Paid my overdue tuition a few days ago, got a belated email today that said my school de-registered me because I owe them money. Well, that explains why my library card stopped working last week. (But it's working now!)

Think this is a sign I should pay my electricity and gas bills (10 months overdue).

And taxes.

Arrrrr (or why I go to Starbucks)

The rest of my apartment does not look like this. It's just my desk. About five minutes after cleaning it, it looks like this again:

This is the culprit:

Yup, it's all about him:

Even while trying to write this post, I lost the first pic because he rolled onto the delete button. And then he pressed a button on my air con remote. Wtf Korben, STOP! It's not a haystack!

Sai Kung

Last weekend's weather was so good it was pretty much impossible to take a bad picture, even with iPhone:

Overdue post: origami window displays

These were from Chinese New Year (my finger's over part of the lens)... more abstract bunnies in those yucky colors. It's one of those stores below ground connected to TST MTR:

This is a store in Soho. Extremely well-done folding, very tidy stringing, someone's definitely anal:

Hilarious Article

From the NYT:

As if further proof were needed that New York is not the center of the universe.

The United States Postal Service has issued a new stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty. Only the statue it features is not the one in the harbor, but the replica at the New York-New York casino in Las Vegas.

You might think that the post office would have just gone with the original, the one off the tip of Lower Manhattan that for 125 years has welcomed millions of New York’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Instead, they accidentally used the 14-year-old statue that presides over thousands of weary gamblers a week.

The post office, which had thought the Lady Liberty “forever” stamp featured the real thing, found out otherwise when a clever stamp collector who is also what one might call a superfan of the Statue of Liberty got suspicious and contacted Linn’s Stamp News, the essential read among philatelists.

But the post office is going with it.

(Full NYT article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/us/15stamp.html)

Count Your Blessings

I am so thankful that: I don't hate anyone in my masters program.

There's only maybe one person whom I dislike, but not on a level where I would not want to be in the same room. But dang, people in my program write the inanest shit on facebook. I just want to defenestrate my laptop sometimes.

Confession: I used to hate three people for no good reason (for many years beginning around age 20). It sucked. And I wanted to exorcize that feeling very badly but just couldn't. Like I wanted divine intervention. They just annoyed the crap out of me (grr!!!). The only reason I don't hate them now is that I never see them anymore. YES.

This Desert Life

I just don't listen to much music these days. These days like the past five years. But today I decided to stick a CD into my laptop, specifically Counting Crows' This Desert Life. And I'm hating all the songs, except I Wish I Was a Girl. It's one of those that are silly and sad and very poppy at the same time.

I wish I was a girl
So that you could believe me
And I could shake this static every time I try to sleep

"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.