Yes, it's some bad things that're happening over in China, what with the proliferation of fake medicine sales that contain toxic substances and are now responsible for a number of deaths. Well, at least I thought it was a bad thing, but some appear to lump this information in the same category as reports of Britney Spears losing her virginity. While I commend the gleaner on reporting this in the first place, I'm not sure why it ended up in the entertainment section of the newspaper.

A conversation I had with the youngest member of my kungfu class yesterday (except for the instructors’ under-10 children) – context is as follows: student A asks student B when he will begin sparring again, due to limitations of broken arm. Student B replies, “Soon, or whenever, I’m just going to anyways.”

At this point, I interject with the following statement, “Ah, you young people, throwing caution to the wind.”

Conversation continues:

Student B: Whatever, you’re not old.
Me: Haha, ok.
Student B (after a moment’s reflection): Yeah, you’re the same age as me!
Me: Yeah, like, maybe ten years ago.
Student B: No man, I know people who would kill to be your age.
Me: Yeah, really?

Student B is quiet for a few moments …

Student B: Yeah, lots of senile folks. Seventy year olds and stuff.
Me: Um … haha. Yeah. Thanks.

Student B was completely sincere and genuine, which just goes to show me how large the age gap between … ahem, where I am, and 19, is.

I’ve started maintaining a list, of all the people who would be forgotten.

No, not with any noble intentions; I don’t read enough to know about … (What the? For fuck’s sake, does everybody need to know when you get an email message? Plug in some headphones or turn the freaking volume on your PC down) … where was I? Ah yes. I don’t know enough about world events to eulogize any imprisoned revolutionary or disgraced nuclear physicist. Nor do I care a fig for people who should pass into the ages as nothing more than fossils to be displayed in museums a million years from now as an aberrant-but-not-too-far-off example of our generation’s merely adequate cranial capacity.

I’m making a list of people who I’ve met once (or a few times) and will likely never meet again. I have a poor memory, and since I’ve decided to do this only a few weeks ago I’ve compiled a relatively lengthy list which makes me wonder a bit on all those other people I might have run into accidentally again but just failed to recognize. That Malaysian guy on the airplane. The internet marketer in Shopper’s Drug Mart. That guy who tried to hit on me in front of HMV in First Canadian Place.

Also, Estella Warren has been popping unbidden into my head lately, whenever I find that I need to focus on something that requires large amounts of concentration. Why, you may very well not be asking?

It all started with a series of billboards in China advertising a cellular service named AnyCall, featuring somebody who strongly resembled said Ape Girl whose name I couldn’t remember at the time. At that moment, rolling through obscenely chaotic traffic, I had no internet connection and with little hope of getting near to one because of previously described circumstances, I was forced to sit and ponder and pore over the scattered mess of a filing system in my head and after many many minutes of near surrender, the name finally popped into my head. Estella Warren! Estella Warren!

So now, whenever I’m thinking of something – a troublesome bit of layered code, a seemingly unwieldly plot twist that made sense the first time I wrote it - Estella Warren! pops into my head and reassures me that continued banging of my head against the wall will eventually yield results.