i feel perfectly normal in this in-between space

On the train from the airport to taichung i repeatedly listened to the xx's album. A british band with simple emo sex music and it fit with my sleep deprived exhausted arrival perfectly. I've watched too many war movies in a roll during the 16 hours on the plane--the ones completely lacked of any gender or class analysis--maybe that's where i got my bad headaches from...The air is really humid and muddy here. I swallowed some aspirins from my mom. We had taiwanese-german breakfast, milk tea, and talked about PhD programs, the economic crisis, and the smart evil people on wall street. My mom is probably some kind of social democratic and she is worried about me being a communist. But i do wanna talk to her about socialism someday. Instead, we talked about the world expo in shanghai and how flashy the chinese goverment is. She got some special promotion stuff from the airline so we are going to hong kong for three days next week. I hope i will run into wang faye or something. It just feels right to be so close to these places, not seeing them in some random white dude's academic presentation in the US.

I briefly talked about the new york moving plan, and about L. When we got home, she actually said to me, "if you wanna call someone in the US, it's half-priced to call it from the land line." I'm so stoked that she remembers L's name.