OK, so I was a little depressed this morning, but the inspiration to write something was nice to have again, something I haven´t had in a while. This entry will be more practical. Since coming to Madrid I have been to Cordoba, where I saw an incredible mosque-converted-cathedral, slept on a grass field for an hour, and had a great Spanish lunch consisting of tomato gazpacho with bacon and eggs and oxtail stew, fresh baked bread and a chilled cerveza. That evening I saw X-Men 2 at the theater by myself. I was surrounded by Americans who were quite annoying with their incessant chatting and laughing. One of them, or maybe they were Australians sat next to me, and noticed that I was alone which I think shocked her a bit, then I think she felt a little pity for me, which I think is what inspired that whole self-pity episode I had this morning. Overall, it was a great movie though, much better than X-Men 1. This morning I went to the Prado museum and say some nice Goyas, including many which I had studied during the Introduction to Art class at Columbia. For lunch I ducked into a cafeteria-bar for a not-so-great lunch of fried eggs, fried chorizos and french fries. It was combo menu so when the waiter asked me if I wanted a salad I thought it was included and said yes. The salad consisted of wet lettuce brown on the edges, tomatos and a few chunks of tuna thrown on top. The salad ended up costing as much as the rest of the meal, so I was a little peeved at that and didn´t leave a tip. It was clearly a tactic he used, because I saw him do the same thing to another couple of tourists behind me. After lunch, I went to an internet cafe (this internet cafe) and checked on the housing situation in Barcelona but was unable to get anything definite. My plan is to take the overnight train from Barcelona to Milan if I can´t get housing. After that I went back to the hotel room, had a smoke, and then headed out to the Bullfight at Ventas Arena. Definitely very cool and the highlight of my trip so far. I sat next to a Mexican doctor who was a true aficionado and explained all the general rules and some of the fine details to me. I will write about the bullfight at a later time because there are a bunch of annoying loud people next to me and I kind of want to leave. Anyway, that´s about it for now, except for the bullfight. Still no progress in meeting people and I don´t see much of anything happening while I´m in Spain since I´ll be staying primarily in hotels.

Madrid, Day 2, I wish I could say there is more to my unhappiness than a childish fear of being hurt. I wish I could say that my reluctance to engage in a meaningful life is rooted in a sense of artistic integrity or monastic ascetism - even simple spìte would more palatable than the ever more apparent realization that my life has been wasted because of an inability to grow up, a failure to learn as all children passing into adulthood learn, that an essential part of one´s existence lies in being a member of a community, be it work, school, family or friends. Somehow I failed to learn, failed to accept, or was not taught how to integrate into my communities, how to make acquaintances through small talk, a friendly smile, a fleeting moment of eye contact that signals to another an openness to friendship. I never learned how to contact those acquaintances to invite them to dinner or to see a movie or walk through the park on a Sunday afternoon. I never learned how to reveal little secrets about myself to build intimacy, to express my emotions through physical contact, to make myself vulnerable and open. And now a fully grown undeniable adult at the age of 27 I still find myself wondering why life isn´t the way I had imagined it would be, when the answer is so clearly staring me in the face. Part of the problem, though, is that to face the problem would be against my nature. That is, to face the problem, would mean to open myself to rejection, failure, self-contempt, pity, guilt, shame, all of which I know too well in the tiny increments I allow myself to endure at times. And for what? For romantic notions of love and friendship and family? None of which I know of, have never experienced, and have often doubted the sincerity of accounts. I could chalk it up to a cultural gap. I do find that describing myself as an Asian male in a western society is probably the best approximation of my predicament. I often find other Asian males like myself walking through the streets of a strange city completely alone, head bowed, eyes on the sidewalk, walking with apparent purpose but no direction. Loneliness seems to be the natural Asian male condition, unwanted, unadmired, crude, dirty, . Unwanted even by the women of his own race. The antithesis of the suave Italian gigolo, the French intellectual, the industrious German, the refined Englishman, the China man sits alone on a wooden stool outside a store shop window, legs crossed effeminitely at the thighs, sucking long curls of thick cheap cigarette smoke into smallish lungs hidden beneath an unmasculine chest, silent, unresponsive, essentially invisible to frequent passerbys and abhorrent to first passerbys. But the walking Asian male forces his existence upon the world. Look at me, he says, I am going somewhere. I have places to go, things to do, people to see. In that sense, my incessant walking is a form of protest, and yet it is also a form of submission, because in fact, I have no where to go, I am just walking, walking as I used to walk the hallways of my highschool every lunch hour because I had no friends to sit with in the lunch room, pretending that I was going from one floor to another, alternating and zigzagging my path so that my silly ruse would not be discovered by passing people repeated times. Such walking is not a protest at all, but an expression of lack of self-esteem. When I walk now, I walk with the purpose of seeing and being seen, I am in fact sight-seeing, even though I as yet have no direction or destination. And so that is what I do, I walk as a form of protest and as a way of seeing. I do not walk for fear of staying still. Although I have to admit that walking on a sidewalk renders one more invisible that simply standing there. So in the end, what does it mean?