Ultraman. He's a Japanese superhero with a sleek silver and red suit -- very 1940s-birth-of-science-fiction style. He looks like a rocketeer. He has a matching surfboard. He is, in a hyphenated word, uber-cool. Or. Ultra cool. Yes!  

My mother calls him "Salty Egg Superman."

I assume this is the conventional Cantonese name for this cute little man, because I don't think my mother is the type to be really iconoclastic with this sort of thing. 

Why salty eggs, I don't know. It took some ponderin', but I concluded it could be the shape of his eyes, which are sort of like giant ostrich eggs, but then I don't understand the inclusion of excess salt. I would guess that salt in the eyes would sting very, very badly and make fighting supervillains difficult. Or perhaps it doesn't hurt, since your eyes would actually be made of salt and therefore more salt would strengthen your vision...

What the hell am I doing?

I have been suffering lately from an acute fear of becoming twenty years old.

Which is very strange, since I only turned nineteen ... now ... but it seems that I have been thinking about the big two-oh (you people twenty and one twelfth and older can stop sobbing now) for so long now that it feels though I am already atop it, instead of having yet another year to apprehensively watch its approach, be momentarily distracted, and have it leap over and sink its insidious age claws into my boney shoulders.

I think, if I was as mousy a social misfit now as I was a few years ago, leaving my teens behind would not be a significant change. At this moment, however, the ages from thirteen to nineteen represent to me a time of my life when I am allowed -- indeed, expected -- to be uncouth, tactless, awkward, stupid, inarticulate, ignorant, and otherwise offensive for the fact that I think highly enough of my uninformed and unoriginal opinions to actually express them to other human beings for nutritional consumption. Those qualities -- performed at an obnoxiously loud volume -- collectively make up my idea of "teenager." For a time, I revelled in this lack of responsibility.

After having endured the first quartern of my life, I do believe that I will be expected to show something for it. Say ... intelligence. Knowledge. Taste. Wit. Composure. Social grace. The ability to suppress chronic girlish giggling (a sore affliction of mine). A non-seasonal job.

Granted, I am probably grossly overromanticizing adulthood. I'm sure it is all too easy for many post-teens to stumble into cracks of indignity ... suffering demeaning work normally associated with dopey, low-skilled high-schoolers ... being unable to define 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism on cue (how embarrassing!) ...  

I have also lived much of life building myself up by exceeding expectations. There is of course a flaw with this strategy, as it relies upon relativity. An Average Effort can seem Excellent if all others are Shit; similarly, however, an Excellent Effort can seem Average if all others are also Excellent. Luckily, expectations for and the output of the average teenager are both so ridiculously low that exceeding them had been very, very easy.

Now with adulthood on the horizon, doubtlessly these standards will be finally raised to a realistic level, rudely jerking me out of the fog I have been living in for the past nineteen years, and I will be found out for the fraud I am. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw.  

Happy birthday, ol' girl.

Is there anything more Gothic-Wrath-of-Old-Testament-God than Sergei Prokofiev's "The Montagues and Capulets" from Romeo and Juliet (Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" being just a tad too John Williams in comparison)? It's good listenin' for the iron-fisted fascist within.

We've had a fly problem around the house this past few weeks, and after a lot of swatting and cursing, we finally hung up some unsightly but admittedly effective flypaper.

There are now some twenty flies trapped and dead, after one evening.

The creepiest thing is that I can hear some of them screaming as they slowly die. No, I really mean this. For a few minutes before their death, there is this loud, constant, futile buzzing. Then ... silence.

I feel almost guilty. *Swat.*

After having made my noble promise several weeks ago to paint the porch -- left to fend for itself for some seven years, so you can imagine the horrid state of it -- I got around to it at last today, pitching in after about forty percent had been completed by my family. I spent about two hours on my elbows and knees slopping paint about on the deck, side panels, and various nooks and crannies.

Casual requests had been made of me earlier to pick a colour, as I was the "artist" of the family (that is, being the one able to distinguish a Matisse from a Rembrandt) and thus regarded as most capable of such matters. While I was mulling over the ideal shade of green to spruce up the boring cut of wood, my father the pragmatist went out and bought the paint himself. He specifically chose what he did because it was being sold at a reduced price, due to the fact the original customer had rejected it, or failed to pick it up.

The shade -- I hesitate to say "colour" -- was grey. While I like grey in my clothing and think it a neglected part of the visual palette, sloshing it over half the front of the house was not particularly gratifying.

I am not a very hardy person, and when I lurched to my feet at the end of it, I nearly collapsed again -- embarrassingly weak in the knees. Luckily no men walked by then, or they might have taken my structural deficiency as a sign of passion.

New boots! Consumerism triumphs again.

The footwear is, of course, too hot (and too hot) for the current season, being a pair made of a synthetic material in imitation of a dead animal's chemically treated hide (henceforth known as You-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Cowskin Cowskin).  

Ignore the mundane setting -- the corridor outside the family bathroom, in dire need of a dusting and new paint job, yeech -- and feel free to imagine something more appropriate ... say, a leaf-covered concrete sidewalk on a crisp autumn day, topped by a modest corduroy skirt ... what were you expecting? Keep yer mind outta the gutter, mistah.

(But I admit, I do get a strange, perverse pleasure each time I zip them up and down ...)

And indeed, the mysterious doorway beyond leads to, of all places, my bedroom! My devious plan of mass seduction is all coming together! I am a minx!  

Aw, fucking hell.

For once, a news agency that celebrates the difference between Greek and Roman cultures -- note the use of "tunics" near the bottom instead of the oft-misused "togas"! Richard Galpin, BBC correspondent in Athens, come here and kiss me!