ones and zeroes

This blogpost is more appropriately titled "Things I Like and Things I Don't Like."

Let's start with the thorns, then on with the roses. I do not like wasting money. I am too Chinese to enjoy expensive things. As Oliver Z. so succinctly said today, as we drove home from a perfectly lovely and frugal night of teetotaling and one $4.75 + $1 tip (note I kept the quarter) gin and tonic, for him and for me, respectively, "Five dollar food tastes the same as twenty dollar food." Which is why I found a $22 plate of sashimi to be offensive, no matter how geometrically avant-garde the plate that it came on was, and why I found the mandatory dinner at the partner's bachelor pad to be excessive. People have planes, Fiji Island-hopping vacations, personal chefs, and nannies. I am SO HAPPY to be a cheap fucking bastard who prefers the company of dogs to lawyers because if I wanted any of those things, then I would feel compelled to work my way up the corporate ladder and also to express polite awe at all the nice things that all the people higher up on the hierarchy have, and then I would be stuck for the rest of my life feeling afraid to feel how I truly feel, which is generally inappropriate at all times.

As it is, I just say things like "I am taking a vaccine for typhoid that prevents me from drinking!" (which is not, technically, untrue) and "I unfortunately have plans for the next 725 nights so I cannot make it to Santana Row for an evening of drinking with strangers made progressively less awkward by top-shelf liquor" (which is also not untrue, since I have plans to work on my reclusivity for the next 725, hell, 72,500 nights) - and I have successfully avoided all but one mandatory summer social event, and besides I attended that one with my dear sweet little Stephanie and we hid from the others and watched the otters by ourselves at the Central Park Zoo.

It's not that I think the people are incredibly bland and boring - I mean, I do think they are bland and boring, because one must make oneself that way in order not to rock any boats, but that's not the reason I don't want to hang out. I don't want to hang out because wasting money makes me sick. I'm serious, I feel ill putting a piece of gajillion dollar morsel into my mouth. I don't appreciate fine or fancy things - except you, my dear - I just think about how the value of those fancy things could pay for, say, rent, or a week of modest groceries at Food Bazaar with some produce from Chinatown thrown in for health, or a year of forced piano lessons for a hateful brat I will raise in the future. Anything else, besides fermented shit or thinly sliced shit or decanted shit. When you eat expensively, you are pouring your money down your mouth. Do you know what that is? You are literally turning your money into shit.

I also do not like smiling when conversing with strangers, or craning my head to look into the eyes of tall, blonde-eyebrowed men while having those conversations. The temptation to look at the eyebrow-apparitions is too great to overcome, and it is, I fear, the equivalent of talking at someone's boobs.

Now onto the roses - what I do like. I like, tremendously, being able to select one's social activities. I like that Sonia and Oliver and Connie and Connie's nice friend Sarah offered me an escape from the partner's apartment, which I looked forward to all night. In the bathroom of the partner's apartment, I slapped my face with water and actually did the F.Y.C. motion (Focus Your Chi, closing your fingertips into a bunch at chest level while breathing in) and made myself breathe quietly for a few seconds while thinking, "I can leave soon. I can leave soon. I can leave soon." And then I contorted my mouth into a yellowing smile and returned to scallops and shiraz at a canoe-shaped glass table. At the first moment I could, I bolted and met up with S & O & C & S at a karaoke bar in the Castro, where a nice gay boy patted me on the shoulder and said, "Great job!" after Sonia and I sang a show-stopping or at least just very embarassing version of "Listen to Your Heart" to a disinterested crowd of moderately attractive people. We plotted our MOKA performance, which will remain mostly secret on this blog so as to preserve the surprise factor, but which I will say will include rewriting the APALSA Constitution and/or crooning Teresa Teng songs, possibly with a country-western accent. Sonia, because she makes all other type As look like type Zs, has already committed us to a grueling practice and rehearsal schedule, to be executed without food, water, or stretching. Connie will apparently play the zither, and Oliver's main task will be to hate white people.

This is what I feel like every time I go directly from doing something I can barely stand to doing something I like doing: desperate love for the people who make the latter possible. The IRCers found this very amusing after I started my firm job because I suddenly began expressing eternal devotion, but all of it is sincere, friends. You put edges on otherwise dull days, and because of that I will always be grateful for your company. Thank you for not being boring-ass people!