January 5, 2006 Archives

How do you actually describe it coherently. I left downtown Montreal soon after the metro opened, at 6 something AM. Already a number of people were lining up at the bus stop for the 211, probably people partying all night, or perhaps working all night. I don't know. But it was very cold outside. The night before was a cold one - not as cold as it gets late January, February, but certainly colder than what we're experiencing today and yesterday.

I slept on the bus soon after it got on the expressway. I almost slept passed my bus stop, 30 minutes later, woke up right on time, just as the bus dropped the only other passenger to be dropped. Of course, there is no other bus to bring me home from that stop (b/c they start at 9:15AM on Sundays, and it was 7:15). So I started walking (b/c I'd freeze to death otherwise - even the McDonalds on the corner was not going to open before several hours), and walked 200m towards the train station, hoping that they kept it unlocked during the night (what folly).

I remember standing motionless for a bit. What a beautiful morning it was. Totally white from the snow that fell the night before, a bit of sunshine filtering between the clouds (but still a mainly cloudy and grey morning), the nostril-freezing cold. The pores on my face were reservoirs of cigarette smoke gathered the night before. It would still stink, even after taking a shower.

For a while, I just stopped thinking about the cold, and started thinking about survival, or, what if I wasn't going to find a warm place to stay and just freeze to death, and then I thought of the homeless people who go through not wearing anything nearly as warm as what I was wearing (a long black coat, with a thick wool scarf). I wasn't going to die, but it'd be a long two-hours - if a taxi didn't drive by just 5 minutes of waiting on the side of the boulevard.

I've been listening to all sorts of things on the radio. Whereas some people listen to the equivalent TV shows (excellent ones on RDI, every day), I do it on the radio, b/c I need to hear something when I work. Or I need to keep the background of my mind busy, while the foreground does grunt work. I don't know. But what I know is that the French Radio One is having a series of documentaries on the theme of intimacy. Intimacy in couplehood, but also intimacy online, in reality tv and the likes. One of the people on yesterday's show was quoting Freud, who was saying how guilt burdened people at the turn of the century, a hundred years ago - while now, it's probably narcissism. Something like that - the idea of feeling important online.

Some teenagers act in surprise when they learn their parents might read their blogs. My parents won't, unless I'm on a trip at the other end of the world. Similarly for close real-life friends ("It's boring/depressing that you talk about Montreal"). I can, or should, take down certain old sites, but to me, it's lost in cyberspace, and it is as public as those pre-1960s scientific magazines "in storage" at some unknown location, b/c the library can't keep them all on shelf. Yeah, so I'm not taking down my old sites. And with a morbid twist, you don't know when you are going to dissapear, so what if you want to leave something behind; wouldn't a blog (no matter how self-censored it is) be the best everyman's autobiography.

(Sure, unless you become an important figure of History, your descendents will be the only ones to remember you a few generations down the road. I sometimes think about my ancestors, and actively try to know the people up the generational tree who have the ... luck, of still being around. My mom has a cousin in the Taiwan mafia. My great-grand-father (her grandpa) was humiliated by the Communists in Guangdong province, before going to HK. My dad's grandpa was a funny man who taught him to smoke. My father's father had only one sibling, an elder brother (so it wasn't a very fecund generation, but then both my grandpa and great-uncle then each had 5-6 kids). There are all sorts of unheard of relatives who aren't so far genetically, just so very far physically, and probably culturally. Like the second-degree cousins I found out I had in HK. Or that second-degree cousin who was a child actor, lives in Vancouver, is in Montreal for university. It's absolutely funky stuff...)

Blah blah blah, I can't believe my mind travelled from "intimacy" to "family tree".

Félix was in Rodrigues Island, 500 km east of Mauritius, before the Holidays, and a postcard just arrived in the mail, amidst a snowy white day. .. Yeah, A new range of Apple laptops is coming out. I could go write my programs anywhere in the World. Not as if they cared about my existence in Montreal every week. XD

This was excellent, and in fact in some other CDs S gave me, there was the stuff I'm looking for right now (Annie, The Arcade Fire - not that they're very similar in style). Music CDs are like wine, it seems...

Memorable music from the trip was Yuki's Joy, and Supercar's B-sides. The first was bought in a music store in the shopping mall within Hiroshima train station. The second was bought at the HMV in Shibuya, same one where I spent hours in 2002 looking for a bunch of CDs for friends to buy. There is always memorable music to memorable events, let them be extended as trips, or punctual as parties. What are your memorable albums, songs?

(On that particular mix, I thought there was some amount of familiar-sounding indiepop... Anyways, b/c I never actually gave my impressions in person ('cause I wasn't in person for 5 months!), tracks 3, 6, 8, 10, 16 and 18 were really fresh-sounding - not stuff I listened to, or am listening to right now, but which if I knew how to find, would definitely like. The girl on the escalator - so many girls on the escalator indeed...