Web comic

I am working on one. As soon as I have it up and running (and have like, at least 3 posts on it), I will let you know, my loyal 1 viewer.

4th Grade Honors Journal Gems

...Or: 9-Year-Olds Kick the Creative Shit Out of Grown-Ups

___________________________________________

Journal Prompt:

Write about as many of these journal topics as you wish, but remember to KEEP WRITING during the journal time in class!

1. If you could be any color in a crayon box, which would you be, and why?
2. Write a list of things that make you laugh.
3. What would you do if you were principal of the school for a day?
4. Describe your perfect dream house.

___________________________________________

Charles
1. White, because if I am white, I will be the long-lifest. Do you know why? Because the owner often don't use me, and I can see my owner's life. It is fun to see my owner's life, if it is not sad.

4. I will make the library bigger than 10 dinosaurs, and when the books add together, it will higher than the moon.

Grace
3. Please try to come to school wearing your Halloween costume.

Andrea
4. My dream house is to have wings. And has chocolate-smelled water to wash my hands and my room will have lemon smells. I would tell my house to fly whenever I want to.

Jade (a boy)
2.

• A person was eating soap.
• make a zip on my stomach.
• The hericoper wings is made of knife.
• Eating the ice-cream all over the face
• A baby pup in his pants
• A man just fell down in the ice.
• A man just step on yucky pu

Holy Shit

First of all...bad Moplumsy. Very bad Moplumsy. Bad Moplumsy for never blogging ever. I suck at blogging, I know.

That said, I totally had my brains blown out today and I'd like to share.

This week is finals week, and the kids are taking exams. All in all, it's pretty boring. We sit in the classroom for two periods of about an hour and a half and watch the kids while they take their tests. No talking allowed. After they're done, they draw on the backs of their tests.

Enter Dave. Dave is a fifth grader, and an amazing artist. He is constantly decorating things with dragons, monsters, tigers, etc. Today, however, he decided to draw this:



Yep. That's a world map. Drawn from his motherfucking memory.

Kid drew this in like 10 minutes without looking at any sort of visual reference. Knowing this, check out central America. Check out Europe. Check out Africa. Check out the positioning of the equator, and relative sizes and positions of the countries. And before you say something stupid like, "But Bolivia is landlocked and the equator goes through southern Somalia," fuck you. Dave's a fifth grader who can draw a world map from his brain with 85% accuracy. You, on the other hand, are a retard. If this were my kid and I saw this, I'd immediately throw him into some kind of government super soldier spy program where he would learn to smuggle secrets out of dangerous places using only the power of his incredible photographic memory. Or enroll him in an art class (which he doesn't take).

Basically, the next time you're proud of a doodle, think of Dave and feel a little worse about yourself. I sure will.

Damn.

La Selva

Wow, what a couple of weeks.

Basically, the last two weekends have involved me partying my balls of with my brother and a small group of two close friends. Last Friday night, Tristan threw a going away party for our friend who is going to be a Vista volunteer in Maine. Halfway through the night, he got punched in the face by a girl.

Here's what went down: I got Tristan a pair of Groucho Marx glasses that has a turn-y thing on the nose and when you wind it up, the eyebrows and mustache go up and down creepily. So anyway, there was this girl at the party who was trying to fuck everyone, and she was flirting with people while wearing the glasses. Tristan said, "Be careful with those glasses." To which she replied, "What, these glasses?" *SNAP.* That snap was the sound that was made as Bitch broke the glasses while looking at Tristan, like some bully would do in High School Musical. To this, my brother said to Bitch, "You're a stupid bitch." Apparently this went on for a couple of minutes until, finally, Bitch hauls off on my brother four or five times before he put her in a very calming, humane headlock for a moment and sends her on her way. He spent the rest of the night and most of the following day absolutely ecstatic that he threw a party in which he got punched in the face by a girl.

So now I'm in Costa Rica. I met up with my boyfriend yesterday in San Jose, and we took an 8-hour bus down to our jungle cottage this morning. By "cottage," I mean "palace." Apparently, dad spent the entirety of this past year adding shit onto the house, and now we have a second bathroom, an upstairs office with a 50" plasma television, and wireless internet. Meanwhile, China's blocked the fuck out of any social networking sites. I'm sad that I'm going to be less connected to my cyber community back in Shanghai than I am here in the fucking jungle.

So I recently made my biggest adult purchase to date, which was a 30 GB iPod touch, a Gateway netbook, and a Bamboo Wacum tablet, all of which have changed my life, probably for the worse (but definitely the more pleasurable). Things I am currently into because the robots allow me to be:

• Twitter. I held out because it seems to be destroying the integrity of internet publishing (har), but turns out, it's addictive. I especially like it because it requires next to no commitment. (If you want to follow me, my name's moplumsy on there too.)
• The iPod touch. I know I mentioned this above, but have you guys seen this thing? It's pretty much the goddamned future. Seriously, I've got two Chinese dictionaries, a Spanish translator, the entire first season of The State, and a game called Globall that shows me where every other person playing Globall is in the world. Shit could probably do my laundry if I downloaded the right app.
  
• "Stuff You Should Know" podcast by howstuffworks.com.
• StumbleUpon

My First Exhibition: Lao Eyes 2!!!

So last weekend was fun. As I mentioned in my last post, Greg, Jesse, and I had our art featured in the second run-through of Lao Eyes, our school's teacher exhibition, downtown at Harley Bar. For those of you who do not live in China, a "laowai" is a foreigner, making "lao eye" an adorable play on words. As per your many (one) requests, I'll go ahead and get my pictures up here, with a couple of explanations, for your aesthetic enjoyment...

This is the whole kit n' kaboodle, all together...the untitled seven deadly sins series. I thought about interspersing the pieces together with the other artworks, but ever since I finished Pride, I've been thinking about it as a cohesive whole. Now, for a closer look...


Gluttony: 1 of 7. My favorite of the bunch. Originally, the word "gluttony" was included in the cityscape below, but I hated how it looked, so I inked it out and filled the remaining space with what you see here, setting the lettering for the rest of the series.

Sloth: 2 of 7. Get it? Heh heh.

Wrath: 3 of 7. This one took the longest by far. The Major Arcana VI card of the Tarot is "The Lovers" and this card is modeled off its equivalent of the Rider-Waite deck. In this version of the card, Adam is taking his rib back.

Greed: 4 of 7. I've done a couple of pieces now (some unrelated to this) of a world being held by an enormous space hand or space person. At first, I really didn't like this one and almost scrapped it, but after a while it really grew on me.

Envy: 5 of 7. Pretty self-explanatory.

Lust: 6 of 7. This was a really hard one to come up with. The final concept was the mouth as a sexual organ, holding a heart inside it as a lure.

Pride: 7 of 7. This was the absolute hardest one to come up with, and I didn't even start it until the Monday right before the art show. It started with a Google search of "pride," which eventually lead me to Wikipedia, which eventually led to the article "vanitas," which lead to my idea.

From that article:

In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic still life painting commonly executed by Northern European painters in Flanders and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term vanitas itself refers to the arts, learning and time. The word is Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity. Ecclesiastes 1:2 from the Bible is often quoted in conjunction with this term. The Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible) renders the verse as Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. The verse is translated as Vanity of vanities; all is vanity by the King James Version of the Bible, and Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless by the New International Version of the Bible.

Paintings executed in the vanitas style are meant as a reminder of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, encouraging a sombre world view.

Common vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certainty of death; rotten fruit, which symbolizes decay like ageing; bubbles, which symbolize the brevity of life and suddenness of death; smoke, watches, and hourglasses, which symbolize the brevity of life; and musical instruments, which symbolize brevity and the ephemeral nature of life.

The actual skull here is modeled off the sculpture "Vanitas" from the same article.

Prince of Orange René de Chalons died in battle in 1544, at age 25. His widow commissioned the sculptor Ligier Richier to represent him offering his heart to God, set against the painted splendour of his former worldly estate. This production resides today at the Church of Saint-Étienne, Bar-le-Duc.

Though he's offering his heart to God, it looks to me like he's checking himself out in a hand mirror.

Greg also has pictures up on his blog of his and Anthony's work...check it out!

I'm bad at updating.

Everyone in the United States believes I'm dead. Here's an update for the last bits of September and the overall month of October:

1. The beginning of October kicked off with a week-long holiday called Mid-Autumn festival (which oddly enough starts at the very, very beginning of autumn). Official Chinese policy calls for 7 days of school followed by 7 days of vacation. The week-long break hardly made up for those last two school days on the weekend. Regardless, I used the time to my advantage and spent several days decorating the apartment and making deviled eggs. I used to feel bad about my lackluster drive for adventure, but it turns out, I simply like being in my home more than I like just about anything else. All-in-all, a splendid week.

2. I have FINALLY started learning Chinese! I'm taking lessons for 2 hours every Tuesday with a personal tutor, whom I adore. Turns out, Chinese is a very simple language to put together, but the problems with it for westerners generally fall into one of two categories: 1) physical inability to pronounce sounds and 2) lack of context clues to tell you which ma of the 20 fourth-tone mas you should be using. The difficulty is not learning all the words...the difficulty is that there simply aren't enough words to go around, so each word means about 50 different things, all with the same tonal inflection and character.

3. I'm in a roller disco picture with Robin in the print edition of City Weekend with Avril Lavigne on the cover.

4. I went to the zoo over the break and had an utterly Chinese day with Jesse and Jingle. First off, one should never go to the Chinese zoo during a Chinese national holiday, as every other person in China is also seeking wholesome daytime recreation (the upside to which is the absolute overload of cute Asian babies at the zoo full of cute animal babies). The first major difference between a Chinese zoo and an American zoo is that the former is essentially a petting zoo regarding any animal that won't try to rip your arm off. At the ostrich pen, one can pay five RMB for a small tub of animal feed or spinach leaves to offer the enormous (and aggressive) birds.

Then there was the kangaroo yard. For 20 RMB, you and your loved ones, children, and pets can enter a large fenced-in quad with grass, trees, and about 30 kangaroos running every which direction. Some lounged as people pet their heads. Some hopped away from screaming children. More than once a kangaroo that was just beginning to trust me was chased away by a couple of kids trying to grab its tail.

The highlight of the event was the petting zoo, which at the very least was filled with domesticated, socialized animals that actually belong in a petting-zoo. As we watched a fat Chinese baby carry around a fat Chinese baby lamb, we heard laughter erupt ahead of us. Looking up, we saw that two of the smaller pot-bellied pigs in the yard had started having sex. It was raw and hilarious and frightening, as the erect penis of a small pot-bellied pig is about a foot long when outside its body, bright red, and about the width of a straw. Naturally, we got the whole thing on video.

Good jokes

I discovered this summer that my 5-year-old brother Charlie has mastered the Delicate and Moste Anciente Arte of the knock-knock joke. For your pleasure:

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Moose.
Moose who?
You have a moose in your butt.

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Snake.
Snake who?
An anaconda is going to bite your face.

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Sandwich.
Sandwich who?
You eat a poop sandwich.


No need to thank me...just pay it forward.

Miracles, and also things that are not miracles.

This weekend was the best and worst of pretty much all the times I've ever had.

Friday (day): Went to the photography market with Cindy's photographer neighbor Steve and spent my budgeted $800 on a Canon 400D digital SLR, or as Canon likes to say, EOS (whatever that means). With it, I purchased a UV filter, a 2 GB memory card, a goat hair lens brush, and a bitchin bag which is also the bag that Cindy bought because we're in love and I can't do anything independently of her. (And it was a really cool bag.) Celebrated with lunch at Whisk where I accidentally once told Cindy's mom (and the whole restaurant. Very loudly.) "that's what she said!" after she exclaimed, frustrated, "I can't pick up this coffee cup...my finger doesn't fit in the hole."

Friday (night): I met up with Ben, Tarrell, Tarrell's friend Ben from high school, and Cindy on the Bund after they had all been to Barbarosa. We rollerskated on the slippery walkway for a while, then went to I Love Shanghai and had more tequila shots than was necessary. Met up with some other teachers at Cotton Club. Michael, who is one of the new teachers here, happens to be a Michael Buble-esque crooner in his free time, so I made him my best friend forever for about 10 minutes as we talked about old jazz standards and I told many people that "he sings pretty." The night gets fuzzy after that, but at some point I fell in someone else's vomit, and my friends kept me from stripping all my clothes off in the middle of the street. Ben (the new Ben, the Ben that doesn't know me at all) lent me his sweater so I could take off my vomity clothes, and me, my leggings, and Ben's sweater were all packed away in a taxi for the long, drunken ride home. When we arrived, I rolled out of the taxi, leaving my phone inside, and passed out in the grass in front of my building for a while.

Saturday: I spent most of the day in Cindy's bed, where she, Tarrell, the new Ben and the old Ben and I all watched Family Guy and talked about the embarrassing things that happened the night before. They mostly had to do with me.

Sunday: (The old) Ben's mom is in China and we all went to champagne brunch at the Renaissance to meet her. The crew was Glenna (Ben's mom), Gale (her sister), Ben, myself, Cindy, Alex, Andrew, and Natalie. As none of us are particularly savory characters, and Ben's mom is a supercool hippie from northern California, things got ridiculous pretty quickly. Especially with me. Highlights of my Sunday drunkenness include:

• me picking up and humping Cindy in front of a wedding party
• me telling everyone about that one time I did coke in a brothel
  
• me saying that we should go to the bar so we all could "find people to do it with"

Luckily, I have good friends that know and love me no matter what. At one point, though, I would get drunk and do things that I know I wouldn't be brave enough to do while sober. Now I get drunk and do and say things that nobody, anywhere would ever do or say even under the influence of heavy drugs. Maybe it's time to reign myself in.

Oh, and the miracle that is mentioned in the title of this post is that, yesterday, I got my phone back. Kiah called my phone and a Chinese English-speaker answered and said she'd get it back to me. I called her from Cindy's phone and went to meet her. Keep in mind, Shanghai has anywhere between 13 and 20 million people depending on who you talk to. People lose their phones all the time and NOBODY EVER gets them back. Except me. Maybe the universe felt bad because I spent Friday night covered in someone else's barf.

Things I'm Totally Into: March 24, 2008

South Korean armed border patrol robots
Okay, when I first heard about this issue at lunch a few days ago, someone said that it was actually North Korea that had the armed robots. But after looking it up just now, it appears that's not the case. Since I'm eagerly awaiting the robot takeover much like my friend Cindy is busy assembling an arsenal of chainsaws and flamethrowers in anticipation of the upcoming zombie apocalypse, I'm totally psyched to hear about this first great leap forward in the direction of Total Robot Domination. As an added bonus, Kim Jong Il is sure to retaliate with his own army of autonomous killing machines to battle those of South Korea. Fingers crossed it's available on Pay-Per-View.

the possibility of a third Charlie's Angels movie
Dude, have you seen these in a while? They're awesome! By "awesome" I mean "horrible," but in a really fun way. I like these movies like I like The Core.

junk-emphasizing undergarments
My friend Morgan wrote an article last month about this season's hottest in the arena of Shanghai men's intimates--the Sling, underwear that puts your dude business into an elevated ring and hoists it breathtakingly into the limelight. Fuck the WonderBra--it's time to teach the ladies a thing or two about flaunting some bits all up in your face. Guys, this is totally the coolest thing to happen to you since Guitar Hero.

roller disco
Costumes. Open bar. Roller skates. Limbo. Everyone comes out with nasty bruises and fond memories. What fucking isn't to love?

The Untitled X-Files Sequel
If you're reading this, you probably know me well enough to know that I was a PHENOMENAL X-Files geek throughout the majority of my adolescence. In the seven years since the final episode aired in the spring of 2002 (the Ally McBeal series finale was the next night. It was a bad week.), rumors have circled the internet, ever hinting at a possible reunion movie, but for the longest time nothing was official. Well, it's finally happening. The pictures are up on IMDB and it's categorized as "post-production." There's no plot synopsis so I don't know what it's about. I don't care. Expect me to dye my hair red and wear my finest mid-90s power suit to the premiere.

Things That Cindy and I Do That Are Gay

• We take long walks together side-by-side, listening to our separate iPods.
• We sit and smoke hookah in silence, listening to love ballads.
• We sit on the same side of the otherwise empty booth at brunch.
• I double her to the gate on the back of my bike while she puts her arm around my waist and carries our parcels.

I guarantee there's more where this came from...

Meanwhile, inheritance may be coming through. Tristan MAY be coming to China and traveling with me this summer! Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

List of things I'm into at the moment:

After getting off of Facebook, which I've found a marvelous move, by the way, I am sort of left with a hole in the fabric of my social interaction. (Awesome metaphor and great sentence.) I still kind of want to share when I get into new things, but now I don't have a simple "Favorite Movies" or "Music" box within which to update my ever-changing tastes. So here's an update of entertainment I've grown to dig over the last week...I'll probably be doing this a lot from now on:

-Sweeny Todd. Sometimes I don't expect movies to be musicals, and if I'm not ready for it, I spend the first half of the movie laughing and feeling awkward. But then I re-watched it, and I can't get the "Johanna" song out of my head. I also have lesbian crushes on both Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp, so the casting gets my seal of approval.

-The Rolling Stones. I think I've found my classic rock band! I don't know if that's a good choice or not among music connoisseurs, but I've never had good taste in music so I'll go ahead and consider this an improvement. If you think not, go ahead and shoot me an email.

-The Pixies. The Pixies...have you heard The Pixies? Fuah. Why didn't anyone tell me they rocked so hard? Currently, my Favorite Song of All Time is "I've Been Tired." It makes me feel like I need a big sailor tattoo and some fingerless gloves and chain smoke like I. don't. even. give. a. fuck.