ok, shhhh, don’t tell anyone, but in two hours i’m gonna skive off werk, and walk out into the blue and sunshine down to broadway, where i will procure two nori rolls — one beef teriyaki (or maybe eel) and the other most likely some sort of vegetarian option (the one with the pickles and shredded inari tofu is pretty tasty) — and perhaps a raspberry mocha frappucino, and settle myself into the cool and dark of “donnie darko: the director’s cut”. yeah.
Category Archives: at the movies
so, i think that you must go see the film “control room“, a very non-propoganda documentary about behind the scenes of the media covering the um… war? in iraq. it’s full of charming, articulate, smart people — which you rarely get to see once the evening news goes to air with the rubble and people firing guns into the air and boiled-down soundbites — and then some really squirmy clips of misters bush and rumsfeld. mrngh.
if you see it at the valhalla, you can walk back up glebe point road after and pop into badde manors for a double scoop of pistachio gelato and sour cherry sorbet. or instead (and this necessitates a special trip back to glebe on my part) you can walk over to chinatown for yumcha. either way, it will be an excellent way to spend a sunny winter morning, packed with education, exercise, tasty treats and fun.
best monday ever
anzac day continues…
a cross-continental conversation with nellie
nellie: um. are you working?
bowb: umm. sort of, but not really. it’s a public holiday!
n: oh! is it anzac day?
b: eh! yah! how did you know?
n: because it’s a biscuit!
b: ummm. yesss. but there isn’t like, oreo day…
n: hngh. you can keep oreo day.
b: … and there isn’t tim tam day…
n: but there should be!
and with that the twinkies were off for three, count ’em, three hours. the phone company should start paying *us* money.
what to do after a marathon phone session, with ear hot and hand cramped into craw, than finish up my goddamn business activity statement, make a bacon, avocado and chutney (pear and fig) roll and walk briskly up to oxford street where the cinema is already quite packed with a holiday crowd ready to see “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”.
when joel says “i love you” to his last remaining fading memory of clementine, oh it brung a twinge to my nose.
and then, another brisk walk to pellagio providore for a litre of pink grapefruit fizzy and two bits of $4 (each!) turkish delight studded with pistachios and covered in white chocolate (sometimes if you’re lucky, pink chocolate. today i am unlucky, but only just), and then on to infinity sourdough bakery for a walnut sourdough loaf swaddled in tissue like baby jesus.
sadly the only thing awaiting me after another powerwalk into the city, is a queue at kinko’s while the toner is replaced in two photocopiers, and then once i am at the machine, another queue to get some paper for the machine. so. it takes half an hour to photocopy one double-sided business activity statement form.
happily what awaits me on returning home is a boy on the sofa who is quite agreeable to the idea of me buying him end-of-school-holiday dinner in the malaysian restaurant up the street. not only is there a flavoursome mee siam with an egg boiled for so long it has a grey circle around the yolk, there is also ice kacang with bits of jackfruit hidden in the bottom.
except for kinko’s, best monday ever.
that scene in “spirited away“, at the beginning, where chihiro’s parents stumble upon a deserted foodstall, an exotic feast spread upon the front counter. all manner of small roasted bird and fatty… um… pork? chihiro’s father sucks a large sacklike thing into his mouth. it looks moist and succulent and quite oily, i guess like a stewed eggplant. i think that i will never tire of watching this.
there were no mystery meats for me this morning, although i did get through that scene — and the one of the soot creatures’ feeding time — over two slices of black rye toast with maple syrup, and a cup of tea. after two bits of toast i felt like another. maybe for lunch. after some drawing.
at the other end of the lunch simplicity scale: a few days ago i bought a futo maki at david jones foodhall. the process in itself is simple enough. however you wouldn’t expect that a little round of rice and other bits rolled up in nori would contain this:
would you?
some days the air is so warm and moist that your armpits are no longer just armpits, they are pits of hell. is there a steaming carcass tucked up there? something that crawled inside and died?
on such a day, it would be wise to catch an airconditioned bus to the airconditioned cinema, where you can see “infernal affairs“. you will bite your nails down to just before it starts to hurt. you will stop breathing a few times, it gets so exciting. my word was i excited!
in the dark you might have a bottle of apple-cranberry juice and a tofu nori roll, and you will have tony leung chiu wai, surely the most handsome chinese man in the world (sometimes the most handsome man ITW fullstop, depending on what sort of day keanu and jude are having).
your armpits will thank you.
um. so if you cast your eye towards the top right corner of the window — this window — you may notice a little person with an inverted rice bowl on his head. clicking it will take you to the bane of my current work schedule: rice bowl journals, a hub of blogs from around asia, or by people of asian descent.
“we speak asian.”
it’s not all animated tare panda icons and people who think they are manga characters. like, for example, there is this girl, and this girl, and also this girl, who recently posted some extremely [speechless. adjective to come. in the meantime, use “really good”] pictures of shelves upon shelves of exotic cakes and filled buns in a bakery in sarawak. lordy, to have been in that bakery…
so even though i turn on the computer at 7 every morning, suddenly it’s an hour and a half later, and there’s still just a little too much text formatting to get done. even though the truth is that any amount of text formatting is too much, and any distraction that will take me away from it is worthy.
to this end, last night i saw “lost in translation“, which was funnier than i thought it would be, and sadder, and um, really good.
and in the next few minutes i shall have to decide if i want to experience the 3-hour there-and-back commute out to penrith for the launch of my previous directory job. the one attractive prospect about going to penrith is that’s where the only krispy kreme outlet in australia is located.
mmm… donuts…
