12.22.2008
WEEKLY DIGG //
I guess it's taken me 2 weeks to get readjusted to America. Here's links:

A few of the greatest social and religious philospers in history.

This is what happens when you take Christ out of Christmas.

TP'ers won't get off old man's lawn, so he takes justice into his own hands.

This should've been the greatest moment in the history of American game shows. Thank God we had Drew Carey to crap the bed.

Here are some incredible photos taken during the Greeks riots.

If Twilight was 10 times shorter and 100 times more honest.

BANG!

Why people write "first" in the comments.

Harsh childhood realities.

Illinois United States Senate Seat -- LIKE NEW!!

The 7 dumbest things ever done by the TSA.

Mad 15 ton front loader skills.

The top photos of 2008.

Merry Christmas from the World's Best Dad.



12.08.2008
TINY IN TEXAS //
I'm back. Sitting in front of my computer after one month of playboying* my way through two countries. Sitting in front of my computer in the middle of the night, as if it was the middle of the night before that, and the middle of the night before that. As if nothing at all had changed. Except that it's cold. And I'm fat. I may not make it to the end of this post.

30 hours. You can get to almost any place in the world today in 20 hours. The Chinese even got the moon is quicker time. On my 11 hour flight I spent the first 2 wondering if I had sharted. The next 3 convinced some feces were smeared on me somewhere. The final 6 with the horrid realization it was the breath of the Chinese dude sitting next to me (he didn't get up one time).

The plane food was plane food. I believe that I was served the Bowel Quiverer on Rice. I had to sit on airport toilets 4 times. Bringing my lifetime total to 4.

By the time I got on my flight in Dallas I was like that mom in Home Alone. Because of weather there was a huge log jam at the airport. I had to use the toilet but we were taxi'ing. An hour and a half later convinced I'm dying of water poisoning I have to find my father's car waiting for me in some dimly lit lot. Fast forward a couple of days I only remember as being too tired to pee or watch tv and one harrowing drive to A-town, I'm back.

* leaving public facilities in an embarrassed state.



12.02.2008
BIG IN HONG KONG //
Real big. Tonight as I was putting on a jacket I heard my mom gasp, "Oh my God! I never thought I'd see it. You have a gut." Yup. It's true. I wasn't wearing a money belt filled with donuts either. It is straight up lard. Conventional wisdom would say that in the last few weeks I've been preparing for a film or that Hong Kong's gravity is different. But I inhaled conventional wisdom after eating the scale.

In all fairness I am on a new medication that makes people look like walking Thanksgiving turkeys, and relatives have been shoveling food into me like it's about to be confiscated by the police. I don't think it's normal to be fantasizing about eating your next meal as you are eating your current one. It also doesn't help that there are several bakeries in every shopping mall and subway station (I have a duty to assist the local economy).

So how much have I really gained? Well I was a spritely 102 lbs before I started this trip. Looking at me sideways I was nearly two dimensional. Now I crush the scales at a grotesque 118; that's after I put down the bag of pastries I just bought.

My daily schedule has been:
Wake up- eat a meal
Go to grandparents- eat a meal
Take a nap- dream about eating
Walk with grandfather- eat a meal
Still walking with grandfather- eat pastries
Go to grandparents- eat a meal
Leave grandparents- eat another meal on the way home (10 min walk)
Surf the web for a couple of hours- go out and eat a meal
Get ready for bed- eat meat pastries
Wake up twice in the middle of the night- eat sweet pastries

I would add 'eat while on the toilet' but you might find that disgusting. I guess things wouldn't be that bad if I had least put on say 1 pound of muscle (or took 5lb dumps). But the only thing getting a work out is my jaw. You could say I was doing bicep curls every time I lift something to my mouth.

Gaining 16 pounds might not sound like a lot, but it's dangerously close to 20% of my original body mass. Imagine if Charles Barkley gained 20% of his weight; the fire department would have to cut a hole in the TNT studios to get him out. This is also the most I've ever been, going all the way back to that period in college when I worked out for like 20 minutes.

As horrified as my mom sounded, she then added, "I'll call you in a couple hours to go get something to eat." She points out that I'm fat and then enables me. That's Chinese mothers. It bothers me a little that I'm a bit overweight, but I haven't felt more American. I've already been doing something about it though- like I'm waiting to finish this blog post before I destroy that bag of chocolate croissants.



12.01.2008
MY RICH AUNT //
Here in HK I have a rich aunt. Not Rolls Royce rich, but mount-gold-machine-guns-on-a-Rolls-Royce rich. Let's put it this way: my mom says she is in the 9 digit neighborhood. At that figure I just start using fake numbers like gajillionbazillionaire, because numbers that big just lose meaning to me.

One of the perks of being related to someone stupid wealthy are 8 course dinners including $40 crabs, $8 clams/ea, ham imported from Italy, fig salad imported from Spain with 8 year aged vinegar, grapes imported from Japan, wine and sea bass from France, and prawns from Australia. That's when we eat in. The first night we ate at a swank restaurant on the penthouse of a financial skyscrapper overlooking the building Batman jumped off of in Dark Knight. Another night we had dinner and I noticed she was wearing a boulder on her hand which I'm told was a diamond ring. For an hour I was trying to think up of analogies to properly put its value in perspective. I came up with 'would command a higher ransom than my life and first unborn child.' But then my mom told me think 'Kobe trying to make up for nationally humiliating his wife ' ring range, so I just gave up and happily ate my Wagyu steak.

How about this: My uncle dumped his tired Porsche 911 for an Audi R8. Apparenly when a car hits 15k miles, it's old.

Currently they are living in a house on the freaking sea only because their other house down the street is being torn down and rebuilt. If you have no idea how exorbitant HK real estate is, my mortgage in Austin could afford a closet here; if that closet was above a toilet and I got a roommate.

Then there is my cousin. He is 6. He's been to Australia, Canada, and Japan twice just to ski, this year. When I was 6 the only place I could brag going was to the bathroom by myself. He has a private coach/teacher for piano, skiing, painting, swimming, skating, ping pong, golf, Tae Kwon Do, and Mandarin. He has his own driver. I went bike riding with him the other day. The nanny and driver were holding up traffic as they crept behind us in a Mercedes. And everytime he stopped his bike the nanny would come sprinting over to start him up again. And once when I was picked up, someone who wasn't the driver opened my door and then vanished. I was later told it was his personal body guard.

So what do you give a kid who has all that? A customary red pocket with an paltry amount of money that his nanny wouldn't even wipe his rear end with?

I introduced him to YouTube and became the coolest cousin ever that he thinks is older than his mom.