Slime Mansion

Did I ever formally mention that I went to Taiwan for the past three weeks? B-because. I did!

And for the record, it was magical.

As soon as I arrived my relatives showered me with red envelopes so that I got approximately $300 worth of spending money. MONEY WELL SPENT. These days, Taiwan is basically like Japan; they're developing a rapid transit system in Taipei, and they're even building a high-speed railway with shinkansen technology that will go from one end of the island to the other in less than 90 minutes; their department stores are basically identical; the customer service is SO GODDAMN FRIENDLY that you want to burst into a cloud of sugar cubes whenever you're greeted when walking into a store. Except the difference here is that ohmygod: TAIWAN IS SO FREAKING INEXPENSIVE.

Holycrap, guys! I got several pairs of NICE jeans for less than $10? And they even adjust them for you in the store for free, so short people like me don't have to worry about buying jeans that will drag four inches past my shoes. Not to mention all the other loot I got from the country: several shirts and shorts, another pair of glasses (my third pair in the same prescription, lawl I'm vain) for $90 with the frames plus the completely-decked-out lenses (FYI, frames along cost more than that at most places in America; similar-quality glasses can set you back $200~$300 minimum here >:o), craploads of CUUUTE THINGS, a 1GB flashdrive for $20!!; at the end of the trip, I found myself in the comical situation where you have to pound your ass on top of your suitcase in order to get it closed all the way.

o ya, and I also got cosmetic surgery lolololol

...Argh, don't look at me like that! >:( Okay, here's the deal: my right eye has a double eyelid, but my left doesn't. Nobody notices it but me, but because I'm such a stickler for symmetry, it's always bugged the crap out of me, especially when I see photos of myself because it's the FIRST thing that I notice. (Although most photos I've ever put of myself online is less obvious about this because a) I wear glasses, b) I normally keep the ones that are obvious about it safely hidden. :D())

Sooo yeah. I got double eyelid surgery on my left eye.

Incidentally, the two most painful parts of the surgery was when they stuck the needle in for the anesthetic, and when they picked out the stitches five days after. ;o Well, it was also pretty painful for the few hours after the surgery when it felt like I got a FIST to my FACE (and it certainly looked like it too, larf), but now my eye is pretty happy with life, albeit still a bit swollen! (Apparently it'll take about four months before the minor swelling stops and the eyelid comes to full maturation, but I'm not complaining--it looks more symmetrical now compared to before. :D()())

Ummm everybody in Taiwan is hot wtf I hate myself but I sure do like them naked hot springs!

I wrote this one entry a while back right after my post about Pirates and Memoirs talking about how lame it is when villains do stupid shit thinking it's for the Greater Good (FF villains 6, 7, and 10), and villains who value pride more than your well-being (FF villains 8 and 9) are pretty bad-ass and awesome, but I held off on posting it because, um, I don't know. Either way, it magically disappeared from my Semagic drafts. Oh well. 6_6

Blackout since yesterday, 4:38PM.

Casualties: one beautiful fish, some food, a good night's rest.

EDISON, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN US >:O!!!

I'm sitting here at Panera Bread and it's been about 23 hours since the electricity went out on my half of the street. Once it went out my little brother and I trucked ourselves over to Panera Bread for a few hours thinking everything would be peachy by the time we got back a few hours later. BUT NO. It was still out. So THEN my mom came back from work so we went to go out to eat again in hopes that it will turn back on after that. BUT STILL NO. T_T

So we tried making the best of the situation by taking a little stroll around the neighbourhood since it wasn't so sufferable outside the house as it is inside, when I saw the dad of one of my old high school friends pull into his driveway. So I ran up to him to greet him, and he was just like, "Oh hey," and turns around to leave. So I was a little shocked and tried to push on a conversation or something, and he's just like. "What." And I was just like, "Oh, uh, well, it's just been a while since we've talked-" and he was like "Yeah." Suffice to say, I took the hint and let him go.

=____=

It was...mortifying. A total loss-of-innocence moment that you find in teen-wangst novels. He'd always been one of the nicest people I know and would always take a few minutes to have a little chat, even if it was just mindless smalltalk, but this time it was just like. SHUN.

After that we went home and eventually tried going to sleep, but without any fans in the house and it being, quite literally, the hottest day of the year so far, everybody pretty much migrated around the house at least three times looking for the ideal place to sleep. I tried climbing into my car and opening all the windows to sleep in there, but after noticing that I got three bugbites at once on my right foot, I decided that that was a no-go. Eventually we all crashed in the living room with just a screen door between us and the backyard. 9_9

...ONLY TO BE WOKEN UP A FEW HOURS LATER BY THE GODDAMN LOUDEST THUNDER OF MY LIFE. T__T It was like 7 or 8AM and the claps were loud enough to set off the alarm on my mom's car. And then it started pouring so we had to close the windows and doors and crap (I had to go outside and close the cracks I left open in my car =_=) so it wouldn't get wet. And of course it was the kind of shower that just makes things more humid and unbearable so none of us could really sleep very well after that.

AAAAAAAAARRRRHGGHGLGHHH!!

Like, I know this is not quite so bad as being marched off to concentration camps and all, but *sigh* still. :( I guess I may as well get used to it though, since I'll be staying in a shack in Taiwan for a month. kfls;djfshdfoka;jf

I guess I haven't made a real entry here, in, what, two months? Stuff has happened but it'd be lame of me to go over them one by one, so right now I'm deciding whether I should choose a topic to bitch about, a topic to squeal about, or just ask my LJ friends list for more favors, kind of like how I do in every other entry I make these days. ;D()

...

Uh...

Let's talk about movies?

This is gonna be a bit difficult for some of you to choke down, but stay with me here, guys: I didn't see the first Pirates movie until two weeks ago. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm out of the loop. ...Furthermore, I only watched the last hour and a half of it, lawl. ;D Was at a friend's apartment at like 1AM and they were like, "hay let's watch Pirates!!" because they had just watched the second movie on its opening night or something, but I was like "dude I stink, I'm going home to take a shower," so I did that and by the time I got back zombie skeletons were invading the ship or something. I don't know!

Anyway, it was enjoyable. Everybody was a dick though, but whatever. ...I guess that's all I have to say about it.

Fast-forward a little to YESTERDAY when I saw Pirates 2 with Amanda at the theatre!! ...It was also enjoyable? But I think I might dislike pretty much the whole main cast. >_o Jack's a jerk, Elizabeth's mean, Will's bland, and everybody else doesn't matter. Oh, and Elizabeth made a shitty boy. ;o Characters I DO like though is the guy whose eye kept falling out (well, once a movie at least), and wtf NORRINGTON? Dude. Like. First movie I thought he was a total douchebag. And I thought he was a douchebag in this movie too, butlike. an attractive douchebag? :9

...which kind of goes to show how shallow I am. D: If you're hot and scruffy and abused and neglected then it's okay to be a tool!! <3

But I don't know. Maybe part of the reason for my total indifference towards the movies in general was maybe all the fangirling going on on my LJ friends list that I pretty much knew everything about the movies without having watched them before? (I had pretty much resolved to not ever bother watching the movie because it didn't interest me--not a fan of Johnny Depp, and he's kind of UGLY and REPULSIVE as Jack Sparrow anyway--so I didn't think that reading any spoilers would ruin me for anything. ;o) ...But that's not necessarily true because most of the crap I read about it either had no spoilers, or they didn't make sense to me so I just kind of didn't compute them into my long-term memory. The only thing that really stuck out was probably all the people mentioning the "An undead monkey!" line, and then me finally watching that part of the movie and just being like, "...oh. kay."

Umm. Also I'm retarded and fob because I can't understand piratespeak or whatever. During the first movie I had to ask for the subtitles to be turned on because the accents and crap weren't translating into anything coherent in my head. () (it might have just been a problem with the volume though, but whoknows.) And the Voodoo Lady in this movie was even worse--halfway through her scene I just kind of gave up on trying to comprehend what she was trying to say--I figure anything important she said would've been repeated back in proper English anyway. (And I was RIGHT >:o)

Well, despite all my Mnegh-ness about the movie, I really did find it enjoyable. XD()() I guess people normally wouldn't write long paragraphs about middle-ground movies, but since I watch so few movies I figured it was okay. >P Oh! I like compasses. I think I might be a bit of a dork for them. :( Remember that scene in Pocahontas? Towards the end where the compass arrow was spinning and spinning until it came to an abrupt stop pointing East towards the sun??

...Uh. I was gonna say that it was totally hot, but now I'm kind of confused by it. () Isn't the arrow supposed to point north?? What's it doing pointing east towards the rising sun? >O Or am I just not remember the scene right?

Anyway, I also watched The Memoirs of a Geisha today with . It was also enjoyable! :>() It was pretty to look at, but considering my mind's more on Pirates at the moment even though I watched it last night, I guess it didn't make a lasting impression on me, although this might also be due to all the fangirling/whining people did about this movie when it first came out. () That and the movie Hero made a bigger impact as far as visual orgasms goes for me. :>()

And I'm gonna feel like a total tool of AZN pride for saying this, but MAN it was so obvious that the cast wasn't Japanese! >O And they didn't even really try to at least make them look Japanese; like, Michelle Yeoh basically had the same hair she did in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (and wtf don't even get me started on the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon female reunion, or how Ziyi Zhang has become, like, the only "authentic" Asian actress that America knows about??), and Gong Li looked practically identical to Maggie Cheung in her role in Hero, both hairstyles being distinctly Chinese to me. I don't know, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but none of the hairstyles in that movie looked like they actually fit the place or era at all. >_o

...Oh Jesus, I just whined about hairstyles, huh? Dammit.

Okaybye.

New layout :o I need a break before I streamline this page. Nya nya.

E-mail my mom received from my dad in response to her getting a second job:

thanks,you are great. i knew all and i will keep on supporting as long as i have any finacial capbility. next year i think everything will be smoothly.

i wonder why Hans can't find any part time job to share his own payment.

such as we all did part time jobs and independend ourselves' expense since we were over 20 years old.

My mom's response:

Hans is helping me out. He has just finished his second manga & it is on sale now, so please don't accuse him irresponsible for anything. He worked very hard for the last whole year to try to finish his second book, so I didn't and don't expect him to work any part time job. I'll let him do whatever he likes to do and help out whenever he can to release my financial burden. Not only selling his book, Hans has also been trying very hard to keep good GPA at school in order to get school and Cal State financial aids, so I don't need to worry about his tuition. With these, I'm very happy and very proud of everything he's done.

If you can keep supporting us, we will always appreciate it. If you can't, I won't complain anymore because you did what you could already.

Thanks!

Becky