Roam, roam around

From a garden near the lab where I often work. Love going there for a walk at dusk.

Met two young college students smoking hookah in the tree shade in College Green, Ohio Universtiy. This is Christina.

I have been reading, rereading and rewatching Frida for the past one week. Even more fascinated by her than when I hardly knew her. But a little fed up with some over-interpretations of her works by some post-structuralist critics. Why do they always put artworks and artists into certain categories, or those -ISMs? Why are they so inclined to politicize art? I look at Frida as a pure and truthful artist who suffered a lot despite the fact that she claimed herself a communist. So much for Frida now. Should shift my attention to Scotland.

Jeff is another neighbor of mine. He said he was a web developer and I did see his computer in his dim living room, which is full of books, almost all of which fictional. He seemed to like beer, too.  I smelt l beer from his body at one meter’s distance. Jeff has been living in his apartment for almost eight years. Quite a long time, isn’t it?

I look around as I walk. It has been a habit, a bad habit according to my mum. We have a vivid and concise expression in Hakka to describe this habbit: da-sa-yam-gai. It literally means “beat snakes and search for frogs on the way.” Da-sa-yam-gai has been what I do often lately, very much like when I was a kid, but with a camera.

I found that huge mosquito in my kitchen. He (not really know if it was a male or female) had been on the wall above the sink for two days, possibly without moving due to his overweight from over blood drinking. I didn’t bother to kill him. It’s such a nasty thing to kill. Think of that blood spot in your hand from killiing a mosquito. I hate killiing mosquitos as much as I hate their existence in this world. But he was there for two days without moving and I saw him all the time, which was not very pleasant. I finally decided to kill him, with a sheet of paper. It was easy. He didn’t even struggle. I was about to throw him into the trash can, when it occurred to me that I should make a portrait of my victim — because he reminded me of another huge mosquito in a surreal novel by a Tibetan writer, which I pretended to like and pretended to understand many years ago. I don’t remember the name of the book, but the story was a bit like Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, another book I read before I really understood it.