Yearly Archives: 2009

Strip Club Experiences

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a strip club. The co-work­ers of my first job, along with the pres­i­dent of the com­pa­ny, were the ones took me to my first. They made it a point to “ini­ti­ate” me when they found out I had nev­er been. I still look back on that mem­o­ry fond­ly, because I was so young and green, and they want­ed to get me over my inex­pe­ri­ence.

But it was nev­er some­thing I did with any fre­quen­cy. You always look at those guys, seat­ing by them­selves at the head of the table with a beer in hand, think­ing, “Is this bet­ter than what you have at home?”

After all, strip clubs are nev­er real­ly about the girls. It’s about being out with your friends, when your par­ents think you’re at a movie1. They’re like con­certs. You could sit at home and lis­ten to a CD with stu­dio qual­i­ty sound, but there’s some­thing dif­fer­ent about the atmos­phere of a live expe­ri­ence.

It’s easy to grow past the appeal of strip­pers though. There’s no per­son­al­i­ty there. Even Playboy mod­els have likes and dis­likes. The fur­thest a strip club goes is by say­ing, “Here’s Porsche, and she used to be an air­plane atten­dant”.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the female fig­ure. But there’s no appeal in a strip­per.

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  1. Some of them had ring­tones set for their home num­bers, and just the ring would set off a round of teenage spite [↩]

Goodbye Karaoke Party

Frédéric, Misun, and the boys are mov­ing to France to explore a new busi­ness ven­ture. To say good­bye to every­one, they rent­ed out a karaoke bar and had a par­ty. The night was a cacoph­o­ny of sound, for the kids were giv­en free reign of the dance floor and ran around in cir­cles, while the adults took turns singing and eat­ing.

This is my first “5x5”; a video of five vignettes at five sec­onds each. It’s a help­ful guide­line for putting togeth­er footage that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have a con­sis­tent theme. It’s also very restric­tive, as five sec­onds is bare­ly enough to see what’s going on in a par­tic­u­lar clip, and that means you real­ly have to find the essence of action. I gen­er­al­ly don’t make 5x5s because I always have a sto­ry to tell, but in this case, it’s fun just to see how peo­ple sing. This is very dif­fer­ent from the Chinese karaoke par­ties I was wit­ness to as a kid, where the adults take their singing very seri­ous­ly, so every­one is very qui­et, atten­tive, and quite rehearsed.

The one who stole the show was Akio, who had heard Frédéric, Misun start­ing a duet of Ne Me Quitte Pas, took the micro­phone from Misun, and start­ed repeat­ing the line he had just learned.

I told Frédéric, “It’s amaz­ing that you’re not ner­vous up there”, and he told me, “I just said to myself that I want to have fun, and it would­n’t be fun if I did­n’t sing, so I was­n’t ner­vous.” I wish I could do that.

When Will The Devil Take Me?

It has­n’t stopped rain­ing since I woke up this morn­ing, and now it’s dark, with only the street­lamps and their reflec­tions in the pud­dles for light. It’s cold out­side.

This is a good thing.

I feel like the epony­mous char­ac­ter in Onegin. Sitting on the bal­cony in the dead of win­ter, wait­ing for a let­ter. His ser­vant, hand­ing him a stemmed glass of vod­ka, asks him to come inside because it’s cold. “I like the cold” he replies, as he resigns him­self to his fate.

He walks down the streets of Saint Petersburg, and his motif comes in on the piano, fol­lowed by strings. FADE TO BLACK.

A sto­ic face to the world. Can I say sto­ic? I like sto­ic.

These titles are get­ting hard­er and hard­er to write.

And I want to say that I’m melan­choly, but I’m not. But I’m not gid­dy either. My emo­tions aren’t black and white. They’re a mix­ture of ups and down. I don’t know what to say when I don’t know what I’m feel­ing or what comes next.

I’m just wait­ing. Passive. Yielding.