윤

First dream of the year, at least that I can recall, was about a missing girl whose suitors seemed to care less about her mental health and whereabouts than their own poor experiences with her: David Barreiro complained about being led on, and another character I felt was based upon the Terry Silver baddie in the latest season of Cobra Kai (whose six hours or so I binged in half that time by skipping the through the new kid’s subplot) continued to pursue revenge wearing special clue-gathering spectacles. Me, I was looking for a Lego car I had left in her place, which I eventually did inside a box or coat pocket; it wasn’t a set piece but built with standard gray and clear bricks and carried some sentimental significance.

In the other, I had been married previously, twice in fact, and never formalized our divorces, though my last wife was decent enough not to make it a big deal.

No wonder I don’t remember this one from Saturday mornings, it’s just a rehash of the epic Executioners from Shaolin (with Lo Lieh quasi-reprising a similar villain he played 3 years prior after amazingly another 73 films), though Kara Hui demonstrates excellent form in her mentor role. She still looks great, while poor Gordon Liu might provide a glimpse of my future beside my own young auntie.

Maybe there is something to this law gig.

There was a moment in my catching-up of Lost last night (or would that be catching-back, as the show’s already over), during a fifth-season episode called “LaFleur” where Sawyer’s trying to convince Juliet to stay on the island and the next scene’s of them living together three years later—as confusing as the back-and-forth must’ve been to temporal laymen, I for one found the dating transitions unnecessary and an artistic hindrance—I realized the appeal to me, the idea that time is not so much an illusion, but more a matter of perspective; my memory takes me back to a point when I pitched far less charming proposals to the woman who is now feeding our child. Sure, you say, it’s narrative manipulation to the tune of omitting bathroom breaks on 24, or just catering to my attention deficit, but knowing that each excruciating second of him crying will lead someday to his graduation from school and beyond makes them all so bearable.

Had a dream we were by the ocean, overlooking it as we did at that stop in 宜蘭, and there was a giant turtle near the shore. It swam behind a smaller one, and when it got close enough, gobbled it up. 老婆 was preoccupied with her relatives and wasn’t listening to me when I told her about it, and wandered into the water …only to be swallowed whole herself. I was horrified, and yelled something to the effect of give me back my wife, but stopped short of throwing myself at the creature, as little as I could conceivably do without a weapon against its rock-like hide. Upon waking I re-considered; I probably should have. After all, not everyone gets a trial run at the life (albeit a lonely one, as a practical-minded coward)-or-certain death decision when faced with a giant turtle who’s just eaten your loved one.

Stupid idea to have 波霸奶茶 on the way back, again, so I’m up; might as well get in my problem with a bilingual children’s book with said title (subbed “The White Snake Saga/A Dragon Boat Festival Tale”) I read at a bookstore near Taipei station—then another, to clear it up, to no avail—which, as it happens is one of many takes on an ancient Chinese fairy tale: Xu-Xian already lives happily enough with his beautiful wife Lady White and her servant Little Green. Lady White suggests he open a pharmacy; the town falls ill and as their only supplier of the cure, they become rich. [There’s no hint of insider trading, at least not in the English version.] Xu-Xian goes to the local temple to thank the gods for his fortune, when the Buddhist monk Fa-Hai warns him that his wife and her servant are monsters. He’s given realgar to reveal their true forms.

Back home incredulous Xu-Xian uses it and they become a huge White snake and small Green one, respectively. He passes out, and comes to later to the familiar sights of Lady White and Little Green, who explain that he’s sick. Xu-Xian returns to the monk, who insists they are lying and offers to hide him in the temple.

Lady White storms the temple like in any good Shaw Bros. movie, demanding her husband, and rather unsubtly throws a flood at it, the water full of shrimp and crabs yelling “Yeh-ho, yeh-ho!” [The Chinese only had the single “Yeh-ho.”] Fa-Hai shrugs the waters off and they destroy the village of Zhenjiang instead.

God, in the singular, is quite irate with all the commotion and sends the wonderfully-named Thunder King and Lightning Queen to punish Lady White. Fa-Hai intervenes, persuades the all-knowing that because she’s with child to grant her a reprieve until it’s born …then bury her in the Gold Purple Bowl under Thunder Peak Pagoda.

Years later, Xu-Xian [the drawing has his faithful dog by his side, and it’s great, he’s got a old mustache and is smoking a pipe] and his son visit the pagoda to pray, and afterwards a cloud of smoke arises in the shape of a woman. Xu-Xian cries, is reminded of his time with Lady White, then realizes the secret of happiness and smiles—now I forget the exact order, as my RAM was pushed to the limits with the spelling of “Yeh-ho”, but it’s either critical to understanding the moral of the story and I failed miserably, or you, too, see why I’m expecting to be at a loss when explaining it to my child someday. He’s glad to have his memories, but not his wife by his side all this time, making new ones while living and raising their child together? Because she was not only hot (and came with a cute handmaiden), but an awesome snake-monster with cool powers?

Not done much bloggin’ lately, but not for lack of subject matter. There was Comic-Con, our first anniversary, and, er, my completion of BST relic. And I never did continue my crime story, mostly because I couldn’t be moved to extract the right screenshot from my now decorative PS2. (In case I don’t before such a real-life circumstance befalls me, it turns out that rice-eater Will was seduced by 老婆 to get rid of her videogame-playing husband, but when he couldn’t go through with it, lovelorn Alice completed the task.)

[Thanks to my new Superfriends lunch gang at work, I’ve come up with details to flesh out my premise for that SVU-based fanfic to parallel my own, ah, rich life experience.]

In the criminal justice system, sexually-based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.

BENSON: You’re gonna love this, Elliot. Second case in the past two seaso—years. Victim is an Asian male, age indeterminate (between the dyed hair and the comic books on his shelves), found cold in front of a videogame.
STABLER: So he played until he died, I’ve heard that’s happening a lot lately.
WARNER: Yes, but that smell of urine from his pants? Usually these hardcore players at least keep a bucket handy. His pants are stained from it, but the floor’s clean. And his hands may be placed on the keyboard now, but roll up the sleeves, those ligature marks indicate that they’ve been bound recently. This man probably died elsewhere, and was moved here.
FIN: Seems all this online gaming stuff is just openin’ up whole new worlds for people to kill each other over.

[Opening credits. Break for commercial.]

Last week’s experience with Redbox was the last straw: $1.07 (or $1.08, depending on where the higher taxes round to now) does not factor in the drive time and mileage between locations with faulty machines, 2/3 among the nearest Albertsons. A ratio only to worsen. So 老婆, she of the torrents and myself more at home on the Amazon, we decided finally to take the plunge—see what I’m doing here with the metaphors; it’d impress in high school English—and become a Netflix couple, which is surely some salient stage of household settlement.

I moved the Xbox to the big TV from the small monitor where it’d been running FFXI, and poorly at that, though the fault there’s less in the hardware than lazy programming from SquareEnix. That the app requires paid Gold membership, however, I’m not forgiving. Fuck them, a 48-hour code from 남재 proved streaming through Live (even with DD-WRT priority over a wired connection) is no superior to just hooking up my notebook on WiFi; in fact, Ping Pong Playa jumped after a ten-minute pause into YouTube resolution …speaking of which, that Jimmy Tsai sure looks like 송강호’s son. Oh, and those two White devils? Ted & Emmett from Queer as Folk.

Even Batman made it look more real (was that from The Cult, I can’t remember): 5+ years as an addict and he’s over it in fifteen minutes, less commercials, then gets the chick. And the Chase-Cameron storyline has it looking like married life is harder. Besides, I liked having Amber around as an anthropomorphic—in science fiction, the kind that’s at least upfront about being out there, she’d be a hologram or whatever they were in Battlestar Galactica—representation of the brilliant mind’s emotional conflicts and deductive processes. What now, they explain her away as a figment of sexual frustration?