ok, so i almost stopped updating this, not because i didn't have anything to say, but because i'm actually doing stuff with my life other than minesweeper or solitaire.

this month was a very expensive month ><

first thing was the laptop... i finally got a laptop (unfortunately a dell... because our school is forcing us to buy dells) and wow... i can't believe i have been using a 6 year old computer for so long -_-;;; this is so much faster~ i can boot up my computer and have it be usable before i can go downstairs, heat up a croissant and eat it and come back. which is what i did while waiting for my old one to boot up.

oh, and the warning label on the bag that came with the laptop just cracked me up haha
maybe it's just me, but something about it just made me want to laugh. honestly, do we really need these warnings? i would think that people who need these types of warnings are the people who would not notice the warning at all and proceed to put the bag on their head as illustrated.

second expensive thing... car... *sigh* so i was perfectly fine with my 9 year old car, but my dad has been constantly whining about getting a new car, so when my passenger side power seat died 他就拿那個當藉口來買新車... so retarded, because yea... the new car (well... new to me, but it's a used car) is really nice and all, but i don't think it was really worth trading in a perfectly good old car.

i mean... the new car makes driving fun again ^^;; but that means i have to be careful where i go and park... honestly, sometimes i wish i drove like a really crappy old car just so i wouldn't have to worry about hitting any curbs or walls (not that i do that or anything, but i'm just like always worried about doing stuff like that)

last major expense of the month? tickets to 台灣 and 日本 ^^ since i don't think i have any more breaks longer than 1 or 2 weeks for the next 4 years, i think this is probably my last opportunity to spend such a long time out of the country~ so, if you're gonna be in taipei or tokyo this summer, let me know ^^

other random stuff that's been keeping me busy?
http://armorgames.com/play/1716/gemcraft this game is addicting haha.. a tower defense game that's pretty well made~ i must've spent like 2 or 3 days on this game trying to get the glowing frames (if you get a high enough score you can get a glowing frame on that level)

another thing i've been doing is this book called "the master tells stories" by the leader of tzu chi (the buddhist group)... some of those stories are just so 誇張... kind of disappointed haha

oh~ one last thing i did this week was kill a spider. bwahhahaha the little fucker decided to wait and sneak up on me while i was taking a shower... so when i got out i taught it a lesson. a story in photos, by me:


serves it right... gosh i hate spiders -_-;;;

nothingness

so i've been thinking... what the heck do i talk about in a blog if i don't really do anything with my life right now? why do people keep blogs anyway? and how are people always able to write a crapload of stuff in their every entry?

well, one of the conclusions i came to was that i'm a bit lacking in imagination haha. and, i don't feel like i think that much about stuff.. like if someone sees something like.. i dunno.. let's say you see someone being really picky about the vegetables at the supermarket, and in the end, they choose a bundle that's buried at the bottom of the big pile. most people would think "i wonder how she's choosing them? is there something wrong with all the ones at the top? why'd she choose one from the very bottom?? " or something like that. but not me.. if i saw someone doing that i'd be like "oh... vegetables." and move on to the next aisle, because you know, i just LOVE vegetables.
...
ok maybe that's a bad example. here's a better one: let's say.. while driving, you see tire skid marks running across the lane and then up the divider. i know at least one person who thinks that "these tire tracks tell a story about a unfortunate person >_>" (thanks to 기문 for the example~ i don't do this type of thinking so i couldn't think of one ><) anyway, if i saw something like that i'd just be like.. "oh." and that's if i even bother giving it a thought. so i guess my point is, i don't really like to think, hence, thinking of things to write (whether it be in a paper for an english class or a blog like this) is pretty hard for me. if only i could get away with 1 word messages haha anyway, i think that my dislike of thinking is not a good thing... i guess i've always known that, but it kinda hit me a little harder after seeing this one speech by huang chun ming (黃春明) at uci a couple months ago. brilliant guy... ok so maybe he isn't that book-smart but he's very creative-smart. he was supposed to give a speech on i think.. art and life, but ended up just telling experiences from his own life, which was pretty interesting nonetheless. one of his big things was creativity, and how the way we do things today isn't really as meaningful as they were in the past, and so, he told a story about a taiwanese farmer to get his point across:

if you were to ask people nowadays how they would take care of a rat infestation, you'd probably get pesticides or mouse traps as an answer, as they are methods perfected with the knowledge that our modern society has. one answer you probably won't get is to use the rats themselves to get rid of the infestation.

how do you do this? well... (skip this part if you are easily grossed out haha) you catch one of the rats without harming it, and then you stick part of a crushed peanut up it's butt. (i'm dead serious, he said that!! in chinese though) why would you do that? well.. supposedly if you were a farmer, you'd know that when crushed peanut gets moist, it expands a lot. and after it expands, you feed the rat a lot of food, which it subsequently can't dump out thanks to the peanut.

so after a feeding it a few times, you let it go. why, you ask? because a constipated rat is an unhappy rat, and an unhappy rat isn't nice to anyone, not even fellow rats haha. letting the rat roam free, it'll bite any rats that come near it, and the other rats will remember that, eventually causing them to go away altogether. so voila, you're left with only one rat to deal with, and it's gonna die soon if you don't do anything about it anyway.

ok so i don't know exactly how well that works in practice, but i have to admit, it seems like it would be a heck of a lot more fun to watch (maybe not to prepare) than poisoning them using rat traps ^^

i guess a lot of the stuff he talked about dealt with the "good old days," which is not to say that he is someone tied down by tradition. there was a lot of stuff he talked about that defies convention but makes perfectly good sense~ he told us about when he was in school, and he was using the abacus when the teacher came around to check up on everyone. all of a sudden, the teacher hits him... because he's using the abacus upside down (the side with 5 beads was away from him and the side with 2 was facing him). so he gets really mad and punches the window, subsequently breaking the window. his teacher, who is now in utter shock from the blood that's gushing out of his student's arm, tells him to go see the school nurse, but mr. huang says "no, not until you tell me why you hit me." and after some argument, the teacher gives in and tells him that he hit him because he was using the abacus upside down.

but who's to say which way is right or wrong? using it the "right" way would put your thumb in charge of the 5 beads at the bottom and your index finger in charge of the 2 at the top, which, to mr. huang, didn't make sense because the thumb is bigger, and, therefore, slower. so why should it be used to move 5 beads instead of only 2?

well of course, you can't really beat that logic, so the teacher had no response to that and apologized and then sent him to the nurse. who would've thought that after a thousand years of using the abacus, there'd be a way to use it better?

his talk had a lot of fun stories about his life like that, and after hearing him speak, i guess i've felt like i really need to think more, and think more creatively too...

anyway, one last thing before i sleep...
youtube's viewer analysis service, called "inspire," is pretty interesting. apparently my video, this one, apparently 8.7% of its hits from searching "garbage truck" haha. go figure

first post!

i think the biggest thing holding me back from making a blog was choosing a name for it. everything i could think of just seemed to sound stupid after thinking over it a couple of times... eventually i thought of 黑白講, which in mandarin literally means something like talking in black and white, but if you read it in Taiwanese, this phrase becomes the equivalent of saying someone has absolutely no idea what they're talking about, which, i think, fits perfectly for my blog ^^

so.. i bet you're all dying to know what i've been doing recently!

and the answer is absolutely nothing. haha. so ridiculous XD ok so i do the occasional chauffeuring of the siblings and volunteering at the school and some dinner parties with the family. but other than that, my schedule has been something like: wake up, take out retainers, sit down in front of computer, check email, answer phone calls, pick up brother from school, come home and read manga or facebook, eat dinner, then resume whatever i was doing before that, chat online, shower, play ds in bed, hear the newspaper thudding on my driveway, then by the time i fall asleep it's probably about 4am. then the next day the whole cycle starts again somewhere between 10am and 1pm~ (no, that's not a mistake, i basically only eat 1 meal a day now.. but i snack a lot too.. plus it's not like a really move around or use that much energy haha)

anywayyy enough about my schedule. time for me to share some of the things i've found interesting lately.

first off, i think some of you know that i enjoy listening to really old-school japanese music, known as 演歌 enka. this genre is typically defined by the likes of 小林幸子 kobayashi sachiko (video) or 北島三郎 kitajima saburou (video). the other day i was surfing the net and found this. i think you all believe me when i say that this completely took me off guard.. i mean, would you expect to see someone like that singing this genre?? (for those of you too lazy the click the link, it's a black guy named ジェロ jero (pronouced like jello? haha) who looks like a (american, not japanese style) gangster but sings enka)

apparently he's a quarter japanese, with a japanese grandmother.. and his japanese... sounds a lot better than mine... haha furthermore, he totally acts like a japanese person, bowing excessively to absolutely everyone. totally blew my mind~

now then, those of you who know me probably know that i think tattoos are a bad idea unless you have some really really really good reason to get one. also a bad idea is getting tattoos of chinese characters of which the meaning you have no idea. so i was at my sister's graduation the other day, and sitting about 5 or 6 rows below me was this poor young woman with this tattoo on the back of her neck. She looked caucasian to me, or maybe perhaps part asian. anyway, whatever she was, i bet she had no idea what the chinese character 笨 means. nor, do i think, did she have any idea that there were a good 3-4 cameras trying to capture the greatness that was her tattoo. i only very discretely took one photo, but my dad with his uber fancy dslr camera changed his lens to the one with the i dunno... 20x zoom and very obviously took probably more pictures of this woman's neck than he did of my sister's graduation. by the way, for all you chinese-illiterate people, the word 笨 (pronounced like "bun") it means stupid or clumsy, most commonly used in the phrase "笨蛋" meaning "A fool, an idiot, a simpleton; a dullard; a moron; a foolish fellow; a stupid fellow; a silly fool; a wooden head" according to my chinese-english dictionary. so for all you people who aren't planning on getting a tattoo, good job. for those of you who are... well... i hope you understand that getting this tattoo will result in a bunch of chinese people waiting for just the right opportunity to snap a picture to make fun of you later =)

so to counter my boredom, i've been doing a little more music lately... dawdling on the piano and violin again. i'm trying to learn Chopin's Ballad #4, op. 52 in f-minor, but i'm getting stuck at the part that requires some effort on my part haha. oh, btw, i made a couple of videos of my playing erhu~ 1) 江河水 (Jiang He Shui) 2) 三門峽暢想曲 (San Men Xia Chang Xiang Qu) and 3) 金珠瑪米贊 (Jin Zhu Ma Mi Zan). check them out if you can~ give me good ratings plz XD

current music~
蕭敬騰 - 王子的新衣 Jam Hsiao - The Prince's New Clothes (or as they translated it, "New Dress for Prince" haha)
林宥嘉 - 眼色 Yoga Lin - A Meaningful Glance
蕭閎仁 - 看袂落去 no english name for this guy... ooh time for a taiwanese lesson: the title literally means in taiwanese "i can't watch it anymore" (pronounced "khwah veh lohk khi" phoneticized by me using no real romanization standard whatsoever :P) which is what you would say if you see something (typically bad) happening and you can't stand it anymore~

ok until next time~~