my first leap

I’m in love. His name is Jung Woo-Sung (the first guy in the picture). I first saw him in ‘Daisy‘, a Korean film on the plane to Taiwan and today saw him again in ‘A Moment to Remember’. So I’m crazy about a guy, who is a figment of someone’s imagination – I just love his character in both films. Girls, you must watch these two films. He’s so oh-my-god. Hollywood is going to do a remake of ‘Daisy’ like it has with ‘Il Mare’, another favourite film of mine. I’ve been indoors almost all day today watching films: ‘Three Times’ and ‘Cafe Lumiere’. Ling showed me her boss’s (Hou Hsiao Hsien) collection of films since the 1980s to go through if I have time.

I’m trying to distract myself. I’ve come to the conclusion that though I did have prickly heat, what I have now may be an allergic reaction – quite a big one. When you have sensitive skin like mine, when something crazy happens to your skin and you feel like the elephant man. It’s like being jilted by someone you love. Initially, you ignore there’s anything wrong. But as it gets worse; and your love leaves unexpectedly or tells you that they simply do not love you anymore without any explanation; you can’t ignore it any more. Your first initial knee jerk reaction is to try to save it with quick fixes, just grabbing any possible remedy or weapon you can find and pouring desperately on it in the hope that it will make it better. But this only aggravates. It doesn’t help; it makes it worse. It makes you feel even worse and the situation becomes a point of no return. Then you try to take it all back; rid the situation of your quick fixes in your desperate attempt to make things go back to the way it was. But what has been done has been done. It’s too late. Then you’re in shock. You don’t know why this has happened. You think of all the little things that may have caused this. The pain won’t go. You just don’t know the reason why. You can’t eat or sleep. You can’t stop thinking about it;  you mull over it; you keep concentrating on it because now the pain is so much, you want to distract yourself but you can’t. You feel like you’ve got leprosy and you try to hide your pain (discomfort) from all around you. You can’t sleep so you walk the streets. My sensitive skin. So I walk the streets all covered up. Like all pains in love; everything heals in time. My sensitive skin, I believe you will heal. And like a new love, I promise to be more watchful and attentative in future.

Seb has suggested we change our travelling plans, maybe cut out Laos and Thailand. Still go to Vietnam but instead travel up to Hanoi, into China, go west of China, try to get into to Tibet and Nepal or if not able to, go towards North China, even Mongolia. Just ideas to avoid the humidity. Still exciting. We’ll see.

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If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do. – George Bernard Shaw. Irish literary Critic, Playwright and Essayist. 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature, 1856–1950

Tags: Taipei, Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.