on the vietnamese teacher's day (Nov 20th) some alumni gave my dad 2kgs of beef. mom cooked a big pot of stew but the meat was really not the most chew-able. while this "gift of beef" could be entirely out of good-will, I'm tempted to think that perhaps dad lost his temper at some point and told someone he was as stupid as a cow. so voila, here is some cow for you sir.
or perhaps it's common to send people meat/fish....have a fish. i thought of you.

the stuffs strangers tell you every now and then--yesterday, the lady at the clothing shop told me my boobs sag. either it's your bra or your boobs, honey. well, it's probably my boobs.

yesterday i screamed and killed a cockroach.
cockroaches. cockroaches. cockroaches. i'm terrified to the point of obsession. perhaps one day i'll cover my canvases with images of scrambling roaches, the way i'm filling the blank sheets with what Steve cordially named sinister balloons.
Does it make sense? to be incredibly cheerful and ridiculously depressed at the same time? to find human beings beautiful and terribly disgusting all at once.
or perhaps contradictions and paradoxes only make all the more sense.

after class, i saw an Iranian film Khane-ye doust kodjast? (Where is the friend's house/ Où est la maison de mon ami) The plot is simple enough but the way the story unfolds is really beautiful--old color tones, subtle yet amazingly sensitive; stone stairways and white walls framing the boy's footsteps, light filtering through wooden handmade windows casting patterns on the walls, the boy's beautiful face and clear eyes, the old man's slow drone as he points out each and every door he's created, and his attachment to those that'd been replaced, and the lovely music. To pull off a relatively convincing story through the eyes of children always impresses me.