"I'm Still Beautiful!"

Nothing atmospheric to complain about today.   Blue skies, “nothing but blue skies,” as Josephine Baker sang, arcing over the northern capital this morning.  Our driver looks eerily like Yule Brenner with his big eyes and shiny dome.  I don’t say that lightly.  He really does.  He is repeatedly invoking other drivers’ mothers, and calling people “stupid cunt” as we plod along Jingshun Road.

I say “we” as my older daughter is with me.  She wanted to sleep for a while, and now has arisen. Before I can suggest any conversation, her smart phone is deep in her face.  The roadside trees are now completely denuded, save the conifers.  Leaves, at least in this section of the road, have been swept up into piles along one section but are blanketed along the ground, dull and dusty here by the traffic light.  Everyone on the street is bundled up, but sitting in the back of this cab with my coat and my sweatshirt, I’m too hot, and start peeling off layers.

The ubiquitous “Donnabella” facial crème ad is in front of me.  The woman is smiling ecstatically.  She is the forty something lady of the popular trio which profiles someone’s idea of twenty-something beauty, beside someone’s idea of thirty-something beauty and this "I'm still beautiful!"  forty-something lady.  She appears to be named Ms. Guan.  You’d need more than crème to hold your smile like that for much more than a moment.  She appears to have been frozen this way for years now.  Perhaps she's become fifty-something.  

Later, Tom Cruise is on someone’s television.  He has just shot seven or eight people, and then faced-off with a gent who appears to be the arch villain.  Circling the bad-guy with a gun, Tom throws his automatic weapon down to the ground and opts for an old fashion slugfest.  He wins, of course and goes and saves the blond lady, who is blond, of course.  He and Robert Duval are having a heated conversation, all in Mandarin.  There are subtitles, but, as this is CCTV, they are also Mandarin.  What a shame, Tom and Robert couldn’t have driven up from Jollywood in time to save everyone in San Bernardino.  All their shots hit people.