hair A+, attitude "must try harder"

For years I've been convinced that my lack of success with women was due to a single factor. Not my boyfriends, no! My hair. And now I have the proof: last night, while I was checking out post-Britneyite fedoras from a street vendor, this hot, athletic, willowy chick who was totally my type put her arm around me so she could get a photograph with the shaven-headed foreigner.

I bought the hat. Then I cycled home alone to organize my Chinese flashcards in alphabetical order.

death days

On the third-and-a-half floor stairwell in my apartment building were sticks of incense and a metal bowl full of blackened bits of what might once have been paper money, the whole thing emitting thick clouds of smoke. Perhaps someone keeled over of a heart attack in that spot. I thought of dumping water over the stinking mess for the sake of air purity, but that might have been perceived as some kind of bad omen.

It was one of the many days on which the Chinese make offerings to the departed. I have never so much as seen the graves of any of my family members, much less swept them with a broom or thrown them a picnic, as one is wont to do in southern China. (The advantage of having stubbornly atheist Jewish grandparents, now deceased, is that if they were "on the other side", they wouldn't dare make themselves known -- because it would prove them wrong.)

The next day, the ashes and incense were gone; but my apartment on the 4th floor -- the number of death -- was instead filled with a pungent aroma of tobacco without any visible source. A ghost sneaking a quick one on the stairwell? No: they've closed the cheap ethnic restaurant at the end of our street; they've chased the snack vendors away and the shop selling freshly squeezed fruit juice -- but construction is now complete on the new cigarette factory, and they've started roasting the killer weed right below our windows.

If you love the dead: why not make more?

baby got back

Hello. Hi. HI! Hey, you over there -- yeah, you, the one with the MacBook and the rumpled copy of the left-wing newspaper. Put your latte down and PAY ATTENTION TO ME!

That's better. I know I've been gone a while -- almost three months, in fact. I've been all over Yunnan and Yurrup with nary a blog post to show for it. But I've been busy, you see.

First, I travelled to the Thai border to meet the man I will call the Third Canadian, for reasons known to anyone who's been keeping a-tit of my sex life. Then I moved in with him. Then I came back to Cambridge to (*gasp*) work on my PhD thesis. In between library visits I made a flying visit to Berlin to talk pots, pans and politics with the Epicure.

More soon. Charmaine X: meta-blograstination.*

*When you procrastinate from blograstinating.

photo: (il)literacy

Like spam,* it's almost poetry: a T-shirt in Kunming exhorts "chunkily-penised boys" to "do her right... to her good". Seduce her with Chinglish!


*Freestyle spam e-mail poetry? Spam lunchmeat haiku? It's all good.

Sighting [Don Mace]

Sunday. The Doña and Doniño, on a rare visit to Cambridge, are taking me for an (OMG-it's-) early morning stroll. Because babies don't get hangovers. "Bowl!" "Mo bowl!" He absolutely lurves churchbells. I've rarely been more of an atheist.

Not far in front of us, Delphine, on a rare visit to Cambridge, emerges from a college not her own.

Ah.

I don't make introductions. No, I just watch her by; she grabs her bike and cycles off towards Bridge Street. When she disappears, I turn to my son and say "Breakfast time?"

And that's your Don. All the awkwardness, jealousy and poignancy of adultery, with none of the sex.

On that note, term's over again, and the Don is returning to domesticity. Adios. Hopefully Char will be back any minute.

Oh, wait, the end-of-term party...

It's 1 am the day before. For some reason my jacket is sporting a bunch of fake grapes, inserted into its breast pocket by a cute ex-blonde dressed as a Fate. The older husband of a European friend has just squeezed them, like they were a boob, and he a teenager. He's not the first. He is, however, the first to follow up by slipping his hand inside my jacket and rubbing my nipple. "It runs in the family", he says, by way of clarifying that this is, in fact, weird. Charmaine, I think I have some more friends for you.

Sightings [Don Mace]

Email contact from Char! And she promises stories. Yum.

(And about time, too, Ms X. I was on the verge of changing the blogname to something brand-faithful but slightly more accurate, like "Charmaine X: Doesn't live here any more. No forwarding address. Try: China", or "X Charmaine".)

In other rara avis news, I've learned that this blog has a reader! At the Other Place. Just in case this heralds a new era of cross-institutional popularity, I'll repeat this warning that I, Don Mace, am a semi-fictional writer of semi-fictions.

So, for example, if I write that last time I was at the Other Place, a lovely young woman took me to her room after a group formal to watch her "change her shoes", and later followed me up to mine to "help me fetch my whisky", and ended the evening by asking if I was going to "walk her home", that might look... ambiguous. But, it wasn't! And that's how it's done.

Finally in avis migrans news, Titania has disappeared again. Presumably it was something I said. Any of you drawing broad conclusions about the survival of friendships despite romantic tension should probably stop before you fall over. I know I'm going to try.

Update: no she didn't.

Oops, I did it again [Don Mace]

Can one apologise for treating someone badly without making them the bunny in the relationship? Just askin'.