sing sing sing

Yesterday's feeling of conquest--our team raised over US $1000! and the whole climbathon raised over 30,000-- was replaced by an increasingly downward-angled frown as I looked at my schedule this week. I fear that much prayer and a flask of (very) hard liquor will be required to get me sanely to the end of the week.

The sense of dread that came with realizing I am leaving at 6:50 AM on Wednesday to judge a daylong drama contest gave way to a sense of punch-drunk hilarity when I realized that, after that torture, on Friday evening I will be judging a singing contest whose selections include Quando Quando Quando and My Heart Will Go On. FYI: Engelbert Humperdink is coming to Taipei soon. And now Taiwanese children will be performing his songs en masse, with actions no doubt. And I get to witness and pass judgment on these children. I'll be like "all of you who sang enthusiastically have been deselected by the process of natural selection and will be sterilized as you leave the building. My condolences." And tomorrow I shall be singlehandedly teaching my university students about prejudice and discrimination. I think it will be a handy time to discuss how crappily they treat Vietnamese and Filipino workers. Maybe I'll make them pretend to sleep on the bathroom floor or not give them their customary break, or possibly order them to go buy me coffee and then take it out of their wages when I find something wrong with it. I could set up a brothel on one side of the room and make them sell me their younger siblings. No more La La land. Jessie once had a student say that Taiwan had no racism because they have no black people. I think it's about time people were disabused of that notion. In general, people are FAR more racist here than in the U.S. Which makes sense, because they aren't even striving for equality. Hierarchy is a given. Much as hierarchies tend to form in some manner even in the best of situations, at least in the U.S. we have the pretense of striving for equality, Taiwanese people haven't even set it up as a goal.

In any case, the Lark News has a hysterical article about outsourcing call-in prayer lines to India. That one and the Billy Graham article on the front are choice.

Yesterday I bought Jay Chou's live concert performance--the concert I attended--and it makes me smile every time I look at the picture of him in his velour aboriginal outfit. I'm so thrilled that I have this image for posterity.