Chinese New Year & Valentine's Day

It has been a long time since we last posted a blog. Our friends have been asking us to start blogging again. So here I am, in SCI_ARC computer lab, typing my saturday afternoon away in a school that I have visited more often than I wanted to, while Jawn is at an animation workshop in Hollywood. (ref: http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/weekend_workshop2.html) Why do people read and write blogs? Is it for people who have nothing else to do, or for people who have the most number of things to do but don't want to do any of them? Hmmm... (I noticed that my wife is getting philosophical here... hmmmm...)

Anyway, an update on ourselves. Chinese New Year has came and passed. So has Valentine's Day. The mood of CNY in LA is the equivalent to Thanksgiving in S'pore, uncelebrated (because there is no public holiday) and uneventful. A couple of streets was blocked out for holding carnival that was nothing compared to S'pore's Chinatown and Marina Bay. However, we still went, hoping to taste a bit of festivity out of this seemingly repressed celebration. I think the highlight of the 15-day CNY festival was the second last day. We went to a 10-course dinner organized by the Club Singapura LA, each person had to pay US$50. The food was delicious but we were totally under-dressed for the occassion. We were the only ones in jeans. The women came in 'sparkling' cheong-sam or evening gowns. The men came in suits, a few of them went to the extreme of wearing the traditional Chinese men costume with the pigtail cap. (I had to call it costume because people don't wear that on the streets anymore). But it was quite interesting, I had not been to a 10-course chinese dinner for a long time, I think the next one we are going to will be ours - the Chinese wedding banquet back home in Sept and Oct this year.

Valentine's Day. I wanted to start with finding out its origin. Do we need to know why we are celebrating something to celebrate it? Who is Valentine? I know the internet is an unreliable source, but it's the only source I had at this point. (poor wife trapped in SCI-Arc while I was being blown away by some of the coolest contemporary artists in the animation industry) I found out that he was the Catholic Bishop Valentine who secretly married couples during the heyday of Roman Empire when Emperor Claudius outlawed all marriages for fear that men wouldn't go to war. People set this day aside to honor Valentine, who was beheaded by Claudius in the end.

It is interesting to see how it has evolved to a non-official holiday that becomes so commercialised and sometimes crazy because of what people do during this day. I heard from a colleague that the statistics of women sending flowers to themselvs so that they appear to have admirers have gone up this year. Men are comparing with one another how many gifts or gimmicks they have come up with to please their female partners. I had to take my hat off to one of my colleague's gimmick. He bought a bunch of nice stuff for his gf but in addition to those, he also bought a $1 Nascar racer's biography book for her and deliberately keeping the $1 tag on the cover. (By the way, she hates Nascars). The idea was really funny and he got the exact response that he wanted from her when she opened the wrapper. (One of shock and confusion that was a blend of "I want to kill you" + "I think it is quite funny" + "but I cannot laugh because you would be too happy"... kind of emotions... maybe I should pull a similar shocking trick on my wife... hee hee... great move Mr. Nick Albert!!)

As for Jawn and myself, we both secretly bought gifts and cards for each other. (and I want to highlight that she and I got presents that were approximately the same size as well. We should be adding the images of the cards to this blog in the near future). It was more difficult for me to get a gift for him because I don't drive and it is almost impossible to get anywhere (at least to where you want to go to) without a car. Haha...the good thing was I got one of our friends to buy it, which was very much to his surprise. Jawn initially thought that I bought something from the market just across the street from my office since I can't drive. So then we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner at night and it was freezing cold that day but we had to sit outside because it would take an hour or more to get a table indoor. Fortunately, our waitress was very sweet and she even sang an Italian love song for us in her soprano voice. She even said that we were her favorite couple that she had served that night. Hi-five glupper! (hi-5!!!)