J pointed out a very good point while discussing the famed Lady GaGa.

"What's up with her model hate?"

"Huh?"

"I'm thinking she must hate them. In every music video they end up dead, or they're really bad people, or something. In Paparazzi they ended up dead, in Bad Romance they sell GaGa off to some whorehouse."

"Maybe she's rebelling against the superficial society, like Everybody's Fool by Evanescence."


"But she only picks on models. As a model, I'm starting to feel like a victim."

J points out a very good point. What exactly does Lady GaGa have against models? They're always these bad people who are never connotative with the good image. They end up dead in the most odd (and sometimes disgusting) way possible, or they're doing something very illicit and illegal. I'm not saying that models are the prime citizens of the society and they uphold all the laws and rules, but come on. Sure, some of them are probably involved in gangs and drugs (actually, I'm assuming most are involved in drugs hearing J's stories), but her presentation of the "model" image is borderline vengeful. Not to mention that her music has nothing to do with models. If Everybody's Fool portrayed bunch of models, sure, I understand, but this one is beyond my comprehension.

So somebody enlightened with GaGa, please enlighten me with this one?

Every year, I say to the world that I will NOT be going to Black Friday this year. I hate the crowd, the noise, the fight over the last sock… and every year, we seem to go. At an insane hour in the morning. Like six.

But this year’s Black Friday has come and gone. J spent it in New York, avoiding the crowd. IM spent it, buying… well, I actually have no idea what he bought, needless to say, they are probably things that he will question purchasing two weeks from now. JB spent it sleeping.

Moving on. IM’s value priority, at least when it comes to me, apparently is hair. Apparently 1/3 of my value is hair; or at least, that was what he had said when I told him that my hair had reddened and it had become dry and brittle. That guy really rubs on my nerves sometimes.

I also created a new blog layout for my friend. A very belated birthday gift. It took me two days, since I wanted to center everything and every monitor lays things out differently. For example, you might say 260 pixels left, 400 down on your laptop, but for your father’s huge desktop that might not be the very center. Apparently the only thing you can center is the background and the image; 2 uneven div’s don’t work. Then I had trouble uploading Chopin; for some reason I kept mixing waltz and nocturne up, so I kept uploading the wrong one.

Well, first, designing became a little painful. I usually have black as a background, but she prefers lighter colors. Then the music selection was difficult. I don’t like light-touch Chopin to begin with – my favorite concerto is Sibelius, and I think that speaks for the rest – but she wanted Chopin, and since the blog was daisies and pink and yellow, I couldn’t exactly bring Ballade No.1 as background music, could I? Rachmaninov was out of question. So I had to ask Mother to pick, since I am no piano expert.

Anyway, I can now layout a blog to a fully customizable level. And my gâteau au chocolat rocks.

Je fais un modéle de blog pour ma meilleure amie. J’ai raté son anniversaire.


Je n'ai jamais réalisé à quel point il est difficile de créer des images blog…

Aujourd’hui je suis allé a Microcenter acheter un clavier numérique et un ventilateur pour mon portable. C’été bon, mais quand je suis venu, j’ai trouvé que le ventilateur était cassé. Donc nous sommes allés retour a Microcenter échanger avec un autre.


Donc je suis trés fatigué. Arrrrgh!

Ou alors il dit.

“Mais tu habites en Paris pour le semestre."

“Je sais, mais il toujours n’est pas.”

…

All my life, I lived in cities. Some were old cities that no longer really qualified as cities; some were blazing young cities. But I always lived in a major city, and these cities were my playgrounds.

So when J asked me why I named my new blog Night City, it made me think. It was rather a spur of the moment, and I didn’t really put in any effort. So his question was valid, and my reasoning nonexistent.

Maybe it’s because I lived in Chicago for so long, but to me, a city is somewhere with bustling streets, cars honking, skyscrapers drawing jagged lines in the sky, where the city never sleeps and it’s always bright. Everything is available to you at any hour (unless you suddenly crave L’Artisan Parfumeur’s La Passage d’Enfer at 2AM, but for some reason I think people can wait until the next morning), cars are whizzing by at 3AM, people never look at you, and you can be so alone when you’re surrounded by crowds.

It’s these moments when I enjoy being in a city. The loneliness, the sense that you can get anything you want except personal contact, is very unique to a city. Each city has a face and a different one at that, but at this all cities are the same. Sure, the pace is different; some cities are slow, some cities whizz by. Every city sins and puts on a pretty face to hide it, like an expensive call girl wearing Dior.

I have never lived in a place where the night was quiet. I never lived in a place where it was completely dark in the night. I go out at 3AM to buy ice cream, go downtown at midnight with my friends, see midnight fireworks on New Years. So these things define the city for me.

A lot of my friends are city kids as well. J lived in Paris and moved to New York, and now he has the jaded ambient decadence of a Parisian and that angry, skeptic attitude of a New Yorker. IC has lived in Chicago all his life (granted, the town he lives in is in the suburbs and he is surrounded by nothing but pure, processed suburbia).

So in response to J’s query: I live in the city, and I’m awake during the night. So most of my thoughts and sometimes even events take place in the city during the night.

And that’s my life.

J, our resident playboy and lady killer, had a little escapade last night.

J: “I got stalked.”

Me: “Again?!”

J: “Yes, but this time it wasn’t a young male or a female.”

Me: “Oh?”

“It was a sixty-year-old.”

JB: “Did you ask her age?”

J: “No, but he sure looked like it.”

Me: “Wait, it’s a he?!”

J: “Yes. a senior male.”

Me: “… MAN, that’s gotta suck.”

So our pity goes to the victim. Apparently the new in things among men are being chased by homosexuals and YSL cologne. The latter I have no problems with, but the former is becoming problematic. Women already have enough problems competing against each other to begin with, we don’t need male population to join the flurry. But apparently good-looking men are attractive to men as well; hence all my friends being stalked by gay people. But maybe it can work in reverse, as a sort of a proof of hotness if you are chased by someone gay (sort of like if you keep getting asked out, you can be pretty sure that you are attractive).

On the other hand, my Sephora shipment arrived. I never knew Marc Jacobs’ Lola was in such a big box. The box is HUGE; it can easily fit four bottles of the perfume itself. There are two more on my “want” list; I’m thinking going with IC just for the hell of it.

L’envoi est arrivé hier.
Ces sont merveilleux, mais la boîte de Lola par Marc Jacobs est immense. J’ai acheté le flacon pour 50ml, mais la boîte est probable que c’est pour 100ml flacon ou 200ml. Il à peine va dans ma armoire. C’est à cause de le capsule. C’est beau, mais pas pratique.

I vaguely remembered a conversation I had with JB a few weeks ago. It was late in the night, I was bored and was browsing Givenchy, he was tired and was feeling argumentative and needed much verbal cuddling.

“You know why I like you?”

“Um… because I have breasts and I haven’t slept with J yet?”

“…No. I don’t even want to know where you got that idea. “

“Do enlighten me, then.”

“It’s because you’ve finally gotten out of the pseudo-feminism era of the 1960’s and have finally embraced your gender. It’s refreshing to see a girl who’s trying to play the game by her own rules.”

“But you guys play by my rules anyway. Why should I bother?”

“Perhaps because nobody else coddles and manipulates others to playing by their rules.”

While I don’t remember the entirety, I remembered this snatch of conversation yesterday and started wondering. There are so many women who are very gung-ho on “equality between men and women”, and then there are Charlie’s Angels, and then there’s Marilyn Monroe. But who actually is the closest to achieving “equality between men and women”?

I first decided to examine the “gung-ho”s. Sure, they recite the feminism manifesto, but after all they seem to be playing by the men’s rules, not the women’s. This is frivolous case but the “Men wear trousers, why can’t I” first takes the priorities based on what men prefer for themselves, thereby judging completely according to men’s priorities. Besides, men can’t wear skirts, so why should women be able to wear trousers to work? (And from now on I’m going to sleep with a gun next to my pillow so I don’t get murdered by the feminists).

I then went to the polar opposite – Marilyn Monroe. This, too, was not achieving the fairness that we all seek. While the former is trying to become a man, the latter is trying to become a man’s plaything and that never really is fairness. It’s fun having a sugar daddy and getting pampered, but that is only fun as far as there are no compensations required. So no.

So I’m starting to think that Sabrina Duncan has the right idea. Be feminine, use that weapon to fight the battles. Men use their masculinity to fight their battles, why can’t women use their femininity to fight theirs? That’s the only fairness that can be relatively agreeably achieved. Sure, Bosley can also probably get the jobs done, but Sabrina probably is better in those missions against men. So which is more efficient and painless?

Going back to the conversation. I can never beat JB in Physics and IM is far wiser than me and J has far more energy and IC is far stronger when it comes to last minute jobs. I’ll never be the girl who can carry 400lb. And I’m fine with that. JB can’t write as well as I do, IM can’t carry out experiments as efficiently, J can’t write thank-you notes and IC sucks at organising. So we all have our jobs.

Men and women are fundamentally different and for some reason even the cleverest women are dragged around by men (take Steve and Miranda, for instance). Men say up then down and women panic; women say left then right, men stops listening and just keep moving forward. Katy Parry sang that boys are hot then cold, yes then no, in then out, up then down, but I think girls do that too; it’s just that while girls notice it, get bothered about it, and make a fuss of it, guys just moving at their own paces without getting bothered by their counterparts’ behaviours.

There can never be a corpus callosum between men and women, but there can be google translate.

J’aime des parfumes et maquillage. Je sais c’est sot, mais je pense c’est naturel pour les filles aimer choses comme ça. Enfin, les hommes aiment les voitures et électroniques, et les femmes aiment parfum, maquillage, chausseres et vêtements. C’est naturel, si un peu sot.

Donc j’ai acheté maint maquillage et parfumes. J’aime Sephora; je pense  elle est l’un des meilleurs au milieu de des boutiques de maquillage. Je ne vais pas lister tous les achats, mais je vais dire que c’était beaucoup de quantité. Il semble que j’acheté toujours ombres à paupières de Dior, et rouges rouges à lèvres de Givenchy. Cette fois-ci n’était pas différent.

L’envoi devrait arriver demain.

Mon stylo arrivé aujourd-hui.

C’est de Mont Blanc. Je avait déjà un stylo de Mont Blanc (modèle de Bach), mais c’est trop lourd. C’est impossible d’écrire; je recevais des crampes main.

Mon stylo nouveau est plus léger, mais c’est noir et pas joli. Mais c’est confortable pour écrire avec, ainsi j’aime le stylo.

J just informed me he got a new girlfriend, because the old one dumped him. He sounded his cheery self as usual, perky as a JV cheerleader; I felt like I was hemorrhaging inside when I realised that it might have been me, if something had gone very wrong. And I probably would have sat in my room wondering what went wrong while J would have waltzed off onto his next rendezvous.

When something goes wrong in the relationship, it always seems to be the female populace who sit around moping and wondering what went wrong. Men are also more prone to forgetting anything that isn’t necessary, which leads to the conclusion that for men, relationships aren’t necessary.

Hmm.

After reading a post online about the second movie of Sex and the City, I’m less than impressed. That series was about “how to live single and still be happy” for me; true, it’s not orthodox, but if you look at the female monarchs they all lived like the girls from the TV show. Eat whatever you want, wear whatever you want, consort with whomever you want and move on when the consorting ends. Who said Elizabeth wasn’t happy living that way? I always thought the classic “she must be so lonely, she’s single without children” to be a stereotypical mistake. Celebrate being free, celebrate your choices instead of moping over it. Be intelligent. Be fashionable. Be whatever you want, and don’t apologise for it.

One of the factors that made the message was Samantha. Eldest of the four, wild and free, she showed one way a woman can live – especially when she shouts out the window “You see us Manhattan?! We have it all!” She never apologises for who she is, happy being who she is.

But then I read that Samantha might be trying to get pregnant and… marry Smith. Meaning that all four girls will now be married, as if in order to achieve happiness eventually you have to get married and have babies. I’m not saying marriage+babies= doom, but marriage+babies does not equal happiness either. If she does get married, everything Samantha had said in the past would be a farce, leaving us with the question: is being single and being happy impossible after you hit 35?

This thought terrifies me. Nobody said I’m going to get married for certain. Nobody assured me a happily ever after ending. I’ll get married if I want to, but do I have to do the reverse apology or actually go apologising if I don’t? Did Samantha always feel that she was missing out on something? What if you don’t want to settle down with any old guy? Very few people actually marry their princes, and the vast majority end up marrying based on compromises and give-ins. What if I didn’t want to? Will I be satisfied, or would I always feel a gaping hole?

And is this what masculine society has forced us to think, or is this the natural course? Because life isn’t an HBO sitcom; like everything else, it has expiration date, and chances of marriage and conceiving decline after you hit thirty. So what if you are Samantha, and then suddenly realise that life isn’t actually worth living if you don’t have a husband and three children, but by then you’re already forty-three? It’s a bit too late for marriage and/or conception.

Being single means certain freedom. Sleeping at 3AM, waking up at noon, wearing whatever you want, buying only for yourself. As soon as you’re married and have kids, you stop caring for you appearance (most of the time), the kid is drooling and screaming in the other room and your husband is hungry. I’m not entirely sure which is better.

So I’m not saying the second movie, if the speculations are right, will be a betrayal to single women. But it will certainly be a betrayal to its premises.

Once upon a time, in the cyberspace that never sleeps, two people were carrying on a conversation in their free privacy that warranted only inhibitions against each other.

“So, what did you do this week?”

“Not much. I bought shoes. I got a discount! They’re Miss Sixty, so they cost about $150, but I bought it for 2/3 of a price.”

“… You bought shoes… again!?”

“Would that be wrong?”

“I have no further comments, your honor.”

It’s always these guys who scoff and laugh at the superficial values who check out the girls in heels, which makes the entire ordeal completely unfair. It’s not the guys who well, not exactly respect but provides no comment about these things who value them, oh no. It’s the guys who do. They’ll laugh and be appalled at $200 sandals from Italy, but then will most certainly check out any girl who’s wearing them.

So I asked him (him being IM), what he thought about it.

“Well, of course we check out the girls. It’s natural.”

“Then why do you guys always make rather derogatory comments about it? $200 strappy sandals from Jimmy Choo are your business too if that is going to be the trigger to you checking the said lady out.”

“We don’t check the girls out because they’re wearing $300 shoes. We check them out because they look hot. And most likely, if a girl’s willing to dish out $300 for a pair of shoes, she cares a hell of a lot about how she looks. So she’ll diet, go to the end of the world to look attractive.”

“How do you know?”

“By looking at you.”

What he forgot to notice is that these expensive strappy sandals also become expensive weapons. So please, don’t mock the shoes. It may not mean much to you, but it means a lot to us.

J: So what have you done recently?
Me: I bought a pair of shoes.
J: AGAIN!? What's it like?
Me: It's suede, it's pink, it's 3 inches high, and it's from Miss Sixty.
IM: 3 inches? I thought your heel preference was like women's preference for [insert the unmentionable body part] size.
Me: I don't wear 8 inch heels.
IM: So you say.
J: Ya know, I'm so glad we don't have to wear heels - yet. Ya never know, Elle made guys wear heels in February, Stephen was complaining about it.
Me: I thought it was only in women's genes to be able to wear heels.
J: Apparently not. Though I think Alexander McQueen went a bit too far with the heel height.
IM and Me: ??
J: Yeah. He made his models wear these 12 inch heels.
Me: Were the shoes cute?
IM: They f*cking defy laws of physics. What do you think?

I was talking to J while reading through some papers when I stumbled across a certain title that caught my eye. I don't exactly recall its precise title; maybe it's just the timing that I was talking to J, or maybe it's the fact that I said goodbye to my teens, but it just stuck to my mind.

The question that arose in my mind was: when is the right time to lose it?

While I understand that it's not some asset nowadays and it's not necessarily something you "lose" per se, along with its connotations, I grew up in the belief - firmly supported by my unfaithful (male) friends and my faithful (female) friends, that virginity should be kept until, well, marriage. A lot of people I know have the same belief as me; well, not all, but a surprising number the people in my address book do.

On the other hand, now that I think about it, I can only think up of very few males around me who follow my belief. Apparently sometime during Genesis God instilled the belief of "No certain expiration date" in women and "Well, there isn't any expiration date but hey what the hell, it's in the fridge let's eat it" belief in men.

Well, maybe I'm being biased. But then I stumbled across another - and rather frightening - statistics in the New York Times. Apparently 1/4 of Japanese people in their 30's are virgins.

Considering that I've never heard of "virgin going on thirty" as being a valuable asset in relationships, I decided to count "virgin going on thirty" as a somewhat negative factor. So people won't be saying "Hey yeah, I'm a virgin" in this survey. Which meant that AT LEAST1/4 of the 30-somethings in Japan are virgins. Which means there may be more.

Not to mention that apparently some guys think virgins are just burdens. I can see that. Those who are virgins in their twenties are probably trying to save themselves for the right guy, regardless of whether he exists, and well, those types don't do well in easy flings.

Which leads to the question: What is the right time?

If you're thirty and unmarried, should you just go do it? Or should you still wait? I'm twenty now, so what about twenty-year olds? (Note: apparently it's easier to get a boyfriend if that factor isn't really important. Never knew...)

Asking J was a foolish thing. His immediate response was, "Why? Trying to lose it?"

"Is that an offer?"

"I'm always offering."

"Right. Go offer it to some other victim."

Is virginity a sign that you're reproductivly challenged? (And mind you, you ARE reproductively challenged if you don't have anyone to reproduce with; for now, anyway.) Or does that mean you're just waiting? Is it a trophy or is it a burden? Is it like a produce, something that you want fresh (I've never seen anyone who likes to drink regurgitated milk) but don't want it beyond expiration date?

Unfortunately the guys around me (read: JB, IM and J) seem to think of it as trophies. But clearly they've had their share of their plays, so I can't really know whether their opinions represent the general populace. Not to mention that it's rather easy for guys to ascertain (to a certain degree) their partners' freshness, with girls, not as easy. As IM said, "It's okay for guys, but maybe not as okay for girls". As much as this sounds sexist, there is cold harsh reality facing the young generation: how many XY's are there against XX's who can claim the same? In my case, not many.

Guys have it so much easier. Spinster sounds derogatory, but bachelor sounds normal leaning on "independent and handsome" (or so my friend said).