January 2012
13 posts
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“One of the most insightful things I’ve ever read about eating disorders...”
– How to Not Care What Other People Think of You, Rookie Mag.
Damn this is so very true.
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Think Small.
I can’t really even begin to explain how much I am loving Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”. I know I’m “late to the boat” with this one (think 165 years late) but previously I’d read Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” and didn’t overly take to it. Too emo, and gothic for me.
But Charlotte has a little more humour,...
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No Sex & The City
It’s been awhile since I’ve felt depressed. It is Saturday night and I have curled up with a repeat of Sex & the City (with flicks to the tennis), a sleeping dog, chocolate, cheese and a tumblr post. The very picture of the life of a single girl circa 2012.
Now I’m downloading a computer game I used to play as a teenager, called ‘Curse of Monkey Island’. So I can...
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“I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it...”
– I am currently reading Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’ from which that quote is taken. And although our lives are incredibly different - hers so limited in choice, and mine too abundant, there are passages like above that I innately connect with. I grow restless in Beijing, but it...
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Why I love weddings (other people's weddings!)
In the last 12 months I’ve been to four weddings, with the four brides good friends of mine. The fourth I attended last week, and I don’t have any more weddings lined up, so immediately after I experienced a touch of post-wedding blues. My friends in Beijing seemed surprised when I confessed that I loved weddings. But here’s why I do:
1. It’s like going to a show, with...
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Second chance resolutions
UGH, there’s a new years resolution for you: no drunk-blogging, ever. (Have since made the post private.)
I’ve decided to start my resolutions after Chinese New Year - lololol, is that cheating? It’s just that in January I’ve been in holiday mode so all of the resolutions were quickly broken. Of course come March I’m sure I’ll be all, “Oh, ACTUALLY...
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“In her book, Millénium, Stieg et moi, Ms Gabrielsson does put Larsson’s...”
– The Independent interviews Eva Gabrielsson about her partner Stieg Larsson who died before he could see his book ‘Girl with a Dragon Tattoo’ (and the two sequels) become super-duper popular. He sounds like my kind of guy.
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Idea: fashion blogger meets Occupy Wall Street...
Like my friend Rachel I’m somewhat fascinated by “it girls”. I feel that it’s a seduction one should fight - but other times I’m not quite certain why I should. Yes, they are famous for being famous (or photogenic). But I think so long as the attraction remains superficial, rather than being elevated to ‘role model’ status, there’s no harm. To love...
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Probably will later regret this post
But I told myself I would tumblr uncensored.
I just watched Crazy, Stupid, Love on the plane which isn’t really that crazy a film, but it is kinda stupid. As for the love bit, well, Ryan Gosling is in it, but it’s probably his worst “love film” of his many, many “love films”.
Anyway watching it reminded me of the fact that the last guy I hooked up with looked a...
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December 2011
12 posts
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The five ways one can change the world
Conversations about the woes - the many woes - of the world often end with a throwing up of the hands, a sigh, and a “it’s just all too difficult”, or perhaps a “nothing’s going to change.”
To that I’ve always had a one-word counter argument. Feminism.
We’re by no means living in a post-sexist world, but one cannot deny that if you look back at...
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When big ideas come before big money
Emily and I have been talking about where we can take Lane Change. We started Lane Change to kick off our “Winter B-icicle Challenge” but were careful to chose a name that was only vaguely linked to bicycles, thereby giving us the capacity to expand. After all, the two of us are not bike nerds. We’re environmentalists. We’re activists. We believe in change, in a better...
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The woman from HR with the sparkly face
Evan from work and I are slightly obsessed with the woman from HR. She is the most beautiful woman in the office, and yesterday I was telling Evan about I how bumped into her in the kitchen.
“She turned around in one swoop and all these sparkles and rainbows and flying unicorns were shooting out from her face. It was marvelous.”
Evan tells me that when she speaks Chinese to him...
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“It’s funny, because when I’ve been in gay bars, I’ve thought: This is my own...”
– Tracy Clark-Flory in Salon.com’s ‘Gay vs. straight: What’s a sexy man?’. So many gems in this piece. Analysis of Ryan Gosling’s sex appeal, contrasting straight woman with gay man perspective, just to name one.
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WatchThis is the Greenpeace activist coming out in me, but someone should have briefed Christian Bale a little more so that he had a few quotable things to say about Chen Gaungcheng (a blind, self-taught lawyer in rural China). Nonetheless totally bad ass and awesome.
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“There was a time when the inner world of the novelist—Kafka’s private vision and...”
– Don DeLillo in interview from a Fall 1993 edition of the Paris Review. DeLillo was responding to a question about a sentence from his novel Mao II, “The future belongs to crowds.”
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“We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be...”
– Long and fascinating interview with Don DeLillo from a Fall 1993 edition of Paris Review.
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Fundamentalism vs. Pragmatism. Should we...
One of our Winter B-icicle Challengers sent in a mainly positive email, but also with this to say:
I love the idea behind your winter cycling drive. More people on more bikes more often! But what is the point of pledging to ride everyday in the winter if you aren’t prepared to ride in the conditions that winter provides?
The reason I feel its important to mention this is because as a...
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“But, in the end, the point of Occupy Wall Street is not its platform so much as...”
– The origins and future of Occupy Wall Street by Mattathias Schwartz in the New Yorker.
A friend of mine recently asked if it mattered whether people who signed up to our Winter B-icicle Challenge actually bothered riding their bike every day. Wasn’t it more important that they simply signed...
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Love that silences your imagination
Hello. I really would like to talk to you about love tonight.
I shouldn’t really know what love is. I’ve never had a proper relationship and my parents were very poor examples. (They are bitterly divorced.)
And yet I know what love is. I know what it looks like, I can sense when it is present. I can even imagine what it feels like. And best of all I feel confident that I will...
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Stepping out of the hipster closet
I’m pretty certain that I was born a hipster. Here is the incontrovertible evidence:
When I was six, I thought it was soooo laaaaame the way all my classmates told our grade 1 teacher they “loved her” and would write message on the board like “I love you Miss Grimes” (yes her name was Grimes, ironic as she was lovely like Miss Honey from Roald Dahl’s...
November 2011
36 posts
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The Black Millionaires Of Occupy Wall Street →
Nietzsche warns us that it’s painful to discover you’ve become the monster you thought you were battling. But what certainly hurts worse is when, having become a monster, the other monsters won’t even let you into their dark and secret hideouts. As wealthy and powerful as Simmons has become while playing by America’s rules, there are still golf clubs where he can’t be a member, and still...
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The Chinese Forrest Gump
My flatmate Open just told me that when he was in middle school he watched “Forrest Gump” and the part where Forrest decides to just run and run, without destination, made such an impression on him that he decided to do the same. Except on bike. He didn’t tell his family where he was going, just rode off from his house. He rode for 8 hours that day and in the evening stayed in a...
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Meet my Chinese flatmates: Open and Fish
Out of all the many headaches that were involved in house-hunting, finding an awesome flatmate was not one of them. I only had two requirements: 1. She/He should be Chinese. 2. They should be chill.
As simple as those two demands are I didn’t have my hopes up. It’s not to say that all Chinese people are not chill, but it is a more conservative society. People party and drink and go...
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This Talking Is Only Bravado: Pedophiles, unlike... →
Pedophiles, unlike other men, show substantial sexual interest in prepubescent children. As far as we know—and many people have tried—these sexual interests are not modifiable by any method that’s been tried yet. So it appears like pedophilia is a sexual orientation. Because if you think of a sexual orientation like male heterosexuality, phallometric studies will show that male heterosexuals...
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“The Internet is basically like being at a house party and trying to find the...”
– Edith Zimmerman in ‘Dealing With Your Own Cultural Irrelevance (at Age 28)’, New York Times.
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Petition to Google: don't kill Google Reader →
Dear Google: many of us have been faithful users of your Reader for years. It’s central to our daily information consumption routines. Reader builds tremendous good will from a core group of heavy Internet users, leading us to recommend this and your other services to our friends. Eliminating Google Reader or its features (like following friends’ shared items) is short-sighted...
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My dawning vegetarianism as a metaphor for social...
I can’t really claim to be a vegetarian but I guess you could call me a “social meat-eater”. In the same way that some people are “social drinkers” or “social smokers” I only eat meat when I’m out eating with (meat-eating) friends. And usually only if we’re eating Chinese style or pizza - something we’re sharing.
Vegetarianism is...
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Born-again hippie
A couple of days ago I tweeted:
Starting at Greenpeace basically made complete my transformation into a complete commie, hippie, left-leaning bastard.
For a long time now, I - as so many do - have been searching for something bigger. A cause, a reason to live and work, something that I could disappear into, like an amoeba. Lose shape and colour, and fold amorphously into the form of another,...
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A fine line between witty and cruel
I currently belong to a circle in which humour is a core part of the group dynamic. Humour, I’ve realised, is a tool that develops in the act. It’s a competitive game - one person lays a card on the table and then the rest try and top it - and your skill improves with ongoing participation. Or perhaps every joke is like a communal project. The first person opens the gate, the rest...
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“She begins one of her most dependable jokes by triumphantly announcing that she...”
– Amy Schumer, as talked about in this NYTimes piece on female comics breaking taboos.
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“I need more rape jokes,” she shouted nasally before letting her fans in on...”
– Sarah Silverman, as talked about in this NYTimes piece on female comics breaking taboos.
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Another boyfriend dream
I had another boyfriend dream last night.
He was blonde, and cute, maybe American. I think he and I were seven years younger than my actual age now. We were on his parents’ farm and there were beautiful, very large, strong horses jumping over fences. We were with his family walking a field, and he was having issues with his father. But at the end, when we were walking a little separate from...
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A reluctant biker’s letter of love to her bicycle
I posted an ode to bicycling on my other site. Here’s an excerpt:
A friend of mine is a smoker and told me that when she was younger she always put shit on people who smoked. “Hello, cancer? Are you guys fucking retarded?” that sort of thing. And the thing is, she says, that even then she knew, in her heart of hearts, she was a smoker and would one day take up smoking. Hilarious, and...
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Censorship's most powerful ally? Self-censorship.
The problem - or should I say power - of censorship is best seen not in of itself, but what happens after. Namely, self-censorship. That is the worst, when people begin to preemptively apply the censorship to themselves, which of course happens in China all the time. After having suffered generations of censorship it has become the norm. People have a closed and invisible barrier around their own...
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Cools Kids vs. The Geeks
With all this talk of high school reunions it’s only fitting - or perhaps synchronous - that yesterday I happened to watch a 30 Rock episode in which Liz Lemon attends her 20 year high school reunion. If you’re not familiar with the show, Liz left her suburban, Philadelphia upbringing and along with it her outcast teen years, and went on to become the head of a hit NBC comedy show in...
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“Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can’t...”
– Truman Capote on short story writing in the Paris Review (Spring-Summer 1957).
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My fake life in a fake nation
I tell people that I live in a fake house.
On my contract it says my house is only 16 square meters, whereas it’s probably more like 60. This is so my landlord can escape paying as much tax. He told me he made this place himself. Like so many things in China, it looks passable, but once you start using it, you realise how dodgy it is. It’s a two level hutong style apartment, hastily...
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The joys and sorrows of being a misfit
As I’ve mentioned I recently went to my high school reunion. So did a friend of mine, who also went to a North Shore private girls school. Here’s how she described her experience, which was very similar to mine:
I paid a fair bit to attend and afterwards thought it was a complete waste of money. It felt voyeuristic, but completely disappointing in the end. Face it - the real reason...
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Coming out of the 'artist closet'
Last night we saw Amy Tan speak at the Bookworm. She’s a Chinese-American author most famous for ‘The Joy Luck Club’ and somewhat of an ABC idol. My friend said she was going to ask Amy to sign her tits. I said that I’d try to ‘fist bump’ her and that during the talk we’d all cry about our abusive tiger mothers and all the related piano-practicing trauma.
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In defense of Pride and Prejudice's Caroline...
You know what one of the most terrible things about unrequited love is? Realizing that you were never the main character.
When you have a crush on someone, you assume you’re Elizabeth Bennett or Mr Darcy, of the beginning of what is going to be a very great love story. There are all these longing looks and coded meaning behind your friendly talk, but we all know what is going on here. Or at...
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Imagine internet identity numbers, assigned at...
One of the interviewees of this piece I wrote for ChinaSMACK and some other sites, freaked out recently because she started job searching and realized that the only thing that came up on Google searches of her was my story. Which hardly paints her in the most admirable of lights. Not that she minded at the time. Different story now that she’s job hunting though.
It reminded me of a video...
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Thick landlord destroys my chances at love with...
The other day a maintenance guy came from the heating company to fix my heater. I had slept through my alarm clock so my flatmate brought him in while I was bleary eyed and still in my pajamas. 维修人 are usually migrant workers and maybe this guy was too but he didn’t look one. He looked like a bit of a hipster tee hee hee, what with his hair cut was long on one side and shaved on the other....