Ok, seriously, I had way too much wine that night. Gay ninja? What? That's a the biggest burst of energy from me than I've had in months!
The story behind the video is that while at my curry party Mag was showing me youtubes of some guy who has a hundred uses for a shirt, and one of the uses is being able to make a ninja headscarf thing. Apparently pink is the gay ninja color. I just happen to have a pink t-shirt (what luck!) and then things just got out of hand.
Rob was commissioned last week by a woman he used to work with at a previous school to do some translation services. At first the job looked totally sweet; all he had to do was quickly proofread some articles that were written in Chinese and English for any major errors, then record the English in his own voice so that the recordings could be uploaded to a website the following day. This was supposedly going to take him about two hours of work every night, and a small sacrifice to make for nearly a thousand dollars a month!
Well, you know what they say about things that seem to good to be true...
On the fourth day of our trial (I say our trial because by this point the workload had become so heavy that it was taking both of us the better part of the night to complete. But I'm getting ahead of myself), we thought we finally had everything down pat: I was going to handle the editing end, then hand the files over to Rob to record the voice part. Well, easier said than done.
There were too many mistakes in the editing. Oh, the editing style wasn't great. Rob speaks to fast. Rob speaks to slow. Rob speaks like a retard. Could you try speaking a little slower, but only on select words? Your voice is starting to sound a little exhasted... (This comment irritatingly added after the fourth RE-recording of one file).
A job that was promised to take only about two hours of Rob's time took us both more than five hours last night and we only finished three quarters of the recordings.
Now, just so you can see that it's not just me, I'll give you a few of the sentences that I was expected to edit. Bear in mind that these were the worst of the three writers that were on the submission team. Ironically, it's the head of the team! Ok, get ready for some bad English, here we go:
The taking out food need to have it to pack with for dinner and the late night snack the convenient plastic bag will not be forgettable to use.
...
Many people only eat vegetable without meat appetite may easily feel hungry and eat more starchy food invisibly. By this method, human body will induce severe burden with the certain causation of increasing the rate of blood sugar, especially to the chronic patients.
...
Due to the domestic rice has achieve to self-sufficiency, three month of safety deposit still remained presently and the fallow lands have run up to 220,000 hectares.
...
Anyway, that's all the complaining I'm going to be doing for one day. I'm truly grateful now that I have my nights and my boyfriend back, and we'll just have to figure out a different way of making up that extra cash necessary for the trip.
For more English mix-ups and other such fun and nonsense, check out engrish.com
Just a few shots from that photo hunt I went on the other day.
Those pink things are supposedly edible. I know this only because they were sitting outside a bakery. Anything that is that particular shade of fuschia and doesn't melt in 30+ degrees is not edible in my books!
I've decided also that I need to venture further than three blocks from my house on the next photo venture. I think I have sixty shots of the same bushes from five different walks. The city just lacks any sort of inspiration for me... Actually, now that I say that, I think my next project is to capture the essence of night markets: the noxious neon, the raucous teenagers, the cacophonous cabbies... if only smell-0-vision existed for my camera, I could share the unique odors as well! (No, you don't want that, actually).
If these were cave man days and my form of artistic expression and broadcast media were limited to cave drawings, I would be marking this day as the first official day of summer in wide swaths of charcoal. And also, I'd probably be hiding in my cave, where it's cool, and where I wouldn't have to deal with the heat induced ill-tempered cave peoples.
Of course it's not really the first official day of summer; I am familiar with how to read the Gregorian calendar. However, local forecasters are tagging the city at 32 degrees celsius in the shade, and that, to me, is summer weather by any standards. Clear blue sky on top of that, you'd think we'd be rushing out with sunscreen and shorts, cartwheeling in parks, frolicking barefooted with carefree ease. That was my natural first instinct when I woke up to see the clear blue sky this morning, and after a full winter of complaining about the cold and feeling like a monkey in a cage I'm certainly ready to leave the house a bit more. But am I really ready to deal with this heat?
For the time being the weather outside isn't quite hot enough to reach us in our inner sanctum, meaning we don't have to rely on the air conditioners or the space heater to make a comfortable temperature.
For the sake of my sanity and yours, I'll stop rambling now. I'm going to finish my strawberry-pineapple-papaya shake, grab my camera and head out of doors to see if there's anything to see. I go with optimism. Wish me luck that on my photo hunt I'm able to shoot anything worth it's meat.
