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doctorstrange
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Yay! I can actually sort of use my left arm again! (although they did have to drain the blood from my left thigh again - it's so weird having what looks like a fist-sized bean bag slowly growing under your purple-mottled skin) I can't yet give the twins airplane rides though... "onka pau dat aypee wide?"* they ask, and I sadly have to say no, Uncle Paul has an owie...
(* translated: "uncle Paul (I) 'that' airplane ride", they point and say "dat" (meaning "that") when asking for something, in this case they point up)
And in other news, two 35°C days in a row... geez... this does not bode well for the coming months, I might just melt away one day...
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dandy_dan
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| Time: | 1:14 am. |
| Mood: | kinda high kinda drunk. | | Music: | Clumsy Lovers. |
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Today, at work, Shawn and I decided to make a visit to the Cambie, so to make a long story short I just got paid $130 to drink my face off for 8 hours.
Good times :P
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tao_of_quinton
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Postal = Surprisingly funny.
Boll under the writing helm did a decent job making a dumb movie that makes fun of everything (he himself being pretty big target at one point). Stuff blows up, things get shot, a cat is used as a silencer, and it all ends exactly how it should. In atomic fire.
Someone made a comment on the whole petition thing, and he did a fair job handling it, including saying that Micheal Bay was responsible for at least 100,000 of those. He talked about how people are essentially reviewing him now, and not his movies, and how doing these video game based movies ruined his career. He hoped Postal can turn it around a little.
Try it out, and if you really cant get your head out of your ass about how it's directed by Uwe Boll, then pretend it isn't and watch it anyway.
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dandy_dan
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| Subject: | A Day In The Life Of.... |
| Time: | 3:39 am. |
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Haven't made a real post in a while, so for those of you who care to read I'll sum this up so its fort and sweet.
I got a new job doing construction at the new Canada Place they're building. It's alright, good pay and I have an awsome shift of working from 2:30 til 10:00 everyday. Too top it all off, I'm working with Shawn and my job is to be his right hand man, so it's all in good fun. I'm going to be doing this just until when school starts up again, sometime in Septemeber, where I'll continue with my studies at BCIT taking Radio Progarmming and Media Communications. I've been playing lots and lots of guitar lately and think I have taught myself quite nicely how to write a song, I've got a notebook full of lyrics I've written to most things I play and they seem to be getting darker and deeper into the style I'm attempting to portray. I leave for Winnipeg on June 4 and am thinking it'd be fun to save up and go on a cruise at the end of summer, but right now its only a thought. I'm hoping to get tickets to go see Eric's Trip and if all goes well, on July 2 I'll be at the Cindi Lauper and B-52's show....Fuck yeah!
WHat else??
Happy belated Birthday, Julie....if your free on Monday maybe I take you out for a peace of Birthday cake, but you must call and leave a message to let me know.
Th-th-th-that's all folks!!!
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precision_flail
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So, I'll be switching to night shifts sometime in the next month or so. I'll be whorking 2:30pm till 1am Monday through Thursday. So, that's means that I'll be getting a long weekend each weekend. Plus I won't fuck up my sleep cycle just to do something social on the weekend.
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tao_of_quinton
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Do you know of a Director by the name of Uwe Boll? Produces and directs (and sometimes writes) the worst videogame to movie catastrophes that I have ever born witness too.
Well, I happen to have a spare seat for tonights (Thursday the 15th) preview screening of Postal, with a Q&A with the guy afterwards. I'm bringing Chris and Tyler, the missing seat was for Andrew, but he was uber lame and had to bail out (just kidding, Andrew. Have fun at your concert). This means I have to take up the cause that Andrew had so wonderfully crafted. What is that, you ask!? Well, maybe if you come tonight, you will find out!
Granville theater, 7:00, be around for maybe 6:30? Any takers?
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julianmaven
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| Subject: | Putuoshan. |
| Time: | 1:39 pm. |
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 Click for larger version.
Two weeks ago, Adam, myself, our roommate Sara, everyone's favourite bar owner and locale entrepreneur Jorge, his girlfriend Jessie, their dog Leon, Sara's friend Tara, and a surly man named Scottish Steve visited Putuoshan Island for the May long weekend. Putuoshan is one of four mountains sacred to Buddhism, and has a gigantic gold statue of the boddhisattva Guan Yin (which I saw in passing but unfortunately didn't have time to get any photos of). It also has two major beaches - Hundred Step Beach and Thousand Step Beach - that I spent most of my time at or around.
We left Wenzhou around 6:30pm on Wednesday night. As Adam and I had a ton of bags, we took a pedicab - my first time on one - to La Luna, where we met with Jorge and Leon. I had Jorge's word that he'd cook us some food before we departed, but he hadn't finished packing so I went across the street and got some quick takeout tofu. Unfortunately, this was to haunt me once we arrived at the packed, sweaty, overheated bus station and my dinner began to disagree with me. We waited for about two hours, me nearly passing out from nausea and the heat, although it was brightened slightly by some girl chatting me up and giving me her number. When our bus finally arrived, we snagged some decent seats and settled in for the four-hour drive to Ningbo.
In Ningbo, we were assaulted by about twenty cab drivers waiting outside the bus station, eager for a fare. I would have just grabbed any two of them and headed out, but because I was with a bunch of dithering, indecisive people, we spent a good half an hour trying to figure out what to do. Finally, we got a van driver who offered to take us to our hotel for 50 yuan. Unfortunately for him, he was more focused on nagging us into his van and not focused enough on the actual location of our hotel, because a) it was on the other side of the city (far more than a 50 yuan drive's worth) and b) he had no clue where it was. We must have driven around for an hour and the van driver was nearly in tears, but we did eventually find it, and settled into our surprisingly posh rooms. Before we went to sleep, we went out for Szechuan food (at around 1am) which was astoundingly delicious, and the first time I'd had a good round-table meal with friends since I arrived in Jiaxing back in August.
The next day we found our shuttle to the ferry and went across the water to Putuoshan. The rooms we had booked were, we discovered, on another island completely, so our first order of business was to wander around the island looking for lodging. We ended up finding a fairly nice hotel that gave us a relatively good deal on two three-bed rooms so we checked in. The rest of the day we wandered around, ate some food, took some pictures, and then found a beach-side patio bar (again, something I haven't found since Jiaxing) and so we set up camp there, ordered about a billion beers, and made sandwiches from supplies that Jorge brought with him. We ended up staying out pretty much all night, exploring the island and the beaches and generally being reckless.
Friday I was pretty much out of it and slept until 5pm. Then I got up, did some shopping, ate some food, and met up with everyone else at Thousand Step Beach just as the sun was setting. We headed back to the hotel and hung out and Sara, Tara and Steve's room for a while, then we all had a pretty early night.
And Saturday we had to leave the island by noon, so I rushed around, bought a couple more things, and got on the shuttle back to the ferry. Ferry to shuttle, shuttle to bus station. At the bus station, we discovered that our tickets had been booked wrong and we'd missed our bus to Wenzhou by two hours. Luckily we were able to get another bus back a few hours after that, so even though we got into Wenzhou fairly late, it wasn't a total disaster. Sara and I drank heavily on the bus and watched Lost on my laptop, and when we got back home we decided we'd go to the bar for an hour or so just to wrap up the night. And that was the end of that.
Putuoshan is maybe the most Chinese place I've seen in all my travels here. There are countless temples and a deep sense of history. It's also one of the quietest and truly peaceful places I've been to in the last year - no traffic, no merchants loudly hawking wares, no random firecrackers - and I was astounded that the sky was unobscured by smog and that I was able to see the stars. If I ever come back to China, a visit to Putuoshan will definitely be in the cards.
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julianmaven
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Turns out I only have three weeks of classes left, then a week of finals. We just finished doing midterms! Where did the time go?
I'm going to miss China a lot. I haven't ruled out the possibility of coming back here in a couple of years, depending on my life circumstances. I think the thing is, whereas I started out completely in the dark and somewhat hopeless and raging against every challenge I encountered, by this point I've adapted to all the demands, and I know that I'm capable of functioning in this environment. Then again, the other day ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mrhorrible asked me how I would deal with the reverse culture shock of coming home, and I had to admit it hadn't even occurred to me that I had no idea.
At any rate, I'll be finished with final exams on June 15th, I'll have my final grades and report cards in by the 20th, on the night of the 20th I'll hopefully be having my birthday party at La Luna, and then we're aiming to get our tickets changed to fly home on the 24th. That's a little more than a month away.
Things I'm looking forward to:
- Using a western washer and dryer.
- Picking up the TMBG CDs that I ordered last year from my old landlords.
- Eating food that doesn't contain MSG and\or is not cooked in oil.
- Being able to cook meals again.
- Visiting all my regular Vancouver haunts, like Stanley Park and Commercial Drive.
- Heading down to Kelly's new place in Moses Lake, WA, for an epic BBQ.
- The ability to go see new movies and concerts of bands I like.
- Getting back to school.
- A reliable and fast internet connection.
- Breathing air that isn't toxin-laden.
Things I'm going to miss about China:
- Jorge, Mike, Dylan, Serge and everyone else in our weekly gaming group.
- La Luna and the regular, tight-knit social group afforded by a foreigner's bar.
- A lot of my students, including Vivian, Kobe, Tom, Zach, Dino, Jennifer, Linda, Sherry and countless others.
- Cheap food, beer and cigarettes.
- The opportunity to practice my Chinese in a fully immersive environment.
- A lifestyle that allows me to work 12 hours a week and still make a retarded amount of money.
- Sara's endearing, ridiculous and often obnoxious squawks, offers of fruit, and hilarious notes on my door.
- Hanging out with Adam.
All in all, it's been an excellent and enlightening chapter in my life, and I think I'm taking things away from it that have made me a better and stronger person. Now if only I could shake this damn head cold...
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doctorstrange
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| Subject: | I'm actually doing quite well mentally, despite it all... |
| Time: | 9:58 pm. |
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Heh. Heh heh. Heh heh heh. Ha ha!
Life without pain has no meaning... pain/struggle/conflict is in fact what life is all about, life wouldn't exist without it, without The Contest we'd all still just be self-replicating peptides* in some murky pool.
Ok, to sum up the last little while:
- immune storm got worse
- brain inflammation got worse
- but I wasn't aware of that, so it hit me all sudden-like on a walk last week...
- ...causing me to quite ungracefully fall sideways...
- ...crunching my left side into the ground, doing unspeakable things to the shoulder and thigh, they ended up having to drain pooled blood...
Nothing actually broken though. It just all HURTS LIKE ALL FUCKING HELL.
The worst part is trying to sleep though. I can't sleep lying on one side all night. And if I roll onto my sore side in my sleep I wake up real quick, screaming bloody murder.
But, one has to laugh. Patches of me are turning all sorts of pretty colours. It's like springtime just under my skin, all the pretty red, blue, purple, brown and yellow bruise-flowers blossoming within my dermis. Maybe I'll post pictures once I figure out my 'rents' camera's close-up mode.
See, this is what I get for moderating the cannabis intake. Very large amounts consumed a few days beforehand and this probably wouldn't have happened. But predicting *when* I'd need to consume said large amounts is tricky - immune storms can strike anytime, and once one starts cannabis can't stop it... only prevent it... *sigh* dare I say it, I actually need to smoke irresponsibly (all day every day) in order to not die sooner than expected? Bah! Bah I say! (not like I can afford to anyway, blah blah blah world's smallest violin yadda yadda)
(* lysergic acid amides (eg: LSD, LSA) are technically simple peptides... coincidence? but then again so are the active ingredients in spider/snake/scorpion venom. although, perhaps that's no coincidence either...)
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julianmaven
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There was a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Sichuan Province yesterday afternoon about 2:30pm. The death toll seems to be around 10,000 right now and climbing, as reports come in. Sichuan, by the way, is in the southwest of China, but apparently even Beijing and Shanghai felt the shockwaves. Oddly enough, Wenzhou is only about six hours from Shanghai and we didn't feel a thing here. Nevertheless, I'm still pretty stunned. I have no idea what to say - there's a palpable sense of grief in all of China but also a 'we'll pull ourselves up by the bootstraps like we always have' mentality that is so contrary to the Western 'how could God let this happen to US of all people?' attitude. Everyone is doing what they can, no less and no more - there are very few offerings of sentimental goodwill between Chinese people, because they know they're all in it together and reminders of that are meaningless.
I have food poisoning right now, which is a nice accessory to my cold. Seriously, I've never had such terrible colds as I've had in China, and feeling like I constantly need to explode out of one or more orifices is not helping matters too much (note: that was gross. Deal with it.) Anyway, yesterday after work I stopped by a food stall I've eaten at countless times and bought a chicken burger. In China for some reason the only condiment on chicken burgers is mayo, and I have no idea how long it had been sitting out in the sun, but I'm going to guess "a few seconds too long". About an hour later, I started to get cramps and dizziness. I had a fancy dinner I had to go to, though, so I pulled myself together and went down, only to sit there staring at the food with a faintly green expression, sweat heavily, and then excuse myself after about an hour and head home. Today I called in sick because I really had no other option.
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precision_flail
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As I entered the world I could see. I could see so much that the intensity of the light overwhelmed my mind. Left me unable to form the words to convey the beauty that was beholden unto me. In a state of shock trying to bridge the light to your minds eye. I need to find the means to communicate the essence that is. Until I find the tools to tap my divine within, what you see is merely a finite visage of who I really am.
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julianmaven
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It's 8:30am and I'm already drenched in sweat. Unless you've been here, you truly have no comprehension of how HUMID China is in the spring and summer. It's not even that hot out... it probably hasn't hit 30 degrees yet. Of course, the fact that I'm fighting off a cold is probably not helping matters.
Last weekend Adam and I, Jorge and Jessie, Sara, Tara and Scottish Steve went to Putuoshan Mountain, which is on an Island off the coast of Ningbo. I'll be posting pictures and a proper report when I'm not so pressed for time. In a word: awesome. In another word: monkeys. We didn't see any monkeys but I'm pretty sure they were there. We did see a lot of monks though.
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hevel
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| Subject: | only those who change |
| Time: | 2:55 pm. |
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remain related to me...
woman - gone
job - gone
condo - gone soon
I wonder what goes next?
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doctorstrange
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Hee hee hee, I have 10 Lemon Skunk seeds germinating... Kind Seed Co is definitely Kind, they guarantee a 90% germination rate, lo and behold all 10 are germinating...
It's not that I'm bored of Northern Lights #5, but well... OK, maybe I am. I'm going to save some pollen in the freezer from the NL#5 males so I don't have to grow this strain out again when I do some hybrid strains.
My other genetics include some bagseed that I found in dimebags of Stevie Wonder - no idea how viable they are, or whether I'd even want them, normally commercial weed doesn't have seeds, the presence of them means pollen was present, and that usually means there were hermaphrodites in the room... which means these seeds have a 50/50 chance of being hermies themselves. But even hermies aren't useless... cross two of them, and you'll get a mix of some with and without hermie genes - breed from the normal ones. Might do that someday, it was a really good batch as I recall...
I also have 12 seeds from an cannabis sativa (strain unknown) that's from a geneticist working on Hornby Island - these seeds are 27th generation of this strain he's been working on, and once grown out, should produce something really mindfucking (I've smoke some of the plant these seeds came from, hooboy, one-hit-wonder weed)
I'm thinking, if I find a good outdoor spot, this year I'll try some crossbreeding, in addition to the "purebred" lines:
Lemon Skunk female X Northern Lights #5 male- hopefully combine the delightfully aromatic and frosty buds of Lemon Skunk with the relatively high CBD/CBN-to-THC ratio (coucklock!) of the NL#5
Hornby female X Lemon Skunk male- hopefully create a 50/50 indica/sativa combining the heady high of the Hornby with the higher-yield and delightful aroma of Lemon Skunk
Hornby female X Norther Lights #5 male- hopefully create another 50/50 indica/sativa with the double-whammy of heady high of the Hornby and the *mellow* body high of the NL#5
Can hardly wait :-)
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