I was making fun of NPY on account of his Chinese dollar store slippers when he explained how he came to acquire them.
Me: Those are such dorky slippers. You’re such a dork.
Him: Do you know why I got them? It’s got your name on it.
Me: Wha? It says… uhm… feng. Wha?
Him: Yeah. In English, “wind”. Wynd.
Me: Aww! You’re so sweet. And still a dork!
You might see me posting more in this fashion because NPY got me a pretty little present for our two-year anniversary. To protect it, of course I …

With last month’s travel*, I managed to blaze through two memoir-like books taking place in times and places I wouldn’t personally know. Yet with my upbringing, the Chinese and Buddhist cultural aspects are somewhat familiar.
I couldn’t quite suspend my disbelief when reading Xinran’s Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet. That is, I wasn’t entirely convinced that Xinran met the woman, Shu Wen, who lived for 30 years in Tibet. At one point, Shu Wen, well on the way to having a large and convoluted story, recaps the epic …

I had only two simple tasks in the evening on my way home:1. Drop off three library books, of which 2.02 of them were unread, and borrow Bloodletting again, a copy other than mine was available.2. Read the last 2% of Kitchen Confidential at the nearby bookstore.
What actually happened:1. It took 30 minutes instead of 15 to leave the downtown peninsula. Thank you untimely construction/narrowing of major downtown streets.2. Found the copy of “Bloodletting”.3. And I also found The Birth House, a novel about turn-of-the-century midwifery in Nova …

I kind of noticed that there was increased activity at my 2-year-old Flickr picture of lucky red packets. Why now?
It turns out that it was selected to appear on a Flickr blog entry about Chinese New Year, a blog to which, obviously, I do not subscribe. It’s still their most recent entry! :D

At the end of the most draining day, a couple of co-workers and I forsaked Friday afternoon beers to geek out in the biggest way.
I came across them to see they had lined up their laptops side-to-side and were comparing their Chinese Windows – Taiwanese version vs. Mainland Chinese version. Without question, I sided with the TW version. ;) They use traditional characters.
This lead to me quizzing them at writing the most complicated characters I could think of, debating the aesthetic merits of traditional characters, …

I am getting so old my idea of comfortable shoes are these platypus-like urban shoes that I broke out from the closet as a new item of clothing to wear on the first day of the new lunar year. I think my hair is making a thinner ponytail than ever before, and yesterday I couldn’t read the words on a screen not five feet away albeit under dim conditions.
I’m not normally a superstitious person (except when it comes to “sport” I guess) but I do observe certain Chinese …

i remember long ago watching an interview with a chinese actor wherein the interviewer asked how the actor learned to speak such good english – “from watching police academy movies!”maybe that stuck so well with me because i was was also watching police academy movies at the time. but if someone were to ask how i learned chinese, i could flippantly answer, “from watching cross-border daddy! (爸爸兩地走)”
i wouldn’t normally indulge in a soap drama but this is “educational” and – what luck – got to start watching from the …

presented with a simplified character that you don’t know (and no accompanying pinyin pronunciation), it’s not possible to look it up in a dictionary by radical/stroke count.
so, when i encountered a new word, i would write on an index card clustering simplified words by their stroke counts and “translate” to my beloved traditional characters. yeah, i’m a geek.