YOUR THIGHS ARE HOPELESS! HOPELESS!

One sentence I read yesterday keeps going through my head like an ear worm, permanently looping. It's from a cartoon about space aliens, this time involving a cat sleeping. "My thighs are forlorn." There is palpable sadness.
Without the illustration, the mental picture it paints is staggering.

Very many people in this city have forlorn thighs, probably most of us.
I doubt that an application of cats can cure it.

It might actually relate to the heat..

Are your thighs forlorn?


The temperature yesterday afternoon was well over ninety Fahrenheit in parts of SF. Measured in Celsius, that equals "too hot by half". At the place where I had tea and a snack, several customers were wilting -- direct sunlight slanting in, but fries and shrimp and fishballs and noodles and hot sauce -- and the owner was listless and limp, though attentive. I did not ask how his thighs were. Seeing as I cannot frame that in Cantonese.
So I didn't ask anyone else there either.

大腿 'taai teui'; thigh, big ham. 胯 'kua'; pelvis, groin, thighs. 股 'gu'; stocks, shares, thighs, hips. 髀 'bei'; thigh, thighs.
That last one is more specific, but seeing as there is fried chicken thigh (絶雞髀 'jaa kai pei') on the menu ....

孤獨 'gu duk; solitary, singular, alone. 絶望 'chuet mong'; forlorn, sad, desperate, hopeless. 悲 'pei'; sad, mournful, sorrowful. 愁 'sau'; feeling sad or despondent, anxious. 難過 'naan gwo'; undergoing hardship. 悲酸 'pei suen'; bitter and aggrieved. 悲愁 'pei sau'; bitter, despondent, downcast. 哀怨 'oi yuen'; sad, sorrowing.


你嘅雙大腿係唔係孤獨嘅咩？
[Pronunciation: 'nei ge seung taai tuei hai m hai gu duk ge me']
Are your two thighs singular? Are your thighs all alone? Or not?


Well, white people ask all kinds of goofy questions, so the chances are they would simple fail to grasp the query, instead of slapping me.

[BTW, what google translate does with that sentence is truly bizarre. Google doesn't do Cantonese. 嘅 and 咩 are particles, and not themselves content-rich.]

Maybe I should have asked the young ladies wearing skirts or shorts, but I was too intent on getting the cheung fan which I had requested, as well as preventing the tyke next to me spilling his drink or falling off his seat.
I could have also asked the Vietnamese girl wearing an extra large teeshirt as a dress on the other side, but if I cannot ask it in Cantonese, you can imagine how badly I'd express it in Vietnamese (she didn't speak any Chinese, though one of her companions could).

How the heck are your thighs?

Several hours later I was smoking a small cigar on the fronts steps of my building, when the downstairs neighbor stepped out.
We agreed that it was rather warm.

Terlalu panas, hari ini, eh. Bagaimana bilik mu?

No thighs at all were mentioned.

Paha itu sedih.




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