Sunday, April 22, 2007

Comic Books

Originally posted on xanga.

I've been collecting comic books for the past 21 years.  I don't have an exact count, but my collection runs into the thousands.  I mainly collect Marvel comics and my favorite is Iron Man.

Recently, I've been having a lot of trouble storing my comics.  I don't know what to do with all this stuff anymore.  I have stacks and stacks of it sitting around my office.  I have most of them stored in my parents garage.  Beyond reading the comics once, I rarely read it a second time.  I keep it as purely as a collectible.

I've been considering stopping cold turkey and selling my collection.  Getting it out of my life completely.

A part of me loved the chase aspect.  I wanted so badly for years to collect all the back issues of the Iron Man series.  That lead to the Avengers, Fantastic Four, etc.

I need to simplify my life.  I have too much clutter.  Too many things keeping me occupied, that I don't have time to do the important things in life.

Hopefully I will find someone to take the comics off my hands for a reasonable price.  Most likely it'll be a comic book dealer.  I don't have time to sell stuff individually, I just want to get rid of it in one swoop.  I'll put that money towards my daughters college fund.

But I may change my mind again later.  There's just so much good stuff out there now. 

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Stuck at 220 and other random stuff

Originally posted on xanga.

So I started my quest to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese better and to start learning how to write Chinese about 6 months ago.  I've been stuck at 220 or so characters for the past 2 months.  I got to 220 characters at around Valentine's day.  Since around than, I took a month off and have spent most of this month catching up.  Just the last 2 days, I've started to learn 2 or 3 new characters.  The first in a long time.  Part of the reason is that I have a very bad review process.  It was taking 2 hours a day to do everything  But this week, I've figured out a way that I only need to review the beginning characters once a week and the new ones daily and the middle ones 2 or 3 times a week.  This cuts my review time to about 30 minutes a day!  I started cue cards  at the beginning of the year, but the stack is huge now and I don't have time to really review with my busy lifestyle.

I recently watched the much hyped Andy Lau and Daniel Wu movie called, Protégé.  It was a really interesting film that had a focus on the drug trade and something many HK movies have nowadays.  An undercover cop.  I was actually struck by a stunning Zhang JingchuZhang Jingchu will also be in Rush Hour 3.

I also like to congratulate Lau Ching-Wan on his win for My Name is Fame at the HK movie awards.  I've been a fan of his since his TVB days in the 80s and C'est La Vie, Mon Cheri is one of my all time favorite movies.  C'est La Vie, Mon Cheri also stars my favorite HK actress of the 90s, Anita Yuen.

I've also been watching this Blood Sword Clan series.  I think I fast forwarded through 80% of the series.  Not very good.