"Your memory is a monster"

What scares me: being convinced of a memory, only to confirm that I had it wrong all along

March 18 was the day they punched a hole in my marriage certificate. The thing no one ever looks at or hangs on a wall. The thing kept in an old plastic bag, if it's lucky. The only thing I could think, as I paged through the documents held together by a cord strung through holes on the corner of each page: how dare they punch a hole in my marriage certificate. It's done on special paper, you know, the kind you can't photocopy, like money, or college transcripts. They just punched a hole in it all willy-nilly. I hate them, and I hate me.

I also like when you can tell he's drunk blogging

http://tomshone.blogspot.com/2011/02/casting-doubt-on-true-beliebers.html

I always find myself holding back my adulation for Tom Shone's blog. But I...just...can't. I heart the guy's words.

Oh and today's made me LOL: http://tomshone.blogspot.com/2011/02/history-in-offing-either-way.html

Wow...

On Joan Didion:
"She considers herself too shy to be a good reporter, but photographers she has worked with say her shyness sometimes makes her subjects so nervous they blurt out extraordinary things in their eagerness to fill up the conversational vacuum."

You know what's really unhealthy?

When you feel like you're gonna have a heart attack or pass out while clicking "send" with an assignment attached to a professor.

I'm so disgusting

I'm having one of those weeks where I can't stop eating. What I ate today, SO FAR (it's only 5pm!):
-3/4 bag of crispy M&M's
-3/4 box of Lotte Pepero "Nude"
-1 roasted veggie sandwich from Simply Life
-1 coffee
-1 banana
-1 large bag of "Hot Wave" potato chips
-2 Haribo coke bottles (I only had 2 left)
-approx 3 glasses of water

Kind of festive?

More display-case origami. Basic rabbits. Really nice that they are strung up, in large quantities. Pretty. Really bad that this Chinese New Year theme confuses with Valentine's Day, unless this visual runs through February. Or maybe bad that it's ambiguous.

I swear

Yogi Tea's Ginkgo IQ "clarify your mind" tea makes me sleepy, every time. So annoying.

Siem Reap

Feel like doing one of these blog things thanks vli :)

How many have you read?

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger 
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 
47. Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan 
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell 
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams 
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

In Pajamas

Home sick today. Not homesick, like I miss HK homesick. But at home, sick. As in, the food here is so dirty everything that goes in wants to come back out.

And what do I decide to do with my day at home, sick? Read Harry Knowles's review of the Social Network, of course. And yeeeeah, he basically wrote the review I would've written http://www.aintitcool.com/node/46685

His short-ish review basically waxes poetic about the opening scene ahhhh it's the scene I can't stop obsessing over either. I think I had a visceral reaction when he said she doesn't need to study cos she goes to BU. Then when she said you're always gonna think people don't like you because you're a nerd, but it's really because you're an asshole... I loved that line. Describes so many people, although replacing the word "nerd" with others. And Harry mentions the opening scene of JJ Abram's Star Trek, which I freaking love.

P.S. Front page byline in the Phnom Penh Post today! YES.

Near Russian Market, Phnom Penh

Christmas in Cambodia

My Christmas present to myself: finally watching the last season of Lost, which I bought at the Russian Market yesterday.

Happy F'n Birthday!

I got dragged to this event last week. Even worse, I got ambushed. My friend said, let's meet at Lane Crawford. Ack! Little did I know, she meant, let's meet at Lane Crawford's 160th birthday bash featuring the most beautiful people in Asia.

Of course, having no knowledge of this tiny little detail, I put on my wide-leg Habitual jeans from 8 years ago, a t-shirt, and Reef flip flops. Yes. REEF. I might as well have been going to the beach, but this was just supposed to be quick dinner between school projects.

I got in through the back door because of course, if you've been following the story you'd've realized, I had no invitation. I downed two glasses of Veuve Cliquot in front of minked mannequins. Literally. In my Reef flip flops. 

It was one of those parties that make you wonder if the average height in Hong Kong is actually 6'1". Yeah that's Susie Bubble up there. I saw a woman go up to her and ask to take a picture. Susie did, but then I swear she dissed her with a kind of "I'm too famous to be chatting with you" turnaround back to her cool crowd.

Then we were required to watch Daniel Wu play ping pong. Don't ask. I refrained from repeatedly asking my friend, "Can we go to Te for dinner now?"

Hurray for MPF

Yesterday I walked by a guy with a big camera pointed somewhere in the sky, and I thought my usual thought: "Look at this fool taking an 'artsy' picture of nothing that he's gonna post on Facebook so everyone can comment on the 'cool' star lens effect.

But I looked up anyway. And took my thought back. Because this fool caught something AWEsome.

HSBC's idea of a celebration? Winter lights facing the harbor?

<-- Yes. I wish they were being ironic.

Protest Prediction: Another Dark Art to Master

Can someone please set up a Hong Kong protest calendar to make journalism students' lives easier?

How can I write for NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC?

Vacancies on our editorial staff are usually filled by men and women who have had quite a few years of experience in the newspaper or magazine publishing fields. In preparation for such work, many of our writers have made a thorough study of the sciences, journalism, and English, and in some cases know several languages. A solid academic background and a proven record of success in one's chosen field are most important. However, because we cannot know a person's particular talents nor assure employment after a completed course, we do not encourage gearing a career or educational program specifically toward employment by the National Geographic Society.

--from National Geographic's website

Don't you love it when someone tells you in an official capacity exactly what you need to hear? Over the past year or so, if someone asked me what my dream job is, I'd say National Geographic. But a company's frankness and dashing of dreams is much appreciated.

Girls just wanna have fun.
Boys just wanna be sourpusses.

Sigh...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130437287&sc=fb&cc=fp

Mid-article, the writer poses the problem:

These days journalism schools around the country are often challenged to justify a mission that trains students at such a high cost for a collapsing industry that doesn't even require a degree. 

After all, many newspaper companies have been forced to seek bankruptcy protection, including the owner of the nearby Los Angeles Times. ABC News just let go a quarter of its entire staff. AndNewsweek and BusinessWeek magazines were in such tough shape their longtime owners sold them for $1 a piece.

Towards the end of the article is what we are told in j-school ad nauseam:

"If you look around the world, whether it's a developed country or a developing country ... if that country has a free and independent press it's much more likely they're going to be a democracy," he says. "And I think those of us in [the] journalism education field have an obligation to help train people to provide information in the public interest."

And stuff like this:

"I am concerned, as a dean, at the costs and debt burdens these students take on," Wilson said. "But I'm also concerned about training the next generation of people who are going to provide the backbone of democracy."

Yeah... we are all skeptical... but trying to deal and learn to love our choice.

So hard to watch...

but so funny... at least the most embarrassing ones are on Fox News...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-6rdjGvj28