It's the 29th. I've got six weeks left in Taiwan now. I'm trying to think of the exciting things that happened before I started this blog, when Ingunn showed me the light right before she left and I made a vow to follow her back to Iceland and work in the tourism office there. Anyway, let's list the more memorable things that happened back in the golden era of my first semesters here:
-The Yunnan-Guizou trip with tai da, great for my Chinese and the joys of tracheitis
-The overnight youth camp at GMD headquarters where I was kicked out for going up to my room and falling asleep after Jason Hu gave a speech about achieving your dreams. I guess you could say I was "chucking a Dad"
-Weekend trips to Taipei like there was no tomorrow and money grew on trees, and it basically did
-Language Centre field trips, like the one to Tainan, when I went hypo and decided I had ADD
-The original trip to Maolin and Kending when I met Ah-Wei and became his girlfriend by way of an intermediary who spoke English
-the Tunghai bar night which is still the best night I've ever had
-the promotion videos Justin and I did for the staple gun and the fake lab testing, and the Mitsubishi one, which I never got to see! and deciding this was the first day of the rest of my famous life
-having a crush on Vincent and getting mang guo bing shas in the arvos, and trying to prove who was the smartest
-buying a tennis racquet and taking up tennis for two hours
-living in that hole of a taofang in Dong Bie
-getting fat
-Xiao Pi







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  I saw four movies on the weekend at the film festival: The World, Land of Plenty, Three Exremes: Dumplings, and Not On the Lips. Dude, the Three Extremes one was about eating dumplings made out of aborted fetuses. And dude, it was frickin graphic. I sat there thinking 'Mum would not want me watching this' while I figured this is where SBS gets all their 12:30 screenings from, with the geeky guy at the beginning who warns you how frickin weird the movie is which you're about to watch.

Rehearsal is getting on my nerves because the tall girl has issues with my existence. She freaked out when I first came, like "why is she here, why is she here, is she going to be in it too?" but I thought she would quickly get over it. Now I dread turning up to rehearsals because she is always looking for something to complain about me. Like, it was established long ago that my Chinese was limited but that I would give it a go anyway with Yu-ren's sincere encouragement, but she still has issues with the fact that I'm not at native-speaker level and it's like I'm supposed to be Chinese or something and the fact that I'm not is a constant problem for her. Christine reckons she's insecure and feels threatened by my being there but I don't know why because it's pretty clear that I'm only there for fun, and don't take my role half as seriously as she does - however good or terrible I am I'm still going to stick out like a sore thumb, with most people in the audience not seeing much further past the fact that I'm a foreigner.

Anyway she referred to me as "that foreigner" the other day as if as if I wasn't there and I think that's what made me boil over and start to think seriously about it. Unlike Yu-ren she still believes I'm stuck in the Chinese-language stone ages so she only talks to me in English and is under the impression that I really and truly have no idea what's going on when the language being used is Chinese (which is all the time). The most bizarre thing is, her boyfriend is American or something, so you'd think she'd be OVER the whole
OH MY GOD THERE'S A FOREIGNER,
AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH FREAK OUT,
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO,
IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD,
OH MY GOD,
HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM
HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO ACT,
HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BREATHE,
HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO WIPE MY ARSE,
OH MY GOD THERE'S A FOREIGNER

thing.

Ahhh that felt good. I'm not completely ignorant, us little shits at Epping Heights knew no bounds when the new kid who couldn't speak English came. N.B. little shits under ten, not in our late twenties

Kindy was a blast today, I won them all over with a dazzling and brilliant impromptu comedy act which involved flash cards and clock-watching. I tried teaching the an-qin ban-ers a crappy ESL version of We Wish You A Merry Christmas but they were uninspired so I switched pages back to the Hokey Pokey and dude it was like the funniest thing they had ever seen, it was a big giant laughter factory in there... the best thing about it was that it was all spontaneous, and all I could see was the brownie-point-o-metre soaring up into the high 90's. What can I say, I'm a legend. I wonder if they teach you how to make kids laugh when you study Education, coz I would like to do it everyday. I wonder if it had anything to do with the three Toblerones I ate for breakfast this morning. Must try that again.


  ¶ 21:37 0 Comments

  The Barbarian Daily Presents

Yu-ren (I won't call him Yuren anymore, certain bigmouthed flatmates made fun of it and now I'm getting forced pronunciation lessons everytime I turn up) has a friend in Kaoxiong who suggested we go down to his art shop there and do a performance there too. Yu-ren was like "We're gonna be famous!" and my first reaction was "Are you making fun of me (Rizzo)?" and he was really excited. Well, it doesn't help that I will probably be in China, but yes we may have officially just become a travelling circus. Then Yu-ren said that lots of people were going to come, aswell as all his movie-directing buddies... but that's what I would tell my performers too if they had turned into total slackers. I want to be in a movie with Chow Yun Fat, I've decided.

  ¶ 04:02 0 Comments

  There's a new Chucky movie coming out where he and Bride of Chucky have a baby. It's called Seed of Chucky. I reckon they should also have a grandkid and Chuckie can be all old and grey haired and tell him stories about the old days.

I got the dirty for not going to rehearsal last Wednesday, I swear these days, noone can distinguish mountains from mole-hills anymore. There are no mole-hills left! Anyway I am not civilised or sophisticated enough to think of an indirect way of saying sorry. (Sometimes saying sorry straight out means the opposite - you're saying it because you're not sorry, which makes it worse. Don't get me started on that. Anyway you have to do things to show your sincerity like do little favours and make sweet gestures and things otherwise you're just a coldhearted animal) Anyway so I taught him a new English phrase that he is going to need if he keeps working with dumb foreigners like me, 'it'll be alright on the night'. It totally will be, I swear, as long as I keep my mouth shut about it so that nobody I know turns up. Except all 2.5 readers of my lovely blog.

Hmm in other news, last night I had a three second moment where I remembered what it felt like to be in love, but it disappeared as quickly as it appeared. Then I went home and decided I was going to get married and all day today I have been thinking about that little feeling. Then my flatmates are like Dude You are Twenty but like, I actually could get married if I wanted to - I wouldn't need my parents permission or anything. How cool is that?  ¶ 19:29 0 Comments

  Ahhh my tummy's sore from learning how to hoola-hoop last night. Christine and I broke all previous records for the percentage of the weekend spend on the couch "chilling" the time away, saving money and recuperating from a tough week of earning to much money and driving through alot of pollution all day. In other words, the fact that we were bums got to us too much so we went and bought hoola-hoops at the mom and pop shop so we can watch TV and hoola-hoop at the same time. The chick in the appartment across from ours hoola-hoops, drinks, and watches tv all at the same time and Christine decided that was what she wanted to do aswell.

I didn't go out at all, I sat there reading "China Wakes" and watching Forrest Gump (best movie in the world), except for last night when we spontaneously went back to the Air Pub after seeing The Incredibles, and did karaoke till 2. China Wakes talks about how corrupt China is and how generally awful and terrible it is there. This guy opened a factory making fake animal medecine pills then bought out the cops and the local government and put protestors in a litte jail he built inside the factory. Eventually he got fully investigated and put in jail for life.

I had another cool Chinese lesson today. I learnt the phrase "han zei bu liang li" which means the "Han people do not stand together with thieves/baddies" which also means Taiwan won't use pin yin because mainland China uses pin yin and they are all baddies. I said "what will Taiwan be 50 years from now" and my teacher said there will be no Taiwan. Let's see, 50 years from now, that's 2054, there'll be no Taiwan. Well it all depends on global warming and how long it takes for Taiwan to be completely submerged. No I reckon in 50 years noone will have invaded unless Taiwan had started harbouring terrorists. If the United Nations doesn't say Taiwan can be it's own nation then if I was Taiwan I would start my own organisation called the United Nations II and welcome other countries to join if they so wish, but if not, who cares, coz they're still a member of the United Nations II.   ¶ 21:18 0 Comments

  I'm liking my little Chinese maintenance classes at TLC, it's breezy, and I haven't been up before ten thirty once this week. It's good for my ego too because I have the highest level there which makes me the big star. Yessss!
My new diet consist of miso soup, sultanas, and tea.
All the uni admission stuff has been sorted out. I got CC'd an email from the admissions centre itself, saying that my assessment has been ammended successfully. Oh I wish I could see where it got ammended TO! The suspense is killing me. I wish they'd frickin tell me at least whether my $30 went to waste or not. I wonder if they'll shove me into arts/commerce, then i'll be doing stuff like microeconomics and econometrics and weird shit like that.

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  My glasses broke again. "We no give you cheap mainland China lenses, break very quickly" - that's the thing about Chinese, even after translating word for word, you still need to translate the meanings of the words themselves: from "cheating you is the last thing we would do" to "cheating you is the first thing we'd do." I will never be negotiation-savvy, it's been a year and I still believe fixed prices are the way to go, seeing as though my culture and values are indefinitely superior to everyone else's and that's the way it should be. Hahaha. I better stop being sarcastic otherwise the wind might change and I'll be stuck like that forever.
I'm going to fork out for some trendy designer frames and feel trendy.

Petunia's Mum gave me a bookmark. I love all my private students, I almost want to stay here just because I like them and their parents so much. Last week I got bombarded with tea and cake and stuff and his mum is really sweet. I wonder what the market for private lessons is like in Sydney.

I'm taking a vow of celibacy and may be joining a convent/nunnery to be closer to dogs. Not ones that slobber though, they give all others a bad rep. No really, I'm never going on a date again, I don't get the date-protocol, like the real, deep significance of letting the guy buy you a drink, and the real, deep, significance of admitting you don't have to be anywhere in the morning. Do I need to hang a sign around my neck warning people that I am a naive prude from the stone ages who will be insulted and aghast when you assume that getting a root is on the cards tonight? Yes., it seems so. AH, SOOOO! Or... Attention: Walking Vagina, Insert 5 Gin-Tonics Above And Push The Right Buttons.   ¶ 22:22 0 Comments

  I think the third wave of culture shock is melting away and today I felt more comfortable than I have here ever before. I've started smiling at starers again instead of having staring competitions with them and imitating the way they try to get a stare in without being noticed.

"Oh I think I might look at that lamp shade on the far wall over there, which may give me the oppurtunity to get a look in during the second I swivel my head around to do so." No, wait, I'm still as sarcastic as always. But seriously, can this country do everyone a favour and not pretend to be all international and dynamic and stuff so dumb-arses like me don't come here and freak the f*** out. This was no 5-week cultural exchange to Germany, no siree.

I sussed out the Let's Go China book today. I've definitely got time for the three gorges. Traveling around Taiwan for a week was easy but doing it for five weeks is going to be different. Like, where am I going to wash my clothes and stuff? Holy shit.

Last night Miss Flatty and I saw The Village and King Arthur for a hundred kuai. The Village was really good, I thought it was going to be about the salem witch trials or something like that but it turned out to be like the Truman Show or the Beach. It rocked. King Arthur was remarkably boring but inspired me to want to take old stories and retell them, that would be so much fun. During the movie, I couldn't really concentrate because of people eating hot-dogs out of noisy plastic bags.

Anyway, I figured out how to write my best-selling novel. I already have a solid character for it! This character is a writer and a socialite, the first genuine socialite I've ever met, so proud of myself. She goes to parties and cultural events and knows more about Western culture than my friend Lily from Marseilles does. Likewise, speaking English is as easy as scratching your arse for her. She mixes, mixes, and mixes some more, when she's not ghost-writing love stories for a local magazine. She has vowed never to speak to her father again but my guess is, we'll never know why. Ooooooh, mysterious!

Who's the second character. A guy. We need someone remarkable, someone whose utter uniqueness deserves to be recorded and preserved through the ages. Can't think of anyone at this time. But dude, a guy that I met last night, that I actually like (bonus), just sms'd me.

  ¶ 21:57 0 Comments

  I Can't Act

It's frickin impossible to act and use tones at the same time. Hopefully I will be dismissed as the token foreigner and be quickly forgotten about.

As of today I will officially be a T.L.C. student taking 2 private lessons a week (WHAT A BUM) and ditching the full-time slog at THU. Chinese school drop-out... go back to uni.... i'd like to publicly apologise to my ancestors for being a Dropout. I've done it, it's done. Ahhh, that felt good.

Justification: Two private lessons will in all likelihood be just as if not more effective than sitting there listening to my teachers rave on about how dangerous it is to drink more than 3 pearl milk teas a day.

Yesterday I went to a friend's friend's place and made cheesecake. It was a good breakfast this morning. Then we ended up making dumplings, and before I knew it, the coffee table was covered in a bunch of different dishes and we stuffed ourselves silly. It was great!   ¶ 16:59 0 Comments

  If any of my 4.5 regulars remember, I applied for a freelance translating job for Compass magazine a while back. After they received my resume via email, the lady called Uvia sent me two passages to translate, one in each language, for a test trial. I did the Chinese-English one and left the other one. They called anyway, offered me an "office job" at about NT$230 per hour, and I proceeded to forget about them.

Opening this month's Compass magazine to page 44, lo-and-behold, there is my translation, called "Will I see you again next semester, Ah-Nai", about a fundraising effort by Starbucks and World Vision. Well, well, well. Joking about how they were probably asking every applicant to do the same thing thereby ending up with a bunch of free translations ended up biting me on the arse now, didn't it?

"Indigenous children" was changed to "Aborigine children". What a dick. And I thought I had a problem being politically correct...

Dear friends and family, if I come back from Taiwan all bitter and twisted, more so than ever before, now you know why!!!!

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Straight Up With Sherri
"Satanikub Bloggus" (i wish i spoke spanish)   ¶ 01:30 0 Comments

  Uni is changing my Absent Fail to a Incomplete. Breathe out.
Last night:
Oldies. Don't like it. If getting stared at by the bitchy xioajies on the other side of the bar for the whole time counted as a good time then my name is George Bush.
Salsa cubana. Has changed alot, now has a 300 minimum and they weren't acutally playing salsa. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
The AIR PUB!
This was where we had our spontaneous and unanticipated blast. We're like let's have a look and they were ultra friendly so I ate all their food, then initiated the foreign take-over of the karaoke microphone with my stunning rendition of Wind Beneath My Wings. Dude, I swear it was good, even Adrian said so. But after Earth Song (a Michael Jackson song) I was pretty much banned, as usual.
Soundgarden. Normal. Met some friends and discussed how the old language centre drinking club has disbanded and how we all miss the oldies are now miserable old fagerillos.

Yesterday I also accidentally bought a Wang Fei cd in Cantonese. What else. we also had a rehearsal and went through the whole thing for the first time. They're going to make fliers and posters and shit but I think if they make programs, (as i discussed with the flatties as they declared that if i didn't tell them when the performances were then they'd find out by other means,) they should write "Please hold laughter until after the performance, thankyou."   ¶ 22:17 0 Comments

  Rather than go home and listen to my couch-dwelling flatmate I am intentionally staying out so that I can live to my 80th birthday before having to get a hearing aid. I can finally get a start on my new collection of blog blurbs. Most blog blurbs say "oh, my blog is about random ranting and raving, I'm not special, you don't have to read my blog if you don't want to." But sometimes you see one that really gets in there and breaks the mould.
So, here is the beginning of my collection.
In Year 4 with Mr Fraser I was jealous of everyone having cool hobbies and shit to talk about for show-and-tell so I decided that the easiest thing to collect would be coupons out of magazines. So I cut heaps out and stuck em in a scrap book, and wait, I think this must be the second dumbest thing I've ever done, took them in and showed everyone for show and tell.

This is what happens when you pick some random ones and put them all together! Next time you need to create a psychotic character for your next novel, you could use this method.

I'm someone who's given up already. I don't like the way everyhing goes, and I can't change it, no matter how hard I try. I'm only interested in new things, ethereal creativy from wherever it may come, just so I can forget about reality. I like making new friends. I'm always in need of cheering up. Life is overrated, in my opinion, and real life is that thing that only happens to other people. My dream is to live without pain. Often described as aloof and somewhat distant, I have come to embrace that definition. Perhaps I was never properly socialized, but I prefer to keep a small circle of close friends and rarely let new people get close to me. ::.. I am..:: | ::..Ever changing..:: |::..Metamorping..:: | ::.. Evolving..:: | ::.. Growing..:: | As you enter my room, you will find it messy but full of creativity. Here you will see the deeper part of me, through reading my perceptions & personal advices regarding different issues dealing with Life, Love, & everybody's favorite Sex.

View my complete profile

I also went around stealing links from people's websites.

Man commits suicide coz tghat retard from Texas was reelected.



  ¶ 01:54 0 Comments

  UAC called my uni and asked whether the Absent Fail on my transcript stands, and they said it did. I knew that would become a problem! Maybe it's for the best. Stick with my B Arts, get home, get all the credit I can, and graduate my little arse out of there. I don't want to leave though, I only just got there! And I don't feel "educated" yet! I feel like I just got out of school.

Bush is back, I don't want to talk about it. Which country is gonna be invaded next I wonder. Hmmm. Where are they having problems with freedom and democracy. oh shit, anywhere. My flat needs a new injection of freedom and democracy. How many troops would they need to come in and take over our flat, and start using our gas and electricity, coz they don't want to use their own.

For the interpretive dance thing, we each have to do a solo. I have to run around like a ballet dancer, then spin around for one minute, then start pretending to be hysterical. I said "Sure, I can do hysterical, just ask my mum." He thought I said, "I'll just ask my mum coz she is hysterical" and said I was mean for saying that. Haha.

I have a cold from my mountain trip. I was going to go all the way this weekend, this time not stopping, and stay in Hualien, but it's rehearsal a go go. I can't be a professional bum anymore because that would require me to ditch the dance thing and I can't do that because they need me to do my bit as a professional retard.   ¶ 04:49 0 Comments

  I went for a drive on the weekend. After Ching-jing farms, I drove further onto He Huan Shan, which turned out to be over 3000m, alpine, and quite cold, and I was wearing a tshirt. I started freaking out and decided it was the stupidest thing I had ever done, because it was already dark, and I had to find somewhere to stay, and my internal organs were starting to shut down. It turns out there is a god, because one kilometre after I decided I was done for, I found a hostel. I walked up to the counter, a total spectacle, and the guy's like "ke man le" (we're full up tonight) and I looked at him as if to say well buddy would you like to be arrested for manslaughter, and he said alright so I got jammed in between two couples in a dorm room where you get a blanket and sleep on the floor. I was pretty cold. He had to fill out the form for me coz I couldn't move my fingers, it was all quite hilarious really. Like, how would you react if you went skiing and you saw someone skiing in a bikini. The next morning my scooter didn't start but I just had to let it warm up. Drove back, and stopped at this forest place a bit like Lane Cove park, then came home from my super long drive-turned mountain-frolick near death experience, and went book shopping with assorted roommates.
Reading 1984 again, alot of it makes more sense, especially the parts about changing history to suit your own needs, oh it's all very scary. Also reading the Da Vinci Code, which is like a cross between The Bourne Identity and India Jones and the Last Crusade.   ¶ 16:32 0 Comments