Categotry Archives: General

nuala, love, happy birthday. this picture (which i am also stealing from you) makes me miss giggling with you so, so much.

i can’t wait for you to come home to visit!

california: eastern=eh.

nevada: eh. desert. ok.

utah: 1st half= eh. arches national park = beautiful.

colorado: 1st half was lovely, 2nd half was like kansas.

kansas: shit. shit shit shit.

missouri: much like kansas until st. louis. which was nice. and then it was like illinois.

illinois: argh.

indiana: oh argh argh.

kentucky: you are so pretty!

west virginia: inbred coal burners.

virginia: child molesters according to roanoke. blue ridge parkway=excellent.

maryland: YUCK. (except for jolie. and raul. and seeing ‘the village’ again.)

delaware: DOUBLE YUCK.

pennsylvania: well…

kim’s apartment: lovely and lavender.

kim’s campus: under construction.

earlier today i stopped at hunchback rock on the blue ridge parkway in virginia and pretended to be a mountain lion on top of a rock. unbeknownst to me, kim then videotaped me. the insolent whore. “rawr!” i go, “rawrrrr….”

it is quite possibly better than the video of me kicking the cattle guard.

perhaps not. cattle guards do incense me, after all.

tomorrow? on to jolie’s welcoming bosom!

postscript: bob nichols in lewisburg, west virginia is a fine, fine man. don’t ask him about guys shooting their heads off with shotguns though, because it will end in a chin. not manchin for governor though. he’s ok.

August 17

At Black Canyon of the Gunnison (a doom name, to be sure), Kim’s guidebook claimed it had a ‘somber countenance’. I practiced taking pictures with a depressed expression. Mostly failure as doldrums do not come on cue. But that was before we left the sanctuary of the car to stand, in the spitting sideways rain, upon Pulpit Rock denouncing the Heavens and their cursed squabbles of a storm.

August 18

Kim saw the weather channel this morning and says that we will be following and followed by thunderstorms all the way across this country. We go like lightening, but it always catches up.

August 19

We race through states leaving behind a fluttering trail of maps by the side of the road. No longer useful to us: Nevada, Utah, Colorodo, Kansas, we abandon you like flotsom.

August 20

I bought a number of Wizard of Oz postcards in Kansas. Did you ever think about how the one really evil place in the movie is on a mountain? It makes sense that Kansas would be piss-pants terrified of mountains. Because they don’t got any.

so the thing is that i uploaded all my pictures of singapore, but i did not create real captions for everything. i did divide all the pictures into mini sub-albums, as just dumping over 250 pictures on you seemed a little cruel. i won’t have time to create captions before i leave, also, by the time i get back i’ll have all of marina’s pictures to include on this. or maybe marina will give you a link to her photos here and you can see them before i get back. i’ll give you brief synopses of the sub-albums though. so you can sort of know where i was or what i was doing.

malaysia, we went here for one day. more like an afternoon sort of. since by the time we got over the border crossing (which was like hell in the heat department) it was like 2pm. all we did in malaysia is go to a mall. yes. a mall. anything was better tthan staying on the dirty, dirty streets with the open potentiality of pickpocketing around every corner. i should clarify, we were in malaysia, yes, but malaysia is big and we only went to the border town of johor which is big (one of the 3 biggest cities of malaysia i think), but still just one city. so when i speak of malaysia, i am only speaking of johor. for all i know, the rest of malaysia could be a paradise. we’ll find out when marina gets back as she was going to the island resort of palau tioman after i left singapore. um, anyway, in this mall there was a stage with singing people. after i took the video of the girls in bondage gear, more of them came out. about 4 more girls and 1 boy. and then they square danced. i am so apologetic not to have gotten a video of that. but i had no direct line of sight and the railings on the second floor were too crowded for me to get thru. square dancing. i swear. and then some aerobicizing. it was incredible. the grey building is a museum (we think) of sultan stuff. supposedly it is much like the keagy house and full of stuffed dead things. i’m glad we didn’t go in.

zoo/urong bird park/and really also the turtles at the chinese gardens: so if it’s a picture of birds then it was at the jurong bird park. in jurong. which we went to a lot, truth be told. (it’s a little north west of sinapore city, still in singapore). i kind of liked jurong. if it’s turtles, then it’s at the chinese gardens (also in jurong). if it’s a turtle with a pig snout, then it’s the pig-snout turtle who either really loved me or really hated me. everytime i got close to his cage, he would go hog-wild trying to get to me. little legs flailing, mouth snapping open and closed, banging up against the glass with his little pig snout. kissing or biting was the order of the day. and if it’s pictures of any other type of animal, then i’m at the singapore zoo. which i think was also in jurong. huh. polar bears are fuzzy and cute and their big back feet are adorable. the big guy would probably bite my head off though. monkeys wandered freely around the park. which was hell of cool.

temples: ehhhh, well if it’s crazy lots of people plastered all over a sort of pointy topped building, then it’s a hindu temple. there’s probably cows everywhere. if it’s…smaller and less crazy and has red chinese lanterns, or foo dogs in front, then it’s buddhist. and if it’s the gold and white domed one it’s the sultan mosque in the kampong glam/arab street area.

shopping is really just the dempsey street area of antique stores where marina’s mom wanted to buy some really expensive pieces of furniture or tibetan drums. this was the day after i deleted all those pictures so i was just taking pictures of anything to make up, basically. but i did want some of the stuff i took pictures of too. mostly the wooden thing with the bats.

sentosa island: if it’s an aerial view of something then i’m in the cable car thing riding like 36 stories above the ground in a tiny little swaying box. fuck, i’m brave. any aerial shots of run down dilapidated buildings are actually on sentosa island. it was part of a theme park attraction called ‘lost civilization’ or something. but that section of the park was closed. lame. the huge white statue thing is the merlion. singapore’s national mascot. head of a lion, body of a mer-creature. it’s patently ridiculous. but they seem very proud of it. at night it turned into a scary thing with laser eyeballs and had sparkly lights on it. both cheesy and even more absurd than it’s daylight facade. otherwise mostly in this album is tons and tons of pictures of butterflies. some alive in the butterfly enclosed park area, and some pinned in the antechambers. i’m contemplating a flight of butterflies tattoo thing, and i needed some really good examples, which is why the pictures. i lost quite a lot of them too in the deletion incident, along with pictures of the aquarium, the laser light show (much like disneyland’s) and the merlion at night. whoops.

river front walk: we went on a guided walking tour on the river front called ‘by the belly of the carp’ with a guide named geraldine. it was pretty awesome and included a bumboat ride. so lots of pictures of this bend (that from above looks like the belly of a carp) of the singapore river. life-blood of the city and all that. huge feng shui thing for the businesses right there because of the water properties and the wind coming in from the bay bringing money and good fortune and all that. also some statues (singapore decided it needed more art so as to be a more beautiful city to look at, and they commissioned art like crazy and had huge celebrating artistic vision grants and stuff. again with the improvements which they decide on and then actually accomplish. not that the huge fat chicken baby statue is really ‘art’ in my opinion.)

national day parade: it’s a huge deal. fireworks, singing, wierd displays of people dressed up like flowers. confetti explosions at the end. it was great. and we got those fun packs. which seriously were full of fun. you’ll get reverse pictures of me with a nokia flashlight phone in my hat when marina’s pictures are up too. though not me singing along to the ‘home’ song. thank god. she didn’t get a picture of that.

asian art museum: not being able to use a flash posed some problems. but some cool stuff none the less. make sure to watch the videos as there’s one of me putting on a puppet show.

misc: ah, the misc album. well….it’s got pictures of the raffles hotel (peanut shells thrown on the floor!) and of jumbo’s where we ate chili crab and yam flour encrusted scallops (i moan with delight even at the memory of those things). one tree hill road signs for christine, views from my bedroom window, playing with sarees, door cock for jason, fountain of good fortune, and huge japanese kimono kites at the conrad continental hotel.

gardens: is predominently the singapore national orchid gallery at the botanic gardens. but there’s some of the chinese gardens out in jurong too. all right, just the last 3 are at the chinese gardens. my camera ran out of battery juice then and i couldn’t take any more of the bonsai collection. marina did though, so we’ll see those eventually.

chinatown: finally, lastly, we have chinatown. where i got the henna tattoo done on my hand, and there was a gay pride flag hanging. chinatown was wicked awesome at night with the hawker stalls and the fun, cheap things to buy.

one of the interesting things about being in a chinese speaking (though almost everyone speaks english) city is having people read my leg on their own and then ask me if it’s my boyfriend’s name. uh, no, i reply. i did not brand myself with my boyfriend’s name. what kind of girl do you think i am? a lame one? it’s my dad’s name. at which point they look at me funny. thinking to themselves, you are no asian. you are not even half-asian. the extreme amount of sarees and that henna tattoo on your hand notwithstanding, you’re still whiter than the dickens. whatevs yo, my look replies to them as i run away from strangers who like to approach me.

i come home today! well, in the vaguest sense. i get on a plane at 5:30pm and will show up in the states after like 15 hours at 7:30pm. but now it is only 9:30am and i’ve got a deal of last-minute things to do so i am off.

singapore, today is your day. for today, you turn thirty-nine years old. today i wear red and white for you as befits a patriotic mentality. and today i will join thousands upon thousands more in a huge grandstand to watch fireworks and people in kilts. perhaps even cheerleaders. because that’s what you get on your birthday, singapore. multinational celebratory antics.

singapore, i am realizing, is not very asian of a city. it’s got such a diverse population and they try so hard to be westernized that the whole sense of a different culture’s traditions have fallen away. like flak from curry.

on the other hand, as asian cities go, singapore has a serious leg up on the border town of johor in malaysia. shit that place was shitty. so dirty and smelly and full of leering men after the cleanliness of singapore. singapore used to be dirty, mind you. but then ministers make little off-hand comments like, ‘let’s hire an otter to be our litter mascot and create huge advertising campaigns about keeping our city clean,’ or ‘maybe in 10 years we could have a river which is the proper river color instead of this putrid yellow color.’ and the thing is, see, that these things work here. when they decide to make improvements, oh boy howdy do they make them. i’m pretty damn sure that you couldn’t get the majority of americans to participate in a keep our country litter free movement. dirty hippies.

which is not to say that i like singapore better than america. because i don’t. singapore, in my mind, is not the kind of place that i would want to live. it’s too…hmmm. well maybe just because it’s a big city and i don’t like big cities.

um, happy birthday singapore!

p.s. crap. singapore’s birthday is actually monday, august 9th. which is the day i am currently in here in singapore. it’s noon in fact. well. heh. stupid time west coast zone. whatever.