('bb', came up with the title just for u. haha)

 

this, of course, is the wkend just before halloween, which means it's the party wkend.  in most of western europe, halloween is not a holiday for kids at all, but for the big kiddies like me to dress up and party.  in geneva, where there is a huge ex-pat community, this is also the case.  but for the local genevois, aside from the cool open-minded ones, are apparently born with a broomstick up their asses and do not dress up.  a fact that is annoying, and embarrasing, as you will see shortly.

 

perennial question: what should i dress up as?  last year, nothing, since i found out about the big h'ween party 4 days after it happened.  year before that, probably something lame, as always.. can't even remember.  this year, thought i'd go big or stay home.  believe it or not, i'd never dressed up in woman's clothing before (at least in my adult life.. apparently one time when i was a toddler my aunt, with my mom as acoomplice, put me in a dress and took a picture of me, thinking what a pretty girl i'd make.. hmm..)  so, being a tranny for a nite it was to be!

 

not wanting to buy a dress just for one nite, i enlisted the help of my girlfriends.  first it was val, who has a cute little pink thing.  but i'da had to choose between zipping it up and breathing.. such a shame.  in the end, she lent me a white skirt and a red top.  with some shoe drama in between, i later found myself trying on some of annalisa's numbers.. found a front-button mini-skirt that showed my ass quite nicely (like i said, go big or go home).  oh yeah, this was already saturday late afternoon.  shops close at 6.  within an hour, i manage to find a top that was tight enuf that i didn't need a bra, pantyhose, gloves that covered most of my forearm so that i wouldn't have to shave them, an ugly pair of shoes and then later a much nicer white slip-ons with a bit of a heel that were still way too small (for a guy with size US11.5/Eur45 feet) but at least i could walk/dance in them.  but, no time to hunt for a wig.  so i was going for the lesbian chic look.

 

went back home to .. uh.. 'groom'.  (this i might later regret writing, but for the purposes of full disclosure.. whoever's reading this better appreciate what i'm doing here!)  i was gonna shave my entire body (save the nether regions).  but being one hairy mo-fo for an asian, i'd been in the shower for what seemed like an hr shaving my tosro and lower legs.. and fearing i'd clog up the drains and since i was getting all pruny, i decided to stop just above the knees, up to where the skirt started.  so now i have a 'border'.  yes, as gross as it sounds.  there's even photographic evidence of this floating around.. that'll come back to haunt me i'm sure.

 

back to annalisa's place to change and get made-up, and to leave my man-clothes (along with, unwittingly, my house keys).  borrowed some of her accessories (beret, bracelet, purse), and i was off.  very nice of her to come with for part of the way, as the double-takes and the suppressed smirks on the tram woulda been rather uncomfortable.  the last bit, the hike up to the pre-party at someone's house by myself, was bad enuf, even as i tried to meander thru dark quiet side-streets.  got a few cat-calls along the way, from guys and girls, and from the older folks, a few stares of bewilderment.

 

and that's why it's so annoying here that no one dresses up.  even if i think that everyone knows it's h'ween wkend, the fact that no one else is in costume.. not that fun.  i normally don't care about what other ppl think, but this was far from 'normal'.  i just kept thinking about ross bravely walking across town in a french maid outfit by himself on a random night a while back.. that gave me courage. lol

 

anyhow, got to the pre-party, got some laughs there, and was with friends when i walked to the main party (got a 'magnifique! i love you!' from a guy with 2 girls in his arms along the way) so that was alrite.  had a great time at the party, and luckily i realized i didn't have my keys with me before the nite was over.  so i went home with sophia to crash at her place for the nite.

 

now here comes the hobo part.  she lent me a pair of pants and a tshirt to wear this morning.  but i still only had the pair of shoes i'd worn last nite.  so it was either black pants with white shoes (with no other visual clues that'da linked me to halloween) or go shoe-less.  at least i had socks (which were part of my breasts last nite).  i chose the latter.  i tried to make it not noticeable, but i did get a few condescending looks while waiting for the bus and tram, including from one older woman walking her two dogs, one of which started to piss on the sidewalk just as she slowed down to look and judge me.  that was just too rich, even for geneva.

 

morals of the story?  i'v walked (and danced) more than a mile in a girl's shoes, and i still don't get it.  i haven't walked nearly a mile in a homeless guy's shoes (or non-shoes), and i can't even pretend to understand what they go thru.  and finally, even if i did make a pretty girl some 27 yrs ago, that ain't tru anymore.

 

ps - i'm awaiting the photographic aftermath to flow in.. and i'm NOT going to volunteer them here.  u'll have to beg for them. hehe

 

ahh paris..

 

for the veteran readers, you know that i'v been to paris before.  2002 to be exact, just for a few days, and was my first time in europe. (i still think i'm the only person on earth who's made europe his/her last inhabited continent to visit.. yay i'm unique! :)  back then, i was absolutely amazed at how beautiful the city is.  the sights, sounds, smell, etc.  my friend eric, who's since moved to edmonton, was being my local tour guide at the time, so i didn't have to think at all about where to go, what to see, etc.  so this time i wanted to see what my impressions are, 4.5 yrs on, having to deal with the locals myself, and having been living in europe for a year.

 

the short answer is that yes, it's still amazing.  sure, seeing old 'european' buildings (to us north americans, they all look the same) everywhere and big churches and monuments and fountains and things have lost a bit of the 'wow' factor.  but i approached the trip more from a 'hmm, could i live here?'  and so while i did do some of the touristy stuff, for the most part my trip was just going to different parts of the city and just walking around (one of the first things i did: hunt down good vietnamese phở in chinatown).  and the locals were surprisingly friendly!  i think that's partly due to me having lived in geneva, where the people are annoyingly rude.

 

so the short anwer to the 'could i live here?' question is yes.  but then i could live almost anywhere, given that it's not permanent and the conditions are right.  but i could live in paris for a long'ish period of time.  of course, if given the chance i'd find the annoying parts about living in paris soon enuf.  but i suppose big cities in general just appeal to me.. something about getting drowned in the anonymous throngs of people of the metro during the daily commute that is very relaxing for me.  can't really do that in geneva.. the 30 min tram ride that traverses the entire city is rather plain and mundane, nothing worth looking out the window at, and often, too often, i see people i know (not the friends type, but the 'oh hey, how are you? how shall we proceed in prolonging this awkward conversation since we hardly know each other and frankly i have no interest in wanting to get to know you?' hehe)

 

into the trip i realized that it was quite symbolic on several fronts that i'd be in paris almost exactly a year after i arrived.  a year ago i almost booked the flight that would have landed me in paris and i would have taken the train to geneva.  (bit of a train buff, so taking the tgv itself was a treat.. disappointingly slow the first half of the trip tho)  and also for about 2 yrs i was seriously considering, and just about, applied to INSEAD, the b-school outside of paris in fontainebleau. (almost went there to visit the chateau there, but it woulda taken much longer than i thot, so went to versailles instead even tho i knew it's closed on mondays).   so in a parallel universe i would have just graduated with an mba from there this past summer.  but then i realized that an mba is not my calling and stopped thinking about that.

 

anyhow, back in this universe, it's 5pm, and it's time to go home and prep for a weekend of partying (woo hoo!) before having to get serious about school and work and icky stuff like that.

 

i don't normally go back and blog about things over a week old.  if i didn't get a chance to write about it, i just let it go.  but thought i would this time because it's kind of a thank-you blog, even tho those involved aren't readers, afaik (as far as i know - i love this acronym! even if i'm the only one i know who uses it.. hoping it'll catch on).

 

last last weekend, oct 6 - 9, was a douple holiday weekend for me, even though neither was an official day off here in switz.  friday was 中秋節 (mid-autmn festival), and monday was canadian thanksgiving day (感恩節).  not gonna talk about the blatantly obvious parallels of the two autumn harvest-related food-centric festivals and them falling on the same weekend and how that feels for this chinese-canadian.  but instead, this is about that particular weekend in the context of being on the other side of the world.

 

instead of sucking and not getting to feast-out, with the help of my friends i was able to chow down on the requisite foods. 

 

by the time i got around to hunting for mooncakes in the chinese grocers, the only flavours left were durian.  GROSS!  i'd never heard of that before, and there's a very good reason why those are the last ones left!  blech!  but thanks to mike (and me being selfish and emailing him a week prior and prodding him to do so), i feasted on a very filling meal, including mooncakes!  imported from hk!  had one with lots of roasted squash seeds in it, a new for me, and didn't really like it.  but there were ones with just the lotus paste with the egg yolk.  mmmmmmmmm

 

as for a turkey dinner, the thot of having a home-cooked turkey dinner here didn't even crossed my mind.  i'd heard of these couple of cdn girls organizing a turkey dinner at a resto, but at 80chf, thanks but no thanks.  so lynn, again at my selfish prodding, this time with anti-bourgeois banter, organized a small dinner at a place that specialized in chicken (chez ma cousine, old town - yes hye, same one we went to) with some other friends.  we tried to round up more canadians, but most of them were already at that damn dinner that was a bit too rich for moi.  if only i had thought of subverting that posh soirée by organizing our for-mortals poultry dinner earlier.  ah well, we ended up going and crashing their party anyway.  the whole reason we ate out was cuz lynn couldn't get her oven functioning in time, and so the following sunday, she invited a few ppl over for a home-cooked chicken meal.  the fresh-off-the-farm chicken was so big that it coulda easily been a small turkey!

 

i guess the moral of the story is that, so what if i didn't get a real turkey dinner, or that i didn't have moon cake breakfast for 2 wks straight (hehe yeah that's what i normally do).  the point is that when you find yourself far from wherever you consider "home", or quasi-home, then maybe the best way to uphold tradition is to break with tradition, trying new things with the new people in your life.  for that i give thx, 在這秋季的一天.

 

leaving it up to you, the reader, to extrapolate, from my last paragraph, how elements of my situation could be the genesis of the inter-generational cultural transmission mutation of diaspora communities vis-à-vis the population in the homeland, which is so blatantly obvious... =)

 

(sorry.. being a bit pedantic lately.  i'll stop.)

 

 

it's been one year and two days since my arrival in geneva.  current weather conditions: overcast, slightly chilly.

 

but unlike last year, when i didn't see the sun for a week and a half after i landed, the sun was still poking thru the cloud, weakly, as recently as 4 hrs ago.

 

so, one yr on, lots of introspecting?  meh, not really.  haven't had time to be honest. (note intentional ommission of comma)  still haven't solved the eternal Q, as in (what i want to do) x (rest of my life) = Q.  but realistically, i wasn't truly expecting me to know in a year's time.  there's been lots of ups and downs - more than, and different from, what i expected.  but i guess that was part of the deal of coming here.  no doubt better than the dread of being stuck in a rut if i hadn't left.

 

well, at least the forecast calls for sunnier picture: intervals of sunshine after two more days of grey drizzly weather.  perhaps portending a brighter future?  at least for the weekend?

 

but i'll be in paris from tomorrow until tuesday anyway, so i guess it's all irrelevant anyway. :)

 

 

first day at UNCTAD.  now working on the 7th flr within the UN compound.. or 'palais des nations' as it is called.  even tho i'v been in the UN many times now, it does feel kinda cool working directly for the UN inside the UN.  i get a pretty good view of the park surrounding the building.. a very nice autumn day indeed.

 

had a super tiring weekend (nothing special, just went out a lot.. tho i did get stupid drunk on friday) and so the alarm just wasn't doing it for me this morning.  let's just say i got here a wee bit late.  but that's ok, cuz i had to do the whole security thingy at the UN gates.. never done it before cuz i had always been entering with my Timor badge, but today thot i'd go thru the whole hurdle in getting my UNCTAD badge.  and so the admin errands that i thot'd take 45 min max took 1.5 hrs.  so in the end me being late wasn't an issue afterall.

 

more or less settled in now, finally.  just got my email working, talked to my boss, work looks promising.  working in the e-business branch, specifically i'll be doing stuff on microfinance, which, by no coincidence, is what i'll be writing my thesis on.  this whole part-time issue tho, still not totally resolved.. the HR lady was introducing me as the half-time guy, while i was careful to call myself the part-time guy.  still have to sort out my class sched before i can finalize my hours with my boss.  and then there's the holiday issue (not touching that yet).  in the end, i am working for free afterall, and i'm giving myself a bit of time to show that i'm taking this seriously, and it seems like they should be pretty flex on their part.

 

last friday was my last day at the [previous employment].  not typing in the name/abbrev because last time i blogged about work, a colleague who looks for mention of the [previous employment] on blogs found my blog, to my embarassment.  not because i had talked negatively about anyone or anything from the [previous employment], but just that i'd been writing this with a specific (albeit ever-changing) audience in mind, namely ppl who are not familiar with the prim and proper CV version of me.  that, and the fact that that entry had a time stamp of 1.52pm.  oops.  (yes i realize that this blog entry is during office hours, but did i mention i'm only part-time?)

 

but well, since my last day was last fri, part 1 of that soirée i was out with former colleagues celebrating (during which time i got well on my way to the vomit-by-tramstop incident), and i guess now prim-and-proper pretty much flew out the window with them.  plus, earlier that day, my colleague surprised me with a very nice farewell speech (in which he basically told the rest of the org that i was a good worker despite having a maniacal nite life..)  i had gone over to the main building for another guy who was leaving (he'd been there a while, so his email actually contained his name whereas mine was visitor4@) and i thot i'd just quietly slip in a 'oh btw...' kinda departure.  so that was kinda touching, as touched as a stoic robot like me can get i suppose. :)

 

alright, this week, only putting in part-time hours, before school starts, i should be able to catch up with blogging.. i know i know, i'v been saying that ad-nauseum.  but maybe this time it's credible, if for no other reason than i actually nauseated this past wkend?? ...

 

i know, i never ask for help, so for once..  i need help in making up my mind on my thesis topic.

 

i'v narrowed my choices down to two and half.. the half being topic #2 from a different angle, so effectively it's two.  there are other considerations such as practicality of finding data and the prof (availability, working-with-ability, etc), but ignoring those for now, the finalists are:

 

1) microfinance within the context of electrification of households/communities

 

reason i came up with this is simple - given my background in finance and my leaning towards development, microfinance is a natural, and this may well be what i will be doing re: job a year from now.  but since this isn't a new topic anymore, i'd have to narrow it down.  the only sector i have substantial experience in is the energy sector.  put them all together and voilà.  sounds a little absurd at first, microfunding for energy?  but considering that microfinance works best with people who are out-of-market but above subsistence-level, a reliable source of energy goes a long way in improving the standard of living.  variations of the topic include renewable energy (solar panels, mini-hydro, etc) for remote communities that are nowhere near the national grid.

 

2) anthropomorphical analysis of corporations within the context of social interacions

 

ok, this one requires some explaining.  there's a branch of economics called behavioural economics, dealing with why people do not always act in the rational way that Homo economicus should.  we know that we should save for a rainy day but we don't, to take a very common and general example.  these economists aim to explain everything from why people spend so much on status symbols, to philanthropy.  (learnt about these as part of the 'economics of social interactions' class i took last semester.)  now, if corporations are 'persons' under the law, and if the anti-capitalism activists are calling the corporation as a sociopath (see the doc "The Corporation"), then is it possible to analyze corporations like they are human beings?  Specifically, if we judge people to be 'good' or 'bad', and there are economic consequences of that (we trust 'good' people, we avoid dealing with 'bad' people, for instance) then can corporations also be 'good' and 'bad' citizens?  how do people show their 'goodness', and how would a corporation do it?  so my idea was to look at corporations committing to CSR (corporate social responsibility) as demonstrating their goodness, in the same way a person would do that by donating to charity or volunteering (and do those companies that say all the right thing but don't really do all they say they do like the people who put up a show for being kind but are really assholes?  how long before they are found out, if at all?)  the social reward for the companies, then, is the increase in stock price, which is measured by/correlated to its brand (look up Interbrand's annual valuation of the world's biggest brands).

 

#2 is new, sexy, topical, 'original' as my prof said, but could be very difficult and downright impossible.  it came to me as a brilliant eureka moment, and that might be why i'm havnig a hard time letting it go, because from a practical point of view, this latter topic is difficult, unrelated to my career aspirations (as far as i can see, which is to say rather myopic), and since i need to find one area of the topic to focus upon and have no idea on where i should start, in all likelihood in a few months' time my thesis will be pared down to something that does not resemble at all what i stated above, and it is only the very idea itself and not the general topic area which appeals to me..

 

so i'm leaning towards #1.  but this is where you come in.  right decision?  bad decisions?  general comments?  more than welcome.  write me if u know me or for the general public, leave a comment here (tho i'm aware that typical microsoft tactics preclude non-msn-members from leaving a message.  i leave it to u to guess what my assessment of microsoft's 'goodness' is..)

 

multiple entry super update day today (as in, not being the most productive at work..)

 

summer’s coming to an end, and so is my first year here.  since i essentially didn’t have a summer break – started working the week after my last exam, and will start my part-time internship (unpaid, sadly) at UNCTAD the week after I’m wrap up here at the WBCSD, with school starting the week immediately following that, i felt a bit of regret for having worked thru the whole summer.  after all, a big part of being a student is to NOT work, n’est-ce pas?  last year’s super summer-o’-wandering notwithstanding, i'd been working my ass off every summer since i graduated, especially 2001-2003.  so why-t-f am i not backpacking across the crimea instead?

 

sure, those 3 back-to-back wkends of jetting off to london/amsterdam/vienna in july was nice, and western european capitals surely are must-dos.  but short hops are not the same as long hauls in places where the only possible response to ‘why did u go there?’ is ‘why not?’

 

i'm hoping that’s what next summer will be, because i'm vowing to not work next summer.  seriously, when will be the next time i'll have so much time not contractually committed??  but then, i haven’t been back to asia (not counting the short trip to timor two years ago) since 2000, and living in the white man’s motherland makes me yearn to go back even more (not just talking about the undertone of xenophobia, but even just the food, like christ can u pls NOT cook supposedly asian food with butter?) so seriously thinking of heading east and FINALLY visiting places like bangkok and angkor that have since become soooo blasé.

 

but being that i tend to automatically, by instinct, make the best of any situation, i went crazy and pounce on easyjet’s sale last month and booked myself on flights every weekend in november.  hence my extensive travel list.  on average they were about 100chf each trip, return incl tax.  not bad!  so short hops it is then, to satiate my wanderlust until next summer.. assuming i don’t do something stupid like get a job..

 

speaking of job tho, i can’t really complain.  this three-month stint here at WBCSD, (two more wks left) has been very interesting. at this point i'm not looking to do internships for experience per se, but more for exposure and contacts, but above all ideas on what i want to write my thesis on, what kinda job i wanna get when i graduate, and the eternal question - what do i want to do with my life?

 

so in that sense, the unpaid gig at UNCTAD will be good, since i'll work directly in the UN, instead of peripherally as a peon for a permanent mission.  have a feeling tho that it’ll just be the nail in the coffin for my desire to work directly within the UN.  but i have an idea of what i'll be doing and it should be quite interesting.  only rub is that it’s unpaid, but that just gives me extra leverage in making the hrs flexible, esp since my current boss met, by chance, met my future boss at a conference last week and made it known that she’da have me stay on if not for my having already committed to UNCTAD.  i was tempted to renege, but i really do want to get UN exposure, and plus that would just totally go against the whole ethics and responsibility thing that i've been researching and writing on the whole summer. :)

 

speaking of ethics, the aforementioned conference last week was about ethics, and what one of the speakers said was that the future of awareness about issues and education will be thru blogs.  not sure i agree (the preaching-to-the-converted thing), but for my part i will try to put up some interesting thoughts/issues/whatever, not on ethics but just the world’s political economy in general, esp since i had been saying that i'd do that for quite some time.  i will try to keep them short and not too often tho, as to not weigh this down too much.

 

one of my two roomies moved back to haiti last week, and since my other roommate is from bern and has been back home more or less the whole summer, i'v finally got the apartment all to myself.  not that my roommates are bad, and we all get along fine, but it’s just that after having lived alone for most of the decade from age 17-27, and being someone who really savours his ‘me-time’, just the fact of having roommates is a bit annoying.

 

so the last few days i'v been taking advantage of the situation by purposefully not doing the dishes, leaving my clothes all over the living room (and not on me, ie can prance around in my undies again!), not locking my room, having absolute peace and quiet..

 

but alas, not gonna last unfortunately.. new roommate’s moving in sometime in october, which means that he could be there by the time i get home tonite..

 

ps - booked my flight to go home for xmas and have updated my travel list. consult on left.