Okay V, you got me...I'll step up only because you're such an incendiary comrade-in-bass. Game rules: once you've been tagged, explicate 8 items about yourself, then tag 6 others, no tag backs. Here we go...

1) I am an unapologetic culinary hedonist & unabashed food fetishist. Food is one of my greatest passions in life. I love eating, cooking, grocery shopping, restaurant spelunking and potlucking. Sharing food with others is how I express affection (so if I offer you a bite of my energy bar, I'm not JUST offering you a bite of my energy bar). I have eaten scorpions in China and noodles off of scorpios. I'll try anything once, meaning both food and the process/ritual/scene/fleshly offering by which it is eaten.

2) You haven't lived until you've sparred blindfolded. At my old wing chun school, we'd take our belts off, wrap them around our heads and blind spar (ala Jet Li & Yasuaki Kurata in Fist of Legend). We'd also spar on staircases, which is not only great stance & foot work training, but pretty damn practical when you get right down to it.

3) I have an encyclopedic knowledge of deviant/cult/hong kong/martial arts films, underground comics, outsider music, critical theory, semiotics and paraliterature but I couldn't tell you where I parked my fucking car in the Rainbow Grocery parking lot to save my life.

4) I come from a long line of divorces. Broken marriages are my heritage. Every single member of my immediate family has been married and divorced at least once. Both my mother & father have been married & divorced three times, respectively. Both of their parents have been married & divorced multiple times (at one time I had 6 sets of grandparents). All of my aunts & uncles, with the exception of my father's younger brother, have ALL been married & divorced. Having said that, I don't *actually* think marriage is the devil.

5) Bane of my existence: being mistaken for anything other than Chinese, which happens waaaay too often. For some unknown reason I am ALWAYS mistaken for (in order of most frequent mis-identification): Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese or Hapa. I can count on one hand the number of times someone has correctly identified me as being Chinese. I have no idea why - I look in the mirror and I see someone who looks, smells and tastes friggin' Chinese! Even Chinese people think I'm Japanese (which is hair-pullingly, teeth-gnashingly frustrating to me). This has been and remains the bane of my existence since I was a kid.

6) I have climbed to the very top of Wu Dang mountain, one of the 5 sacred mountains of China and legendary birth place of the Taoist martial arts forms like Tai Chi, Xing Yi and Ba Gua. It was both a pilgrimage and the completion of one of the main goals of my life. Wandering above the clouds through cliff-nestled temples, gazing dizzy downward at the birds circling below as specks through my squinting vision. Never have I experienced such a coalescence of elemental Qi as I did on that mountain.

7) Critical theory makes me wet.

8) When I was very young (around 4-7 years old or so) I used to cry every time I saw a homeless person who was obviously mentally ill. I remember seeing these people, wandering the streets, muttering, screaming, gesticulating wildly or just simply standing there lost in some schizophrenic catatonia and as if by some strange Pavlovian response, right on cue, I would burst into tears. There was some part of me that, even at that age, registered the loss of one's mind to be a fate of such abject horrific proportion. And that these people were not only completely alienated from any physical & economic support, but also utterly alienated from themselves. This happened again just a couple weeks ago for the first time in years. I was stopped at an intersection and movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. I glanced over and saw a man sitting on the sidewalk with his back against a chainlink fence. It was an extremely windy day and he had his arms tucked into his thin green t-shirt for warmth. As the wind whipped paper and plastic, trees and leaves wildly through the street, so too his body spasmed and shivered with an internal wind coursing from his shaking legs, his trembling tongue darting in and out of his mouth, to the top of his head, which quivered and quaked uncontrollably. People walking by with heads bowed and backs hunched against the wind, ignored him utterly. The elemental violence of the scene, both internal and external, so explicitly displayed before me brought me right back to that primitive childhood place. I found myself suddenly in tears, sobbing and unable to tear my gaze away until the car behind me honked my attention to the now and apparently for some time green light. I drove on, tasting the salt of my years flowing down my cheeks and remembering how easy it was to forget.

On with the game... I tag: Loren Earle-Cruickshanks, Dov, Justin Boreta, Domini, Sha, and Stephen Trichter.