My four-year-old glasses broke about 5 days ago. I lost them for a day and when I finally got off my arse to look for them they were deep in the recesses of my bed and I had slept on them and they were seriously bent. My flatmates are like "don't do it, man, you're gonna break them!" but I tried to bend them back anyway. They broke, and because I have seriously been broke aswell, and busy, I've been walking aroung the appartment holding them to my face. Christine called them my bi-monocles and the other day she helped me sticky tape them to my nose and forehead so I could watch DVDs with them in peace. They indicated to me that it was all class the way I wore them, povo-style, and eating off ham that came free with the building barbeque last Friday. I finally had another private today and went straight to the optometrist. They're not really into OPSM here. I'm like, I want glasses, so test my eyes, and instead of going into an office with a bunch of machinery he pointed to the corner where there were a couple of looking-through things and that was it. Oh shit I though to myself, it's like going to the dentist - it's amazingly cheaper and it seems to be the same standard... but there's just something wrong about it. (thanks to the dentist screwing up one filling, all the surrounding teeth have chipped, yay). This time, I'm going for a cheap & nasty pair of rimless, ooooh rimless glasses.

I'm going to Wuling Farm on the weekend. We're renting a car and apparently it's deep in the mountains, and really really good etc. You pick fruit and stay in a Japanese-style cabin and stuff. Yes!!!!! Can't wait. Bags not driving though. I swear I'm not as bad in a car as I am on a scooter. It's a totally different sport. Sport? I never said it was a sport!

The weekend after that my flat is having our long-awaited BBQ. It's called the post-moon- festival encore BBQ extravaganza and the whole world is invited.

My an-qin ban'ers like me again. They even said to me "we like you again". Nice. That's a relief, because I did a shitty performance with the da-bans. The thing that works with the an-qin'ers is the drama I throw into the stupid dialogues. They dig it when I over-act and today they even asked to come up and do it. And I came early to photocopy stuff to give to them. Nice one.

I applied for a translating job with a magazine. They sent me a paragraph in Chinese and one in English and I had to do both of them. Chinese into English was supposed to be a breeze but it took me frickin ages so I don't think I can do that job anymore. The Chinese one was this stupid Starbucks promo about working with World Vision Taiwan to buy some pens and paper for kids affected by landslides and other disasters. Like, Starbucks is huge, and helping WV ask for donations to help exactly 1500 kids is nothing but a cheap advertising campaign. I know that's the way it normally works but I realised I didn't want to translate that crap into English so even more people are inflicted with it. Or I was pissed off that it was so much harder than it looked.
  ¶ 23:34 0 Comments

  Check it out! Oh god. My Mum took "home economics!"
"The Good Wife's Guide":
http://forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.php?t=22912

And here is my revised version!

1. Have dinner ready for him when he gets home. Is anyone ever going to do this for you? No, because you are a woman.

2. Prepare yourself. Touch up your make-up, because you are but a shell without it.

3. Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him when he gets home - men love lesbians, and maybe you could buy some sex toys.

4. Clear away the clutter - it must remain unknown to him that you have better things to do all day than sit around yearning for him.

5. Gather up schoolbooks and toys - your Husband must not be reminded of the presence of children in the house, and clean everything, otherwise he will think you are dirty, and then divource you, and then what are you going to do?

6. Light a fire and create a haven of rest for him - catering for his comfort might mean a nice box of chocolates somewhere down the line.

7. Tell the kids to go to their rooms and shut the f*** up - the Queen is coming to stay.

8. Be happy to see him. Make sure the postman has left well before the roast is in the oven.

9. Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to fully depend on him for your livelihood.

10. Listen to him - his topics of conversation are more important that yours because they can be.

11. Make the evening his. Never complain if he comes home late or goes out to dinner or other places of entertainment without you - he's obviously having an affair, but you should have thought about that when you agreed to marry him.

12. Your goal: Try to make sure your home is a place of peace and tranquility. One fight will lead to another, and then he will divource you. Are you willing to live the rest of your life in utter disgrace? What will the ladies at church say?

13. Don't greet him with complaints and problems - visit the hardware store, buy some gaffa tape, and stick it over your mouth. This has proven quite successful with many ladies who have written in and told us. Take it off to eat, brush your teeth, and for other tasks that require an open mouth.

14. Once again, don't complain if he's late home for dinner or even if he stays out all night. The motel he's staying at may be giving him discount rates, depending on whether or not he's a regular customer. This is for you to determine.

15. Make him feel comfortable. Give him a pillow, or even a blow-job in front of the fire place. He has been working all day, and you, all you have done all day is read magazines like this one.

16. Arrange his pillow and take off his shoes. Speak in a low, sexy voice, and if you try to compete with the other woman for sexiness, maybe he'll start coming home from work a little earlier from now on.

17. Don't ask him questions about his actions or question his judgement or integrity. He is always right, and it is unfair to make him realise he didn't marry a bimbo. Hire a private detective, and find mean and nasty ways of taking revenge. After all, that's all you can you - be thankful he married you. Maybe if you buy a new shade of lipgloss, he might feel attracted to you again. Check out the new lines on page 56.

18. A good wife is one that shuts up and puts out.
  ¶ 19:19 0 Comments

  I got an email from Germany the other day. My old penpal Christin is complaining about how she has just discovered how superficial her girlfriends are and how jaded and pissed off she feels. She's upset that whenever she finally decides to trust people most still do not pass when the friendships are put to the test. I say, find new friends, or just decide whether you have the time for these people!

In other news... in the Wu Fong department, it turns out that the Chinese teacher who passed off the blame for the pencil-stabbing incident onto me, according to other sources, is actually known to be a bad teacher or something (she's got to be better than me though) and was previously deemed to be dodgy and altogether questionable! I still swear I had their attention the whole time. Before class the other day she waited till right before to tell me what I was supposed to teach, therefore allowing me a total of four seconds to do any preparation for it, and then she tried to give me this serious-sounding guidance, telling me that I have to become close to the kids like the other guy is (who has been there for a year or so). Right... She must be super close with them if they are stabbing each other during her classes... In fact I hit it off with them on the first day and I think she's pulling a load of crap out of her ass just to put me in my perceived place. But before all this happened, Robert pulled out his guitar and started playing Wonderwall and the two of us gave everyone an exclusive performance of the Two Foreigners singing an old song. They dug it. The school has never had two whities teaching there at the same time.

At the kindy we're teaching them the parts of the body so to suck up big time I forked out for a stupid book about eyes and ears and lots of coloured cardboard and made a bunch of body parts, all in about 15 minutes. The kids didn't really dig it though and thought the eyes were like a monster's eyes, and the body had no neck, which turned out to be quite a setback, but it earned me good brownie/guanxi points with the bosses and the teachers.

Our building had a moon festival BBQ and I'm sounding pretty cynical and awful here but I signed up for it hoping to take advantage of the oppurtunity to solicit private English lessons out of my neighbours like a hooker at a bar. It didn't work but I got free food. Oh listen to me it's all about money now, boo hoo. Well, it is. If god floated down from the sky and told me that it was my destiny to be a professional English teacher for the rest of my life then I would probably take it slightly more seriously and be a little more sincere about it but dude, frankly, I want money.


Poetry Corner

It's no good to be
self-righteous
but I might jus'
continue.


Supplementary whining:
It turns out that a friend has liked me for the past year, and because I apparently had his name on me, none of his friends were permitted to flirt with me, even though it was clear that I was not interested in him, until his girlfriend (second best?) finally decided to come to Taiwan, and it was my responsibility NOT to consider being attracted to any of his friends so that he wouldn't be jealous. Right. He was still at it even when he knew his girlfriend was coming. If all the guys I had ever liked were too scared of making me jealous no-one in the world would be flirting with each other right now.
  ¶ 18:32 0 Comments

  I had a test today, I remembered all my characters for the first time in ages because I forced myself to stay up till one and learn them and face the dreadful prospect of passing the whole of today with bags under my eyes. Bags? When do I ever get bags? It's just not my style godammit. I saw Man on Fire last night. Denzel Washington is a discount bodyguard because of his drinking problem but his beautiful friendship with his client brings him out of it and then well most of the movie is the glorification of killing people as an art so I wouldn't be taking the kiddies to see that one.
Theatre on Tuesday was mad fun, we did a bunch of screaming and Yu Ren the director brought along a kids' book for me to read out :-)
There are heaps of Aussies at the huayu zhongxin this semester so everywhere you turn there's an Aussie accent dominating the airwaves. Well that was an exaggeration but it's a pretty good turn-out I must say!
Our flat is having a BBQ on the roof for moon festival. I have been highly successful in the moon-festival department with a total score of two boxes of mooncakes from assorted employers. And Ken's mum gave me more fruit the other day and asked if I was feeling better after the hour of hell I gave him last week.
I've started teaching the kindy kids phonics, doing my own thing with them. Last week the boss told Angela and me off, saying that after three years of these classes, all these kids know is the alphabet. They thought it was hilarious when I started saying b b b b b b b banana! and a a a a a apple! but now they just think it's weird. Like, they still don't know that the letters in words actually make sounds and I only just realised that half the problem is that this point has been pretty much bypassed.
Tomorrow I am teaching at Wu Fong again. Two weeks ago one boy stabbed another boy with a pencil or something during class and I am having trouble recalling it actually happening but apparently, as my coworker nervously told me, it happened in my class, and there was alot of shit with the parents, and I need to attend to my classroom management skills. Like, dude, if it means her job, I'm happy to take the blame for her but it would be nice if she would just be honest about it.

  ¶ 00:22 0 Comments

  Ahem that last post went into internet trash can oblivion.
Anyway, the theatre group was good fun, we just read stuff out. Then had coffee with Claire and Betty*, who gave us a full-scale report of the shag she finally got. When we got home we watched this Japanese tv show which is kind of like a long episode of Red Faces. Some of the acts were frickin genius. These people dressed up all in white, and started running around a giant mixer, and as it mixed, more and more people in white stopped running around and formed a mountain around the mixer - they were doing a re-enactment of egg-white getting beaten, and we thought it was a cack.
First day back at the huayu zhingxin today. It's amazing what you wear when you're behind in your laundry and you are forced to choose from a bunch of clothes you never wear. Anyway I am in a class with my classmates from the Spring semester, Changzi and Youzi... ahhh, how sweetly FAST the Japanese classes run.
Dude, I've made headway with the An-qin ban kids... today instead of choosing the first person to put their hand up I just go around one by one and make them all do it so they can't kick up a fuss about someone getting way more stars than them. And when I enacted the dialogue I tried to be funny (oh god) and it worked, they loved it. I knew I could break that crowd. But officially, I'm stickin' around for the money.
Insanely/mentally disturbedly yours'
Eliza Stonemason



*names have been changed to protect privacy
  ¶ 22:50 0 Comments

  I saw the giant buddha today and went to the pig pen and was generally quite tired... last night i went on my super date with ah zhou the mechanic, he has a nice car with a tv on the dashboard and he took me and my reluctant escort Christine (housemate) to an all-taiwanese bar with great food and beer and everything was treated, and then he took us to taichung harbour. christine is like so what's taichung harbour like and i warned her not to expect anything like ahem sydney harbour or anything and well yeah we parked opposite a factory and heard the dirty waves crashing on the dirty shore and waved at fu jian and xia men on the other side of the strait and then we climbed up onto the top of a wall and gazed at the stars, and ah zhou fell asleep and then we woke him up and he drove us back to our scooters. i think he was a little peeved that i brought a friend... i didn't think it was going to be a serious serious date but as well all know, i'm a little behind in the guys department and once again i was stupid... on the way to the bar he drove past everyone he knew (including the bin lan girls, ahem!) and introduced them to his wai guo peng you. he's still cute though.
tomorrow i'm going back to the theatre group and having my first indonesian lesson.
yours' sincerely
ahopghaefghogjegosdfks;daeo[sghsdfog aghloaero[ghrgnoaef

poetry corner

One day a little girl called Jane
Jumped to a Conclusion
-Alas!
said she
-What I conclude
Is merely an
Illusion!


  ¶ 07:10 0 Comments

  Disclaimer: The events depicted in this story did not actually happen but the author would like to state that she wishes it would.


Jane crept into her boss' office feeling the dread of an oncoming put-down. "Man, they really loved that song about making a circle, didn't they boss? Hahaha," said Jane.

"Listen Jane, we know how much you LOVE kindy teaching, and gee whiz, it's a tough industry to get into, so competitive, people crawling all over each other just to get that big chance... It's tough, Jane... that's all I need you to understand."

"Oh, of course, I understand, boss," said Jane hopefully.

"Listen Jane, I'm gonna be straight with you. We at the Academy of Performing for Three Year Olds believe that you just don't have what it takes to become a decent kindy teacher. Sometimes Jane, enthusiasm just isn't enough. It's talent and brilliance we're looking for here, Jane, and I'm afraid, Jane, that you just don't cut it."

"Right boss, I understand."

"We'll pay you till Friday."

Jane walked out and went to Starbucks. For the past couple of months she had tried to abstain from Starbucks because it was relatively expensive. But today she had some thinking to do so she decided to fork out for it. "Oh shit, there goes that job," she thought to herself. She pictured a glim future of twenty-kuai noodle meals and lots and lots of TV instead of gin-tonics ahead of her.

All her non-dreams of not not becoming a kindy teacher were not shattered before her. To think that she had worked so not hard for this, that every minute of every day was spent not focusing on her not-ultimate goal of being a kindy teacher and that she had not lost her dreams forever.

"I pretended, I really pretended, and that's all that matters - pretending," she consoled herself.
  ¶ 15:04 0 Comments

  i got my scooter yesterday, after taking it all out on Ken... i was an ultra-impatient bitch with him last night. Ah sheiss. Anyway I handed over my money to the cute mechanic (as yet do not know his name) and told him to be careful with it and he said i was heart broken that i had to spend that much money, and then i said he had to use it to buy me drinks, and now we have a date on Friday. He's so cute. Although the original idea of flirting with him to get a fair price kind of fell through.

My housemate has started a new quotes file just for me, apparently i've already said two stupid things which they thought were hilarious e.g. They said be careful make sure he doesn't know where you live, and I said well he doesn't know my name but he knows my numberplate and they went mental but I still have no idea what's so funny. Oh wait the other thing I said was that The Postman was a good movie.

Last night i had a dream about having to decide whether I was going home now or waiting another semester. i also can't sleep on my stomach coz of my 5 millionth gravel burn and hopefully my last... i will return home in february with 18 months of living in Taiwan tattooed all over my body. "And this was my scooter accident, and this was my scooter accident, and this was also my scooter accident, and oh, this one, on the left, was my scooter accident." I don't think laser surgery is that expensive anymore.
  ¶ 15:20 0 Comments

  It was an eventful first night in Taiwan for Ingunn on Saturday. That's all I'm going to say about that!!! We went to 89K which is a bikey/cow boy bar and to the Dive which is nice, Ingunn declared it to be our local from now on! I got way way drunk, off my idiomatic ;-) face, blotto, wasted... I specifically told her I was trying not be an alcoholic anymore too! We were waiting outside to go somewhere else when Christine ran out and said that Ingunn told the bar people she would only buy a drink if she could make a music request, hahaha, that's when i realised she was really back.
Yesterday my sister asked me if I was going to live overseas forever. I can see it happening but anything could happen. I guess it just depends on where exactly I become a humongous star :-) Let's see, where does Nicole Kidman live? I think she hops between places every so often, and I think this will work fine for me ha ha. But if I become a graphic designer/kindy teacher/marketing executive, I could do that in Sydney.
The cute mechanic guy at the scooter shop is really cute and I chewed a couple of beetle nuts with him on the way to get my scooter and he's angry that I still haven't taken him dancing yet and I totally would but I don' know what he'd think of places like Seduce and the Pig Pen. He also reckons chewing them will help your hangover. I don't know. I don't like em that much.
  ¶ 15:49 0 Comments

  Last night was my first night at Wu Fong and it was good, better than when I subbed last time, because this time I wrote all their names on the board at the beginning and bribed them with stars next to their names for giving answers. I wish I had known that back then. They really dig that stuff.

On Wednesday I had a bad day at the kindy with the an qin ban kids... this new girl's mother is sitting in on the classes to prevent her from suffering from separation anxiety or something (that's my guess anyway) and this little shithead started pretending to cry and said he "didn't want me, he wanted Angela!" Angela uses a microphone and throws a ball around while I read them stories. He got busted bad, sucked in. I also taught them the wrong way to write the letter A (who really gives a shit as long as it looks like a frickin A) and the Chinese teacher, who joins in and encourages the fat bully kid at the back to call things like how qi guai I am, made no effort to save face, and told the kids, "she has taught you wrong, Angela has taught you right." So anyway on Friday I made them shut up and cut out the states of Australia and colour them in and then put them together again like a puzzle. They thought it was "jian dan si le" (deadly simple) but that was the plan anyway. The only thing I said to them the whole lesson was the Canberra was written in upper case while the other cities weren't, therefore saving 10 more Taiwanese kids from learning from a dumb arse Canadian or someone that Sydney is the capital ofAustralia.
Then Elizabeth had her going away bash and we went to the Pig Pen again and last night I went to the Party Animal and stood outside the Pig Pen for too long and then to Escape, and then hung out at our friend's apartment which is right near it. Yeah and then I got up late and my two thirty year old housemates were acting like my parents which was cute and then i finally went and bought some bedding. Wow.
  ¶ 19:35 0 Comments

  Ken's mother gave me a fruit yesterday, I was so happy. I wasn't sure what it was though. It looked like a guava on the outside and a grape fruit on the inside and felt like an orange but I couldn't put my finger on any specific flavour... she asked me if we had those in Australia and to be sure, I wasn't sure.
I also scored regular work on Friday nights (errgh) at Wu Fong.
I also have to figure out how to order honey from Capillano or someone to make up for not bringing those 24 jars of it which my friend (who I met at Wu Fong) asked me to bring 'for her grandmother's sore throat' (or possibly her family's restaurant, couldn't be sure!).
I have pronounciation problems of my own and I'm a little worried. Like if you say the word camouflage really slowly in three beats is the ou part an "oh" sound or an "oo" sound? Sheiss.
  ¶ 13:03 0 Comments

  I officially have a favourite class at work now. It's the one that went nuts during the hokey pokey and today they actually got what I was talking about. But I also got in trouble for not preparing anything for the an-qin ban but the thing is I don't know what to prepare and I'm too poor and stingy to buy children's books I'm only gonna use once. And like, on the face of it, it seems like a communication problem, but like, I really rely on my boss to tell me when she doesn't understand what I'm saying, which is all the time basically, but she smiles and nods and, this is something I have found typical, interrupts me mid-sentence so I am basically unable to tell her anything. The guy that passed the job onto me also gave me a big bag of goodies like magnetic letters and even some of those sausage balloons with an air pump and a Dr Seuss book, and some little balls that have suction caps all over them. Dude, can someone please tell me what exactly you're meant to do with these things? Oh woe is me.

I walked there today, it's only ten minutes. You little beauty!

  ¶ 23:17 0 Comments

  Hello I'm back from Australia. It was good fun. A whole year has passed and my niece and nephew are like real little people now and my brother has a zit! I went back to uni and they were having free coffee and there were goths walking around. What the. I saw Erina Fair... it has a gym and a public library with Weight Watchers meeting rooms and an art gallery. Bonnie my cat took about five seconds to remember who I was and then it was just like old times again. I got my ticket to China so I'm definitely going now, yay! Dude those student flight people were bimbos. I went bowling and got a strike. Granny and Mum both took me shopping yay and I dragged my friend Mark out to two naval bases in the harbour to spontaneously go searching for Able Seaman Johannes I'm-a-Dick. Then I drank my troubles away in north sydney and returned home to my sister's house. My sister and her friends knit and play cards now. I read about that in a magazine once, it's called knitting and playing cards syndrome and it develops just before the mid-twenties when people get sick of going out. I hope it never happens to me!

The ten hours at the airport weren't that bad but dude the food was gross. A warmed up chicken leg with cold, gross fries was like $30000000000000. I walked past the gold class transit lounge and there were couches, coffee tables and curtains and all that jazz and I'm like Would it really be that much to ask if they just made the whole place like that? How much does a couch cost in Vietnam anyway. I came back on a direct flight and sat next to an ex-pilot who sadly said he had no xiaojies in Taichung.

Oh I'm going back to work today, yuk, must convince myself that I am in fact looking forward to it!


  ¶ 12:01 0 Comments