Like almost everyone under the age of 25 in this town, I’ve been back home for Thanksgiving break. Home, for me, is Wichita, KS, something I don’t really admit with pride. For those of you stumbling on this page that have never been to Wichita, you’re not really missing much. Wichita is home to a butt-load of aircraft manufacturing companies, which have employed many of my relatives (and laid off a good number of them, too). The economy took a big nosedive because of 9/11, so the city administration has been working really hard to boost the economy and bring back all the people that have escaped/are trying to escape this sinking ship. Here are some of the things they’ve done:

- Installed a nice roundabout west of downtown, confounding Wichita drivers (”durr huh? do i go around?”)
- Changed the logo from “Air-capital of the world” (our airport has a grand total of 12 gates, for Chrissakes), to “Wichita: Where the goods are.” What are these goods, you may ask? Damned if I know.
- Put a proposal for an arena up to vote. Now do they know where the arena will be placed, how much it will cost, what they’ll put there? No, that would require too much sensible planning and thinking ahead for Wichita - although, in their defense, they’ve isolated the location to “somewhere downtown.” But they let the people of Wichita vote on the proposal, and guess what? It passed.
- Endless construction projects that seem to take at least three times as long as anywhere else (nothing new for Wichita, really).

Ah, Wichita. The shining beacon of light in the Midwest you are. Also, while in Wichita, I got cut off by a middle-aged woman on her cell phone, in a minivan, with several screaming spawn wreaking havoc in the back. In addition to having several of those ribbon magnets plastered on her bumper, she actually had a soccer ball sticker as well. Christ, can we confirm any more stereotypes here?

Anyway, despite having to spend time in Wichita, break wasn’t so bad. I spent much of the break watching these low-budget, 25 hour long, insanely cheesy and hilarious Chinese movies with my mom. They were dubbed into Vietnamese, which I don’t speak, so my mother had to translate the poorly dubbed Vietnamese into broken English in order for me to follow the absurd plots. One was about the first female “king” of China and her rise to power - I think I learned some Vietnamese from watching it, especially how to say “king,” which was only mentioned fifty billion times (”wang tuang?” Don’t ask me how to spell it!).

Another was called “Return of the Condor Heroes” and I’ve decided that I’m going to write my next novel challenge based on this movie. It’s that awesome. Here’s evidence of its sheer awesomeness - at one point, some people are attacked by bees. Now I’m positive that the movie producer’s total operating budget must have been no more than $500 dollars, thus they couldn’t really afford to hire stunt-bee victims. So as the bees approach, the movie shows a shot of the people being attacked, then switches to some stock footage of bees, and back and forth again. After five minutes of tension-building camera zooms, some cartoon bees that bear little resemblance to the stock bees are drawn all over the people, while off-camera someone’s electric razor emulates the sound of buzzing. Only the cartoon bees aren’t really bees so much as little blobs that winkle and speck as they destroy their human victims. Words can’t convey how hilarious this scene was; I wish I could get footage stills of this scene so I could post them.

Overall, it was nice to spend some time with my mother without getting irritated by her quirks. I think working with Jodie has made me put things into perspective. My mom might be a little nuts sometimes (she told me not to eat too much at my father’s house because she thinks my stepmother will poison me, for instance), but I can deal with her variety of crazy. Which reminds me - I don’t have to deal with Jodie anymore! Hooray!