Bra, bra, bra

Something that I love about living here is how easily something that seems ordinary can turn into something totally wacky. On my lunch break today, I went bra shopping. I hadn't planned to, but I was walking around the block and noticed a few long tables heaped with bras, so I decided to dive in. I picked out five bras in my size and asked if I could try them on. (OK, so actually I pantomimed trying on a bra, pulling imaginary straps up over my shoulders.) The saleswoman said no, there was nowhere to try them on, but if they don't fit I can bring them back. Fine, so I handed them to her... and she threw them on a scale. They were priced by weight. I just bought 295 grams of bra! Is it just me, or is this just hysterical? It was like a deli counter of underthings: "Excuse me, yes, I'd like 295 grams of bra, please." I bet you don't know how much your foundation garments weigh. "Oh, those panties look fresh! I'll take half a pound."

(Plus I really like the idea of "bra" as an uncountable noun, as in "Wow, that's a whole lot of bra I've got hanging outside for all the neighbours to see!")

Bras here are wacky to start with. To make a sweeping, racially based generalization (always a great idea!), Taiwanese ladies are not really a busty bunch. But never in my life have I seen bras with such sturdy construction! Not only are most bras padded and underwired, but they tend to sport outrageous amounts of lace and other appliqués. We're not talking about a rosebud in the cleavage here, folks. There's nothing unusual about a shiny red padded bra with a purple fabric flower sewn across one cup and then a layer of sheer gauze over the whole thing. The saleswoman today was trying to sell me a lace-trimmed satin bra printed with license plates, for pete's sake. But you know what? You pay for those extras! Three NT dollars a gram, baby.

I didn't work today, so I had the chance to take some photos outside. (Like many of you, I'm too rushed in the mornings to do it, and it's dark when I get home from work at this time of year.) First, here is my feather and fan scarf so far:



I'm still on the first 200-yard ball of yarn. It knits up really quickly: three rows of garter stitch and then one row of yarn-overs and knit-two-togethers. Clearly I'm taking a little break from the Must Have cardigan to knit this, even though I'm only three or four inches from finishing the back of the sweater:



And here is a crafty idea for you: Do you have a 100 percent wool sweater that you love but is past its prime? Wash it in the machine, dry it, cut out two squares, sew them together, and stuff the shape. Felted pillow! Man, I can't wait to have a washing machine with hot water again.

Turning Taiwanese

For the first six months or so that I was here in Taipei, I found it hilarious that every time I asked a Taiwanese person what they had done on the weekend, what they were planning for the next weekend, or how they planned to spend a holiday, the answer was the same: "Sleep." Well, I'm not sure exactly how or when it happened, but I've become a local. I've never been so consistently tired in my life, and I can't explain it. I have a full-time job -- that's it. No kids, no other commitments. Just general sleep deprivation and a partner who feels the same way. Is it the polluted air? The effort of having to compete with a million pedestrians (half of them driving scooters) for sidewalk space? Fatigue from understanding only about 3 percent of what is going on around me at any given time? What? What the hell is it? In the past, when I've worked full time, I would do things in the evenings and on weekends and get enough sleep. I really don't get it, but I'm just too tired to figure it out.

My plans for tonight are about as action-packed as it gets these days: check e-mail, knit, watch CSI: Miami,* and take out the garbage. And I can't wait. When did I become a senior citizen? (Actually, that doesn't even make sense, because all the senior citizens I know have lives that are about eight hundred times more active than mine. I am an affront to senior citizens everywhere.) And then I'm going to stay up too late reading, and at about midnight either Bill or I will utter some sad-assed cliché like "There just aren't enough hours in the day."

* I've complained before about having only movies and CNN to watch on TV. One channel started playing CSI a couple of months ago and then switched to the Miami version, which, despite David Caruso being unreasonably sexy, is nowhere near as good as the original Vegas version.

Alison and Lorna sittin' in a tree,
k-n-i-tt-i-n-g



Yarn: Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport (colour: Tuscany)
Pattern: Wendy's Feather and Fan Scarf
Fun? Yep.

I'm itching to start a lacy scarf. This is why I need a personal assistant. I don't want to waste valuable weeknight free time winding balls of yarn by hand. No, I just want to make a call:

"Hi, Benicio? It's me. Listen, I'm going to want to cast on for a lacy scarf tonight, so can you organize a ball of Lorna's Laces for me, please? And it would be great if you could whip up a little gauge swatch as well, so you can have a needle ready for me. You're a doll! Say, what are you wearing?"

Self-portrait, with Bea

Literally thinking outside the ballpark

The Plain English Campaign has conducted a survey and determined that "At the end of the day" is the most irritating phrase in the English language. To read the other nominees, go to the site and click on the best link ever: it says, in plain English, "Click here for our latest press release, revealing the world's most irritating phrase."

The Lynne Truss book (Eats Shoots and Leaves) has reached Australia, and there's a feature in the Age about it: "Semicolons rule, full stop". I like this anecdote, because it's a great illustration of the power of punctuation, specifically the comma:

Comedian Ronnie Barker starred in a '70s British prison sitcom called Porridge. In one scene, Barker is reading aloud a letter from home to a fellow inmate who is illiterate. The letter ends "Now I must go and get on my lover". Oh, dear. Striving to save his cell-mate's feelings, Barker amends the correspondence and offers the punctuated version "Now I must go and get on, my lover."

(I also like it because it reminded me of The Two Ronnies for the first time in about twenty years! When I was little, my brother and I thought they were hilarious. Does anyone remember this show?)

While I'm at it, another example of the need for proper punctuation, this time with a hyphen, appears in a Canadian news story today. (The story itself doesn't matter, but if you're interested, it's "Some 1,000 attend funeral for Harrison McCain".) The lead sentence includes this clause:

...but it was the plain folks and neighbours of the frozen-food magnate who paid the most heartfelt tributes.

Sometimes I have trouble convincing a writer or editor of the need for hyphenation in a compound modifier that precedes a noun. I've finally found the perfect example! Certainly it would be unacceptable to refer to the late Mr. McCain as "the frozen food magnate," would it not?

(OK, honk if you think it would be kind of funny, though. Anyone?)

The civil unrest here in Taiwan isn't affecting my life much. My office is just up the street from the Presidential Palace, so I can see the roadblocks and all the KMT supporters who have been and are still being bused in. I think officials should just recount the ballots and be done with it, but what do I know? It's not my country. They want to fight about it, and there have been brawls in the legislature here over much less.

If you didn't do so yesterday, go over and wish Em a happy birthday!

Isn't it great to see Joey Buttafuoco back in the news? Isn't it great to say "Joey Buttafuoco"?

I'm sad that the referrer host has quit. I found a lot of new blogs through that list at the bottom of the page. (Hey, leave me a comment so I can still find you!)

I'd forgotten how much I love Honey Nut Cheerios. Thank you, big grocery store with Western food.

Because Beatrix is an urban Taipei rooftop cat, she doesn't know from trees and grass and birds and mice. But don't write off her feline instincts yet; Little Miss Bea has been bringing cockroaches into the house! "Aw, thanks, Bea! That's nice. OK, bye-bye, cockroach! -- [flush] -- Where did it go? Oh well."

Ta-da!



And now, back to regularly scheduled knitting with natural fibers. :)

My friend Candy made my day yesterday by sending me some yarn in the mail from Vancouver. I picked up the package on my lunchbreak and tore into it as soon as I got back to my desk. Inside were two of these:



This stuff is crazy! I'd never actually seen it before. I'm tempted to cut some two-inch lengths and glue them to my eyelids. My coworkers were fascinated, since they'd never seen such a thing. (It really should be available here, since the keywords of Taiwanese fashion are fringe, frill, flounce, and fancy.) Plus we all found this very amusing -- look closely:



Oh, those three little words that are burned on all our hearts as children: "Made in Taiwan." So these little balls of Parrot-coloured boa were sent across the Pacific, but they've found their way home. Don't you just love a happy ending?

But wait, there's more! Candy has a gift for thrift (a lady after my own heart), and she managed to combine two fabulous things: she found this yarn at a thrift store!



Isn't it fabulous? I don't know what it is, how much of it there is, or what to do with it, but I'm in love. It's that perfect vintage shade of pink, and there is a silver thread through it all. Take a closer look at that sparkle:



Any ideas? A light and drapey scarf? No hurry -- at the moment I'm whipping up a keyhole scarf from a ball of the Boa (pattern on the label).

Would you believe that my azalea photos are so pink that they actually look bad on the screen? The colour is so saturated that the photos actually don't work. This one is all right and gives you an idea of what I've had the good fortune to see every morning on my way to work for the past couple of weeks:



Show-offs, aren't they?

Taiwan is electing a president today. I assume there won't be much coverage at home. This election is very important for Taiwan, and the two candidates were running neck-and-neck going into it today. For a little background on the election (and accompanying referendum), there's a good story in the Guardian: "Taiwan provokes China with missile referendum":

Analysts fear that a victory for Mr Chen would heighten the possibility of military confrontation, because he has pledged to reform the constitution in a second term. Arthur Ting, head of political science at Cheng Kung University, said: "The risks now are higher than during the last election. If Chen loses, the chances of war are about 20%. If he wins, the risk rises to 40%."

Keep your fingers crossed for this little island this weekend, OK? Have a good one.

"Taiwan president shot, not in critical condition"

"The bullet hit the vice president in the knee first, then the president," Wang Hsin-nan, a lawmaker from Chen's Democratic Progressive Party told TVBS television.

Chen, 54, had sustained a deep 30-cm (12-inch) wound across the stomach, said Wang, who was traveling in Chen's motorcade.

Chen was able to walk into the emergency room unaided while the vice president required assistance, one witness told television.

I hadn't expected anyone to get shot before the election! :-(

* Update: the Government Information Office press release

I'm feeling a little hungover and schmeh today.* Please keep the lights low, and speak quietly amongst yourselves.

Good news for British Columbia: "NDP ahead of Liberals for first time since 1996".

Doesn't Courtney Love have friends? Isn't there someone who can take her aside, make her a cup of coffee, and say, "Courtney, dude, you're kind of messing up here. Do you need some help? Want to talk about anything?" And what did she do to her face, anyway? I hadn't seen her photo in quite a while, and I hardly recognized her.

Bill and I watched City of God on Tuesday night. Holy crap, was it bleak. It was well done, visually stunning. All I'd known about it before was that it was Brazilian and has won tons of acclaim and awards. I never read reviews before seeing a film, and living here, I find myself watching movies that I know absolutely nothing about. (At home, you can't avoid knowing something, because you watch TV or a friend talks about the film or whatever; here, there is none of that buzz.) So I wasn't expecting so much violence, but I really was blown away by the look of the film and the depiction of the favela, which is something I really didn't know about. And then extra blown away yesterday when I read that the only professional actor was the drug dealer Carrot. (I think I have that right.) I'm not sure that I want to know how the filmmaker got that tiny boy to cry like that -- too real. (Do you know which scene I mean? I don't want to spoil anything for those who haven't seen it.)

I dreamt last night that I'd decided to have all my hair shaved off (by a young woman who was shaving the head of another woman outside on a sidewalk). To prepare, I cut it all off myself, so it would be easier to shave with the electric clippers. But then I saw myself in the mirror and thought it looked really cool, so I considered forgoing the shave. For some reason, though, my hair had turned platinum blond, and the reason I thought I looked so hot is that my face had become Angelina Jolie's face. But I didn't realize that, so I just thought, "Wow, this haircut looks great on me!"

Does anyone have any thoughts on using a variegated yarn to make a lacey scarf? (I have enough Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport in Tuscany to make Wendy's Feather and Fan scarf.) Actually, what I'm really asking is, is it stupid to knit lace with variegated yarn? Will the colours just pool in weird ways and obscure the stitch pattern altogether?

I don't know if other people do this, but Alisons do it. When we meet another Alison, we ask "One L or two?" and then "An I or a Y?" and if our names are spelled the same, we say something like "Right on!" as though we can take credit for making an excellent choice. (This happened to me last night, but I swear I've had this exact conversation with every Alison/Allison/Alyson I've ever met.)

You might need a Pink Fix and not even know it! Go here to get one. Me, I get a pink fix every morning and evening these days, since the azaleas are in full bloom in the park near my office. I took some photos, so if there's a computer at my house tonight, I'll share them with you. The flower-to-green ratio with these azaleas is outrageous.

Hmm. I just had a moment where I honestly had no idea whether I'd had my lunch break yet or not. I had to look at the clock. Ah, yes, instant noodles two hours ago, that's right. OK, back on track now. I suppose I should do some work.

* I realize this is an awfully long post for someone who is hungover and schmeh, but I've actually been writing it off and on since I got to the office, oh, five hours ago. And it's taken a lot out of me. Is it nap time yet?

As a rule, I'm cheap thrifty. But sometimes I splash out and buy things like expensive monkey cookies. Go figure.

Since it is St. Patrick's Day, and since Jessica posted her knitting limerick,* I'll share mine, too.

One day Brainylady was knittin'
(Which she loved, so this scene is quite fittin'),
When her yarn -- it ran out!
And she was heard to shout,
"Crap! Yet more that my kitten has bitten!"

Jessica's is much better. What was yours? (Ten points to anyone who managed to work "from Nantucket" into his or hers...)

* There was a contest, see, on another blog.

Have you seen the latest sweaters in the knitblogging ring? Claudia's zip-up Rogue is awesome, and so is Erica's Banff. These make me wish I'd chosen red for my Must Have -- and of course that I could knit fast enough to keep up with all the beautiful things I see other people making! Plus there's Monica's Aran, which is just lovely.

(Oh, and Carrie looks adorable, as ever, but I'm just never, ever going to knit a pair of pants. You can quote me on that.)

I had some good knitting time this weekend. On Friday night, I cast on and finished the ribbing for the back of the Must Have cardie. (You may recall that I'd started one of the front pieces a couple of weeks back, but I've put that aside. I actually read a bit ahead in the pattern, and there was an instruction about when to start sleeve shaping -- when the front piece is as long as the back was when you started the shaping on the back piece. Uh...) Yesterday I worked on the Must Have first while watching High Art (in which Patricia Clarkson is brilliant as a washed-up drug-addicted German actress, and Ally Sheedy is just insanely sexy) on VCD (three for $4 if you don't mind Chinese subtitles!) and then later while watching Primal Fear (in which Edward Norton is just insane) on TV. I've done a little more than one full pattern repeat. I'm slow. Oh well. It's fun.

As well as the knitting, it was a good weekend. It involved laundry, some cleaning up of the back balcony (a.k.a. the outdoor laundry room), fun with Bea, reading in bed, enough sleep, beers with my second cousin (you're right, that is weird!), talking to my parents on the phone, Indian food, taking photos, chatting with taxi drivers, updating bits and pieces around the blog, and yellow watermelon. I hope you had a good one too.

(And hey, how cool is it that there seems to be another planet out there? I like it when Nature shows us that she'll always be the boss of us.)

Awww!



I used the Kittyville Lil' Devil Baby Hat pattern, Bernat Denim Style yarn (worsted, acrylic/cotton, super soft), and a 5mm circ. This hat is for the new baby girl of some acquaintances here, and I think it might be a bit too zany to give a red devil hat to someone you don't know all that well, don't you? (You never know how people feel about the devil!) So instead we'll give a green pompom lumberjack hat. Who wouldn't want one of these?

Bill made the amazing discovery a while back that when we put a folded towel on the desk, Beatrix will curl up and go to sleep instead of walking on the keyboard, standing in front of the screen, pushing pens onto the floor, etc. As I sit here blogging, here's the view to my left:



I think she's dreaming of shredding rolls of toilet paper. Ah, good times.

I haven't knit a stitch on my Must Have cardie since last weekend, but it's on the agenda for tonight. Bill's working, Bea's been fed, and this lady is going to watch TV and knit. You can click on the Must Have detail to see how both sleeves turned out:



You know about the British gardening club ladies who posed nude for a calendar to raise money, right? There's a similar group in Australia. They're so fabulous! It all started when a local hall needed new stage curtains, you see, and at a cost of about $5,000, the ladies figured that soup and sandwich luncheons just weren't going to cut it. So they got their kits off and made a calendar. Check out the gallery here; they clearly have good senses of humour. Why am I telling you about this? Well, because of these two particular shots: Knit one, purl one, drop one, OOPS! and Knit two together and cast off! Now, these are some sassy knitters. I'm certainly never going to look at "cast off" in a pattern the same way again. Hmm, anyone in for a knitbloggers calendar in the future? With strategically placed swatches?

Thanks so much for all your congratulations about my school news. Have a good Friday!

Great news! It's official: I've been accepted into grad school for this fall. I'll be going here to study this. I've been out of school for three years, and I can't wait to get back. (I've added a countdown to the left-hand column, so you can follow along at home. I predict the time will fly by and there will be much panicking starting in July.)

Good news! I finished an adorable little baby hat last night, and the baby I was knitting it for was born yesterday.

Bad news! No photo today, because Bill took our computer away for work yesterday and didn't bring it back last night. (Sheesh! I've tried to talk to him about priorities, but to no avail.)

A little inspiration for those taking part in the Audrey knit-along: "She's everybody's dream girl".

And for Rachael, who had some trouble at the DMV recently, this story will ring very true: "A long way to change a letter".

After an hour and a half in line I was designated a special case and given a number prefixed with a letter H. For the next two hours I watched the Hs nudge up slowly, thinking if this were a deli counter my cheddar cheese would have fully matured into stilton by the time I was served.

I'm hoping to show you a knitting photo tonight or tomorrow!

Hey, what's yer tattoo say?

I have five tattoos. My fourth, which I got in Montreal in 1994, is a line from "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats: "beauty is truth, truth beauty" (which continues "that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"). You can read the whole poem here. Like many of you probably did, I read this poem in my Grade 12 English Literature class, and it really made an impression on me. For several reasons, I decided to get the tattoo, and I've never regretted it. The only negative part is (some of) the attention from other people.

Strangers will touch me to try to read my arm, which always shocks me; maybe it's something like pregnancy that way, in that my body has become public property somehow. It came to bother me so much that for a couple of years I wouldn't go sleeveless, but I'm over that now. People also read it out loud and then say, "What does that mean?" I usually reply that it's from a poem and kind of hard to explain. Nine times out of time, that answer is sufficient.

I had it for three or four years before someone commented on it who actually knew what it was from: a waiter at a Vancouver restaurant said to me, seemingly out of the blue, "That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." I was blown away. Since then, maybe half a dozen strangers have expressed to me that they recognize the line. A few years ago, for example, Bill was playing in a golf tournament, and I was waiting for him in the bar. (Yeah, where would you be?) Another golfer, probably in his late fifties, started smiling at me; it turned out that he was a Keats fan, and not a creepy flirt. Always a nice surprise! When Bill and I were on an elephant ride in Thailand in 2002, a similar thing happened: a man I'd figured was creepy came out as a Keats buff.

But I continue to be surprised that so few people recognize the line. Maybe lots of people do, and they're the ones who leave me alone. Maybe they know it, and they think it's stupid. Who knows?

I'm thinking about all of this because of a feature in one of the Australian papers today: "Tattoo fleshes out the wise words of a poet". The writer had been at the beach and noticed a young woman with words tattooed on her back; she approached the woman and found out the words were a line of poetry by Ben Okri. Turned out the young woman was an interesting character. It's a good story.

p.s. I have to say I'm more than a little disappointed in the news that Charlize Theron will play a "bikini-clad assassin" in an upcoming film. Her role in Monster inspired no end of comments about the need for gritty, multifaceted roles for women in Hollywood, for opportunities for women to really act. Is anyone (actors, writers, studio execs) going to put their money where their mouths were after the Oscars?

p.p.s. Sadly, the body of Spalding Gray was found in the East River on Sunday. If you're not familiar with Mr. Gray's work, I'd recommend renting Swimming to Cambodia (1987, dir. Jonathan Demme) and/or Monster in a Box (1992, dir. Nick Broomfield). Smart, smart, funny guy.

Eighteen out of 24 ain't bad

I hardly knit at all this weekend. First of all, because I couldn't knit while watching 24, and between about eight o'clock Friday and midnight Sunday night, we watched eighteen episodes! We were like zombies: "Another one. Another one. Agghhhh." And we're still not through the longest day of Jack Bauer's life!

Aside from that, the skin on my index fingers, especially on my right hand, is extremely dry -- cracked-and-peeling dry. I'm afraid that knitting is making it worse, so I don't want to knit too much until it heals. (I did buy a pair of cotton gloves yesterday, so I'll try to knit with those on.) I'm using 100 percent wool, and I'm wondering if it is taking moisture and oils from my skin, since the worst spot on my finger is on the side of the top joint, along which the wool drags with every stitch. Has anyone else had a problem like this? I know that one of my knitting aunts uses a hemp-oil-based moisturizer on her hands. Does wool dry knitters' hands?

Anyway, all I did this weekend was start the left front of the Must Have. Just the ribbing and one repeat of the big diamond cable. It's all I want to knit, but a couple we know here are having a baby this month, so I'll take a break from the Must Have to whip up something for them.

Sometimes in movies, to signify boredom, a character pours salt onto a table and pushes it around with his or her finger, drawing in the salt. You know what I mean, right? OK, so imagine a similar scene, except instead of a diner, the setting is my hallway, and instead of a few teaspoons of salt, the medium is half a bag of kitty litter. The bored character? Well, of course, that would be Miss Beatrix, Kitty Litter Artist! Bill woke me up on Sunday morning with "You'd better come and take care of your cat." If it wasn't so funny, I would've been very mad. Bea was in the middle of the hallway, crouched on top of a small mountain of kitty litter, with a crazed look in her eyes. When she saw me, she froze, and then she tried to run, but she scrambled around in the kitty litter, sending grains of it flying in every direction as she tried to get some traction. Seems she had tipped the bag. I'm sure it was an accident... you betcha...

Happy International Women's Day!

I've probably mentioned before that the only English TV channels we have here are movies and CNN. I feel like I've missed so much TV over the past two years -- much of which I'm happy about (because I can resist a reality show about as well as Imelda Marcos could resist a shoe sale), but lots that I would've liked to have seen. So yesterday evening at the video store, when we spotted the first season of 24, we rented the first eight episodes. We watched six in a row last night! We were totally hooked. We watched the other two this morning and then went back to rent the next eight. Those of you who watched it on TV during the regular season: how could you wait a week between episodes?!

You know that Keifer Sutherland (the star of 24) is Canadian, right? Many Canadians are famous in the U.S. entertainment industry, as everybody knows. I'm one of those (surely annoying) people who always needs to point out that, yes, Keanu Reeves / Carrie Ann Moss / Neve Campbell / the guy who plays Ed is Canadian. ("Canada: We're not just Michael J. Fox and Most of the Funny People Who Have Ever Been on Saturday Night Live!") But Keifer Sutherland doesn't just happen to be from Canada. Americans may not know this: his grandfather, Tommy Douglas, was a founder of the socialist CCF party in Saskatchewan (which later became the left-wing New Democratic Party, which he also led) and is known in Canadian history books as the father of medicare.

Plus, Keifer's a big hottie. We Canadians feel protective of our hotties.

Hello Kotex!

Who was checking?

Provincial Govt in China scraps 'symmetrical breasts' rule

A provincial government in central China has scrapped a rule that its female civil servants must have "symmetrical breasts" after a public outcry.

Stop the tofurkey massacre!

Virulent Strain Of Soy Flu Traced To Single Tofurkey

SAN FRANCISCO--A virulent strain of soy flu has been traced to a single tofurkey at a Bay Area food-processing factory. "An investigation of Green Earth Foods has located the bird-shaped loaf of firm bean curd from which the infection originated," said Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "To prevent further spreading of the disease, all tofurkeys in Northern California are being quarantined and destroyed." Gerberding said it appears that the soy virus was not transmitted to the factory's Spaghetti & Wheatballs Microwaveable Entree division.

You guys are awesome. Thanks for all the (mostly terrible) jokes. Most of us have a groaner up our sleeve for occasions like that, don't we? Here's the one I always use:

Why don't cannibals eat clowns?
Because they taste funny!

I do feel quite a bit better today. I could even knit! So I did, and I finished the second sleeve of the Must Have. On to the front pieces; I'll save the back for last.

I am very, very pleased to announce that, as of this afternoon, I am free of my student loan. It was huge, and I've paid it off.

I graduated from university with a B.A. in the spring of 2001. I had spent five years on it (an extra year for Honours) and received student loans for the whole period. It was my choice not to get a job during the semesters I was at school; I wanted to be totally focused and have the time to do my best. I was lucky that loans were available, but mostly I was lucky that I finished my degree before Gordon Campbell became the premier of British Columbia. He was elected just months after I graduated, and one of the first things he did was to lift a six-year tuition freeze in the province. Since then, tuition fees have increased dramatically at B.C. universities and colleges -- many schools have raised tuition by around 70 percent, and a few by 150 percent. It is outrageous that postsecondary education has become less accessible than ever in British Columbia. How many people won't even consider going to college because of the high cost? Also, how many people will give up dreams of studying philosophy or art because they can't count on a high-paying job after university to enable them to pay back their loans? I came halfway around the world to pay mine. That's why I'm here in Taiwan. I had to leave the country.

The Canadian Federation of Students has set up a website specifically about tuition hikes in B.C. If you're from B.C., or even from Canada, you should write a letter to Mr. Campbell and let him know that he's so wrong on this. I just did. (But don't mention Hawaii or drunk driving -- he's still a little sensitive about that.) (God, what an asshole.) (Sorry, Mom.)

I'm sick. Wicked sore throat, swollen glands, tired head. I didn't go to work; spent the day reading and snoozing, not knitting. I was a little worried about work, since I slept all morning and didn't call in until eleven to say I was sick. So when my phone rang a few minutes later, and it was the manager, I was nervous. It went like this:

Boss: This is Art Vandalay.* I hear you have pain in your throat. OK, this is what we do.
Me: [gulp -- I'm not going to get paid for a sick day since I called so late...]
Boss: Green tea. Make some green tea, and let it sit so it's not too hot, and you want to gargle...

Does anyone want to tell me a joke or a funny story? I'd love that.

* In case you never watched Seinfeld, this is not really my boss's name. His name is actually really funny, but you think I want to get fired?

This weekend was such a drag...

There was a going-away party on Saturday night for a friend who is moving to Bangkok. Another friend, Jon, took the opportunity to get dolled up as his alter-drag-ego Magnolia. The transformation took place at my friend Danny's place over two or three hours. When I arrived, there had already been eyebrow shaping, and Tony (how helpful to have friends who are professional makeup artists!) was applying foundation. Here we are at just the first bit of eye makeup:



Many layers, lashes, and vodkas later, and we headed out to the bar, where a private room had been booked. Upon arrival, Magnolia prepared to be admired. She ended up looking something like a futuristic Myra Hindley:



(I'm sure I'm committing some kind of drag blasphemy here, but I just have to share this photo. We're not supposed to know it, of course, but sometimes even a drag queen must do something so pedestrian as visiting the ATM.)

I'm off to bed. Very, very tired, want to snuggle with Bea. I can't believe she's only been with us for two months -- I think she's settling in well, don't you?