su-lin and choonping are very keen on a shanghai party (choonping: i'd have trouble squeezing into my cheongsam but i'll come) but julian says he wouldn't come if it involves him speaking chinese. i said he could be a gangster, the strong silent chow yun fatt type, and put lots of gel in his hair and wear a suit and dark glasses, so he doesn't have to talk....julian says he dislikes chow yun fatt and doesn't want to be a gangster, but agreed he could come as tony leung in "in the mood for love," although that wasn't in shanghai, and in the wrong decade, come to think of it...

if we have a potter party, choonping wants to come as mcgonagall, or mad eye moody, so he can go around booming "constant vigilance!" su-lin says she sees him as a sybil trelawney, and he retorted that he saw her as professor sprout. she can't be professor sprout though, because yen wants to be a mandrake root. su-lin said why not, she'll wear pink earmuffs, pull at yen's hair, yen would scream, and the rest of us can drop dead. rowling has no good female characters. well there's mcgonagall and tonks and hermione and lily potter, but otherwise, they're all either bland or insignificant or ditzy or incompetent or nasty. cho would have been alright but she annoyed me in the last book. i suppose there's also madame maxime and fleur delacour only which of us look like we are of veela descent, yes? or we could go fan3 pai4 and be bellatrix lestrange. or narcissa, which i'm telling su-lin has one great advantage, that of satisfaction at the knowledge that your husband is sexy and evil... i think i'll just be a boggart and sit in a cupboard. and i'll just wear what i normally would, and it wouldn't matter because no one knows what a boggart looks like. what would i do about the shape-shifting, su-lin asks. well, the rest of you can just point at me and say "riddikulus!" and imagine me turning into a minzhi. there we go.