About Chocolate Parfaits

So a friend gave me his Netflix account – wooohooo! I started adding films to his queue so recommend to him (oh god, he has a horrible recommendation system, namely Netflix itself and ends up watching a whole bunch of bad movies…). While DVDs would always be sent to him, there’s still a whole lot of films that I can stream. So quickly, I started adding things for myself…

It turns out that most of what I am adding is qualified as “cerebral”, what the heck XD I actually thought that recently I am watching more fun films than necessarily deep, meaningful stuff. I guess I was wrong then. I also realized that I keep adding non-American movies! Even though the majority of the films I like are probably still all from the U.S., I have a feeling that I have a tendency towards European and Asian films now (which are all grouped into “foreign” on Netflix, LOL).

I don’t know if you can browse Netflix without an account, but if you can, feel free to recommend stuff to me! Also, this is a list of films I already have in my “instant queue”, and of course you are also free to warn me from watching any of these.

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Things I love so much that I would never give them up because of a guy

dredg, Death Cab for Cutie, mathematics, white shirts (both on men and myself), Converse shoes, my resume, spaghetti with tomato sauce, Jim Jarmusch, Milan Kundera, subtly erotic friendships, stay up too late, Chekhov, Ibsen, Horváth, Schnitzler, long bangs, murder as a fine art, Anna Karenina, Thomas Mann, theatre plays, going to the opera, traveling, breakfast, write e-mails, politics, hats, white flowers, manga, love-hate relationships, 36 Crazyfists, Deftones, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Verdi, fresh bread, red wine and cheese, Paris, Mondrian, Malevich, Hopper, Otto Dix, the exhibitions of the Centre Pompidou, red fruits, honey, milk, tea, cigarettes (although I don’t smoke), freedom, doing something crazy, sunrise, laziness, eat breakfast while being at the computer, the Enlightenment, greek mythology, atheism, Huo Zhe, Harold and Maude, M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder, Shortbus, spend six hours talking to a friend without doing anything else except drinking coffee, Loris.

Things I dislike so much that I would never come to like them even if it were for a man

V for Vendetta, La Règle du Jeu, Citizen Kane, touch a woman, Rossini, techno music, the smell of womanhood, my own shape, criticism, stay up late (sic), vegetables I don’t know, the taste of pumpkins, environmental pollution, bad papers, expensive hotels or restaurants, my forgetfulness, learn a language, software issues, Haydn, Bach, Wagner, the behavior of the Japanese government regarding WWII, wars, propaganda art, King Crimson, 80s music, the humidity of spring, jealousy, gardening, elitism, disinterest, complicated affairs, live with somebody I don’t consider family nor I have slept with, Resnais, Aronofsky, Eichendorff, Fontane, Montaigne, Rousseau (Jean-Jacques and Henri), Bochum, the suburbs of Atlanta or any other American city, live at the same place for more than two years.

Etc.

I got 31 points in the midterm, the professor gave 20 bonus points to everyone so that it says 31 + 20 = 51 on my exam. A few minutes later, he said: “If you got over 50, you’re in the A range.”

So this is the situation: You are watching a movie with someone of your preferred sex (hrr hrr) and this person starts with some random sexual activities. These are films I would definitely find unsuited for that, in cooperation with Pixi X3

• JSA
• Dogville
• Full Metal Jacket
• One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• 4 luni, 3 săptămâni şi 2 zile
• La Haine
• Dancer in the Dark
• Festen
• Huo Zhe
• La Strada
• M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder
• Requiem for a Dream
• The Motorcycle Diaries

Anything I have forgotten? I’m sure there is lots…

Gorp says that he wants more of my life here on the other side of the ocean, so here we are with a little aspect of it: A tiny dorm room! Ahaha.

Actually the title of this posting is not entirely true, considering that I barely spent any money on these posters, which in return means that I didn’t really have the freedom to choose what posters I wanted. But, I happen to like my room much more now that it feels somewhat personalized.

So, from left to right, we have:

• a Georgia Tech campus map
• a Megami poster from the series Phantom ~Requiem for a Dream~. In fact, I have never actually seen this series, but for some reason, I really like how this poster reminds me a lot of Ingrès nude women.
• a poster from the Atlanta opera, which had a delightfully boring mise en scène, and totally ridiculous singers (in my opinion). However, this particular poster = love
• another one from Megami, this time all the K-ON girls in ridiculous maid outfits, yay!
• finally, some poster I got from the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech. I kind of like the pattern a lot. In the following picture, you can actually discern it (and it looks much better in real!):

So, what type of poster is still totally missing here? (Despite my incredibly high spendings here, I am still being a total cheapskate about posters, I know -.-)

• 69 pages without appendix
• 86 pages including everything (title pages, empty pages, thanks and stuff)
• 42 figures
• 30 references
• 8 tables
• 10 people I am grateful to (actually there are 11 people in the document – there are two people on the list I mentioned out of politeness and one person who I have not mentioned because I think it would be awkward to for silly reasons)

Fyi, 1986 is the year I was born, everything else should be rather self-explicatory. Now isn’t that great?

In a list form, as always. (For those few not informed ones: I arrived in Atlanta two days ago and just survived my first shopping tour.)

Things I got at IKEA:
- NOT Floor Lamp (because I have no desk lamp, I randomly decided to get this 2-in-1 desk plus floor lamp! What a commoner I am, hohoho.)
- Light bulbs
- Set of chopping boards (what the heck was I thinking?)
- A large blanket (the most expensive item!)
- Duvet cover and pillow cases (but my product actually looks different while it has the same name, how weird)
- A 17 items tupperware set (it’s not like I need that many, but it was so tempting?) I should have gotten this manly bento set instead, but I didn’t see it.
- Spice jars (This is the luxury item of all the stuff I got. I am perfectly aware that the last thing I need in life are spice jars, but considering how often I use the thym/basil/oregano/rosemary set, perhaps daily even, it’s okay)
- DINERA müsli bowls, plates and this incredibly stylish bowls set
- and finally the product I have always wanted to have, the KRABB mirror XD

Things I still need to get:
- A lightbulb
- Water boiler
- Hair dryer
- A decent knife
- Sewing machine (lol)
- Bike

Other places I am going to leave a bunch of money at:
- Wal-Mart
- Target
- Home Depot

PS. Finally, I also had my armpits waxed today. Uh oh.

Happy new year, everyone! I hope you guys had a good start into the year, and thanks everyone who has voted in the poll! In fact, I am quite happy that the new design seems to be popular. ^^

It’s been awhile since I last watched a movie, isn’t it? Well, partially this is because my rabid anime consumation has kicked in again, and partially it is because I truly don’t have much time for movies anymore. This is quite sad indeed. Instead, I have been talking with my father about Anna Karenina recently, when he mentioned a list of 100 best quotes from literature made by some chinese person. The list really is interesting, especially since my favorite book “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is on it.

Although my view really might be tilted due to the appearance of my favorite book, the list is also very interesting from the perspective of my “chinese-ness”. There is no chinese work in the list at all (probably intended like that), and it is quite a mirror of what chinese people consider the world’s masterpieces of literature. It is quite an amzing list with a lot of japanese, english, french, german and russian literature, but it also features some classics, some rather recent books and also covers some areas in the world that gets less attention (India, Latin America). Except for Horváth and Schnitzler (who ultimately only seem to matter for the german-speaking anyways), this list basically has everything I can currently think of if I had to make a canon of literature: Hemingway and Steinbeck, “Ulysses”, Goethe and Schiller, Homer and Platon, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, Maupassant, Camus and Sartre, Kafka, Dickens, Gogol, “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “La dame aux camélias”, “Madame Bovary” and “Le Rouge et le Noir”, “A Doll’s House” and “Lolita”…

And so, without further ado, here it is the list after the jump. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out some of the original titles and so it’s actually a list of 90 works. Also, I will bold the titles that I have read, or at least partially read.

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