Tagged with clothes …

Nov 06 2007
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winnipeg

i guess it happens once a year

This afternoon I was up in my room when the freaky little ice pellets started barraging the area. They were bouncing off the bathroom window making a racket that got me off my couch to investigate. And I looked out the window and felt like crying. Or maybe just puking. I really really really hate winter.

Before I left for work I hunted out my mittens in the basement. They were stuck in the pocket of my brown coat, which is my next step in the winter coat progression. Today the yellow leather jacket got removed from the rotation in favour of my Nepali coat. I felt bad about it. Poor little guy. I just got that jacket and now it won’t be worn for months.

One of the things that bothers me most about the weather is how much tension I carry in my upper back from walking outside. I have to huddle in on myself to keep any semblance of warmth going and that tenses me up into a clenched little claw of a person. There’s no holding my head up high, only stoopedness to give the outside world as little surface area as possible to steal heat from.

I really shouldn’t live in the city I do.

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Oct 28 2007
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winnipeg

new old jacket

Alison is so good. Tonight she reattached the cuff of the sweetass yellow leather jacket that used to be Reyn’s dad’s that Reyn’s arms were too long to fit. So now I have the jacket and can use its powers for good.

Also, more irons have been added to the fire. That’s all I can say about that right now. *Mysterious!*

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Oct 18 2007
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Uncategorized

mourning

Last night as I returned from work (where the Indian guy who reads with great volume and haltingness did two hours of Rabindranath Tagore poetry) my coat caught on our backyard fence. The coat I refer to is my red leather one, the one Dave’s dad gave me umpty million years ago, the one the guys down at Campaign used to call my commissar coat. There was a small hole in it, but nothing too drastic, a flap of leather exposing some of the seventies plaid lining. Just a bit more character, I’d thought. A bit of character and prime ripping territory it turned out.

So now the coat is pretty shredded down the back. To an unbearable degree. Reyn said he’d bring a jacket that used to be his dad’s to see if it’d fit me (its arms are too short for Reyn).

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Apr 17 2006
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中国

ladies please, one at a time!

Nanchong was, as always, a good time. It’s funny how making and eating cookies from 11am till about 6pm gets you very full of cookies. So full that you have to stop even though there is still much batter to be devoured. And then sandwiches taste so good afterwards.

We also got a good old fashioned case of meat poisoning on Saturday as our [organization redacted] Easter meal. I’m not saying the meat was bad; it was delicious. It’s just that the possibility of overdosing on proteins and iron and stuff was very real. For the record, chicken hearts that are grilled in the same seasoning they use for lamb kebabs are flipping spectacular. Well, more like rolling spectacular until you spear them on your fork.

I perused the used clothing market and found TShirts I liked. One is Korean and the other is what I like to think of as my anti-You Haven’t Had a Night Until You’ve Had a Mennonite shirt. It has a pink picture of a car on it with the words “i may be small but i’m FAST.” There’s no better way to say you’re confident in your sexual prowess than to wear something stating the exact opposite. At least that’s what I hope the message is.

I also got to connect my computer to the internet at Holly’s. This meant that aside from accidentally deleting all the pictures I’ve taken in China, I made some changes so the discojivesuper5 website looks thematically consistent with the propaganda machine you’re now reading. I doubt that anyone actually ever visits djs5.com itself, but now it doesn’t look quite as much like ass.

(I had the pictures backed up on my iPod, so it wasn’t too big a loss, except for my funky photoshopped versions of stuff.)

Not to be all sentimental or anything but that was my last official CEE thing. Single tear. I’ll head back to Nanchong at least once more before leaving, and Holly & Phil said they’d come down to Wanzhou sometime, so it’s not like it’s the end. Holly said Dan got all sentimental near the end of his time, but somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen to me.

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Aug 10 2005
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中国

cinnamon gum centre

[This post was written earlier this week but Blogger seemed not to want to publish it. 8/14/05]

One of the great things about Beijing is that there are cool Chinese people here. It’s what happens when you live in one of the country’s major centres I guess. I always forget about this because out in Wanzhou the really cool people are few and far between. Because they generally don’t want to hang out in the sticks and head for a place they can congregate.

On Monday our teacher took our class out to this artsy district (DaShanZi) that was filled with old factories that had been turned into little art galleries. Some were also artist’s studios, like this one guy who was doing big canvases of white on white paintings that were all about the texture. But there were posh little places with anti Party style art (pantsless babies in mao jackets saluting faceless baby mobs with their fists in the air) and cramped little places with dancing girl sculptures that looked like they were made from buildings, and a superb photography gallery.

The best piece I saw was a matched pair of metre – metre and a half across woodcut things. One was a red star on a black square and the other was a black star on red square. These are the big five pointed communist stars (or at least what I think of as communist stars). The awesome thing was that the red parts on both of them were smooth spray-painted wood, but the black parts (so the background on one and the star on the other) was made out of the woodcuts used for printing Tibetan prayer books. I’ve never wanted to be really rich more than at that moment. I just wanted to drop an exorbitant amount of money for them without batting an eye.

On Friday I’m probably heading back to one place that did funky one-off clothes to buy a ridiculously expensive jacket (but one I can afford, hopefully).

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Apr 20 2005
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teaching, 中国

and may i ask why are you purchasing these articles of clothing?

Today I bought a couple of shirts purely out of spite.

People who get my quasi-weekly emails (and if you want to, just give me your email address in the comments) might remember me mentioning how much I hate the shirts that exist here in Wanzhou. They’re all pastel crap with big stripes and are just ugly.

This past Saturday I was talking with one of my students and he mentioned that they’d had some class meetings to do teacher evaluation kinds of things. He told me that all people said about me was that I should get some new clothes.

To be fair, I don’t have a huge wardrobe here. I have three teaching shirts that I cycle through each week. So yeah, they’ve seen those three shirts a lot. But come on! Evaluating your teacher based on his shirt? That’s low. So I decided to start wearing a blazer and jeans (I kid!).

How this comes down to my delicious spite shirts is that I bought two shirts today, finally finding ones with non-awful colours (although the blue on one of them is pretty pale) AND I WILL NEVER WEAR THEM TO CLASS. Hahaha!

I’ll mention I bought new shirts to build up their anticipation. “A Justin in other shirts exists” they will murmur electrically, but they won’t get to see him. When students come over I will quickly change out of them. I’ll wear other shirts on top of them until I am outside the school gates. Once in a while I’ll be wearing one the spite shirts downtown and a student will see me and the legend will grow, until they are begging to see these mythical shirts that haven’t burned into their retinas.

Of course the other reason for me not to buy any more Chinese shirts is that they don’t fit.

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Jan 24 2005
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food, 中国

it looked like tofu

The problem with trying new foods here is how often you find yourself with a mouthful of organs.

I picked up my mail today and it was a glorious imaginary Christmas. A poncho-y fleece. A DJS5 toque. A pile of Maclean’s magazines. It was worth having to explain to the FAO that yes I was back for a little while, and yes I would still be going to Hong Kong.

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