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toastykitten

May 2025

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toastykitten: (Default)
I am 25 today! I got a dozen beautiful red roses from my department. My manager let me get off early today, and I took some time to walk all the way down to the Ferry Building, following the concrete ribbon structure along the way. It was a beautiful day outside, and as I walked I watched the ocean. I had a great view of Treasure Island, and the Bay Bridge. It's stinkiest right under the bridge. I briefly skimmed the little informational bronze plaques and square towers set into the floor, read a poem from an Angel Island inhabitant, and walked and walked and walked. It was fun, but I am tired!

Yesterday we went over to my parents to have dinner. I was feeling a little guilty about having left this weekend for Los Angeles, so I decided to make it up to them a little. We had a quiet dinner, interrupted only by Kaitlin's chattering. That girl sure can talk. She seems to have gained a lot of weight, which is great, considering all her clothes were hanging off of her the last time I saw her. She got a memo from her art program mentioning the teacher walkout on Thursday. Oakland teachers have been going two years without a contract now, so I don't blame them for getting antsy. I'm glad it's not a strike (yet) - if an actual strike happens, Kaitlin's education is going to be pushed back even further than it is now. So I'm crossing my fingers. She's improving so much that I'd hate to see any interruption in her routine.

I've been reading Bidoun, and it's really good. Some of the articles are a bit too academic for my tastes, but the interviews with the artists and filmmakers, and the photography is the most interesting part. It's taking me forever to get through it, though - the material is really dense, and I'm reading it like a book. I have Issue 6 - Envy - the one page that should not be missed is the Bidoun Phrase Book, where you can learn to say things like A friend of mine said that if Cairo's nouveau riche, then Beirut is bourgeois, or Of course I know you're Phoenecians. I'd never assume you're Arabs. It's so obvious. in Beiruti Arabic.
toastykitten: (Default)
The 12 Girls Band is good Chinese New Year's music.

My sister burned me a few VCDs of their concerts, and I listened to it at work. I was really happy that no one sang, because if they sang, it would be friggin opera, which I can't stand in Chinese.

It reminded me of The Great Wall Youth Orchestra, a local group that "plays Chinese musical instruments and performs a variety of music". It is also most famous for Tyler Thompson, an African-American kid with an aptitude for Chinese operatic singing. I have two distant relatives in the group - they're the sweetest kids I ever baby-sat, and after watching one of their concerts, really talented, too.

In this one concert, one of the performances was a very famous scene in a Cantonese opera. (It's actually one of the few songs I like.) As I was watching, I was of two thoughts - "Oh my god, that's so cute!" and "Oh my god, that's so wrong!" You see, this scene that these two kids perform is this marriage ceremony in which the bride and groom commit suicide by drinking cyanide. The bride is a princess who's been forced against her will to marry someone else, so she's committing suicide as an act of rebellion, and to send a message to her subjects to keep fighting. I think.

Anyway, it was really, really cute seeing the kids all dressed up in the elaborate costumes and makeup, and I'm pretty sure they didn't know what they were singing about.

The KQED show about it was very entertaining. One of the kids interviewed cracked us up. She said something along the lines of "My dad had a flute in China, but then he had to chop it up for firewood." I bet her parents totally made that up. It's such a Chinese thing to say.
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