Embrace life.

(Not my photo.)

A glorious artery-clogging pile of steaming gold potatoes, smothered with rich mushroom gravy and speckles of gooey cheese curds that melt oh so decadently into one creamy, silky texture. I savoured the taste of a gravy-filled crunch as I bit down into a forkful's starchy innards like it's my first.

I had my last batch ever yesterday. I'm leaving Montreal for three months and I will miss Mamma's vegetarian poutines so so much.

so many crazies and weirdos

some guy just ran up to me while i was hurrying down the street with groceries, and screamed "I'M NOT GOING TO RAPE YOU OKAY" to my ear.

Sometimes, quite unfairly perhaps, I can't help but wonder if Gadamer, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Lyotard, Foucault, Feyerabend and similar other infamously postmodern, great poststructuralist "incredulous-towards-metanarratives" thinkers all just failed grade 9 Biology.

This is the hilarious. For the first few minutes I had absolutely no idea what was going on, until Mr. Hard Gay showed, gyrating his pelvis and wearing latex shorts like there's no tomorrow.

WTF Japan.

Being plagued with deadlines, I am constantly thrown with stress. So I decided to go into temporary remission and sit myself down on a plush couch to read at least a chapter of my latest Tolstoy purchase, in order to pound out the despairing fatigue of my brain (or at least, to inspire it).

The novel, The Death of Ivan Ilych, led me to Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru (To Live), which was more or less Kurosawa's interpretation of Tolstoy's Ilych. I've yet to delve more into his works (Rashomon and Seven Samurai I've covered already), but Ikiru is I think one of Kurosawa's most subtle and existentially engaging.

It made me wonder, though, after reading and watching, exactly what sort of thoughts belonging to the two artists passed through their minds on their own deathbeds, as they experienced that very topic they wrote/filmed so much about. (I am talking of course about the process of dying, and not "death.")

All I can interpret for sure from both these artistic works is how a shallow and pathetic nihilism contaminates our modern age, and how odd/ironic that it takes fiction (of all things) to bring to light the ignorance of reality.

I just found one of these under my toilet. Instead of humanely killing it with a squash, blow or scooting it away outside, I sprayed it with concentrated ammonia bleach and prisoned it under a plunger. It's now suffering a slow and painful death.

Later I found out they can't actually bite humans, but eat other creepy crawly bugs which makes them good substitutes for insecticide. In other words, they are mother nature's harmless-but-hideous version of a bug repellent.

Moral of the story: do not kill house centipedes, they make good housecleaners.

Because my brain is going to explode from stress.

What I like in the world:
- Seahorses
- Dodo birds (no longer in the world)
- Avocados
- The Globe and Mail
- Vegan food
- Evo devo
- Murakami novels
- Peonies
- London fogs
- Zach Johnsen
- Continental philosophy
- Angry scientists
- Science philosophers
- Ballet
- Jigsaw puzzles
- Chess
- Quiet people
- Making up new words like "floob"
- Red lipstick
- France

What I dislike in the world:
- rain
- The Montreal Gazette, The National Post, canada.com
- Communists
- Deadlines and due dates
- Celebrities
- 90% of the North American population (that is, superficial idiots)
- Americans
- Censorship
- "Rules"
- The banning of intellectual discussions on racism because it's "controversial"
- Cowards
- Being a coward
- Nationalism
- "Family values" (What the hell are "family values")
- Dogmatism
- Seal hunting on the excuse it preserves Native economic income (it doesn't)
- France

My dream job would consist of getting paid to do nothing except read and write. I think of this every single time I step into the lab.

I am also officially broke. I spent my last free $40 on three books: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Kitchen and A Personal Matter, all of which I'll probably read while starving and cold, wearing my last clean t-shirt in -3 degrees Montreal weather since I can no longer afford to do laundry.

To make my life even more of a cliche, I couldn't even afford Kraft Dinner yesterday, and had to buy the no name "mac and cheese" which tasted like bleach sauce on paper.

Have you ever been so broke that you had to eat bleach sauce on paper?

I am willing to take petty cash handouts. Please donate.

In this post, comment on this tag board anonymously anything you want to say (about me, this blog, life, the universe, etc.). IP logging is off with my account at Tag Board, so your tags are anonymous.

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Guess who.

I don't think I would ever be solely satisfied with "happiness."

I think the term is overrated. I don't understand why most people want it so much. I don't understand why most people sacrifice so many of their years and efforts to obtain it.

Happiness is often described as a state of satisfaction, connected to gratifying a desire one has. But I don't think the two are synonymous. I think it's possible for one to feel satisfied without feeling happy.

As a randomly-chosen example from many, Foucault—whose critical writings have affected over half a dozen teaching disciplines—had acute depression and suffered from AIDs. But if one were to pull him back from death and ask if he was depressed because he was "unsatisfied with his life," I believe the answer he'd give is no. Because Foucault, for one, probably wouldn't give such a predictable, shallow answer. Were you to ask the question if he'd exchange any of his accomplishments for a state of fixed happiness he'd probably throw that out the window too. How could someone even possibly suggest something that superficial? he'd wonder, probably genealogically.

Anyway, I don't understand why people would invest more than half their lives trying to build enough "resources" that are deemed indicators of a person's happiness, like money and a family. Those things aren't some objective indicators of one's happiness, and I don't understand why our culture sees it that way. I think it's poor judgement to think so, because they're not the greatest indicator as our Disneyfied culture so often claims considering family and money are also obvious sources of misery. Not only that, but I think seeking happiness itself is a poor judgement. Surely I can understand from some evolutionary perspective why wanting happiness is selected for in order to achieve useful desires, but how would natural selection explain for those who are technically feeling satisfied but still unhappy? (A mismatch between our modern environment and prehistoric genes, perhaps? A quirk in human evolution? But even so, does this possibility excuse our existential yearning for happiness altogether?) Insatiable drug addicts, in the moment they're indulging in their drug of choice, are surely one of the happiest people you'll ever meet.

Call it a kneejerk conclusion, but happiness, to me, sounds like some grand delusion. More realistically it's a fleeting state of emotion that's all too insufficient compared to more genuine goals of life (which I won't identify here). I think "I want to be happy" is a statement no different than "I just want to feel good." If that's really your aim, then you're no better than a hedonist. The statement, "I want to be fulfilled or satisfied" is a better substitute, though, I should emphasize, it does not mean that one is implying happiness as its euphemism. One is simply meaning one has goals that she wants to fulfill, regardless of the state of emotions she may be feeling when that happens.

The difference between the two is the level of meaningfulness one obtains from feeling satisfied. But given that, even the feeling of plain satisfaction doesn't always equate to a feeling of contentedness. One can be satisfied with the things he's achieved, but overall not be a happy person: I can be pleased with my latest midterm results, for example, but (in the conventional sense of the term happiness) this satisfaction still is not something I'm feeling "happy" about. It's not like I wrote the midterm for the sake of making myself feel happy. My aim wasn't to feel happy, it was to get a good grade for the sake of a good grade. That's all, and the effect of happiness didn't even factor into it. In terms of the aftereffect, I simply felt sufficiently satisfied, in the "okay what's next" kind of way, and not something in which I extracted some joyous pleasure from. Happiness wasn't my aim because aiming for it wouldn't help me produce a good grade, which is a lot more meaningful to me than some feel-good emotion. And I don't understand how such a sense of happiness could be anymore meaningful to a person than the act of having done something more profound; for example, writing the next great novel, going to jail for defending some noble idea, proposing a radical new intellectual theory, etc. Isn't aiming for "happiness" just missing the point? It's aiming for the aftereffect and not looking at the actual processes (i.e. creating, thinking, experiencing) of finding meaning, which to me, is the real deal - the genuine source of possible meaning - in one's life.

Like Foucault, surely it's possible to live a fulfilling life and yet not be a happy human being?

According to our Disneyfied culture with its pill-popping solutions to even things like unhappiness, I'm under the impression the answer is no. Happiness is the population norm: the "standard," or a universal state that all humans are expected feel at its base (and at least aim for) in developed countries. Any deviation from it is a medical problem. It's dubbed as depression and slapped around in medical journals as a "modern disease." Cases of unhappiness are considered an exception from a such and such normal distribution.

My problem is not understanding why happiness is supposed to be the common norm. And I wish more people would aim to excel for excelling's-sake, rather than be preoccupied with attaining some great state of happiness which is pretty much a nonexistent idealization. It's a delusional medical fantasy.

J. Stew is my favourite jew.

"STOCKS BEFORE WHORE, EVERYONE'S PO-OR"

Last night, James and I spent the whole night stubbornly cuddled together in his unfriendly Ikea couch, watching foreign films that we knew none of us could probably fully appreciate thanks to our damned anglophone origins.

Well, were we ever wrong. Jeux d'Enfants is one film both of us agreed was worth the extra $2 shellout at Blockbuster when we decided to rent it. Neither of us really enjoy the standard romance love story genre, but we were both blown away by the acerbic dialogue and the coy, dynamic chemistry between the two actors: Marion Cotillard and Guillaume Canet.

Jeux d'Enfants, as I discovered, is a love story made for those who hate love stories. And a cynical, self-loathing and perverted version at that.

Later we found out the two actors were dating in real life. No wonder.

JE T'AIME GUILLAUME. ♥

I admit, I feel sometimes privileged to be surrounded everyday by smart, kind, level-headed and generous friends and colleagues that I sometimes forget the shallow-minded, dogmatic numbskulls also here at this university.

Everywhere I look, there is always some elitist ignorant idiot that puts down those who don't necessarily agree with their absolutist views. For instance, today I had a 5 minute discussion with a self-described atheist about why faith is ultimately one destructive force, and believed stripping muslim women of their hijab attires in public places is a solution.

As much as I admire the argumentative force of Chris Hitchens and his writings, and lovingly enjoy the snarky anti-theist books of Richard Dawkins, I can't for the life of me figure out why such subversive and engaging minds would subject themselves to the same style of absolutism as that of Christian fundamentalism. The absolutist is ALWAYS too simplified in his perspective. They've blinded themselves in this ideology that one size fits all, that one solution to a complex issue is out there. And this consequently gives way to the superficial labels that's constantly being thrown back and forth about atheists and theists alike.

Why must there be labels, anyway? What is their purpose, other than to dumb down or reduce the real matter at large? Issues like faith can't be reduced to a simple, "get rid of it" solution. Or vice versa, like some theists argue. The truth about the value of faith is something that's more complicated than our pseudo-intellectual discussions will allow. Objectivist theories are ones that carry the onus of proof, and often times, they're not better successful than subjectivists.

Maybe this is all too hypocritical of me, too, because I am dogmatically opposed to dogmatism of any sort. (I admit, it's circular!) However, even so, doesn't my version call also for a sense of self-criticism and open-mindedness that so many of us pathetically lack? That our limited brains could put to good use?

It's fascinating to realize that only 4 days ago I felt wonderful, and today I feel as if a diseased hermaphrodite has taken a shit dump on my face.

"By being a Dasein who's very most possibility of Being is its already being in the world through circumspective understanding which I receieve through nondeliberate nonmentalistic for-the-sake-of-whichs, I am a being-in-the-world who's 'who' is 'the one' more than the 'mine' of myself."

..... kill.

I admit I need more traffic. And by traffic, I mean more external links that link to this site to boost its daily hits.

It's pitiful for my poor blog to get only 10-30 hits per day, when there are blogs on MySpace exhibiting some 14-year-old's obsession for emoscene makeup and wine coolers that get anywhere from 100 to 200 hits per day.

Why am I so obsessed with web traffic? For two reasons. The first is personal. I invest all my exhibitionist inclinations on this very website, considering I am the more paranoid and Korean equivalent of Woody Allen's miserable "Jew" persona. I hate Facebook and all similar types of social media. I hate cameras. I hate any form of attention not related to my work or studies. I also hate gossip, and giving in-person interviews, and conveying (or unconcealing) real, tangible information of my "self" to realistic strangers. To this, I provide this blog as my only tolerable medium, and also the only medium that can exactly satisfy my peculiar threshold for self-indulgent exhibitionism. In the least intrusive way possible, to my knowledge. This is considering most of you, to me, are faceless.

Secondly, I enjoy writing. As a writer, I write for an audience. The larger the audience, the more impressionable my words are on a quantifiable scale—the more power I wield as a writer, a blogger, and a procrastinating nerdish soul with a fetish for flamboyant art and mega blog power.

I do note that this makes me one self-conscious, self-loathing, self-loving, self-indulgent human being with delusions of being able to awesomely capture "my cultural perspectives" via my blog's on-and-off ejaculations of words. To that I offer no excuse. I am a walking contradiction. Yet, still a pining writer with a few 'goobalicious' ideas nonetheless.

So, if you are reading this and have a regular updated blog with personality, be so kind to link me. I will link you back.

I'll even dedicate to you a gratifying 300 words of praise in an entry, describing what a smart and wonderful person you must be. Written in the style of a Shakespearian sonnet, swelling with iambic pentameter and all that jazz. Okay?

I love juice boxes. It's my version of candy, liquefied. I drank like four juice boxes in a row earlier this afternoon. That said, I've experienced sugar highs for the most of the day. And what follows sugar highs? The crash. Predictably, I fell asleep (and I've just awoken now), this time on James' new Ikea (aka, shit comfort) couch that gave my tender-slash-nimble vertebrae some serious bruises.

I wouldn't be surprised if my immediate discomfort by the couch irritated the dreaming sequences authored by my brain. In my dream I was somehow a gay boy (yet I looked exactly the same), having imaginary sex with some hybrid human celebrity. Think of it as the lovechild between Daniel Day Lewis and that vampire from Hellsing. And it was imaginary sex, meaning, even in my unconscious imagination I am consciously imagining fictional scenerios.

Then, I give spontaneous birth to a black and white dogcat. By "spontaneous birth," I mean literally pooping out what looked like a furball. Also I've no idea what a dogcat is. It looked similar to the genetic hybrid of a border collie puppy with feline body parts.

Ten billion points goes to the person who explains the psychological significance of this dream to my new adoption of a beagle, Freudian-style. An extra gazillion if you bring to light the Ikea connection.

My head is literally like a gestalt of Freudian treasures.

Link: The Metaphysician Test written by Jaylhomme.

1. Daniel Day Lewis winning Best Actor during the Oscars

2. Mushroom soup and poached figs.

3. Beagle puppies

4. Adopting a beagle puppy

5. Venti london fogs with extra foam and nutmeg

6. Making "happy" lists

Five wonderful things have happened while I am recovering from my wisdom teeth operation:

1. A sympathetic visit from a boycrush / labmate.
2. Dinner and wine, courtesy of boycrush / labmate.
3. Hugs with boycrush / labmate.
4. Cuddling with boycrush / labmate.
5. Labcest ensues. ^_________________^

I'm jumping off my seat as of this moment. I am a ~girl~, afterall.

I admit I only occasionally check my tagboard, but I did today at just the right time to find my old friend PURA has returned to the interwebs?!? If you're reading this Pura, please let me know if you've got a blog up yet! I'd love to find out how you've been!

On another note, I had my wisdom teeth operation today, and my mother took the train all the way to Montreal from London during my recovery to feed me copious amounts of her homemade jook (a Korean rice porridge) with crushed pine nuts and green tea. I have been spoiled this entire day with savoury Korean dishes like my mother's infamous chapchae, spicy rice cakes and brothy bowls of veggie Korean udon.

After living away from home for so long, I forgot how wonderful it feels to have someone nurse and snuggle you until you feel like you're 10 years old again.

The largest beef recall in U.S. history

FEB. 18—The U.S. Department of Agriculture has ordered the recall of 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a California slaughterhouse, the subject of an animal-abuse investigation, that provided meat to school lunch programs.

http://wcco.com/national/recall.slaughterhouse.2.656343.html

Note this post isn't intended to fuel any vegetarian propaganda, rather, to point out the chronic failures of the U.S. agricultural enterprise.

You eat and buy this shit, paying for diseased, disgustingly-mishandled meat with your pocketbook. It's also fed to your children.

As consumers, we have choice. Do we not have a responsibility to know exactly what we are purchasing? To know where your dollars and cents are inadvertently going to?

Edit: New (and better) AP video updated, featuring better footage of the animal abuse allegations.

Animals, Catherine Ledner

@4:35 p.m. Ran into my thesis supervisor, lied to him and said my dissertation was going well.

@4:38 p.m. Accidentally choked on hot coffee. Backwash coffee and spit slobbered all over his white sweater.

@4:39 p.m. Labmate/boycrush/most perfect person enters room.

@4:40 p.m. My life ends.

@4:42 p.m. I commit suicide in my imagination.

@4:57 p.m. I officially hate life.

While You Were Sleeping, Su Blackwell

I haven't been as struck like this by a film since I first saw the Seventh Seal. Best film of 2007, hands down!

The 'She's a Lady' crooner insured his pectoral growth for almost $7 million, The Mirror reports.

"Even at the grand old age of 67, the ladies love his hip-thrusting moves and catching a sneaky peak of his famously rugged chest hair," a source says.

"Like a vintage wine, Tom just gets better with age," the same source adds.

Jones is not the first celebrity, nor the last, to protect his features in this manner. Others include supermodel Heidi Klum, who insured her legs for $2 million, and Bruce Springsteen, who insured his voice for $1 million.

http://music.aol.com/news/story/_a/
singers-chest-hair-insured-for-millions/20080206104209990001

This made my night.

#1180, Masao Yamamoto

I am tired, hungry, restless, tired, overworked, overstressed, tired, facing a bout of post-crisis ennui, tired, tired and tired. Why can't one stop being so tired? Perhaps instead of suffocating myself with coffee and nail biting, I should take up a challenging hobby as some sort of outlet to unleash my sleeping raw animal within. Like gardening. In February.

It's already been a month so far in 2008. It feels the year is already going by so fast. I have about 57 things to do by the end of next week, and as always, time is never enough.

Dear my childhood, why do I miss you so?

Sometimes, I wish for the extinction of the human species. Actually, I wish that all the time, but I feel this applies more to some people than others. Mainly radical nihilists and hippies. Radical nihilists because they are radical nihilists (hello?), and hippies because no amount of drugs, sex and peace would ever get them to shut the fuck up or bathe.

I'm thinking of genocide, something in terms of a "painless, friendly" kind applied to all the human race, where someone who looks like a Mother Teresa-esque matron injects you with a special chemical that stimulates the neurochemical pathways mimicking the experience of intense pleasure. Then, you die while sleeping. The injection would be administered for a few decades gradually, until everyone is wiped out except for the last person who injects the second last person. Obviously, this last individual would have to resort to injecting himself.

I think I'll write a novel with this idea.

On that note, I hope people who are reading this would care to read David Benatar's book of doom, gloom, harm and pleasure, entitled Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. I've just started it. The premise seems so far to be employing a utilitarian outlook for weighing minimal pain against moderate or maximum pleasure. However, myself being so corrupted heavily by this value-intense period of post-war, post modern, post-generation x's ennui or what-have-you, I've tried to distance myself towards a more objective, mechanical viewpoint, and Benatar's argument has been etching into my brain like a beautiful weed since. Here's an excerpt of the summary on the back:

"David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one's life make one's life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. ... The author then argues for the 'anti-natal' view—that it is always wrong to have children—and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a 'pro-death' view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct."

You didn't expect me to be pro-genocide, did you? Neither did I. Note, though, my genocide is entirely separate from Benatar's anti-natalism. They are utterly and completely separate concepts, with different moral and practical implications. Regardless, I still would like a pleasurable and friendly version of mass genocide brought on by Mother Teresa lookalikes.

Last night, I had a weird dream where I was a dinosaur hunter who flew a rocketship and my pet was a tamed T-rex named Gorgolo. In my rocketship I fought space aliens and space pirates who tried to kill or steal all the dinosaurs on the planet.

Unfortunately, I couldn't save every dinosaur. The space pirates and aliens formed a massive alliance and they got to every last one before I could. So, the mass extinction of dinosaurs was all my fault.

I need to stop drinking so much coffee.

Prick-me-dainty. A. n. A person who is excessively or affectedly precise or fastidious about dress or personal appearance; a dandy. B. adj. Excessively or affectedly precise in matters of dress or personal appearance; excessively particular or fastidious. (OED)

Haha describes me exactly.

Every once in awhile, I will come across a book that's so striking and mesmerizing, it will become a part of my consciousness for quite some time after reading. Often do writers touch my mind, but my consciousness is another thing. Haruki Murakami is one storyteller extraordinaire who does exactly that.

Kafka on the Shore is one milestone of a surreal, metaphysical journey. Page after page I'm drawn into the interpersonal realm belonging to a runaway fifteen year old with an Oedipial complex, and a quirky old man with the charming ability to talk to cats. From the start I predicted both were "doomed" in the literary sense: like all Murakami novels, his protagonists never really find their own redemption, nor land on some underbelly conclusion which sets readers' minds on fire. However, Kafka on the Shore has its own special, sophisticated twist: it plays and toys around with the elements of its surreality instead of mechanically presenting them, cruelly teasing its readers by putting them at the helm of Murakami's strange, dreamlike and poetic imagination.

If the most compelling and ghostly sonata came into form as a written novel, Kafka on the Shore would certainly be that sonata.

I am so glad it's over.

I feel like a faceless, cloistered audience member of a dramatic play.

I have met too many people these past few months who've accomplished too many amazing feats, and they have inspired me to do the same. For instance, James, my labmate, had recently arrived from doing development work for a NGO in South Africa and told me of his story where he fell in love with his future wife and was mugged then beaten up by her coked-out 14-year-old brother. And this was after his visa was denied and he was threatened to pay nearly $10,000 in Canadian currency to get into the country.

Another is Susan - my former orgo lab partner in sophomore year who used to swear at our hotheaded TA in gibberish French - actually went to France to freelance, and is now signed by a Parisian publisher to start her first book writing about "avant-garde" French food.

When I speak with these people, and they tell me their stories and about their newfound vocations for their futures, I feel like the sheltered child still stuck in grade school while the rest of the world is outside, building towers. Yet, I find little comfort in the fact that my current research is helping to advance our understanding of molecular signaling. (That statement itself is probably giving me too much credit!) What towers can be built when one is sitting inside, trying to figure out antiviral pathways with predendritic cells in a corner cellblock of a closet-sized office? Who else cares other than the few well-meaning professionals, who do only because they are also a part of the industry? Don't get me wrong, I love my research and greatly appreciate the input and help of my labmates and supervisor, but everyone around me is maturing into global citizens, while I am stuck inside being exposed to stories about drunk frosh barfing on the principal's door. The buildings around me are collapsing, and the university's gates look smaller to me everyday.

If anything, professional school would at least have been better, because at least they'll throw you into applied situations where you can witness your very knowledge and learning taken as useful. Although I could never see myself working as some highly stressed physician in the hospital setting, I think I may have greatly underestimated the experience when I declined the offer to UofT's medical program in April.

However, I know this to be sure. After finishing my graduate studies, I think I am going to travel for a year before spearheading any further into my future.

Countries I'm wishing to visit? For now, I've only a few to list. Hopefully, it'll grow. The future is bright.

1. South Africa
2. Russia
3. France
4. Germany
5. Britain
6. Ireland
7. Spain
8. Denmark
9. Greece
10. Czech Republic
11. Israel
12. United Arab Emirates
13. Japan
14. China
15. Australia

A few blocks north of my apartment lived a single immigrant man in his 50s. He lived in a rundown building, painted a bright red to compensate for the filthy grey that dominates the streets of Montreal's chinatown. It is the only such building on my street.

Outside, nailed onto the man's door, is his mailbox with 'HEroLD' scratched onto it.

Whenever I would arrive home past 3 AM half asleep and drained from studying, I would pass by his window en route to my apartment. His kitchen light was always left on, and I would witness him having dinner. He dined while reading yesterday's paper, sitting in front of his giant window in which he left his blinds wide open. Anyone who walked by his building could see everything in that kitchen through that giant window, from his ancient refrigerator to the many boxes of packaged foods and plastic containers, all of which are manifestations of his 3 AM cooking adventures.

One could say, then, that the "culinary portion" of Herold's life was entirely visible - an open book - to the public at the right hours of the night. His kitchen window was literally a see-through opening into his residence and lifestyle. I suppose privacy was never an issue for him, as he had never once closed his blinds or sealed it off with curtains.

Knowing that, I've never once seen any photos of family or friends on his walls, or even a pet. It was just him in that room. He ate and lived alone, and curiously, he would appear to be genuinely happy.

Two weeks ago I saw him in person at a bakery I frequent every Tuesday. I was behind him in line. I became then both indifferent and pitiful towards him, realizing that the guy is probably entirely alone in the city, let alone the country. The moment was brief. It was the only time I had the opportunity to view him in person, and not through his shabby kitchen window barely holding onto its broken blinds. But I did not say hi. I thought I would feel too creepy, and reasonably enough, so would most people in my situation.

This Sunday morning, while biking pass his building, I saw an ambulance parked outside in front. A senior and a man in his 20s, who I assume were also tenants of the building, stood outside talking with paramedics.

Herold had died sometime in between Saturday night and Sunday morning from some unknown ailment, and was probably discovered by his landlord via the dimly lit window that everyone could see into. The two men were his only neighbours who were around when the ambulance arrived. His kitchen light has never been turned on since.

The street space has become darker now, without the light from his kitchen's window to generously illuminate the empty sidewalk.

Yuko Shimizu, 2007

New doors, new beginnings. Where I am, life is standing pretty still. I can't help but miss the summer, however, where my everydays had felt uninhibited and free. They were full of that feeling of 'not knowing' as I had just moved to Montreal, with every minute that passed encompassing an exciting thrill of questioning everything, of wondering what to do, where to go, where to stop.

It's similar to a feeling of being lost, with no direction home, with nothing except your sense of liberation - this feeling of ultimate freedom - to recreate a new self, entirely by yourself. And soon as you take heart, a new door will open, an old door closes, the fear comes back, the freedom suffocates, and the unrewarding process for self-recreation repeats.

I continue to find myself seduced everyday by a lone flower blooming stubbornly in the crack of someone's stone-paved driveway, or accumulating a love for the silky beauty of several long-finned goldfishes swimming around in the dirtied display case of an out-of-business pet store. It's pretty clear the flower will soon become squashed by some careless person's rubber soles, and the goldfish flushed down a toilet because they won't sell. But, I think they are very beautiful, with part of that beauty coming from their continued existence in spite of their circumstances. As I see them, I become very happy.

Life is an absurd thing.

Antagonizing the self-vicitimizing identities of minorities

Shelby Steele, author of White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era spoke on Wednesday, Oct. 24th in Toronto as part of the Grano lectures. I fortunately ran across this G&M interview with Margaret Wente during my procrastination misadventures while cramming down my latest (and most poorly-written) research paper. In the interview, Steele explains why things like affirmative action-fueled policies and the 60's rise of "black power" are only feeding the self-patronizing attitudes of white guilt. People are more racism-conscious than ever, but racism is still built into the social fabric of Western identities and continues to remain, conveniently labeled under "xenophobia," or "nationalism." White guilt doesn't erase the deeply-rooted presence and stigma of racism, but only masks it under a veil of false redemption. Blacks (and other minorities) have built their identities which uses white guilt for advancing race-based group victimization, ultimately magnifying into opportunism for intellectual laziness.

It would've been an interesting talk, and I wish I could've attended. It certainly would've made my lab-infested October less mundane and passionless by sparking, at least, some sort of iconoclastic clash into it. Here are a few excerpts from the interview I found interesting.

Shelby Steele on 'white guilt' and the culture of black group victimization

SHELBY STEELE: Blacks who stand up as individuals in their own communities are shunned - they're called self-hating. Blacks loathe him because he won't play the challenging game. They've called him an Uncle Tom. So if you are a white person and you like him, that means you are a racist. ...

MARGARET WENTE: In your book White Guilt, you argue that victim-focused racial identity politics has stifled black advancement more than racism itself has. How has this happened?

One of the most amazing events of the 20th century was the moral development of white America. I knew America when it was comfortably racist with impunity. Today, the entire Western world fully acknowledges the evil of racism and whites live under this stigma. They've lost an enormous amount of power because they have lost moral authority. White people are terrified of being seen as racist.

Meantime, the new black identity has been defined by group victimization. The unwritten law is that no black problem - high crime rates, high rates of illegitimacy, poor academic performance - can be defined as largely a black responsibility, because it is an injustice to make victims responsible for their own problems. Racism no longer has any authority to it - it doesn't mean much and it doesn't hold you back much. But if you're black, you can't say that, because you'll lose power. Your guilt is our power. ...

White people need cover. They think, if I can support affirmative action, it shows I'm not a racist. These policies exist, I believe, entirely for the purpose of institutionalizing that kind of cover. You can't be in business today and not have diversity programs. It doesn't matter whether diversity helps minorities - it helps the institutions. It gives them moral legitimacy.

What's been the impact of black power on blacks?

It's been ruinous. It's had the worst impact of anything short of slavery. It's given us the idea that our future is going to come from the manipulation of white people rather than from our own imaginative creativity and hard work. A worse thing couldn't happen to a group than to feel that our future is tied up with manipulating white people. It's taken the life out of black American culture. It's a very sad, tragic thing. The pursuit of black power is the worst thing we can do. It's the kiss of death. Seventy per cent of all black children are born out of wedlock. What's black power going to do about that? ...

This is a group of people who are lost. But we are surrounded by whites who refuse to tell us that. The system works very well for whites - affirmative action is a cheap price to pay to fight off that stigma. But for blacks, especially the bottom half, it's built for failure. ...

There's more colour-consciousness than ever, and that's sad. "Individual" is a very negative word in black America today.

Yuko Shimizu, 2007

Worst month ever.

Days without sleep: 4.
Hours without food: 15.
Hours in the lab this week: 60.
Pounds lost since last week: 5.
Cups of coffee drank since yesterday: 6.
Current time: 7:54 a.m.

My veins are shriveling from dehydration and undernourishment. I will explode. I cannot wait until this weekend.

Please stop sucking. I've just humiliated myself in every possible way by saying "derivering" instead of "deriving" like a douchepod to a certain Mr. X, who is pretty much is the most important person in the world (objectively-speaking). Sixty million dollars goes to anyone who can transcend physical laws and erase him from existence. Or my embarrassment.

Not only that, but my textbook was stolen today at the library. And I have a test tomorrow. In addition, having not slept for more than 3 hours since Sunday, I have now fully developed insomnia.

Merci,
J.H.

... do not make a great mix, especially when eaten together at once. But sugar highs can feel euphoric on occasion, especially on a busy and breezy autumn afternoon. It is exactly what topped my day as perfect.

Other than glorious sugar rushes, I'm home in London for the Thanksgiving weekend, and to my surprise, my mother had presented me a faux (50% polyester, 29% acrylic, 1% modacrylic) mink fur coat upon my arrival. The colour is a luscious mosaic of salt-and-pepper and pale brown, and it is surprisingly well-made in that it doesn't look like the skin of a muppet. If I'm careless when I'm accessorizing, I'll end up looking like a well-paid hooker whenever I wear it over a simple dress. To the coat's defense, however, all faux fur is like that: volatile and challenging to wear, but once the stylizing process is mastered, the warm rewards against the cold winds are endless.

Today, I wore it outside while seeking to gratify my caffeine addiction, and it caught the attention of some local zine photographer who took my photo for the zine's "street fashion" extra. Pictures of my perfect coat soon to come, if (and only if) David fulfills his promise to fixing my less-than-perfect camera.

For now, if you're ever in Montreal, you can see me strutting around the city's grey streets dressed in nothing but the coat and a smile—the latter coloured happily in red lipstick.

On another note, I found this picture via Google images when I inputed "fake fur red smile." It was the highlight of my day.

I love seahorses. They're beautiful, shy, faithfully monogamous and incredibly weird. The best part: the male seahorse is the one who becomes 'pregnant,' essentially, via a brood pouch. Eggs are transferred to his pouch by the female after mating courtship. This way, he enjoys complete paternity, without risk that his partner may 'cheat' on his reproductive success, and share her eggs with other males. It's fucking fierce.

Watch a male seahorse giving live birth:

Yuko Shimizu, 2007

Everything and everyone is moving forward too fast. Old friends disappear, and new ones don't stay long enough. In Montreal, the Sunday paper comes out on Saturday, and by Sunday morning, it is already old news.

My own "new and old" are always caught in some continuous mesh of revelation, evolution, revolution, circumvolution. I long for a moment of pause, and if I'm lucky, that the pause be a quiet and unspeaking one.

All incoherent rambling aside, I missed two deadlines last week. My masters supervisor blames my fatigue, but secretly, I blame sadness. It's really a feeling of mental hemorrhaging: like being caught in the static fabric of apathy and wastefully bleeding away your intuitions and ambitions combined. It is also a feeling of undeserved hurt, brought on by the jabs and stabs of ruthless daily ongoings and emotional criminals. There are more feelings lurking aside that I could explain, but to do so would take too many gratuitous words and hours, none of which I can afford at the moment.

This does not mean I'm becoming unmotivated in my chosen field of study; rather, a bout of inspiration - be it a kiss on the cheek or genuine hug - would be like fuel that warms my mental palate. Any, and from anyone, would be all too welcome at this moment - even though this is what all isolated people ask for (and get none of). Receiving encouragement from people are rare in my field, especially if one lives and breathes the machine that is academic competition.

But today, I take a break.

I'm experiencing one of those moments where I hate being alive.

There are so many ridiculous competitive fucktards who inhabit this university. And goddamn those national scholars with $1 mil grants, who are also piano virtuosos and math geniuses and speak 5 languages beautifully and also win every national chess competition. They're everywhere, and I want so badly to be one.

But, I also want to say to them: please be so kind as to say hello when you walk by the average joe, like yours truly, in the hallway. The rest of society apologizes for never being as spectacular, or as privileged.

Goddamn my insecurity. And those lucky motherfuckers. And goddamn my poor parents, whom out of ignorance never knew better.

Yuko Shimizu, 2006

Goodbye, summer.

I've aged another year yesterday. To recall at one point, I used to believe my blossoming 20s would be exciting times. I made a goal to bungee jump off a bridge in Europe by the time I turn 23 when I was 17 years old, but considering my monstrous schedule and almost no breather time, traveling and flying off a bridge is unlikely.

I just returned to Montreal last night. This whole weekend I spent back in London, eating nothing but some horrible yet oddly quirky mix of mexican and korean food, catered by my partner-in-crime James and his "sugarmomma" Alison. With that, the whole weekend I was shoved drink after drink until my liver cried in protest. It now harbors sordid hate against me. I expect a full-on cirrhosis any day now, right after the blackening of my stomach thanks to my daily coffee overdoses.

My pitiful health aside, I feel I've gone back in time about another 2 years the past 2 days. My energy's been replenished with the torrential affections of my family and best friends, my fatigue torn away by the steady encouragement of a special boy whom I thought I had deserted, and that tiny, quiet creative spark I once nurtured with affection, but later smothered to silence with a soulless mask of scientific papers, was resurrected with an almost-gravitational pull.

I wrote freely, painted, and reunited with my old piano that I played with the exuberance from my childhood when I harboured an awkward crush on the young Mozart. I stopped feeling like an isolated schedule or a working timetable, and more like the night sky, subtly coloured by clouds and connected to the rest of the world like an overarching, transparent abyss. Sleep became genuine, friends grew close, family even closer, and the familiar smells and sounds of home became my one glorious emblem of happiness, yet too precious and fragile to describe now through plain language.

I feel rested, even while painfully hungover with a headache that shoots ghastly spikes of pure agony. Any tips to cure or lessen my illness would be thoroughly appreciated.

Now, back to work.

yuck. august weather is something i always dislike. the heat is doubly vicious and the humidity of the air always has that "sticky"-ness feel about it, making the experience of walking outside feel like you're inside someone's mouth.

i also step outside for 2 minutes and i'm browner than when i left. uv rays these days are terrible. it's what i get for causing global warming.

recently, i've been gorging up all my free time watching woody allen films. anything made in the last decade borders on mediocrity to woody's control-freak disasters, but his golden years--circa 1970s--have my heart won. i dub his Love and Death as my favourite allen film, most notably because it's the only movie that's ever caused water to spill from my nose while laughing.

anyway, onto an entirely different subject: Pitas is so utter