This is a birthday shout out to my man in Asia, Alf Hickey. It's his birthday today and I think that we should all give him a pat on the back for sticking to his "cultural immersion" program for so long. The good lord knows that I'm ready to go home soon. I really can't say for sure regarding China but in Japan it takes a special kind of person to stay long term. That kind of person is not me, not necessarily.

My life is good, mostly, but I'm just ready to be something more than a conversational English teacher. Thank god for the first good wage in my life, but I could go with a little more job satisfaction now and then.

IN other news, I watched Sin City last night, downloaded surreptitiously from secret sources on the internet. I have to say that though the movie was visually interesting and quite stimulating, I didn't really love it. As you might expect, the characters were two dimensional figures, as if peeled off of the page and pasted directly onto the screen. If you like Quentin Terantino or comic books or Dick Tracey, then you've got a good chance of liking this film, but if you want more than eye candy, look elsewhere.