I went across the Bitan bridge to visit the Sandca…
I went across the Bitan bridge to visit the Sandcastle yesterday. The weather was as fine as you could ask for, and though my new place is quite pleasant, I wanted to get out a bit. After eating at a vegetarian place we retired to the Sandcastle and chatted a bit. Sandman and his wife Jojo decided to donate a couple of elaborate green-and-purple chairs for my new place. Before I repainted, the green-and-purple scheme would have fit right in, but I think more repainting is the only way to rescue these chairs, which are surprisingly comfy and look like little sub-thrones, from the clutches of dubious taste.
After we got the thrones back to my place, we decided to go out to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Sandman and Jojo swore it was a good place, but after we got there and were served our food, the woman attending us said there was no rice. This was followed by a few moments of disbelief. No rice? In a Chinese restaurant? We looked around, saw other people eating rice. “We’ll make some more, though. It will be a while.” We looked at the dishes rapidly cooling on the table. She could have said something, or timed the dishes to arrive with the rice. You just can’t have Chinese dishes without rice; it’s like a hamburger without the bun.
A good while later, after we had all agreed that this was pretty shoddy service, I noticed the serving woman hand-delivering a bowl of hot, steaming rice to an old man at another table. Curious, I got up and went over to the rice cooker. The woman warned me not to open it, but I did anyway. Not surprisingly, it was filled with steaming, well-cooked rice. “Why didn’t you give us our rice?” I asked.
“It’s not ready yet,” she replied, even though they had just served some to another table from that very rice cooker.
“Well, give us this ‘not-ready’ rice, then.” It took them a while to realize just what I meant by this, and we got our rice, only then taking our food back to the kitchen to be re-heated while our rice got cold. It was an amazing experience. Apparently the boss was away that night, and none of the current servers were regulars. Maybe they just grabbed random people off the street and gave them a thousand NT to play waitstaff for a night. The food, when we got it, was decent enough, but I’ve seen starved crocodiles with better attitudes. It was like a game of charades where they had to impart the concept of telling us to fuck off without actually saying it. Sandman seemed on the verge of going over to the fishtanks, grabbing a particularly large grouper, and hitting the serving woman with it, but we managed to leave without incident. Outside the restaurant was a kitten in a cage, the color of its fur obsured by the dark and several layers of filth. The waiter didn’t know what gender it was, or how old it was, but it seemed friendly enough and meowed an answer to its name, “Mimi”.
On Saturday Mindcrime and I went to see Underworld, in which a group of poor, innocent werewolves are discriminated against by arrogant vampires who laze about in an elaborate living room staring at whomever has the gall to walk by. I know this because the completely emotionless main character does it several times, and they all act as if noone’s ever walked through a room before. Hints of what must have been a romance in the original script are hammered in here and there, and though day is referenced in the film, it’s never shown to exist. The dialogue was painful enough on its own, and even more so when muddled through by the actors. Wonderful camerawork and good editing made it watchable, but not easily. On the plus side, though, we did get to see a kick-ass trailer for Return of the King before the feature.
That night, after dinner, I was walking back to the subway station when I spotted Maurice, Dolly, Peter and Rowan sitting out in front of Cosi a Cosi. Rowan and Maurice, having drunk quite a bit at that point, were singing what I took to be some kind of Broadway medley. I sat down and we talked a bit. I was glad to hear that they are all eager to start work on another project now that Lady X is finished, since they’re all good actors as well as good people. I accompanied them to Q Bar, where we met Dean, Alien and Fuad, but I didn’t stay long since I had to take the train home, and to be honest, I’m not very comfortable in such situations for very long.
I have some more short movies to put up, as well as a brand-spanking new spymac account to put them in, plus various pictures of idiots on the MRT. I’ve been getting more and more frustrated with the Windows Way over the last few weeks. My computing needs are fairly simple. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect an OS to actually work. Having to perform the mechanical equivalent of brain surgery just to perform the simplest tasks is not, in my opinion, a winning business strategy. I am being pushed further and further towards getting a Mac, if indeed they are all they seem to be. I don’t want miracles from my computer; I just want it to work, and do the things it is supposed to do. Limited finances keep me PC-bound for the moment, but at this point I think that if I somehow came into a large amount of money I would definitely choose a new G5 over upgrading my PC anymore.
