They Say It's Your Birthday

And it came and went, with a little help from my friends.  Although that's probably the wrong song.  This is the right one. This is the first birthday I have experienced where I have not prematurely rounded up my age to get used to it, to exploit it, in the coming year.  No, this one was a little more hesitant, the year of rabbit can continue a little longer for me before the dragon arrives; then I will acknowledge reality.  I celebrated less than I contemplated the aging process.  Birthdays are milestones, but meaningless really, except in that they give an opportunity to review one's progress and destiny.  Are we older AND wiser?  If the Taoist is actually returning to childlike innocence, immortal fetuses and all that, I only hope I can achieve it while maintaining control of bladder and bowels.

I spent my day in a fog, really, getting ready for acquisition of the Christmas tree -- my actual birthday present.  As I predicted, this year we scored a perfectly satisficing one in less than three minutes at the lot at Ala Moana Shopping Center.  These are not decisions that should require agonizing dithering. The next decision was equally easy: an party-of-two afternoon in both of our downtown Irish pubs, literally across the street from one another.

The day after the day, I tested my new all-region DVD player which failed to play my gift from my friendly Chinatown DVD vendor, Andy Lau's Future X-Cops, (what was she thinking?) which seems to coded be for a region beyond the Milky Way.  Perhaps just as well: I was bleary-eyed after finally completing Jewel in the Palace, a popular Korean drama about cooking and medicine, with some restrained romantic and political intrigue with an uncharacteristically happy ending.  My own trusty laptop has suffered--I hope sustained--a logic board failure, so I was using the Wizard's older one to access Dramafever.com.  His Mac drops signals and has some display issues, but I finally can say I have enjoyed this 54-episode classic of K-D. (That's 54 Korean hours, which are just about 60 minutes, more or less.) Since starting it some months ago, I see by my own reckoning, I have watched at least 40 other films and several Chinese series. Why can't I speak fluent Mandarin yet?  But the DVD player did let me enjoy a strange double feature:  The Magic Blade, a 1976 Shaw Brothers classic, and Chen Kaige's Together.  Still I can't get the haunting theme from Jewel in the Palace out of my mind.  Here is the same theme, in the "sad" mode.

I don't know why anyone would waste time with reality TV or the sitcom trash available on your standard cable lineup, when you could enjoy this:

Handsome and beautiful characters, engaging plots, scenery, costumes and soundtracks.  And that's just the historical stuff!