Posted 7:34 PM
I get to go home to a new home tonight that will be home for a couple of months.

I hope I don't fall in love with it.

Posted 7:11 PM
I think I'm sick.

My head feels just a bit on the left side of weird, and my nose is constantly stuffed up. I feel groggy without being drunk or hungover. Josh gave me ibuprofen and Coca-cola but that didn't help much.

Watched Southpark and shows like "Undergrads" til 3 in the morning. Saw the fight in Drunken master again. You know THE fight? Everytime I see it on TV I had to watch it. As for Southpark, it's just brainless fun for a couple of hours.

Television is something that completely consumes. It leaves off social pressure because if you don't have anything to say to each other you don't have to make conversation. You just watch and make comments and occasionally laugh. So you sit in front of the damned screen for hours and feel like you've socialized but you really haven't. The conversation was maybe 15 minutes long stretched out over 6 hours.

The shows are lined up so you don't have to leave. Remember when cable was free? Well, when it was all supported by advertising? When I grew up there was no such thing as cable. There were 4 channels, 2 in Chinese and 2 in English (I grew up in Hong Kong, at the time an English colony). One channel dominates and the other provide variety when you get sick of the first one. There was no such thing as paid cable; there was satelite television for those who could afford it but my family couldn't afford anything.

I come to rely on entertaining myself via other means, predominantly books and theatre. When we were creative my cousins and I made up dances. We would get together and act out what looks like watzes or foxtrots. We read to each other or sing onto tapes and play it back. We made up ghost stories and told them sitting in a circle with a thin blanket and a flashlight.

Life was simpler and more complicated in those days. Simpler because it didn't involve commercials about club-girl barbie dolls and innocent-gunning "heroes", but complicated in the way it involves people and a thinking process and binding us together in a pact. When I look at a television these days I think of how much fun I used to have with a refrigerator box we rode to the moon.

Posted 2:27 PM
Ever been to the Gladstone Hotel? It's got a bar downstairs, karaoke every Wednesday. The hotel is old and falling apart and I think they're going to renovate it soon. The floors in the hallway's just bareboards. The walls are peeling and you can see the wiring peeking out in the corners. Established in 1886, the Gladstone hotel rooms doesn't have showers or bath curtains. They have old victorian style bathtubs. The dressser have shirt drawers with change slots in it. I felt like I was in a world war II mystery / detective movie. Or a Graham Greene novel. Probably more like in a Graham Greene novel. Have you ever seen that movie Enigma? It's like that room the main character stayed in. A man in a bowler hat walks in, puts his coat on the wooden hooks. He walks into the bathroom and tries to close the door and it doesn't close properly. You can see inside the keyhole that he's fixing his tie in front of a mirror taped to the wall over a porcelain wash basin.

I feel like a hitman on the run.

Posted 7:21 PM
A lot can happen in 2 days. I've been helping Eric look for an apartment, and now it's my turn. I'm going to HAVE to find a place within the next few days, or at least within the next month or so. I'll probably end up storing all my stuff at auntie Julia's, and then pack up a moving bag and scramble.

Nothing I haven't done before but honestly I'm sick of it. I thought I had a home and I almost started unpacking all of my stuff. I unpacked my books, and that's a pretty big step for me. I almost always leave them in the boxes now because I've been moving so often.

Leaving a place behind was a big step. Leaving people behind are a bigger step. I left everything behind when I came to Toronto in 1992, and I believe as a person I have never been the same. I believed in a lot less; and when I was left alone at 14 and moved from place to place it chipped away at my belief in love and people. There's books written on the child that I was. Rebellious, introverted, destructive. Never places her trust in anything but a skeptic in all. Then I found my religion again (bhuddism) and things were ok. It still is in a way. Right now my head's in a state of shock, unable to panic or even to think of what I can do with the rest of this week or this month. Eric said he'd take care of me and I believe in him but I guess I'm just afraid of relying on anyone other than myself again.

Iris and I can't possibly be friends right after this. Call it a revelation if you will - a revelation that our whole living situation was a facade of neatness and a spotless kitchen. A room free of clutter for without it and the hidden thoughts never told we could never live that way. Leaving a sock on the kitchen table would've made an apocalytic statement in our home whereas among other people it might've been a good joke.

I wonder where I will be next week.

Posted 2:49 AM
I ran through the rain with Eric last night.

I don't think I've ever had this much fun getting soaked inthe rain. Being Chinese, I'm naturally afraid of thunder (hit by lightning is one of the most common oaths to take), and I ran through it squealing. We had an umbrella but it honestly wasn't much help. We left the restaurant into the rain, and realized I left one of my shopping bags behind. He took off his shirt and ran back for it. When he came back he was soaked through but my new socks were safe in their plastic bags. My hero.

If I keep smiling like this I'll get wrinkles.

Posted 1:11 AM
Had a gig up in Port Elgin today. It's a great support seeing all these people who bought tickets to see our band play, and of course those "I love your voice" and "you have the sweetest voice" comments help as well in my confidence department. Although sometime words coming from much older people have their fallacies as well (see how the rhetoric course is getting to me already?), such as my grandma telling me how much I've grown everytime she sees me. I haven't grown an inch since I hit 14, but to her I seem to have grown taller every 3 months. Maybe for her it's something to say, like feeding me or giving me money when I was younger. It's something that makes her feel like she is still a part of my life and have a helping hand in shaping me as the person I am.

I wonder what Iris is doing right now. I got a call from her in the morning and I didn't pick up the phone apparently - although I kind of remember picking up the phone. I was THAT tired. The answering machine is very weird. You hear the ring, you hear the beep, you don't hear the message sometimes, so you assume there's no message and it's blank so you don't check it. Or maybe she left that one at night...who knows. I just got back and I'm dead tired again. Port Elgin was 3.5 hours away.

I think it's mid-autumn's festival today. 7 years ago I won a Chinese karaoke contest hosted at the festival down at Chinatown and I remember I was so shocked. 14 years of education in humility have taught me I was nothing and I had to build myself to something with very hardwork, and I guess it didn't hit me til then that I can actually sing and I wasn't imagining things. Tonight I rode back in a car with my bandmates, 4 years of being with the big band, audience that loves us, playing side by side with Peter Appleyard. I was happy just shaking his hand, let alone being on the same stage with him!

Tomorrow is back to the grind. I'll be at the Grenadier cafe from 1:30 - 3:30 if anyone's interested. For more concert dates our gig list is at the Toronto All Star Big Band web site.