Iron Man and Chuck

Iron Man 3 is on the horizon. I make it a rule to have low expectations for anything that ends with a 3, so I can be pleasantly surprised no matter how bad it is. Usually I do such a good job with the first part that I end up not watching the movie at all. But I don't always have a choice in the matter because frequently all the other movies in a 2 month radius are made in China (I live in Beijing and sadly Chinese film is even more mediocre than the sweetened garbage that comes out of Hollywood), and Yuan Yuan needs to be entertained. Otherwise she'll entertain me, Gladiator style.

Recently we've been on an almost exclusive Chuck diet. I'm usually busy so entertainment hour coincides with feeding time for efficiency. This has interesting side-effects:

1. Yuan Yuan is more likely to volunteer to cook, since I can go without eating meals and she needs her helping of Chuck.

2. I have no idea what anything tastes like anymore, but sometimes I'll find myself cracking up when I put Yuan Yuan to bed and grab a carrot for a midnight snack.

3. Mario has watched more TV in the past month / 2 seasons of Chuck than he has in the 9 months before that. He never admits to watching, and he's really good at looking away just in time when you try to catch him sneaking a peek, but when he's studying the same syllable on the same flashcard before and after the episode, it gives away the game.

Instant mastery for sale

I asked Mario today how much he would pay to instantly become master of After Effects. Not THE master, but a decent master like Andrew Kramer, one of my more personal personal heroes. Mario started at $1k and I massaged him up to $5k with promises of future riches, but he wouldn't budge past that, despite the fiercest massaging. He finally shelled out $10k to become an instant badass actuary but that one was just a hypothetical scenario.

$5-10k seems like a miserly sum for even the most average greatness. I think I'd pay at least 10 times that amount. Now I just have to find someone to take my money. And then write them a check. The people in the Matrix didn't know how easy they had it. What the hell were they thinking going back to the real world to fight crime. They could have been After Effects masters!

Yesterday's discussion was much cheaper, but entertaining none the less. We were hypothesizing what would happen if everyone suddenly switched gender. How much chaos would erupt in Muslim countries? Would the next US president be a woman? Would I still be with Yuan Yuan and would I develop a taste for male? Would there be a frenzy of revenge rape? Would Mario get up and pour me some water like a good girl? Would there be no one in the streets the next day because they'd all be at home playing with themselves while shopping for shoes?

Obviously our research, and I don't hesitate to call it that because we used the scientific method and because it was inconclusive...was inconslusive. But mark my words, one day I'm going to give you a sex change and then you'll wish you thought about this sooner.

Who wears the glasses in this relationship?

Today, after a shower, I went back to the room to put on my pants, a little ritual I have. Yuan Yuan, who can't just sit around when I'm naked, jumped up from wherever she was on the planet at that time and did a little dance around me, or rather between me and the pants. Being a man, and therefore stronger and faster and smarter, I managed to get to my pants and begin putting them on before she could figure out right from left, which she has a history of mistaking for each other (as well as for up and down, depending on the pitch and roll of the bed-shaped centrifuge we keep next to the bedside drawer and call a "bed"), at which time she seized my left--a.k.a. her right--leg and danced with me around the room while I tried in vain to put my right leg and then whichever leg turned out to be the other leg into the pants, which was even harder than usual.

Of course when I finally succeeded, Yuan Yuan was sprawled on the floor (did I mention I was stronger?), screaming "give me back my glasses! They're in your pants!" (Did I mention I was smarter?), after which I felt something in my pants above me knee, and it was glasses (Thank goodness. I'm proud to say I haven't crapped my pants in years. That means at least 2).

Sadly, the comedy ended there and the soap opera began. I refused to take my pants off to get her glasses ("Whose fault is it my leg is wearing your glasses!") and Yuan Yuan refused to reach her hand in from the bottom and fish them out ("Take off your pants like a real man!"). The night ended in the worst possible way - everyone apologizing, including Mario, for not taking off his pants to check for spare pairs of glasses. 

Speaking of wonderful people acting stubborn and prideful, a former student once told me that if someone spits in your face, you shouldn't give them the satisfaction of seeing you wiping off their spittle. You should just pretend like they're not important enough for you to even acknowledge that they spit in your face.

 I wonder how many loogies his face is wearing right now.

Dream joke

Last night in a dream, Freya sent me a joke by email. It went something like this:

A guy has a parrot, an exceedingly rude, obnoxious, foul-mouthed parrot, probably confiscated by PETA from the last peg-leg pirate. The parrot is completely insufferable, the worst thing being that it won't shut up for a second, it spews a steady stream of obscenities like the proverbial faucet. The guy tries everything to make it behave: begging, pleading, threats, spanking, ignoring, fingers in the ears + "La la la, I'm not listening!", hiring a parrot whisperer, he even does a 30-day trial of not cursing himself, to set a good example. Nothing works.

Finally, out of options, short of ripping the parrot's face off, he takes the parrot by the scroat and throws it in the freezer. The stream of verbal abuse is muffled and then a minute later unexpectedly dies out completely. The guy is curious, and a bit worried, so he opens the freezer door. The parrot comes out and apologizes eloquently and profusely, promises it'll never take that tone of voice again and will be the most well-behaved pirate parrot the world has ever seen. The guy is completely mystified. As he picks his jaw up from the floor, then the parrot says, "Just one question. What did the chicken do!?"

And that is the first joke I've ever been told in a dream. Thanks Freya!

I dream of Dima

I read my dream diary today. I wrote in it on and off for around 6 months, mostly off judging by the amount of dreams recorded, and it is a pile of diamonds in the rough, though quite soft to sleep on. It reads like a collection of sci-fi microstories. Some of the stuff doesn't ring any bells, some sounds awesome and vague memories bubble to the surface, some was written with the wrong side of the pen and requires a seeing paw dog to read, and the rest are written in Dima's* handwriting and will probably never be deciphered. Still, you've got to keep those scientists busy or they get restless, and if there's anything I've learned from sci-fi movies, it's that scientists with free time inevitably end up responsible for a nuclear/chemical/fashion apocalypse.

Favorite quote out of the successfully (and possibly correctly) unscrambled notes:

"Took time slices of two apples to make sure one was traveling."

If only I'd taken a time slice of that dream and stuck it between the pages of the dream diary.

*One of my early childhood traumas. Grandma Mila was teaching me math. I had the makings of a great mathematician, evident in the fact that I wrote all over the page in anywhere but between the lines and all in some futuristic alphabet. Grandma Mila patiently tried to show me the light:

"You write like Dima and Dima writes like an idiot!"

Since then, as much as we love Dima, we can't help but abuse him verbally at each and every opportunity:

"That's not how you cut watermelon! You're holding the knife like Dima!"
"How'd you like my poem?" "You sure Dima didn't write it?"
"Look, everyone's a Dima when they first start, but don't worry, you'll get better."

He'll understand, once it goes viral and he gets his cut of the profits.

Relationship censorship

There's been a mini oil rush upstairs for the last three days. I feel a bit like Joe Pesci from My Cousin Vinny.

"Do they start drilling for oil upstairs every day at 9 in the morning?"
"Nah!"
"Thank God! I was starting to get worri..."
"Usually they start at a quarter past 7."
"Ah...I see. Oh well, I never much liked sanity anyway."

As if a jackhammer to the ears is not enough, YY's mom coming to town and she's booked the drill-YY-about-her-relationship tour. And to finance the stay, she's getting a job here. At YY's hostel. Everything would be fine, but YY insists on taking out her earplugs when talking to her mom--just like that idiot Odysseus---and I've misplaced my ship's mast and ropes so I'm at a minor disadvantage. Here's the latest forecast, based on the many aftercasts of the past:

"Are you and Mark still together?"
"Yes..."
"Are you going to be together forever?"
"He promised me at least till Saturday."
"This Saturday? Or the Saturday before the heat death of the universe?"
"I'll double-check with him, but I'm pretty sure it's the first."
"I see. Well, daughter, riddle me this! What's the point of staying together till Saturday if you might break up on Saturday?"

Now that I think about it, what is the point of expiration dates? I changed the sticker on the jar of peanut butter just when it was about to expire for the third year in a row and I've been eating it with just minor post-consumption hallucinations. Let's just rip the expiration date stickers off of everything and nothing will ever expire again!

I've ruminated on subject for at least three seconds and I've come to the following conclusion: the problem is that YY's mom is from the past, a place way darker and scarier than the future, and even crazier than the now. Do you ever see people suffering in movies where they travel to the future? Never (sometimes). They're always walking around with stars in their eyes and becoming celebrities by reinventing sliced bread. Does anyone ever die now? Never. It's always "wait...did he just die? Damn! I missed it!" But anytime you see anyone time-machining it to the past, they get abducted by the government as food for their crazy scientists (you won't like them when they're hungry!), dragged into holy wars, and generally cruelly and unusually mistreated. Real life is the same way except less romantic. Your parents are the time machine and they come equipped with only one button: Back. Unfortunately, the last time I explained this theory to YY's mom she just nodded her head, an ancient body gesture that is the rough equivalent of the even more prehistoric one of twirling a finger near your temple (or so future me tells me).

Currently YY's mom is in the half-dark about us. That means she can see our silhouttes in the hazy room of her suspicions but she can't tell if we're making out or if one of us is getting CPR ("He's probably just giving her CPR. No wait, now she's giving him CPR...and now he's giving it to her again...I need to read up on the latest procedures..."). Actually, she probably knows everything. She's likely questioned all of YY's friends and relatives, read the latest blogs on the subject and watched the latest recordings from the nano-cam she installed in our ceiling fan. She's feeling very dizzy right now, and our ceiling fan is just a painting of a ceiling fan. She knows everything...but since YY hasn't told her anything explicitly, she probably thinks that what she knows is merely what she thinks she knows. If she finds out that what she knows is exactly that--what she knows, I may soon find myself in the censored area of foreign relations, along with this blog.

VPN virginity taken (cheap)

My flatmate brought a new boy back today and he's been punching her in the funny bone for the last hour. She hasn't stopped giggling since they came back. I hope they have the window open because by my calculations they should be running out of oxygen right about now.


I just popped my VPN cherry, with ExpressVPN no less. My computer's been a most heinous network nazi when it came to sending/receiving anything vaguely important. Wanna download some porn? No problem. Wanna download the latest source code for your project? Sorry, we only support downloading porn. But you can upload the sources you just wrote. No wait, just kidding, you can only upload porn. Yea, the one you just downloaded will do. Thanks...hey you sneaky bastard! You just renamed your project folder into Porn and uploaded a ton of .java files with porn names. I'll let it slide this time but don't think you can fool me twice!

And so on. I accept a little hassle since I'm in the land of the free-to-do-whatever-you're-allowed-to-do but lately conversations with the network have gotten tiresome, repetitive, repetitively tiresome and most of all tiresomely repetitive. (It did bring one more self-descriptive phrase into the universe, however, so there is a small silver lining). Anyway, we'll see in the next few days if ExpressVPN can manage to sneak my shit through the fan.