it started out as helping a friend.
it was fun, most of the time... so I kept helping.
most never knew that technically, I didn't belong.
"who cares about that?" you snorted; well... if I say yes to you, ppl will start to care.
"if you can't do it, I don't know who else can."
我的自以為是和責任感果真是太容易戳中的死穴啊 哈哈哈
2 weeks ago, I joined in on a birthday brunch and spent a lovely afternoon with four intelligent and beautiful ladies. The birthday girl hooked me up with a book she recently read called "The Four Agreements".
This might sound like another one of those self-help books that you'd never be caught flipping through in a bookstore, but it actually helps us to self-reflect because they are very simple guidelines that we know by heart but too often forget to follow.
1. Be impeccable with your words.
2. Don't take anything personally.
3. Don't make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.
太晚看到了... 不然還挺想考考看
http://www.mofa.gov.tw/webapp/content.asp?cuItem=37629&mp=1
只是我應該到了第二階段(口譯)就會被刷掉吧 XD
那種東西不練是不行的...
In August '02, I was sitting in an air-conditioned studio, watching my boyfriend and his band struggle with this melody for over 20 minutes.
In February '09, this song came back to me in a MSN dialogue that got me through another night of OT.
Nowadays, it is one of the most-played songs on my MP3 as I count down the days to the embarkment of a new stage in my life--a stage that had been on idle mode for quite a while, until you came and jolted it into motion.
I was sitting at the sandwich bar where our friend was on her final shift, dining on a nicely tossed Greek salad, when this song came blasting out of the stereo (plugged to the iPod that belonged to one of the boys who worked there). I thought of you, and something you wrote me not long ago. You might like to refer to that as "meaninglessness", but I've worn it on my heart since.
"Discipline does not 'hang on the mouth'... sacrifices have to be made."
Tonight, I successfully put together a feast of 7 dishes with 2 bottles of Japanese sake that I picked out RANDOMLY and to my own surprise was really good and sent my coworkers home with their taste buds pampered and their stomachs satisfied. :D
菜單: 菠菜炒蛋, 泡菜炒豬肉, 炸雞軟骨, 煎餃, 豚骨拉麵, 秋刀魚烤明太子, 鱈魚奶油燒 (all proved to be a great fit to the sake I ordered!!)
酒單: 天之戶吟釀 (甜中帶嗆), 良志純米酒 (偏甜)
I spent about 5 mins staring at the fridge trying to decide over the 7 kinds of sakes... and when I finally made my 2 choices, the 老闆娘 took one look and said: 「お客さん、じょうずですね～ 」(日文: 您真內行) Waaaaaaah~~~ hey you, the guy who taught me how to pick out sake even if I knew nothing about it-- maybe I should call you 師父 now... hahahahaha!!
Both Sides Now
She insists that only music moves her, but A-MEI is a Taiwanese voice reverberating in China
All A-Mei wants to do is sing, sweetheart, use that smoke 'n' sugar voice of hers to deliver a tune. The Taiwanese pop star doesn't much care about lyrics, just the mood-ring colors her music conjures up. Today, sitting in a candle-filled studio in Taipei where she's recording her next album, A-Mei is straining for a color, and she has the precise shade in mind. The background music is low funk, and A-Mei hums her way up the spectrum, eyes closed, past turquoise, sapphire and lapis lazuli. No words, just a husky voice scatting along until it settles into the perfect note—a sultry, soulful shade you would see at midnight.
"Did I make you feel blue, baby?" A-Mei opens her round eyes and fixes them on her guitarist. "Because I want you to feel like you've been swallowed up by blueness." The guitarist assures A-Mei that he does indeed feel that particular shade, not least because he's been caught in the A-Mei vortex—a sexy, impish gaze that leaves men feeling, well, a little blushed. "Mission accomplished," she says, leaning forward to blow out a candle. "Tomorrow I want to sing red, the color of a cut when it first bleeds. And after that, green, like wet grass."
But music is not just an abstraction in A-Mei's world: it's one of the great uniters of China and the little renegade island it half despises and very much wants to absorb—A-Mei's native Taiwan. When a Taiwanese singer evolves into a pop star, his or her main audience is across the strait in megalopolises and villages throughout the vast mainland. Fame and popularity have proved that to A-Mei. What the 29-year-old singer has also learned is that what unites can divide, that her songs can acquire shades of meaning she never intends, that a mere song can hurt, alienate, maybe cause a war when, as W.H. Auden wrote, " ... each ear/ Is listening to its hearing, so none hear." "I just want to sing," says A-Mei. "But everyone keeps connecting my music to the future of Taiwan and China." And that's how it's going to be: music joins the sundered parts of Greater China. Someone—in this case A-Mei—has to sing the songs.
A-Mei was born in the rugged mountains of eastern Taiwan, as a tribal princess of the Puyuma clan of aborigines. Making up just 2% of the island's population, Taiwan's aborigines have been reduced to kitschy tribal song and dance at ethnic theme parks. City folk disparage them as drunks and hookers—the disenfranchised underbelly of Taiwan. But historically, the Puyuma have always used song to communicate their deepest feelings, and A-Mei sang the loudest of all, quickly rising from small-time ethnic performer to pop-chart diva for the entire Chinese-speaking world. Proud of her native roots, A-Mei incorporated tribal rhythms into some of her pop songs, like Sister, which celebrates the matriarchal aboriginal society.
Time: March 21, 3 AM
Place: Primo, Taipei
so the three of us came out of the nightclub, and between getting breaths of fresh air that we haven't had since 11PM, we were pondering on the idee of going to 永和豆漿 for late nite snack, when i noticed this guy standing about 10 feet away in a baseball cap, black rimmed glasses, t-shirt, and jogging pants, who looked oddly familiar...
and then i saw them--2 small but unmistakable steel loops for earrings. no, he wasn't an aquaintance, but he was someone whose work i have admired for quite a while.
i nudged c. "look behind you," i said. "do you see that guy in the baseball cap? is he 范逸臣?"
