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bauhinia
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Name: Evan
Birthday: 12/2/1981
Gender: Male
Interests: READING: Esquire, the Economist, GQ, The South China Morning Post and Æ»¹ûÈÕ±¨
MUSIC: Hamasaki Ayumi, Move, ÖܽÜÂ×£¬LUNA SEA, Orange Range, Everclear, Eve6, S.H.E., F.I.R.
MOVIES: GTO, The Rundown, ÉÙÁÖ×ãÇò£¬The Rock, Bounce Ko-Gals, Ñô¹â²ÓÀõÄÈÕ×Ó£¬Tampopo, My Sassy Girl, and the movie that I can never get tired of: CLUE!!!!!
CLOTHING: Giordano, Polo, Lacoste, Brooks Brothers
Expertise: Playing Hockey: yes, doing the splits hurt, but not in the way you think it does.
Juggling: useful analogy for life
Being a snob: Hockey, Asia, Movies, cocktails. In these areas, and others I am the self-appointed expert of the world.
Languages: yes, I speak, read, write some languages to varying degrees of fluency
Taming shrews: Orchids work, hugs are good, kisses are good for shutting them up
Occupation: Consulting
Industry: Business
Message: message me
Member Since:
4/6/2003
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| Having too many options, too many interests, I am using one eye to read a Chinese media blog online, one eye to read about traditions in fashions in GQ, sipping a gin and tonic (two days after the solstice is too long to go before the first of the season) and listening to the television. This is a young professional who has more pies than he has fingers to stick in them.
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| Read an interesting article about Macau by Sandeep Tucker of the FT:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b96588f2-1991-11dc-99c5-000b5df10621.html
Additionally, this from the SCMP:
http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2af62ecb329d3d7733492d9253a0a0a0/?vgnextoid=5f8628e540b23110VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD&ss=Companies&s=Business
Macau certainly is an interesting place. Not at all like Vegas (except for the universal truth of gambling that The House Always Wins) Honestly, they could put that on the brochure and people would STILL come in throngs to Vegas, Macau, Mohegan Sun, Foxwoods, you name it. I was talking to a recent acquaitence this evening about how Macau is so different from Vegas. Perhaps "Vegas With Chinese Characteristics." and it seems that there is little debate regarding Macau's rise, the main point of discussion may be what sort of resort area the SAR turns out to be. Will the gambles on the part of Wynn and Venetian turn out to change the atmosphere from "children discouraged" to "family resort destination."
Given my own, limited, experience, I would be inclined to say that Chinese love to travel and they'll take their kids (or 'kid' as the case may be) with them to any number of different destinations. Right now, travellers to Macau seem to like the business only kind of travel that you take to Macau (business of giving your money away, that is). and I think that maybe over time the hardcore VIP gamblers will stick around and the added kid traffic/ family traffic will only serve to augment the current boom.
As for my remark about giving one's money away, I believe in the legitimacy of paying for the thrill of a gamble and I don't consider gambling --in most of it's forms-- to be stealing. Risk is exciting and people don't take enough risks in life many times. This doesn't mean that gambling addiction doesn't happen or that people can't make bad decisions. But where I used to think that gambling was evil, I've warmed up to the notion. It's too bad that there are other industries that often follow the gaming industry... part of that has to do with loan sharking as a natural complementary good/service to accompany wagers.
How much would I ever gamble? I don't know, i could see myself throwing away 200 dollars in one night. But I don't like the idea. In fact, it sounds pretty bad. But maybe that's just because i"m not used to taking those kinds of risks. and risk for risk's sake is not that great of a notion.
I'm going to spend a day in Macau this summer, maybe I'll get a taste. Then again, given that the minimum buy-in in Macau is twice what it is in Vegas, I may be in over my head even at the kiddie table.
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| Making random connections allows you to break through the invisible fabric that separates people in public places. This is seemingly self-evident and it probably goes without saying for most. For me, however, this was a revelation that hit me only recently. I wonder how true it is to consdier that people walk around in bubbles. You plan to meet with a person and and you set a time and a place and then you go to the place, and you arrive early, and so you wait. Your personal bubble is sustained. You wait. You talk on your phone (or try calling people but realize they all already have plans and don't want to be your entertainment while you stand and wait for that friend to meet up). You listen to your MP3 player, you read peoples' t-shirts, you think about what you want to order to drink when it's time to order a drink or food when it's time to order a food. The food, the drinks, the the writing on the shirts and the people wearing the shirts might as well be on a tv screen somewhere because you are just watching them. The bubble doesn't burst until somebody distrubs the equilibrium struck in the restaurant/bar/subwaycar/airplane/elevator. And once it does, you're in a vacuum. When you ask a stranger what time it is, when you tell somebody that they just dropped some posession, when you muster up the courage to talk to someone who is just cute enough to warrant it.
Sometimes these random connections turns into something but most of the time they don't. That's why it nice when they turn into something.
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Trudging off the subway after a 13 hour work day reading the Journal having just completed my duties hosting a dinner for 600 hundred people. I may not have been sitting at the head table with the Chinese dignitaries or the American CEOs but waving through the company reps and sharing jokes with some of the US business world's biggest and brightest, I was important by association. Just being there for support was but a tiny role though it gives me a glimpse of that wide world of who's-who. Very inathentically (i.e. if you flaunt it, you obviously haven't 'got' it) I blog about it, but seamlessly fitting I find myself thinking 'Okay. What's next?'
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| In Cville with the girlfriend this weekend. Did a little shopping where I was tempted to finally replace my aviators but I couldn't find the right ones so I'm holding out for longer. I lost those aviators only a couple months after I moved back to the US after the epic 2005 summer in HK and I think I may have deposited my memories of fun from that summer into those glasses and so when they got lost I was still feeling the sadness of having to say goodbye to that summer. The summer ended abruptly and what felt premature. It reminds me of how people remember Kurt Cobain and James Dean- if you never get the chance to fizzle out then you've cemented immortality. The summer disappeared before it had a chance to get old and was resultantly framed forever in ideals and fantasy. When I have a particularly good day, I ask myself sometimes "why can't EVERYDAY be this great?" and I usually think "well, if everyday was this good, would any of them really feel this good?" I think that's a kinda knee-jerk response kind of answer. Afterall, you can have an entire two months of back-to-back-to-back... fun (as I did in that summer) and perhaps it was knowing that it was finite that allowed me to enjoy it? Perhaps it had nothing to do with the nice restaurants, the carefree living, the cocktails and reunions with friends and had everything to knowing that I would only have two months...
as usual, i find myself coming back to the fact that there are only 24 hours in every day, and that doesn't change. People need to use their time as best they can. Time is the worst possible thing to waste. I blame TV and the internet.
on an unrelated note (okay, that's false, considering that everything's related) I really dislike the word 'proactive' because it's reduntant and borderline nonsensical. A friend of my family's (an engineer/salesman/comicbook collecter) introduced me to that word with the accompanying disdain when I was about 15 years old and I kinda held on to it ever since with the same sense of disdain. It's funny the things that kids hold onto from the 'grownups' they meet. Anyway, I find it bitterly ironic that I dislike that word so much and yet I have so much occasion to use it. I feel like i need to be more proactive at work, I feel like i have failed in certain areas at work because I have not been as proactive as i could have been. I don't xanga at work anymore and so you can't really catch my commentary at its most productive (rather, you'll have to settle for hearing me complain about my shortcommings at the office as I sit at my computer and surf the net. That's why it's too bad that we who are not professional bloggers only write when we are already resigned to loafing around).
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