Jia Lin’s Weblog

blog directories

GeoUrl: by geographical location-worldwide
bluepulse: by topic
Eatonweb: by U.S. cities
weblogs: by updated time (last 3 hours)
goolge directory: by genre
directory of wblog directories: list of web directories

Sex and City is back

The first episode of the new season is not exciting. After one year, the four women we used to love are getting older and paler in appearance, which I’m aware of, is a cruel thing to say. But truth is out there, anyone can see that. It is nothing wrong for getting older. Getting older is associated with getting wiser in Chinese value. But the girls did not get any more mature or more enriching in emotion state, even worse, they are trying very hard to return to their teen years. That’s what make mid-aged woman pathetic- I might be too cruel here again. I believe there is certain thing you do, certain outlook, certain state of mind at certain age, and that’s the beauty of life dynamic. I’ve been following the stories of these New York women for several years (season 1 to season 5), and I’m expecting they are growing up at new phases of life. After absence of one year, they are still dealing the same issue, with the same attitude and sometimes, mindless. Maybe it is very hard for its screenwriter to produce more good stories after five seasons, which was the same problem with Ally Mcbeal, the other very good show ended up in disappointment. Both of them have a very strong story and witty dialogue as a chic show.

I like the first four seasons of Sex and City very much, especially the first two. When Carrie was in love with Big, there was a good drama. You felt the attraction, love, pain, jealousy, craziness and stupidity. And I like the sense of detachment when Carrie observe her masochistic love to Big, endless pain and endless self-deceiving. There is dramatic contrast of Carrie�s soberness as a feminist intellectual and stupidity as a woman desperate in love. I love her deep self-reflection followed by insane self-denial. Since season five, she seems stop doing this intellectual thinking. Instead, she seems to abandon the complicated past and return to innocence (or the show producer wants her to), once again seeking for pure and unworldly love, regardless of getting older and supposedly getting wiser. She, together with Charlotte and Miranda present a group of pathetic chic women, sexy in body and innocent in mind (maybe it is ideal archetype), exactly the way men want women to be. No wonder Samantha is always on top list of audience�s pick, sexy, smart, down-to-earth and know how to protect herself. Although she did not change in core over years, she is a mature woman and knows what she wants.

Anyway, this is just the first episode; I�ll watch on and expect good stories.

Look what I got for $19….

The wings of the dove, Washington square (Henry James), Madame Bovary, The Tempest, Nausea (Sartre), Beautiful and damned (Fitzgerald), Great Expectations, Frankenstein, 1984, The Brothers Karamazov, Brave New World (Huxley), Future Shock (Toffler), Dream power (know yourelf from your dream), The theory of the leisure class, Selected travle writings & Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton), French Dictionary, Mythology (Edith Hamilton), Greek Historians

And they are all in good condition! I had to try very hard not to buy more Agatha Christie’s detective books, which I bought tens of them in past two years from this annual sale at our public library. I guess now it is time I donate them back.

The joy of possessing new books (even they are used!) are enormous. But moving them with tons of my other book collections to California is really a pain on neck. With the time goes by and I’m getting older, I’m really getting worried if I could read through all books I owned, before I leave the world . How about one third of them? Then there is a issue of choice: for every book I read, I abandon the chance of reading another maybe better book (like getting married, ha!), LIfe is so short. When you have such a stupid anxiety, it is quite difficult to concentrate on reading one thing. Here is what I do: I read three or four books together which cover diversed topics. In mathematics senses, the odds of losing chance reading other books is basiclly the same, but it really reduce the psychological sense of loss. And I also save some classic books for the future, when I have to read them with my kids anyway.

world as a blog, via alex

I’m trying to make sense out of the map. Well, if the emergence of a red dot means a new blog posting, if the new blog posting means someone is sharing his/her speculation with others, Can we consider the area with frequent appearance of red dots have more dynamic intellectual activities, or say, have higher creativity? That might be a good research topic.

To-Do list at 30

*Get the Dr. degree
*sit down and do some serious reading (for real): City in Civilization, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Birth of tragedy, Interpretation of dreams, complete works of Graham Greene
*pick up piano lessons (self-teaching): warm up Bach “Three-part invention” and start “French Suite”, finish Chopin “Nocturne” (complete work) and start some of “Polonaise”, “Mazuka” and “Etude”
*daily walking (10,000 steps), losing 10 pounds
*controling quick temper
*writing blogs (at least two each week)
*call at least one friend in China every two weeks
*watch lese television, see International movies
*speak with BIn more in English (help each other)
*sleep less (no more than 7 hours each day) and get up early
*think about the meaning of life, how to make life less regretable.

Writing a book!…get over it…blogging instead

Ok, These are the facts being talked again and again: most books are written either by nuts with talents, or nuts without talents. Most of books lose money, frustrates authors and wastes time and money of readers. What should you do when you have unquenchable desire to beat the odds and become part of the culture phenomenon? The answer is go blogging. Tacit Knowledge — Writing a Book talks a lot of clich�s, but there are sparkling moments, such as:

�this is a big part of why I generally celebrate digital media — because the new tools give people from the non-nuts range of humanity a better chance to contribute and take part in the conversation that is “culture.” How many such “normal” voices have really been heard in this conversation before? But these days, if you write and publish a blog, for example, the publishing part of blogging is trivial, at least once you’ve set the blog up (or in the especially inept case of the Blowhards, paid a good webteam to do the hard stuff). You can say what you have to say, press a button — and what you have to say flies right out there and becomes part of the ongoing culture thing. Never before in the history of blah blah blah. Very cool, in any case, and I’m going to follow how this affects the tone of the culture-conversation with interest. Blogs have already had quite an impact on journalism. What kind of impact will they have on the cultural world? (Huge, I hope.)�

Who owns what media .via Eszter

Peck is gone

He loves me, he loves me not

Since last time I fell asleep in middle of Matrix Reloaded, I decided to stop watching American movie, at least commercial movie for a while.
Luckily, there are several foreign movies shown on Buffalo recently, such as L’Auberge
Espagnole, Bend it like Beckham or The dancers upstairs (although made in America, it is about Chile, and directed by great great John Malkovich, one of my very favorite actors). I picked He loves me, he loves me not, because I was completely in love with Audrie Taotou, the Amelie in Amelie. Furthermore, I was quite intrigued by the structure of the movie and its reflection on reality and perception. It turns
out I would rather not have known about the story before I went. I got less surprise and heartbeat as the movie goes on. But it is still a very special, smart and interesting movie, in spite if the triviality and simplicity of the topic. Audie Taotu is still a dreamer and voyeur as she is in Amelie, but not the cute type this time. It is always an enjoyment to follow every movement of her. French movie seems not trying very hard to make stunts, but you see the delicacy and cleverness everywhere. In all, this movie is an combination of romance, suspense and black comedy. But I really don’t want to write too much about the story as most of those movie reviewer have done, which really deprived the pleasure of seeing the movie- in case someone read my blog, which, though I know is very rare.

Let me go back to Matrix Reloaded a little bit. It is not really so bad, I fell asleep because I had a long day that day, and we went to see the 11:00pm show. And I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s totally overwhelmed by the first episode and felt a kind of disappointment at the second one. Special effects on Reloaded are good, ok, even better. But that�s never my priority. Some scenes in the beginning strongly remind me of some Si-fi films like Star war or Star Trek. These kinds of film really make me asleep. And about the dancing scene in Zion, I even thought it was a music video from Hip-Hop MTV. I was reading an article in New Yorker the other day questioning what�s wrong to live in Matrix. Well, that is how I feel about Zion. There is no refreshing moment such as �red pills or blue pill, reality or matrix�, or �guns, lots of guns� (when Neo came into Matrix to fight with agents) in the first episode. In �Reloaded�, I don�t see the profundity and cool-ness I found everywhere in the first episode. My heart kept sinking when I saw familiar plot and idea thatI can found in many other main-stream movie. However, I will still go watch the third episode in November, anyway.

LA

Life in LA can be so unimaginative. We were seeing old friends every day, but our conversations seldom exceed house, job, car and kids. Bin and I are freaked out by the bleak outlook of our future. I don’t know if it is because in LA or because we will about to step out of grauate school. We want something different, other than house, job and kids, or Chinese food. But it is hard to say what exactly is the thing that we want, maybe just a bigger house instead of condo or apartment, maybe residing at Santa Monica instead of at Montry Park. Maybe a place to be meritocracy instead of technician or office staff. Maybe, maybe just a sense of being different. We don’t know. My feeling is we will get more used to talking about house, job, car and kids, as we moved to LA.