Rice Candy

Some good progress on the picture book today. Started dividing it into the proper layout, which usually works out to 24 pages or 12 spreads. Still not sure it's gonna work out, but it's coming along. As I want to include a lot of things that I remember from my own childhood, I spent some time looking up all the Chinese candies the Aunties would send. Didn't realise that the Botan Rice Candy was actually Japanese, but doesn't really matter, I suppose. I need to go into Chinatown and have a candy spree and see what I can find. If I can't find the Botan one, then maybe I can find the White Rabbit kind. There has to be some rice candy. A must. And pocky. Red ginger. Lucky candy.

I'm feeling very ambivalent about a lot of things. There are no right answers in life, you know? And kind of generally unsatisfied. But I don't see any way to change things, because it's not just about me, is it? No Man is an Island.

Such a stupid saying. Platitude. Bleh.

My office smells like a bonfire. The wind has been blowing down the chimney lately and it always smells like ash and fire now, like my own little private slice of Hell. Not saying I don't like my office. Just saying it's all brimstone up in here, yo. Kind of distracting. I keep expecting an imp to pop out of nowhere. I would call him George.

Was thinking about double eyelids. No, really. It comes up in Korean Dramas quite a bit -- it's apparently one of the most common plastic surgeries for both girls and guys to get. And I remember when I was a teenager and my friend Alice (who was all Chinese, as opposed to my hapa self) was so jealous that I had double eyelids. Everyone wants something they don't have. If anything, I probably wanted MORE of a sense of my Chinese self probably because I so didn't want to be myself. Living in backwoods Florida (and Mississippi and Arkansas) never felt like home; I always felt foreign and, to be honest, I embraced that to an extent. I ate with my chopsticks at lunch. I might envy some people (mostly because they had money and stability and things and didn't have to shop at Kmart or yard sales and then because they had a dad and not an alcoholic pedophile stepfather) but I never wanted to be any of them. Never wanted to be me either, exactly, but I also didn't want to be anyone else. I suppose that hasn't changed.

This is getting really rambling and not making much sense. Ah, hell, I don't know what I'm even trying to say anyway. Probably because I was dredging up childhood memories to work on this picture book. Though goodness knows none of that stuff is going in the book.

Anyway, decent gym time today and I'm almost at my next downward milestone. Just a bit more to go. But my back is killing me. I maybe shouldn't have done the running on the treadmill bit and just stuck to the elliptical, but I kinda wanted that feeling of feet pounding, blood rushing, music beating, steps in time. It's not the same on the elliptical somehow. Though it is better on my freaking ancient back.

Also, where did all this silver hair come from? Some days, it feels like a crown of spiderwebs.