Thursday, August 31, 2006

Last One Gone

My German roommate moved out on Tuesday.

He's going on a 10-day Western Canada road trip before coming back to visit for a week, then leaving for Germany. Until then, I'm alone in the quad until the next batch of roommates move in. Every inch of the suite now seems so empty. My eyes scanned an area of blank wall where he used to hang his Canadian flag with all his friends' signatures on it. Fortunately, we here in Canada aren't "patriotic" enough to arrest him for defacing our national flag, along with all those who have named themselves by contributing to the desecration.

The flag...DAMMIT!! It's been hanging there all along and I forgot to sign it myself!! My only hope now is to wait until he comes to visit and pray that he didn' bury his flag so deep in his luggage that he can't take it out without having to pack all over again.

Until then, I'm bracing to see what comes through my quad door.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

I Ate Skippy!!!

Another first for me today.

My comrades at the iaido club invited me to their weekend practice at Simon Fraser University. I had to decline because it's too far and takes too much out of my study time for next week's final exams. However, it was the after-event that merited my presence - exotic meat burgers.

The venue was this place called Stormin' Norman's Spirit Grill on Commercial Drive. They also operate at Wreck Beach but I never noticed, probably because I was too focused on the sexier of the nudist fare there. Alright, so I admit it, but as long as they voluntarily expose themselves, I'm not technically a pervert. Incidentally, the restaurant website also has photos of Wreck Beach if you're even mildly curious at seeing a bunch of naked people at the beach.

I was the first one there, and waited an hour for those other people to come. Well, they finally did come - just about when the waitresses there were starting to believe that my "friends" were really imaginary. After the menus were passed around,I looked through it and sure enough, there were all sorts of animals listed. The most prominent offerings were buffalo, muskox, caribou, elk, venison, wild boar, ostritch, kangaroo, and alligator. To me, the latter two were the most exotic, but since I've already eaten alligator during my time in Miami, I opted for the kangaroo burger.

It reminded me of a TV show I used to watch as a little kid called Skippy The Bush Kangaroo. Don't ask me how we end up getting an Austrailian TV show from the 60's aired over here. My best guess is that the Commonwealths share their television programs very openly.

Anyway, the basic premise is that the eponymous kangaroo befriends the park ranger and his son in a national park or some sort of reserve. Not just any kangaroo, but a highly intelligent kangaroo, who would help her human compatriots protect the park from the likes of rustlers, criminals, hippies, and other evildoers. Skippy demonstrates her intelligence each episode by doing stuff from simply going over to the ranger house to recruit Dad's help, to flying in a helicopter to pick up an injured hiker.

One of the quirks of the show was that the boy would make this long whistling sound with two leaves, and Skippy would drop whatever the fuck she was doing and hop straight to his aid. It taught me at a very young age that animals are sentient beings and would make wonderful and helpful friends with people. It brought so many fond memories.

So I made it a double kangaroo burger.

When food finally arrived, the waitress directed us to the toppings and condiments bar where we can further customize our meals. In my enthusiasm for the eminent tasting of this delicacy, I hummed, in a sick form of irony, the chorus to the song Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport - another childhood memory.

Once all that is done, I finally chomped on my Skippy burger. It was pretty damn good! The texture was quite like a regular beef burger, but I suppose that as long as you grind it up into a patty, anything would have the same texture as a regular beef burger, including cardboard (which I suspect is the reason why McDonald's burgers often taste like their containers). The taste was more or less similar to beef, but milder and less "musky", which is the best way I could describe it. All in all, it was a great meal for under $10.

I'm definitely going to come back to taste the rest of the zoo.


Double kangaroo burger

Double Skippy patties with bacon, cheddar cheese, onions, mushrooms, green peppers, olives, and a side of poutine.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Scourge Of The Berliner

It's just my luck.

Every German person I've met so far is cool. Every gay person I've met so far is cool. What are the chances of me encountering someone who contradicts both? What are the chances of having such a person as a roommate?

Better than I would think.

I've been getting neurotically senile old people shacking in the same suite as me, but as far as unpleasantness is concerned, he may be middle-aged, but this guy takes the top podium. From my German roommate's conversation with him, he is also German, and from Berlin. Therefore, to avoid further confusion with my German roommate, I shall henceforth refer to him as The Berliner.

He never explicitly said he was gay, but he'd do things that tips the gaydars off the scale. One day, the Berliner walked in with a bigger man, both naked from the waist up. Without a word of greeting, they headed straight into his room and locked the door. At that point, I begged my imagination not to go any further.

But don't get me wrong, his homosexuality is not the problem.

He's actually been here for a week and moved out today, and he's been quite civil, saying hi whenever he'd pass us by. His problems didn't become apparent until the day before yesterday. I was heading back home from class, and when I passed by the building administrator, she called out to me. She told me that The Berliner has been complaining about the noise I was making the night before, and told me to keep it down. I figured that it must've been when I was playing Star Wars: Battlefront II with my friends in my room.

Now I don't have a problem with keeping things quiet for others. But what really pisses me off is that The Berliner didn't come to me first and asked me to quiet down. He went straight to the administrator. Furthermore, it didn't make sense for him to do so; if he approached me right away and told me I was too loud, I would've been more than happy to turn down the volume for him - problem solved right away. Instead, The Berliner had to put up with my noise into the wee hours until he had the chance to tell the administrator.

He has finally moved out this morning, but not before leaving an unpleasant note on the door of another temporary roommate, adjacent to his room, a Korean girl:

Goodby my little, noisy slamming-Queen! I hope someday,
someone will teach you how to use the door handle properly.
Go to Hell!!!

To which my reply would be:
1) Who are you to call other people a "Queen", poofter?
2) Go to Hell? No thanks. You've done more than enough flaming for all of Hades.

In a blatant display of his gayness, he wrote the note with girly-curly writing and drew exclamation marks with cute little triangles and circles. I suppose the reason why he didn't dot his i's with a heart is because this is a hate letter.

This guy is so socially inept that he is uncapable of consulting directly with other people to work out any problems he may experience from them. I've had it with this place being turned into a hotel for assholes during the summer. Good riddance that he moved out.

Actually, I hope he moves back to Germany and leaves Canada a little bit more of a pleasant country.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Testing Times

Certainly a trying day today.

My capoeira belt test was scheduled for today, so I rushed to the campus ATM before going to get cash to cover the testing fees. The master really tested my knowledge of all the moves, as every move has a name and he just calls them out and I perform them. Some of the moves I don't know at all so I had to look them up on the internets. What made the test even tougher was that I went to one lesson yesterday to get in some more practice before the test, so I was really sore today. I think the master was satisfied with my technical and musical abilities, seeing how this is my first belt test, and he gave me advice on how to improve my capabilities. My brand-spanking-new belt will be presented in a special ceremony in September called a batizado, or "baptism".

I left feeling good...until I felt a certain emptiness on my waist. It wasn't because these last two days made me lose ten pounds there - it was my empty phone pouch!! It was a poorly designed phone pouch, as it was loosely fastened with a magnet, and the clip allowed the pouch to rotate fully 360 degrees. If the pouch with phone were to somehow turn upside-down and one is to accidentally brush the fastener, the pouch will open and the phone is gone.

I looked all over the capoeira school and the ATM and their surrounding neighborhoods, the only possible places I could've lost it as I distinctly remember setting my Bluetooth headset to my phone just as I left my building, for driving safety. I even asked nearby stores if the phone was turned it. When it didn't look like I was getting my phone back, my heart just sank and said hello to my colon. It was a nice black Motorola V3 RAZR phone, but more importantly, I had a lot of friends' contacts in there. Some heartless and selfish motherfucker just picked it up and decided to keep it.

I always hated the Finders Keepers "rule" and think it's downright wrong. Some asshole simply made it up to justify theft. If I ever find something, no matter how valuable, I always try to find the owner, or at least turn it in to a reliable lost & found. I will not stoop so low as to salivate over finding and keeping other people's precious belongings, something that might mean a lot to them. (Okay, maybe if it's The One Ring to Rule Them All). If Finders Keepers was the prevalent rule, what keeps me from going to some poor schmuck and saying, "Hey, while you were away and I found your house, car, and beautiful wife laying around. They're mine now."

Without further agonizing, I cursed the phone and now the thief will have a horrible rash spreading from his/her hands.


Motorola V3 RAZR
My Preeeecioussssss!!

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Matsuri At Powell Street

Network building, picking up girls, call it what you like.

I decided to volunteer at the Powell Street Festival, an annual weekend festival run by the Japanese-Canadian community there. Spending three years in Japan myself, I was hoping that my experience and fluency in Japanese would be of help.

The first thing we did was set up the whole place on Friday. There was a lot of work to be done in terms of erecting (heheh) and arranging the smaller kiosk tents, putting up the large event tents, and setting up the main stage at the baseball diamond. There was about 30 people to do the setup, but fortunately, the festival wasn't that big, taking up only a neighborhood park. And best of all, a lunch consisting of delicous food in Japanese bento boxes was provided!

The hardest work was driving down these huge, 2 and 3 foot-long iron tent pegs with sledgehammers. Normally, I enjoy hitting more compliant objects with a sledgehammer, such as walls, uncooperative electronics, illegally parked vehicles, and human heads. In this case, the ground was tightly packed, particularly at the gravelly baseball diamond. We would also hit the occasional rock-hard object somewhere in the ground, which probably explained why someone in the neighborhood won't be getting any water or natural gas - or is still wondering where Grandma is buried.

The next day, Saturday, the festival opened, and I did my part by doing a demonstration with my iaido class. Due to the tight space, I stopped short of stabbing one of my classmates. Although the swords that we use aren't made of carbon steel and don't have an edge, they still have a bit of a point. Well, it's not my fault that unlike karate, you don't look at where you attack until you actually attack in iaido. Fortunately, my superior contol over my sword throughout the thrust saved her life and no one noticed the near fatality. Then again, it would've validated the effectiveness of the technique we were demonstrating.

After the demonstration, we all scattered and I was left to look around the festival, shop, and try the various fare at the food stands that broght me a sense of nostalgia of going to an actual festival in Japan. I was also planning to wear a men's kimono the next day, so I needed something to carry loose change, since, unlike women, men do not carry a special purse when wearing a kimono - that would be too gay. Rather, guys stash their stuff in their kimono sleeves. Still, loose coins isn't the best things to keep in your sleeves, unless you're doing some magic trick like pulling a quarter out of a poor kid's ass.

After shopping around all the kiosks,I finally found the perfect coin purse - a small one closed by drawstring with, oddly enough, designs of a bunch of angry-looking owls. I thought it was very kawaii and a bit mysterious, as it made me wonder what is making those owls angry (Is it because the White Man took away their land?). Also, both the color and design was consistent with the mood of the angry dragons on my kimono. A great buy for $4!

The last day of the festival, Sunday, was going to be the busiest. Not only was I going to be volunteering all day, but I also had to help with taking everything down once it was all over. I started by hosting the events at the Japanese Language Hall, which included a Japanese archery demonstration, Hiroshima atomic bomb expo, music & dance shows, and a musical poetry reading. I ended up using my Japanese after all, as some of the older people were actually from Japan, rather than 1st or 2nd generation Japanese.

My evening shift was spent guarding the door to the makeshift performer's change room across the street, space kindly donated by some Filipino community center. Fortunately, I had a clear view of the main stage, so my watchdog shift wasn't so boring as I caught the last spectacular taiko drum shows and the closing ceremony. I didn't have to use my iPod after all.

The end of the festival and the ensuing cleanup finally came. Some locals and even some homeless people came and helped out, as dinner was being provided at, oddly, a Chinese restaurant not too far away from the festival site. If I just saw these people out in the street, I'd probably wouldn't talk to them at all, so it's another benefit to the community that this festival has brought us together. Although the setup took all day, the cleanup only took a few hours, and we were off to enjoy some delicious Chinese food.

Well, the story doesn't end there. There was a Gay Pride parade going on at Davie Street, at the same time as the Powell Street Festival. Although I specifically told my mom that I was volunteering at the Powell Street Festival last weekend, she still somehow manages to get it into her head that I was trying to tell her something by participating at the Gay Pride parade.

So she called me to make sure I wasn't volunteering at the gay parade. I told her, as I have done before, that I was volunteering at the POWELL STREET FESTIVAL, a Japanese festival going on at POWELL STREET, not Davie Street. At that point, she was probably picturing me in my men's kimono and carrying around that special kimono purse. Before I hung up, I reassured her that our festival had nothing to do with homosexuals (even though they are welcome to attend the festivities), and that it was strictly about the Japanese community there.

Then I ended the call by telling her that I had an absolutely faaaaabulous weekend.

Japanese Balloon Fishing
A Japanese balloon fishing game, where you keep what you catch.
Probably the closest thing your dad will ever do to taking you on a fishing trip.