What I want to be when I grow up

I have this fantastical idea to open a brothel in the Wan Chai area of Hong Kong in the vein of "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." You know, with random musical numbers interspersed with prostitutes screwing men and the police screwing everyone.

I envision men lined up in a waiting area as the women, dressed in tacky Frederick's of Hollywood lingerie, sing and dance into view.

I'm from Manila, and it's such a thrilla to be filla'd by your cock. Give me money, honey, and don't forget to watch the clock. What a shame that those dames from the US of A want to pay their own way, your manhood they did slay. But now you're here, don't you fear, for your dong will be taken care of in the Koooooong.

And if that doesn't work? A cheese factory run by transsexuals in the Blauwestad area of the Netherlands.

No one appreciates my vision.

Who will babysit the babysitters?

Not long after the September 11, 2001, attacks, I noticed the first crop of "no photography" signs pop up on the bridges connecting New Jersey and Staten Island. Because if Mohammed is prevented from taking a still shot of a bridge, then surely members of the al-Qaeda base camp can't figure out how to search Google or Flickr for similar images taken prior to the attacks and our nation's infrastructure will be safe. Hallelujah.

Nevermind that a real terrorist mastermind likely discovered that you can take photos and video discreetly, using spy-type equipment available for purchase online (using untraceable stolen credit cards).

From there, this false-sense-of-security obsession spread like the plague, infecting any location that conceivably could be a terrorist target: government buildings, private banks, train stations, malls, petting zoos. Emboldened by what they erroneously thought the Patriot Act and other federal/state laws contained, cops and rent-a-cops alike descended upon photographers, demanding to know why these potential terrorists thought they had the right to record events and places in a post-9/11 world. And if law enforcement didn't like the answers, demanding that memory cards be erased or cameras confiscated to ensure no "sensitive" information appeared on them.

Being here in Hong Kong, thousands of miles away from "home," it's surreal to watch the government-backed slow death of the freedoms that Fox News and right-wing blogs claim the terrorists want to steal from us and that soldiers are dying to protect. Hong Kong is a mostly autonomous part of China, a nation that isn't exactly known for its liberal and democratic stances, but it's practically a crime here to not have a camera with you at all times, documenting every aspect of your life and capturing snippets of other lives in the background.

Although photography is just a hobby for me, I routinely carry three cameras in my messenger bag: a Canon IXUS 860 IS (because of its video-recording ability)，a Canon EOS 400D (because of the image quality), and a Lomo Diana (because, well, I'm a nerd). I take photos of everything, and so does everyone else.

Most restaurants I go to here, someone is taking macro shots of their meal. With the message from the U.S. government that we must report suspicious activity, without ever defining what constitutes suspicious, how would an American react to someone taking close-ups of their Bloomin' Onion? Assume the person was doing reconnaissance for an elaborate food bioterrorism attack aimed at chain restaurants?

And it started with the tomatoes...

The crackdown has become so meta that when Fox's Washington, DC affiliate was doing a story at Union Station about photographers being harassed and told photo-taking was not allowed (untrue), a security guard interrupted the reporter's interview with an Amtrak official to warn them that videography was not allowed.

And now hundreds of law enforcement officers, firefighters, paramedics and even utility workers have been trained as "Terrorism Liaison Officers," on the lookout for suspicious activity and reporting their findings into a secret government database.

Taking photos or videos can be deemed suspicious because "surveillance is a precursor to terrorist activity," said Colorado State Patrol Sgt. Steve Garcia in an interview with the Denver Post.

Sure, in the movies.

In the movies, swarthy tourists taking photos on a car ferry in Washington state would be the buildup to a climatic explosion that kills hundreds. In reality, they're just fucking tourists.

Not allowing photography, confiscating laptops at customs, and encouraging people to spy on one another are setting up the populace for acceptance of a police state, where there's no transparency and if you're a good citizen, what do you have to hide anyway?

Link:
Know your rights

This photo disturbs me

Well, these photos side-by-side are disturbing. Is it just me?

Misery loves comedy

Somewhere between New Jersey and Hong Kong, I lost a box of comic books. Maybe it was the universe's or Tober Logistics's way of telling me to grow up and start making purchases from the New York Times best-seller list.

While most of the comics were ones I hadn't read in years, there were a few still in rotation, including Ivan Brunetti's Schizo.

Jim Hanley's Universe introduced me to Brunetti's work when I was in high school and going through the whole insufferable no-one-can-possibly-understand-the-degenerate-thoughts-going-on-in-
my-mind-dear-God-when-is-this-public-education-torture-going-to end phase. His comics appealed to my skewed perspective on the world, and the taboo-shattering subject matter helped me feel comfortable in my skin because from where I stood, it seemed like no one else experienced the self-loathing and painful self-awareness that consumed much of my day.

As I got older, experienced more of life than what my depressing hometown could offer and slowly retreated from living inside of my head, I turned to Schizo more and more to remind myself of that dark period and how easy it would be to fall back into comfortable misery if I didn't keep focusing on the good aspects of my life and how I could improve it even more.

I've been all over Hong Kong trying to track down even one issue of the comic, but I haven't succeeded, so it looks like I'll need to order the anthology from Amazon -- or liberate the inner misanthrope I've suppressed for the past few years.

What's great about flame cooking

When I owned a house with a spacious kitchen, a stainless-steel oven with four burners and every KitchenAid product known to man, I cooked almost every night.

Then I moved to Hong Kong, where two people can barely fit into my kitchen and there is no oven, only a stovetop with two burners, and it's often more expensive and inconvenient to cook at home than to call or dine out.

So, God bless Towngas, Hong Kong's monopolistic gas supplier, who thoughtfully included a brochure of "flame-broiled healthy soup" recipes with the latest utility bill to encourage me to use my limited cooking resources and to ignite my passion for life.

While I've long been a slave to the oven, Towngas explains that "flame is an ideal medium for boiling soup as the excellent heat control helps to extract the essence of ingredients giving a high nutritional value and a good taste." And here I'd been using the flame mostly to fry bacon.

Their go-to person in this edition of Towngas Healthy Living is Lee Wai Ling, a "happy person who enjoys studying natural, effective and economical methods of skin care." And with my skin suffering in the city's oppressive humidity, I'm grateful for her tips "so that all ladies can lead a contented, beautiful and healthy life."

City people, you see, "generally lack of exercises which would slow down metabolism" and thus, "excretion mechanism of people is not functioning well." To combat this, one should eat glabrous greenbrier soup because it's "good for excreting excess liquid in our body and makes you feel lighter."

With ingredients including glabrous greenbrier, candied dates, and pig's tail, it's "suitable for all the family members."

But if your metabolism is in tip-top shape and you're excreting excess liquids normally, you might want to try wood fungus lean pork soup instead. This soup is good for osteoporosis, high cholesterol and constipation, and the wood fungus "is kind of natural food which nourishes are skin and blood."

Please note, if you're suffering from an illness, any illness, "keep having the soup for 3 months; have 1 bowl of soup before meal in the morning and at night everyday." Your health will be strengthened if you follow this routine three times per week.

And now you too can "enjoy wonderful flame-boiled soup with all your family and friends"!

What the 'uck?

My "f" key doesn't work. If you see an "f," I copied and pasted a borrowed one from other text. Luckily, I discovered I don't use many words with that letter. And those that I do tend to be spoken rather than written and accompanied by hand gestures. The now-missing "f" key, which I removed to try to fix the problem, is a testament to the way in which I treat that category of possessions I refer to as "stuff."

Stuff is anything that required a cash, credit card or bartering transaction to acquire and to which I have no sentimental connection. Stuff is my laptop, my iPod Shuffle, my knock-off messenger bag, my shoe collection, my sheets, my clothes, my abandoned car... stuff is anything I can put a monetary value on. Because that's about the only value I place on it.

Not that I'm one of those people who wants to take down the capitalist swine and spend my remaining days camped out in a yurt, but having grown up with an alcoholic father with a wicked temper and who occasionally took out his anger on my possessions, I learned early on to not get too attached to stuff.

Since I started writing this blog entry about a month ago (and got sidetracked), dealing with that laptop became very Black Knightish. Every number except 5 and 6 stopped working. The QWERTY keys soon followed. That didn't deter me. I bought a USB keyboard. Then I couldn't right-click. I bought a USB mouse. Then the laptop stopped booting unless it was charged for two days.

I gave in, but I didn't go down without a fight. It was a hassle installing XP on that laptop last year, and I didn't want to go through the process again.

Now I'm here with an Asus I bought on the cheap (because, you know, it's just stuff) that is going to require a Herculean effort if I want to force XP onto it. Technology, what's it good for if I can't use it the way I want to?

Shine on, you crazy Magna Carta

As a native of Trenton, NJ, first, I'd like to apologize for the existence of US Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Alito.

Today, the Magna Carta, which gave us the writ of habeas corpus, is 793 years old.

The US founding fathers considered habeas corpus essential to the liberty of citizens of a free nation and to prevent tyranny by the state, but since the September 11, 2001, attacks, the right to habeas corpus has been under attack itself by the Bush administration and its cowardly lapdogs.

In the US justice system, an accused person appears before a judge to determine whether there are grounds for continued and legal detention, and a prisoner may petition the court or judge for a writ of habeas corpus.

In 2006, both houses of Congress approved and Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, a bill that would suspend habeas corpus for any person determined to be an "unlawful enemy combatant."

On June 12, 2008, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Boumediene v. Bush that terror suspects detained by the United States in Guantanamo Bay detainment camp have the right to seek a writ of habeas corpus in US Federal Court.

Can you believe the nerve of the liberal justices on the Court? Don't they realize that the Bush administration is discarding both the law and spirit of the Constitution to save us from terrorists?

Like Justice Scalia said in his blistering dissent in this case: "The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed," and "Today the Court warps our Constitution."

Because when I wake up the morning, my first thought is: Will Obama bin-Laden al-Zawahiri get me today? With NYC a playground for most of my friends and family, I can't help but allow fear to rule my life. What if today is the day that Islamic foot soldiers infiltrate Chinatown and slip ricin into the soup at New York Noodletown? Dear God, what if? I can't even imagine. Who will save us from this threat?

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, of course, who said of the decision: "These are people who are not citizens. They do not and never have been given the rights that citizens in this country have."

Bless George W. Bush and his friends for having the strength and resolve to look past the principles upon which this country was founded, and... ah, fuck, forget it. I can't do this.

The country has no hope.

Fist jab of death

For my first post-college job, I worked as a technical writer for a large defense contractor that was implicated in the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. My position didn't involve orchestrating naked pyramids but creating interactive and print manuals for a system designed to prevent soldiers from killing each other in friendly-fire incidents. Occasionally, the tediousness was punctuated with moments of editor-nerd excitement, such as reading a manual on what I guess could be described as Guerilla Warfare for Dummies and discovering a page was missing, leaving a soldier with a half-made makeshift incendiary weapon.

The work itself was dull, with endless meetings on how we could build a dynamic new product for the modern technological age when the military was stuck in the past with its Netscape 4.x and its do-over scripting of the Millennium Challenge 2002, so it was my co-workers who made me wake up in the morning and commute 120 miles roundtrip.

The former Mormon who drank almost a case of Pepsi each day and ended almost every conversation with, "Can you believe they pay us to do this?"

The middle-aged woman who embraced both Jesus and open-toed sandals with stockings and whose husband was fired from his various jobs for stealing and was obsessed with porn and whose young son was suspended from school for diddling himself in class.

The boss who could never remember my last name or how much vacation time I'd taken (or if I'd taken a vacation at all) and rarely returned to the office after his liquid lunches with the client's administrative assistant.

While the personalities were diverse in the manifestation of their eccentricities, the thread that held together the organization was the forwarded urban legend and often-racist emails that everyone except us undercover liberal-types enjoyed. And even though it's been years since I worked for that company, I still get these emails from former co-workers, and Obama's run for the presidential office has given them ample fuel.

Is he a Muslim? Is he the Antichrist? Or is he... the Muslim Antichrist?

Commentary from two emails about Obama forwarded to me from a former co-worker, an elderly Italian-American woman who could have been an extra in "Goodfellas" with her neon eyeshadow and platinum hair: "Boy, this idiot must be paying off a lot of the News Media which has not reported an eighth of what this Muslim, AntiChrist has done. Our country is now on the bottom of the totem pole. All of the other countries have surpassed us by a thousand miles. What a shame on what has happened to America which was once Number 1 in the entire universe," and "Can you imagine this Muslim and Racist Wife in the White House. Let's make sure that he doesn't come within 1000 feet of it. He is the Anti-Christ and I will continue to say this. He is out to destroy the world along with his anti-american wife. What a farce this is."

Unless I turn on CNN or CNN Headline News or seek out political websites, it's easy to avoid what's going on in the battle for the White House, and it's the path I've chosen to take because the level of ignorance displayed by such a vocal minority of Americans and the ever-lowering standards of the media to cater to this relatively small (but squeaky-wheelish) group are depressing. Not that Americans are necessarily any more ignorant than anyone else -- I mean, the majority of Koreans genuinely believe in fan death -- but our ignorance has greater consequences for the world than if tens of millions of people refuse to sleep with an electric fan on in a sealed room.

And the ignorant are crawling out of the woodwork in droves now that a black man, a black man with Muslim ties, has a real chance at making U.S. political history. The accusations lobbed at Obama are hilarious and entertaining from afar and in emails from an aging gumar but disturbing when one realizes the following shit is actually playing on mainstream American TV channels:

My Palawan vacation in brief

It's an iffy prospect when my husband and I plan a vacation. After nearly 15 years together off-and-on, from high school until our current Hong Kong adventure, sometimes I feel like I'm married to his 90-something-year-old grandfather.

He can be a crotchety, get-off-my-lawn-you-damn-kids, gonna-take-a-nap-after-eating-some-dried-prunes bastard at times. And it does get a bit annoying that he can't drink because of his epilepsy medication, so I have to cut out early or not drink too much out of respect for him. Which is fine, but sometimes he's such an insufferable dick about going out or staying out too long or pouting when I have a beer that I just want to wake him up in the middle of the night with a strobe light or set his Firefox homepage to a site of nothing but animated GIFs.

It's true love, I know.

I never understood those couples with joint MySpace, Facebook or Orkut accounts who profess their undying devotion to each other and how they're the happiest couple to ever exist in the history of the universe. Really? Because it seems perfectly natural to me that, at least on some occasions, you want to smash each other's faces in.

But not on vacation. Vacation is an escape from the urge to want to chop each other into tiny pieces and sell them to one of the butchers at the Central wet market. True love. Really.

So, it was with some trepidation that I planned a vacation to Palawan, a relatively isolated region of the Philippines located about an hour's prop-plane ride away from Manila. If we wanted to engage in a little uxoricide or mariticide, it'd be quite easy to get away with it. You know, take a kayak out to one of the many uninhabited islands ringing the resort and...

As I'm writing this, I survived the vacation. So did the husband. Here's a video of the highlights (at double speed, because everything is better when sped up):

Viva La France

There's a force inside of me that I find difficult to control, an overwhelming urge to fight against That Which Is Expected. It's as if I emerged from the womb with the devil's advocate switch permanently locked in the on position and the understanding-of-sociocultural-expectations switch permanently locked in the off position.

While traveling in Europe, before the proliferation of wifi hotspots and travel blogs, I'd brought along guidebooks that warned me of the charming quirks of the native population, such as not ordering cappuccino during dinner. But why? Who decided that coffee with milk should be a breakfast drink? And who cares?

I'd adjusted my habits to avoid these faux pas, but then were was France. It's always France that does in the American trying to be respectful of foreign traditions and norms, isn't it? Because if you're an American, those traditions and norms are made up on the fly to confuse us and to expose the true savage nature we try to hide with our muted clothing, suitably trendy haircuts, smart shoes and Canadian flag patches.

At a rest stop in the French countryside, I decided I wanted a piece of cake. And a beer. For breakfast. Yeah, so what? I put the chocolate cake and bottle of Stella Artois (my options were limited) on the tray and approached the cashier, a stringy-haired blonde with roots who wouldn't have looked out of place in a Wal-Mart in the Deep South. She looked at my breakfast of champions, clucked her tongue, wagged her finger and said, "Uh uh uh, this does not go."

As I stood there staring at her and wondering how to argue with her admittedly sound logic, she grabbed the beer and placed it back with the other bottles. She flat-out refused to sell that combination to me. Who made a backwater French service worker the arbiter of fine dining?

While I'll agree that cake and beer aren't an ideal culinary pairing, don't knock it until you've tried it. Before I arrived in Hong Kong, if you'd told me I'd find myself enjoying a Pizza Hut pizza with sausage, ham and pineapple with Thousand Island dressing instead of tomato sauce, I would have thrown a tomato pie from DiLorenzo's at you in disgust. But you know, it turned out to be nowhere near as offensive as I'd imagined, and if Amélie had expanded her horizons a bit, maybe she'd have discovered the pleasure of bière and gâteau at 10 a.m.

CouchSurfing and you, perfect together

Last November, my first CouchSurfer arrived. A 29-year-old Australian from Melbourne named Jeanette who is a corporate whore for a tech company and a practitioner of reiki. An interesting woman all around, and hell, she brought Krispy Kreme doughnuts for me. Considerate too.

After she showered, we headed out to cause a ruckus, leading us to the seedy streets of Mong Kok on the Kowloon side.

It's rarely wise to be a follower, but sometimes, you need to see where the weathered Mainland woman holding a sign advertising cheap foot reflexology is going to take you. She beckoned us with a flyer offering a 60-minute foot massage for HK$98 (less than US$12), and we looked at each other and shrugged. Sometimes, you just gotta know.

She led us down streets, across streets and in the middle of streets, and as we neared our destination, a British guy passed us and yelled, "Ladies, don't do it! Don't go! It's terrible!" We laughed, because... yeah, we had to know.

As we ascended the three flights of narrow stairs of a grungy, ancient building, I started to think this was one of those bad ideas from which you never recover or at least never recover both kidneys. But the woman continued to quietly hold her sign proud and high, until we reached the entrance to untold foot pleasures.

We entered the massage "parlor," which was one large room with minimal ambient lighting and two smaller rooms with stained curtains for doors. Five or six people, a mix of Asian and Western, sat in oversized chairs in the large room. A woman gave a foot massage to one, while the others waited their turn.

A woman thrust another flyer of services at us and demanded that we take a seat to wait our turn. We still weren't sold on the service; we were curious observers. Observers who hoped our curiosity wouldn't follow through to its natural conclusion.

Jeanette asked to use the bathroom, and the woman directed her toward another room in the back, leaving me alone to bear aural witness to... that... that which is joked about in many stand-up comedy routines... that which never allowed me to look at a certain Friendly's sundae in the same way after learning its double meaning.

Of the two smaller rooms, one had its curtain opened, and I noted the dingy single mattress with a hole haphazardly cut into a head-shaped opening and the Winnie the Pooh pillows on which to place one's feet. From the other room, with its curtain closed, I heard moans of pleasure that an expert massage could theoretically cause, until the moans crescendoed and then faded. No foot massage brings about that much pleasure, no matter what Marsellus Wallace says.

As soon as Jeanette came out of the bathroom, I looked at her, shook my head and whispered, "We need to get the fuck out of here." Her look asked me why, isn't this an adventure?

"Let's... just... go."

We moved toward the door, and the woman who had forced the flyer on us when we arrived blocked our path. She kept insisting that we stay, and we kept insisting that, no, thank you, we'd really prefer to leave. After a 2-minute standoff, we managed to get past her and open the door, and she yelled at us, "Fucking assholes!"

We booked down the stairs, and when we reached civilization, such as it was, I explained to Jeanette of the pleasure I'd had the pleasure of hearing.

And she relayed to me a story of her recent trip to Thailand, where she received a massage from a Laotian woman. During the massage, Jeanette engaged the woman in conversation, asking about her background and her kids. The woman misunderstood her question and thought Jeanette was asking for a happy ending. She said as she mimicked sucking a cock, "Men, yes, women, no."

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, come on, we already established what she is, now it's just about haggling over the price. So, as we passed by a farmers market on our way back to the subway, we pondered buying a cucumber, taking it back to the parlor and negotiating a price. Because sometimes you just gotta know.

Time to make the Jihad

Between turning on CNN Headline News and watching Nancy Grace furiously masturbate while screaming, "Where's the head? Where is this murdered mother's head? Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh," and visiting CNN's website and seeing the pressing poll topic of whether obese children should be paid to slim down, it's little wonder I don't plan to live in the United States again.

And after a one-week break from the Internet and TV, I don't know why it surprised me to come back to a Michelle Malkin-fueled controversy over Rachel Ray. Rachel Ray, the bass-mouthed pseudo-chef whose biggest error to date is not tipping wait staff to stay under her $40 budget.

The kerfuffle started over a keffiyeh, the traditional scarf worn by Arab men and Western hipsters. In the spot Ray did for Dunkin Donuts, she wears a scarf that bears a resemblance to this style.

Malkin, the conservative shrew who, among other noted achievements, wrote a book defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, took note of the commercial and Ray's wardrobe and accused Dunkin Donuts of subliminally promoting radical Islam and Palestinian independence and of hiding Osama bin Laden in the open as one of its franchisees in Edison, New Jersey.

In response to a shit storm kicked up by someone with little influence outside of the right-wing kookdom she rules over, Dunkin Donuts pulled the ad.

There is no Dunkin Donuts in Hong Kong, but its legend is great in Asia.

When an Australian friend had a six-hour early-morning layover in Hong Kong, she brought with her a box of doughnuts she bought at the Phuket Airport's Dunkin Donuts. We went straight from the airport train station to Lan Kwai Fong, the central drinking area near my apartment, so I needed to carry the bag of sugary treats from bar to bar. A bit embarrassing.

At our last stop of the night, a club called Insomnia, we decided to check our coats, snacks and stolen kangaroo poster (don't ask), so we would have two hands free to knock back beer after beer. One of the workers, a Filipina, saw the box of Dunkin Donuts and asked excitedly, "Did you buy those in Manila?"

We asked if she wanted one. She nodded and asked, "Are you sure?" As I looked at the box of doughnuts and realized there was no way I wanted to carry them home, I told her to take them all and pass them around. At that, a group of Filipinas gathered around us, eying the box eagerly, and thanked us. By the time we picked up our stuff three hours later, all of the doughnuts were gone.

Because, apparently, Filipinos really love Dunkin Donuts. And as the Philippines has a sizable and troublesome Muslim population, if Dunkin Donuts advocates an Islamic revolution and if Filipinos love Dunkin Donuts, then clearly Filipinos are supporters of terrorism. Michelle Malkin is of Filipino descent, ergo Michelle Malkin is an undercover jihadist, cleverly lulling the conservative blogosphere into thinking she's one of them and luring them into her C-4-filled-doughnut trap. QED, bitch, Q-E-D.

Fanning the flames

There's a reason that Hollywood keeps stealing movie plots from Japanese and Korean cinema: The United States lacks the mythology, urban legends and all-around weirdness that these ancient civilizations possess.

Such as electric fans can kill you in your sleep.

I'd never heard of fan death before today, but it's widely accepted in Korea that if you fall asleep with a household fan running with the windows closed, you will die. There's no consensus among medical professionals as to how the fans kill, but according to Wikipedia, theories include:

• An electric fan creates a vortex, which sucks the oxygen from the enclosed and sealed room and creates a partial vacuum inside.

• An electric fan chops up all the oxygen particles in the air leaving none to breathe.

• The fan uses up the oxygen in the room and creates fatal levels of carbon dioxide.

• If the fan is put directly in front of the face of the sleeping person, it will suck all the air away, preventing one from breathing.
  

• Fans contribute to hypothermia.
  

It's such an ingrained part of the Korean psyche that appliance manufacturers equip electric fans with warning labels and a timer switch that turns them off after a set amount of time.

According to The Straight Dope website, when informed that the phenomenon is virtually unheard of outside of their country, "some locals claim Koreans are uniquely vulnerable due to a peculiarity either of their own physiology or of Korean fans."

Fun with foreign languages

One of the more enjoyable aspects of learning a new language is applying that knowledge in conversations with people who have no idea what you're saying.

(1:43:52 PM) Jen: Seu porra!
(1:44:31 PM) Dan: Hey.
(1:46:14 PM) Jen: Gosta de levar no cu, ne?
(1:47:22 PM) Dan: What?
(1:47:56 PM) Jen: Nothing.
(1:49:41 PM) Dan: Matt bought his ticket to Rio.
(1:55:49 PM) Jen: Yeah? I can help him with some basic vocabulary.
(1:56:32 PM) Dan: Email it to him.
(2:07:13 PM) Jen: Like these: Vai se fuder = How are you?
Quando eu bato punheta, penso na sua mae = I think the beaches here are beautiful.
Voce é feia de cara mas bom de corpo = You have the face of an angel.
Sou viado e quero fazer um boquete = I am a foreigner; please speak slowly.
(2:16:32 PM) Dan: Why do I doubt they mean what you say they do?
(2:19:48 PM) Jen: You're so paranoid. He'll be fine with those.

Leave your damn kids at home

To the families traveling together who brought their diaper-wearing accessories with them to Club Paradise: I know there are more important issues than this. I know that millions of people in Asia are suffering the effects of natural disasters, that African children are forcibly recruited into militias after watching their mothers raped and killed, and that George Bush is still the U.S. president and McCain has a real chance of being his successor. I know there's a lot wrong in the world, and one of those things, from atop my lofty middle-class perch, is that you couldn't leave your damn kids at home. Look, I know being a parent is difficult, frustrating and stressful, even at the best of times. I know you need to relax as much as anyone, but why not Disneyland? A family-friendly resort in Phuket? Your own backyard? If you're looking at a vacation and it involves a resort with the word "paradise" in it at a secluded locale where rooms cost close to US$300/night, it is not a vacation for you. No, not yours.

I realize that you're probably from an old-money British family. Double-barrel last name. Oxford educated. Used to always getting what you want, damn everyone else. But some of us grew up in shitty, soul-sucking, lower-class American suburbs where our summer vacations, if we were lucky to have one, were spent at beaches occasionally shut down due to washed-up medical waste and meals consisted of cheesesteaks and fries in a paper cone. Maybe we'd like a little peace and quiet on our once-in-a-lifetime vacation.

No one who wants to get away from it all, and that includes other parents who had the good sense to leave their damn kids at home, wants to be awoken from their afternoon nap by a screeching infant. No one who wants to get away from it all wants to dodge rambunctious toddlers while trying to navigate the buffet. Your kids are like the drunk who stumbles past apartments at 2 a.m., loudly singing "Danny Boy" and proclaiming he "coulda taken that guy." A drunk is okay at a bar. You expect drunks there. Don't go to a bar if you don't want to encounter drunks. It's not okay to wake an entire neighborhood with your drunken rantings in the early morning. And it's not okay to take your whiny, annoying kids to fucking paradise.