I sent in my absentee ballot today.  I had to put six $1.40 stamps on it.  There were 8 pages in the ballot.  Wow--voting in my first presidential election!

Dear Penny,

            heyo.  I’m feeling super lazy.  Good thing my mom just called… but I’m on
hold for now… The rain and gray skies and wet pavement reminded me of New York
today, when I woke up and Phyllis was still asleep and I looked down at the
light by the door, and saw the wooden panels and… it seemed kinda like that
“wake up early in the morning and mom’s probably up but the sky looks dark
outside… hmm hmmm hmm let’s fall back on my pillow and lie in bed for a
while...” feeling

            Wah, is
that the sun coming out.  The typhoon is
probably moving away and all, but there’s a thunderstorm warning in effect.

            Happy
Birthday to Evelyn! =)

Christina

more often than in the states i feel a sense of pointlessness.  i'm by myself all the time, not just physically alone, but i'm mentally alone, always just existing through the thoughts in my mind.  my interaction time with others is cut by how much percentage i don't know.  if i don't have plans for the weekend, it's cut by 99% perhaps.  i probably talked to other people for a total of 5-10 minutes of my day.  that's almost 12 hours of waking time and a few sentences exchanged.  5-10 minutes seems like a generous amount.  well actually, i'm not counting time spent online, so that makes the situation better.  i'm not practicing for a life as a hermit, though, so why does it seem like it sometimes?

i put a post up on dearestpenny [http://www.dearestpenny.blogspot.com] on my earlier thoughts. ...these are my current thoughts.  sure, they're all in the depressive/pessimistic strain, but i'm not really down like... down to... well, let's just say if i were feeling really unhappy, i wouldn't be typing..

meta-reflection: (reflection on reflection) i know this isn't the first time i've thought these thoughts, but i can also predict that my state of mind will pass... by tomorrow, when i have a schedule of things to do and classes to attend, i will do what i need to do... and i will focus my energies on deadlines.

Maxim Bakery (an ubiquitous bakery here, known for its mooncakes for Mid-Autumn Day), prints a poem (found here: http://www.bartleby.com/105/65.html) on the plastic packaging of its Butter Loaf.  I was reading it today and decided to look it up to know the ending (the poem was partially reproduced on the packaging).  It's a delicious poem to read out loud in a British accent (haha!).  It rhymes yes, and I believe it is of iambic tetrameter.

Yesterday I went to hear Dr. Corey Hamm in a piano recital of Frederic Rzewski's "The People United Will Never be Defeated," a
piece containing a slightly saccharine melody(*) but--how can I
describe it--it is grounded.

It has 6 themes with 6 variations each, so 36 variations total. The last one of each theme combines parts of the 5
variations that went before it; so 6 is comprised of bits of 1-5; 12
comprised of bits of 7-11, and so on. The 31st variation combines parts
of all the first variations, so 1, 7, 13, etc; the 32nd variations has
parts of all the second variations, and the 36th variation, the last
one, has combinations of all that went before it. All themes are based
on the same melody. Does that sound magnificent?

I could hardly tell when one variation ended and another
began. When the original melody started again, however, I knew the
piece was ending.  I enjoyed the concert. Although I didn't tear up, I respect that I felt I could be moved to tears by his playing.

(*)This
cannot be attributed to Rzewski, as his piece is based on a Chilean
song, "El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!" by Sergio Ortega and
Quilapayún from which the melody is taken.

Links
"El pueblo unido:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kp2Rc8GBc
F. Rzewski playing his own composition - an excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6-MhlBSBrM

..the typhoon winds whistle outside..  Typhoon Hagupit!  (Haha sounds like one of Am's words that she starts off Xanga with) .. I went to Langham Place today.  I like it.  I ate at delifrance (salmon mayo sandwich) and had a hazelnut chocolate drink at Main St. Cafe while I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  I've just finished Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.  If I finish a book every two weeks, perhaps I can read 6 books while I'm here?

Marketplace at Langham Place sells Teddy Grahams!  They had three boxes; I bought two because I couldn't reach the third one.  hahaha j/k.  I'll probably go back to buy more...

this reminds me of...

"Haha, I just remembered something else.  So the scallion pancake thing.  Apparently Wai Gong* thinks I-Mei brand frozen
scallion pancakes are better than other brands. 
And apparently they don’t import them as fast as they sell out around
here.  So he says, I went to this
supermarket and they didn’t have it, they’d sold out, so I went to this other
supermarket and they had three.  So I
bought all of them, and now they (the
supermarket) don’t have any.  It was
hilarious.  And he’s all serious.  But it’s funny!  So we know the brand (heck I even knew the
brand without needing to see the packaging) and he says he will pack us some so
we’ll know which brand to buy next time. 
And my parents are telling him, that’s OK, keep your pancakes, we know
which brand, I-Mei isn’t hard to remember, good good.  When we’re going to go, he comes in with an
opened package of scallion pancakes and it’s funny coz we don’t want it, and
we’re like we can buy it ourselves, and he’s like, you don’t know when they’re
going to import them in again!  (and I
didn’t have time to crack up over this (coz after all, he’s the one who bought
the last ones)) when Zhang Aiyee’s like, this is an opened package, aiya, give
them a new one… and he comes back into the living room, takes it, and comes
back with a second package, new and unopened hahah.  I don’t know if we ended up taking it home
with us, but what a heart, Wai Gong. 
What a heart."

*my maternal grandfather

sdfsdfsd!  http://weblog.revelife.com/revelife/674933372/are-we-missing-the-mark-as-christians.html says love is the answer, and that the church and its members need an infusion of love; and to stop going around like, "I convert you, Pikachu!" because that would be, read: that would be an agenda.  Okay.  but everything is tangled up..... because now there's a "new" agenda: "how can i avoid agenda-ism and just love on others?"

i am sorry if ^none of that makes sense, but if it does, you can comment if you'd like..  if it doesn't, don't worry about it..

I really appreciate what great teachers my language teachers have been!  In I.S. 25, Senora Cantante had her wacky, slightly cultish "Canco" phenomenon, and I believe I still remember Rule #2.  (Students must be sitting in their seats, working on the Do Now, before the bell rings.)  Geez, she must have really gotten to me.  Senora Cantante gave us extra credit for decorating our flashcards, where we put the vocabulary she wrote out on transparency for us to copy.  Her handwriting--I can see it in my mind--was easy to read.  Even though she could hold a grudge like no other (and played favorites), her lessons provided me with an invaluable foundation in Spanish.

(Ms. McGinnis)

In high school, where I continued my Spanish studies, I had Ms. Ambia (accent mark over the I!) for four terms.  I remember after the first term, with a stint at Brooklyn Tech, I didn't want to be in her class.  Please, let me not get Ms. Ambia (it was luck of the draw)... but I did.  And I came to love her.  She even wrote a college rec for me.  I had some trip-ups the first semester and thought I was done for.  It turns out beneath her "squinting at you, lips pursed, and eyebrows knitted together" scolding look she reserved for deadbeat students was a humorous, singing-and-dancing-loving teacher, amiable, understanding, and always ready for a conversation in Spanish, profesora.  If I learned the utility of flashcards in learning a foreign language from Sra. Cantante, I learned how to write, memorize, and recite skits in Spanish at the front of the class (these are skits prepared during class time, usually within 15 minutes) from Sra. Ambia (among many other things).

I say all this because both skills have come in handy while learning Cantonese.  My teacher, Chahn sinsaang, makes us give "speeches" which are basically skits, and it's a good thing they're no longer as scary b/c of similar past experiences.

Today it was I-House Orientation Night.  They had some innocuous games and some not-so-innocuous games.  I'm glad the drinking game was "how fast can you drink" and not, "how much can you drink"!

Are there ever times when you're in a reflective mood, and things feel so sweet around you... they're sweet because you wish only good things, and hope only the best?  The tiny bits of sadness squeeze in between those cracks between "hope" and "realization" -- you don't know if things will happen as planned... but I choose optimism...

I heard the canteens were closed today because of Mid-Autumn Festival.  I stayed in my room and snacked, trying wife cake for the first time, to tie me over until my dinner plans.  I went out with Helen, May, and three of her friends to Causeway Bay where we ate at Hokkai restaurant in Sogo and walked around the Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival in Victoria Park.  It was the most expensive dinner I've had in HK so far, but it's OK.  My favorite lantern display was of a woman dressed not unlike Mulan, in a setting with a red gate with a Chinese inscription on it, surrounded by bamboo and rabbits.  I thought the story behind Mid-Autumn Festival had something to do with a Milky Way and a romance (this from Chinese NH).  My mom and dad remembered something about a woman who ate something that made her immortal, which caused her to be banished to the moon.  And then there were the rabbit(s) who somehow also made it to the moon; reason unknown.  Haha.  I just like the rabbits a lot.  I was taking a picture of hanging lanterns when I lost the rest of the group.  It took several phone calls before we were reunited.  Later, the rest of us were separated from May and Daphne, and it took a while before we were reunited again :X.  We decided to get some drinks at 7-11 and then we took the tram (first time for me) to Admiralty MTR station.  It was $2 fare and we sat on the second level of the double-decker bus.  Nice and breezy.  Sometimes a tram would pull up really close behind us and we could have carried on a conversation with the people in the other car, but of course we didn't.  We laughed a lot on the tram ride because Ivan encountered a misfortune, which I learned was only one of many in an unfortunately eventful day for him, lol.  Comedy amidst tragedy.  (He'd lost his Octopus card, then an opened can of some soft drink leaked through the pocket in his pants where he had stored it (Daphne and May thought perhaps they wouldn't let us on the tram with drinks, but that wasn't the case), and then his toenail almost came off his big toe.)  That last part might sound gross, but it was going to happen sooner or later.  We tried to make sure no more unfortunate events befell him on the train ride home.  At Fo Tan we got out and hailed a taxi (another first time for me).  About $30-$35HKD to University.  Yay!

According to two of my flatmates, Hong Kong people work long hours.  They go overtime because their colleagues go overtime; they don't want to be among the first to leave b/c it would reflect badly on them.  Even if they're done with their work, they learn to be less efficient at what they do.  This means many families employ Filipino maids at home because both parents work and cannot watch their children at home.  It is more economic for them to employ a maid than for a parent to stay at home.

Today I went swimming at the pool.  I was surprised I could still do (even if just my best attempt at a facsimile of) breaststroke, backstroke, dolphin kick, and freestyle.  It was fun; I'm glad Phyllis, my roommate, asked me to go with her.

Later today, I went to Shatin with Phyllis and we bought a fan for $149HKD.