I hadn’t done anything particularly interesting al…
I hadn’t done anything particularly interesting all day on Sunday, with the exception of going through some more editing exercises and practicing sword forms on the roof, so I decided to go take in an old movie at an even older theater with Jason, an American guy who stumbled on this account a few months back. We decided over tea at the Roach Teahouse to skip the whole “It’s such a pain being a gay Chinese in Australia” session. We ended up seeing The Tale of Genji at the Chungshan Hall in the West Gate District. It was a novel experience to watch an old Japanese movie from 1951 in a building originally built by the Japanese a few decades before the movie originally came out. It’s a huge space, ornately decorated with an old-fashioned balcony held up by columns.
Unfortunately, the movie itself was incredibly boring. The story consisted of Our Hero Genji, a polite fellow who goes around being an absolute bastard to everyone. The scene where he decides to take a strange girl he met on the road home with him was the most polite kidnapping I’ve ever seen. Basically the movie was a series of scenes involving various Japanese women dying on white beds surrounded by maids saying “Oh it sucks to be a woman”, and Genji sitting around saying “Oh it’s too bad,” followed by a pan to cherry blossoms. The happiest moment in the film for me was when I realized there were no possible plot points left and that they’d have to end the movie soon.
Work was busy today, with a rush translation job. Every time I get one of these jobs I doubt I can pull it off, and yet somehow I do, or at least the international incident hasn’t broken out yet. I should be getting new windows some time this week, a very welcome development as I still don’t know what my job situation is yet, so I wouldn’t know what price range of places to look at. I think it will be another week or two before I know what’s going on there. I’ll be pissed if I don’t get this job after all the trouble I’ve gone though to get it, though. I even bought a new watch, just for interviews, mainly because the watch I normally wear really doesn’t go with Ze Zuit. At all.
The guard downstairs tells me that there’s a gigalo on my floor, an American guy who “brings two or three Taiwanese girls home with him every day! Sometimes they do it in the elevator!”
“Do what?” I asked him.
“Make out! And none of the girls speak Chinese with him, it’s all English!”
“Wow,” I said, but he didn’t catch my sarcasm. I know, it’s hard to catch sometimes. Speaking of catching things, that atypical pneumonia thing is a bit worrying, innit? There’s three cases in Taiwan right now, I think, but it’s scary. They say it started on the mainland, so I think I’ll be avoiding standing too close to well-dressed older businessmen who look like they might have been managing their factories in mainland China recently. I’m glad to hear that Randall has moved out of crowded downtown Hong Kong to a nice country apartment complex. Perhaps I should follow his lead (without straying out of walking distance of the MRT, of course). This epidemic might also be a good excuse to go around wearing a mask, too, which would not only stop germs but get me better service at restaurants as well.
