Which OS are you?

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Which OS are You?

Mun Sum Mo Quai? Or, Denial of the Tragic

Between moments of the estatic and despair, our memory pushes for the experience of a lifetime in one full body thrust.

Mun Sum Mo Quai? It depends. Who is asking? When is it being asked? We're always telling ourselves that we have done nothing wrong. I have done nothing wrong.

Belivers of fate, the Greek thought that bad things don't just happen. We might not always get our just deserts, but they happen anyways because we did something to make it happen or our natures and our inheritance bring about our misfortunes. Our vices and our virtues both can be our path towards the tragic.

In fact many other sees liffe the same way. For Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Cassius is destroyed by his jealousy, Brutus by his trusting nature. We see this in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Guan Yuan by his pride and Drunkeness. Zhou Kwailang by fulfilling the call of heaven and his loyalty to the Liu's. There is always amoment of catharsis. The character realizes their ends are inescapable because it comes from themselves.

Almost ten years ago, I thought about killing myself. I was at the park behind my high school. I laid on the baseball diamond, near home plate, over an inch of fresh snow. It was still snowing. Cold I was drowsy from the cold. I thought about sleeping and not getting up. Never getting up al all.

I knew now that I probably wouldn't die from sleeping in the snow with my warm parka on. It wasn't cold enough. I didn't know that then. It felt comfortable. The snow felt war in the winter air.

My seventeen year-old mind came to a conclusion about life that made me want to get up: refuse cartharsis and there cannot be a tragic. If some shit happen to you and you come to some great, profound moment of self-knowledge, ignore it. Fuck. Forget that moment. You can remember all the bad shit, just don't remember that moment when you feel whole and complete and in-tuned with the self and the universe. Cuz when you do, you have just become a tragic hero. And nothing good ever happens to the tragic hero.

Forget it and the tragic cannot touch you. All that bad shit is melodrama. After that, the ironic. Ask yourself, mun sum mo quai? And say yes. Always say yes.Tragic heroes always die or suffer some fate worse than death. When bad shit happen to you (assuming you're a good person,) just laugh. Savour irony and life is just a bunch of random shit. Good or bad. Nothing is a tragedy if you don't allow it to be. If you just ignore all the profound stuff.

Daddyo's: Pasta and BYOW

New restaurant catering to the college crowd on Spadina and Sussex (just
south of Bloor.)

Pasta are below $10. Great thing about this place is the BYOW
Endorsement. They are charging $5.99 for corkage fee. Absolute deal in
Toronto.

Nice open patio. Very chilled crowd. Beer are $5 a pint.

View from Bridlewood Mall

I took these a few weeks ago.

Opera on Dundas Street: Notes on Northern Banality

Some people just need help.

There was a showing of the 1983 film adaptation of La Travalita at the
Italian Consulate on Beverly and Dundas tonight.

I walked by accidentally and decided to watch the show. I don't know
much about opera; I never had the privilege growing up. I try, as often
as the opportunity comes, to learn.

It is very very good. It's a love story. Hooker with a heart of gold.
(In fact, it was the opera Julia Roberts and Richard Gere watched in
Pretty Woman.)

I enjoyed myself, despite the show being one hour late because the tech
guys had problems with the giant outdoor projector.

I sat actually on the other side of Beverly, across the street from
where the screen was. I didn't wanted to go in because everybody was
crowding on the grass with lawnchairs. My vantage point allowed me to
not just the movie, but all the people's reaction during the movie.

First off, the average age of the people on the grounds of the consulate
was 50. There were a few Italian women in their mid-30s having a girl's
night out. Mostly it was older couples. A few Chinese people passing
from Chinatown stared, smiled, then left.

The young people that went by were just plain rude. (Does this make me
sound like a grumpy, old man?) They pass by, and as soon as they saw it
was opera, they would make snide comments. A few shriek out cracked
notes in a mocking falsetto. Most just scoffed.

I don't know. Was it really necessary? That most of the young people
have to give an exaggerated, hostile display to their friends on how
much they are not into opera.

Most vividly for me were these three CBC Chinese guys. They just started
walking very rapidly with a smirk: amused and disgusted. I wanted to
shake them and tell them: you won't be any less of a man if you listen
to opera.

I can understand if many people are uncomfortable with opera. It is very
much white, upper class type thing. There is a lot of highly
un-politically correct stuff. For example, in La Travalita, Violetta
gets hit quite a few times by her lover, Alfredo.

Still, I respect the imagination and craft of the piece. You have to
respect a thing that is beautiful.

I still remember when I was first introduced to hiphop. I grew up in
Newfoundland. Rap music had sounded like random noise and people
talking. A friend of mine actually had to teach me. He told me: listen
to the beats, listen to the track. Even if I don't understand what the
song is about, appreciate the production value, the hundreds of hours
finetuning each part of the recording. He put on some Neptunes .... I
sudden realized what he was talking about.

Appreciate the production value, if nothing else, in Vivaldi.

I hope those three Chinese guys will.

When the movie ended I walked towards the subway station. Across the
AGO, somebody had ripped two forget-me-not bushes right out from a
cafe's flower pot. Their yellow roots were drying up and dirt was
scattered everywhere.

Angels, peace, friendship, and folly of Western Civ.

If I had to pick a moment when I lost all respect for the white,
suburban, "North" American, it was around the just passing of the
millenium. It was then that I realized the absolute evil subjected to
their inner psyche by a bowlderized suburban upbringing.

A wicked fad was taking place when every middle-class white person
decided that they need more edge -- and what's more edgy than tattoos?

I, personally, love tattoos that transforms people into living picture
books. They are sometimes very beautiful. I am still a sucker for goth
chicks with angel wings drawn over shoulder blades. (It's cliche. I
know. But I don't question your fetishes, why do you question mine?)

What I didn't like were those stupid tattoos that some people -- well,
predominately white, young, middle-class people -- had of Chinese
characters strung together to meaningless nonsense.

In the hot, suffocating times, on the streetcar, I would sometimes speak
to the women with the strappy lycra tops and capri pants (this was a few
years ago, remember?) Their absurd tattoos on some out of the way places
-- mid-back, upper arm, the semi-flat patch of skin an inch above the
ankle -- would only be visible in the summer outfits.

I needed to know. So I always lie and tell them I don't speak Chinese.
And asked them what that word meant. People are always so eager to
tell...

One women, I remember, had three words written on her inner calf. She
told me she wanted to put on her body the three things that are
meaningful to her: Peace, Friendship, and Angels. She was a nice lady.

The words were sort of right, but the choice of them and written
together: Peace (as in otium rather than pax), Friend (which is not
always a positive word in Chinese), and Angel (which has no one word
representation in Chinese; angel is roughly translated as heaven's
delegate) means either nothing or -- at a stretch -- some over-inflated
bureaucrat working for some kind of funeral home.

---------------------------------------------
If you want to see more examples of ridiculous "Asian" tattoos, visit
http://www.hanzismatter.com/

It's pretty funny.

Ambushed by NINJA: ECB, Fed offer additional liquidity

I go off the net for two weeks and, all of a sudden, the world goes to
shit.

I was still working on my manual. Decided to take the subway somewhere
else to keep working. Standing on the platoform waiting for the train.
One of those CP24 news tickers on the screen: ECB offers $130 bil at
discount rate of 4% to calm market.

What?

Next news item: Fed to follow suit with $12 bil in liquidty.
Next news item: Bank of Canada also indicated that it stands by with
additional liquidity.

Um, WTF?

I wasn't sure what was going on. Why are all the central banks around
the world signalling WWIII.

I was kinda watching CBC Newsworld this morning and everything seems to
be going fine.

Wait, next news item: Oil prices dropped to $72/barrel despite declining
gasoline, oil US reserve.

Now I am very curious. I couldn't get a cell reception in the subway
station. So I bought a newspaper! Imagine that!

Globe and Mail -- um -- nothing. Their idea of a headline yesterday for
the business page was "Canada's missing out in India: Tata." Wow, news I
can use! In fact, page after page of the Globe is talking about buying
opportunities after the recent stock plung.

That the stock market has been plunging is not news. It has been one
sick market since the whole subprime market with their "No Income, No
Job, no Asset" loans (NINJA) is finally destabilizing the credit market
is well know for the last half year at least.

But the bigwigs on Wall Street said they have it covered. Bear Stearn
had said that it was contained. And Bear Stearn has the most exposure to
the subprime market. HSBC is not exactly going bankrupt. So everything
is going to be alright, right?

The last six months, a certain silence surround the topic. Elephant in
the room. Everybody is talking around it. Giving it a positive spin.
"Credit crunch woes: How to profit from it." "Manulife shops for bargin
assets prices."

There were hardly hard numbers to be found about what kind of exposure
it is. Most of it are in hedge funds owned by banks or hidden up with
other numbers. Just a lot of reassuring words from pink, old men that
everything is going to be a-okay.

Now I am sitting in a Tim Horton's, reading Jim Cramer's TheStreet.com
because all the major news outlets are ignoring the story. Smiling blond
couples from the Younge and Eglington, an area infused with bank money
from Bay Street, are covorting. Is it my imagination? People here don't
seem too worried. But I am worried.

Central bankers don't go around telling artsy "business page" reporters
that there is plenty of liquidity unless there isn't. They also don't
emphasize that they are putting out $130 bil unless it is some strange
PR campagin except as some sort of last ditch effort to convince Main
Street investors to park their money exactly where it is.

But why?

What the fuck is going on?

I am reading the Globe's website and some analysists are worried about a
consumer recession.

There is a fear of collapse of Asian and European banks. The word
"contagion" is dropping from every fat banker lips.

Fuck it all, I am going back to my manual.

Little Old Chinese Women

Another little old chinese women asked me for directions today.

It's getting very common. Little old Chinese women are always asking me
for directions.

Must be that I have an honest face.