat there listening to Alan Tam playing from the neighbor's open window and cried to myself. It took me almost two days to build the CP3O. I got burns all over my fingers from the hot modeling glue, but I persevered and built it. I was so proud of myself, like for once, it was something I did for myself, from start to finish, I accomplished something. But she didn't even notice. When she looked at me, she just saw another mouth to feed. She said I was dumb like a piece of barbeque pork. I ain't sure what she meant, cuz I don't really know how you measure how smart a barbeque pork is. But that doesn't mean it didn't hurt, for your own mama to think you are useless. Deep down I know mama is just doing the best she knows how. She's got it hard too. It's not her fault. Somewhere it gets passed down, all the anger. People at the Ping Yuen don't got much hope. You see the same pain over and over again. You ain't got no reason to believe.

But my counselor at school believes. She ain't got any skills with the hair and makeup, but she's a nice white lady anyways. She's like, "Don't ever let anybody convince you that you are a piece of barbeque pork. Everybody is good at something. You are good at math, and math will take you far someday." I was like, "How do you know I am good at math?" She was like, "I can see it in you. I can look through your glasses into your eyes, and I see an engineer, or a mathematician, or something like that." I think she's right - it's flowing thru my Chinese blood like a golden dragon. I need to remember my ancestry. I can't let the circumstances drag me down. My people are a proud people. We are not defined by the Chinatown ghetto we live in. We got numbers in our calculating soul. My heart beats like an abacus. Sometimes when my mama is yelling and screaming at me, or when my neighbors are fighting cuz a mahjong game gets really heated, I think about the pythagorean theorum to drown out all the noise. It helps. It helps to know no barbeque pork I know of knows the quadratic formula. My mama don't know it yet, but I am better than a piece of barbeque pork. If my counselor believes in me, then I should believe in me too. The white lady's like a messenger from God. I don't know why in minority stories like this, the messenger from God is always white, but it ain't no difference. I shall rise up.

Anyways, I am not saying everything is alright just cuz I know a little bit of math. It's still hard. My CP3O is still sitting there on my bookcase armless. My mama has expanded her attack to calling me a salted duck egg instead of barbeque pork. And sometimes there is still urine in the Ping Yuen elevator, and the Wah Ching and Joe Boys are still fighting their turf wars. But it's a good thing to know that even when I forget what my name is and lose my way, God and the white lady counselor will remember me. And no matter the madness and chaos circling me like pitbulls with rabies, a² + b² = c² will always be true.

Math is...precious. Don't you ever forget it.

run fire enter devil

I took an extra few days off for Veterans Day cuz I need to burn off my use-or-lose leave. Off the top of my head, I only know one veteran. He likes guns, I can tell you that much. And his weakness is this girl who totally uses him. The lesson there is, girls are more dangerous than guns. But then we knew that already, didn't we?...Earlier this week, I went to this place on Judah called Mango Medley and had the most delicious coconut lime chicken spaghetti for lunch. My stomach was happy. Washed it all down with a matcha red bean drink...Tonight is Amazing Race night. After all these years, it's still the show I look most forward to watching. And who says I am not loyal? (Actually if anything, I am loyal to a fault.) I like it when I have my tv shows to look forward to. It makes me all excited. I swear it's the small things that keep me going. Sure I wouldn't mind if my life was fufilled with higher purpose rather than with trivial tv shows and pop songs, but I think that club is exclusive to people like the Dalai Lama and Oprah...Both Jason Mraz and Jack Johnson have live cds out this month. I like the vibe of these two guys a lot. Of course, I don't really know them, but from what I can tell, I really like the way they go about life, the way they look at the world. Of course, I also suspect that some of that zen attitude is from pot smoking...I just watched The Proposal. It's not the best rom-com ever, but man, Sandra Bullock is just perfect for this stuff, and she and Ryan Reynolds have surprisingly good chemistry...Meanwhile, Drag Me To Hell is kinda lame. It got tremondous reviews, and I don't know why. I wasn't scared or anything, and it was actually quite uneven in tone to me. Was it trying to be campy or not? I can't tell. I think it only got good reviews cuz Sam Raimi directed it, so the critics think Oh, it's a classy horror flick...The Pats play the undefeated (and much hated, by me) Colts tonight. You know I will be watching with one eye closed...I tried to pick up the writing stuff in the last few days, but nothing coming out is very inspired. I think you can tell when you suck, and I am sucking these days. But I think it just takes practice. I will devote more time to it, I promise this to myself. For sure, I will write a lot more, or try to anyway, during my December leave from work...Is anybody else sick of Lady Gaga? Yeah, I know. I liked her when she was an upstart and I didn't have an image to go with the perfectly catchy dance songs. But now I just feel the overexposure is not justified. Her image is actually quite horrible in my opinion. The costumes, videos and stage performances strike me as overwrought rather than arty. I think there is a fine line between art and whatever lies beyond that, and she's crossed it many, many moons ago. There is a phrase in Chinese that literally translates to "run fire enter devil." I know that's a horrible translation, but it kinda expresses how I feel about her. Give me Annie and La Roux anyday!...And speaking of me getting sick of something - I am already sick of the hype surrounding Precious, a film about an abused, pregnant teenage girl who finds respite from her hardship of life in Harlem through the power of poetry. It's brought to you by the saintly combo of Oprah and Tyler Perry (the two most powerful black people in America, besides Obama, and they know it!!!). It stars Monique as the abusive mother and Mariah Carey, sans makeup, as the girl's counselor. It has the most Oscar buzz going into award season. I know, for the next four months, I have to put up with endless praise about this (white critics have to champion this because it makes them feel socially responsible), Mariah walking the red carpets, and Oprah and Tyler Perry gloating. (Remember the last Oprah gloating opportunity was thankfully averted when Rio got the 2016 Olympics instead of Chi-town.) Somebody please come up with a bigger movie to trump this please!!! Paging Peter Jackson...

samantha who's that girl

If I were an ABC exec, now that I've canceled Hank, I would bring back Samantha Who to shore up the Wed nite comedy line-up. It would go like this:

8:00 - The Middle
8:30 - Modern Family
9:00 - Samantha Who?
9:30 - Cougar Town

Come on - how perfect and obvious is that???

team edward

With the dawning of a new Twilight (haha) and renewed debates in the world over who's the dreamier Twilight hunk, I now declare I am on Team Edward for the following reasons:

1. He's a Brit.
2. Messy hair > clean cut. (Man, I really want that hair.)
3. RPatz in interviews is quite funny and self-deprecating (kinda goes with #1 above). Exhibit A: the latest Vanity Fair cover story, in which he reveals one leg of his is shorter than the other, and that he thinks he looks like a cartoon character.
4. He's pale just like me.
5. He's brooding and elusive, vs. too-ready-to-be-there-to-lend-a-helping-werewolf-paw Jacob.
6. He was Cedric in Harry Potter.
7. He wasn't Sharkboy.
8. He is subject of a documentary called Robsessed (now that's clever and cheeky at the same time!).
9. Vampires are cooler than werewolves.
10. He sings. And I actually like the song he did called Never Think.

Now, I actually am not a hater. In fact, Taylor Lautner appears to be quite a good kid - I am very happy that he got to keep his job as Jacob after the brouhaha. And it's awfully neato that he is dating Taylor Swift, which makes them Taylor-Squared. All I am saying is, you always have to pick a team and choose a side (Adam Lambert vs Kris Allen, Star Wars vs Star Trek, India vs Palestine); otherwise, it's just no fun.

Oh, another disclaimer: I have not read any of the Twilight books, so I don't really know how the story goes. I presume Bella chooses Edward in the very end. I guess I'll find out sooner or later. I am probably not going to watch New Moon (or Eclipse, or I forget what comes after) in the theater. It's nothing like film snobbery or anything (after all, I watch shows on the CW!!!); it's just that I doubt I can find anybody who is willing to go with me to these movies. I don't know any tweens. Or more accurately, I don't know any tweens who would go to a movie with me - cuz that's all kinds of creepy...

class of 2009

The fall movies I have high hopes for:

Broken Embraces - Almodovar! Penelope Cruz speaking in her native tongue! It's arty and sublime and beautiful:


The Road - Aragon goes all post-apocalyptic:


The Lovely Bones - Peter Jackson tackles death and heaven and the murder of a thirteen year old girl:


A Single Man - Colin Firth is a gay man who has to deal with the death of his partner, with the help of a saucy-looking Julianne Moore and an all-grown up Nicholas Hoult:


An Education - Nick Hornby-written film about a teenage girl coming of age in 1950's London and falling for Peter Sarsgaard:


Avatar - James Cameron's first film since Titanic looks corny as heck from the trailer but should still be a spectacle to behold:


Nine - Lots of hot women and Daniel Day Lewis dancing, singing, and smoldering:


Sherlock Holmes - Iron Man abandons metal armor for tweed coat to solve some mystery:


New Moon - Edward and Bella and the Scooby gang are back:

the glee of glee

Top ten, Glee edition:

10. Gold Digger
9. Hate On Me
8. Sweet Caroline
7. Maybe This Time
6. Taking Chances
5. Take A Bow
4. Leaving On A Jet Plane
3. Bust Your Window
2. On My Own
1. Don't Stop Believin'

the wall

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, over 1,000 domino pieces, painted by Berlin youths, have been erected and will be sent toppling on Nov 9:

raising malawi, burying mariah

Madonna was recently in Malawi doing more charity work, including attending a groundbreaking ceremony for a girls' school she helped built with her Raising Malawi foundation.


(Look how radiant she looks.)


(That's really, really good work of her. Found pic on a Madonna web forum. Makes me happy.)

i don't like your music

10. Heartbreak/Make Me A Dancer - Sophie Ellis-Bextor
9. Never Forget You - Noisettes
8. The Price - Dappled Cities
7. Saviour - The Lights
6. Fireflies - Owl City
5. Monsters - Hurricane Bells
4. Bulletproof - Lou Barlow
3. Horchata - Vampire Weekend
2. You Belong With Me - Taylor Swift
1. I Don't Like Your Band - Annie (This song is ridiculous! I ordered the cd from cd-wow, with the bonus disc. Cannot wait.)