NO SWASH WILL BE BUCKLED

At the ripe old age of well past thirty, I may have achieved a certain amount of 'gravitas'. Which I've always associated with 'defitgheid', that being a Dutch word for stuck up poncy people and their haute bourgeois pretensions, the type who don't associate with you or me and you're glad of that. The English word lacks those connotations, and is far more favourably slanted. But still.

Three times yesterday I was addressed as 'sir'.
I still instinctively look around.

And apparently I look and act like a gentleman, instead of the devilish ruffian I still see in my mind's eye. Four people wished to affirm that. One of them being an elderly lady of scarce four feet tall, who could barely walk -- it had taken her ten minutes to get up to the bus stop, twenty feet -- to whom I pointed out a nearby seat, which she declined because she was only going two blocks. And she also complimented me on my Chinese. Gentlemen are not risky business, and do not buckle swash. In my mind I'm still like Captain Jack Sparrow, though. Pipe after tea in C'town later. Red Virginia flake.
And my Chinese is crappy.

Tea: one cup of yuen yeung (鴛鴦) and a po lo naai wong baau (菠蘿奶黃包). That bakery has ramped up for the holiday, a vast selection of sweet New Years cakes (年糕) covered the central table. Pipe: a Comoy sandblast stack which I associate with Hong Kong for complex reasons. Even though the downness of the old neighborhood is a bit depressing, I was in a much more upbeat mood than I've been for several days afterwards.

Let's hope that carries through while dealing with the repellent right wing fossils in Marin at work today. I don't want to chop off heads. It would be undignified.



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