so i'll be a shadowboxer, baby
it's been a great week. returned from a mentally/emotionally exhausting dc/nyc trip (my third trip in three weeks) with coffee jitters and a case of sleep deprivation bordering on delirium. but i've relished being back in the warm hug of the bay area for the past few days, and we've been eating really well. thursday night we decided to save money and eat in for a change. i made my mom's nationwide famous chow fun--hadn't made it in quite a while, but i aced it. we pigged out and passed out in a greasy, but happy food coma. the next morning i made my specialty, the salmon-green onion scramble over sticky rice. later in the afternoon we knocked back a few pints at the bear's lair, just like old times with anne. they've totally descrated upper sproul, such a shame.

friday night steve made a crab dinner--SO GOOD. we conked out again, woke up around 1:30, and went to thalassa for a last-call vodka tonic and then top dog for a late-night snack. saturday we went with alex to the oyster and beer festival in north beach. it was crazy crowded, but the sun was out, and there were beer and oysters, so all was good. the beer lines were too long, so we got some 24 ouncers at a corner store and sat on a stoop with our seafood and liquor. and, for those wondering, oysters actually are aphrodisiacs. damn, they are. we ended the night with the stoners at a korean restaurant on telegraph (i wimped out and got chicken katsu) followed by manhattan at home.

cd resurrection of the moment: fiona apple, tidal

dupont circle, washington, dc, march 2004


big sur, march 2004

i've decided a blog is basically a surrogate boyfriend, so now that i have a legit SO, i've abandoned my blog. sorry, my faithful readers, updates will be sporadic.

honolulu, march 2003

oh man. the sky opened up to me this morning at 6 a.m. driving into the city. it was creamy yellow and shiny blue and there were no clouds to interfere. the commuting cars streamed quietly into the city via the bay bridge, and i had visions of coffee. such a beautiful sight.

You're France!

Most people think you're snobby, but it's really just that you're better than everyone else.  At least you're more loyal to the real language, the fine arts, and the fine wines than anyone else.  You aren't worth beans in a fight, unless you're really short, but you're so good at other things that it usually doesn't matter.  Some of your finest works were intended to be short-term projects.
Take the Country Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid

roads
in hawaii, i stuck my nose in julian barnes' talking it over, and there's an interesting distinction made in the story, between falling in love and being in love. you see how falling in love is different from "the chase"? i hate it when people say they love "the chase" -- it sounds so vulgar and void of emotion. i feel like the chase delineates the hanging out, the "i'm breezy" phone calls, and the "it's not a date" dates part, the "do you like me?" bit. who could really like prefer that part of it? sure, it's an essential component, but it's also so juvenile, so middle school, like eating animal crackers before your soy sauce soaked tender veal cheeks. falling in love is different from the chase. it's the time of discovery, of "firsts," of having to be near each other all the time, of being perfectly content to lie in bed all day and chat, stuff that slips away after a while, when you settle into the comfortable and somewhat complacent "being in love" phase. the "being in love" phase definitely has its perks, but i think overall i prefer the falling in love part the best out of everything. it only happens once in the relationship and for a finite amount of time, which makes it all the more sweet.

it's a weird feeling, being able to see the end from the beginning. relationships are supposed to be full of promise starting out, but i think there's also a sense of fatality there, an unshakeable feeling that the end (as inconceivable as it seems) will be bloody or at the very least turbulent. there is no modern romance.

---------------------------------
an interesting read: the politics of the lonely crowd

flurry of updates before i'm off to pass out for a minimum two hour nap so i can be sufficiently awake and coherent before getting faded tonight at scott's:
- i'm going to be in dc mar. 25-28 and then nyc mar. 28-30, and would love to meet up with anyone in the vicinity of those areas at those times
-going to see the yyys next tuesday at the fillmore (read the interview and see why karen o is my idol)
-still waiting to hear from one more grad school, but it's a real reach, so it looks like i'll be off to maryland come june
-hawaii pics to come

off to hawaii for a week. be back next wednesday. it's a tough life, i tell you.

a reaction to some soft skin
all of my close friends seem to have sex on the brain, and i love it. nothing makes me happier than hearing (and subsequently retelling) people's sexual misadventures. these include the confusion surrounding omnipresent pads, post-coital crying, signs from god that you shouldn't be having sex, and the standoff over who should be buying the condoms (answer: ALWAYS the guy). i love marvelling at the draughts (two years!!) and the floods (five guys in five months), both of which i heartily commend.

people always seem to be talking about relationships, too: what to do about a guy who doesn't share your political beliefs or your level of emotional detachment, the inability to find the proper time to break up with a boyfriend (answer: after LSATs), how to deal with exes lurking around every corner, and the urban myth (recently discovered to be true) of successfully turning a hookup into a relationship. people spend so much time looking for and endlessly analyzing signs of love or desire, it's crazy.

anyways. keep those stories coming. :)

---------------------------

also, dirty dancing: havana nights: WHO'S COMING WITH?? diego luna is fucking hot.

and, there are really few things sexier than a guy recommending a book to you that he thinks you'll enjoy and loaning you his copy. :D

ok this one's for sam, who i know will probably read this tonight because he's the type of guy to check blogs on a friday night (it's not an insult!):

finally gave in and watched goddamn vanilla sky. i saw abre los ojos (the original version of the film) one random saturday night in england with my flatmates in jenna's room when it was on the bbc or itv or something. abre los ojos gave me fucking chills, and i couldn't sleep a wink that night (ask sam, i think i called him). it was a total mindfuck; it was unexpected, it was visceral, it was about science, and arrogance, and love, and physical beauty, and utter ugliness, and sex, and the completely fabricated line between dreams and reality, and the lengths people will go to in order to blind themselves to things they can't handle or don't want to see. even the title, "open your eyes," has so much more meaning than "vanilla sky."

damn, do i have a bone to pick with cameron crowe -- he has this annoying tendency to simplify everything, to sanitize it, and he throws in all these unnecessary pop culture and music references (which is probably why sam likes him so much; cameron crowe is the nick hornby of film). cameron crowe took the soul out of abre los ojos and replaced it with tom fucking cruise. also, he's really got a thing for conventionally beautiful women -- kate hudson? penelope cruz? he fetishizes them with his camera, and it's just too easy for men to fall in love with them. i dunno, i think his movies aren't very challenging, that's all. it's not a bad movie, i suppose, but it didn't give me chills.

OH MY GOD it's fucking true!!!!!! all the guys i know are "the boy next door"!!

if you are a guy and you took the test in the last post, and you're NOT the boy next door, please leave a comment, so i know the apocalypse isn't near.

on a related note, it seems the girls are, well, girlish: two girls i know are "the priss" and one is "the sonnet." wtf, gender roles?

got this test from corliss:

The Wild Rose
    Colorful, but unpicked. You are The Wild Rose.
    Prone to bouts of cynicism, sarcasm, and thorns, you excite a certain kind of man. Hoping to gather you up, he flirts and winks and asks you out, ultimately professing his love. Then you make him bleed. Why? Because you're the rare, independent, self-sufficient kind of woman who does want love, but not from a weakling.
    You don't seem to take yourself too seriously, and that's refreshing. You aren't uptight; you don't over-plan. Romance-wise, sex isn't a top priority--a true relationship would be preferable. For your age, you haven't had a lot of bonafide love experience, though, and this kind of gets to core of the issue. You're very selective.
    The problem is them, not you, right? You have lofty standards that few measure up to. You're out there all right, but not to be picked up by just anyone.

"You're never truly single as long as you have yourself."
ALWAYS AVOID: The Bachelor
CONSIDER: The Vapor Trail.

WTF IS THE VAPOR TRAIL!?!?!?

for the koreaphiles (you know who you are, and yes, you should hang your head in shame!)
from an interesting la weekly article on k-town, courtesy of g-lo:

All this talk of movie stars leads the conversation back to American misconceptions about Koreans — this time in Hollywood.

“On TV and in the movies,” says PK, “the order of sexy guys is always white, black, Latin, vibrators, Asian guys. We’re always below the vibrators.”

where's the love, east coast?
so this handy site tracker thing shows me where people are reading my blog from, and every time i check it, i always hold my breath in hopes that it will be 50% west coast and 50% east coast. i guess i like to think my blog has bicoastal appeal or something, or that my east coast friends will represent. alas, it's usually 85% west coast and like 10% east coast, with the other 5% coming from random people searching for things like the "restaurant from seinfeld" or "hemingway + the lost generation" or "sexy resume" (seriously). but lately, the east coast has been coming up, and yesterday we were at 65% west and 25% east. not bad, but where's the love, east coast?!? (god, i'm lame)

well the freak weather has left us, and we're back to foggy windy rain, which is somewhat comforting. i can't decide if i'm a warm weather person or a cold weather person. i used to love love love the sun (who loves the sun? who cares that it makes plants grow?), but i dunno, i think i'm probably more of a cold weather person simply because it's more romantic (ne ho romantic-ahhh), and i like the whole long coats/sweaters/scarfs/long-hair-flying-about-in-the-wind-thing (except i don't have long hair anymore, boo). but you know what the one good thing about warm weather is: miniskirts. ;) are you more of a warm weather or cold weather person? (ok that was pretty lame too)



i saw the dreamers on friday with regan, which was an interesting experience. did anyone else see it? it definitely leaves an impression on you. it's rated nc-17, and there's tons of nudity and explicit sex, but strangely, i was totally turned off after watching it. i was like, ew, is that what it really looks like?!?! the french guy in the film is MAD HOT though, and, as miguel said after seeing the matrix reloaded last year, i wet myself like five times. it's a nice-looking movie, but plotwise it's a little heavy-handed.

listening to: death cab for cutie's transatlanticism on permanent repeat (thanks to the margotbot aka columbia house)
reading: candy by mian mian

oh jake

love is for suckers
about to start my new internship, and today was our first meeting. i'm really really excited about this gig; it's something i've wanted to do for years. i actually interviewed for and was offered this same internship the summer after my sophomore year, but i turned it down to go to new york city. i briefly wondered today how things would have been different if i had taken the internship here instead. briefly. i'm feeling like, after a long break, this is a good step on the right path of what i really want to do in life.

so my first task is to write a "superlist", which is basically a list on any topic i choose, but it has to be comprehensive, so it has to be something where there aren't 10,000 items. if anyone has any good ideas, let me know. it can be about anything in the city.

things have been really relaxing in the city this week -- i didn't have any commitments or deadlines, and the weather has been absolutely beautiful. i've actually been wearing sunglasses out. for you poor frozen east coasters, the weather's been about low 60s here, which means you don't need to wear a jacket until nighttime. absolutely lovely. freesia and i had lunch at this great little patisserie on guerrero and 18th called tartine. the food is so so good, but a little on the pricey side. definitely the place to go for ham and cheese croissants on saturday morning. i miss paris like crazy (and am in desperate need of a shopping spree in london).

well i suppose i should say something about valentine's day. it's not a big holiday for me, just another excuse to drink. my associations with valentine's day and boyfriends are overall pretty negative, save one: way back in seventh grade, my boyfriend at the time gave me a silver necklace with a heart pendant that had an "L" on one side and "Love, Eric" on the back (his family owned a jewelry store). yes, i was a golddigger even then.

but you don't want to hear the good stuff, do you? you want the dirt, of course, you cheeky thing, you. so i will tell you, even though my ex-boyfriends do read this blog. but i do it all for you, my faithful readers: i broke up with one boyfriend the week before valentine's day, and a few years later i got into a horrendous fight with another one to the point where we almost broke up. thinking about the latter today, i had forgotten how bad that fight was--we had fought about something that i can't even remember anymore, but it was so intense that it brought us to the brink of ending the whole thing. instead, we decided to not speak to each other for a few days and to spend some time thinking about it while i went for a weekend break to edinburgh. i remember that before i left i got a very nice valentine's day present from him in the post (the mail). i thought it was a sign that he had gotten over whatever we were arguing about and that things were fine again, but it turned out that he had sent it before we had the fight. that was probably the worst fight we had in our entire relationship. oh l'amour.

within you without you
there's this scene that always haunts me from annie hall: annie and alvy are about to sleep together, except she wants to smoke pot first but he doesn't want her to be under the influence while they're having sex. so they forge ahead without the weed, but a transparency of herself steps outside of her body and goes to sit on a chair nearby, watching the scene from a distance, slightly bored. alvy asks her if she's alright, says it seems like she's not really there with him, but she assures him that she is. that scene pretty much captures the state of things for me these days.

i've had to learn how to separate my mind and emotions (yeah, i've got a few) from my body, and it hasn't been the most pleasant experience. your body does one thing while your mind sits on the chair next to the bed, wishing it had brought a book along to pass the time. and you can't help but slightly miss the old times, when your heart and your body were one, when you had a heart, when you weren't jaded beyond belief, when you believed in love and romance and first kisses and the meaning of love songs and fluttering heartbeats and holding hands and coy glances and things unspoken but understood. but you wake up blinking one bright sticky sober morning with dry contacts and a dry mouth, and the radio's been on all night, and you ponder what it would take to bring those two things (your emotions and your body, that is) back together, and if you even want those things to be back together. you stare at the ceiling, thinking back to a time without secrets, when things happened spontaneously, when you didn't have to worry about mutual friends, or the past, or an uncertain but surely volatile future, and the judgment of your peers. but you can't think about all this right now, because after all, your body is still in that bed and you have to put a wan smile on your face.

excerpted from my favorite column, putting some perspective on the janet jackson super bowl debacle:

So outraged was the populace that Michael Powell, sanctimonious head of the FCC, he of the flagrant corporate whoring who recently tried to cram through new rules that would've allowed a handful of media giants to own almost every media outlet in the nation, is actually launching a probe into the Janet episode. How cute.

This is the message: A woman's bare breast is a horrific and disturbing thing, completely inappropriate for an afternoon of wholesome macho homoerotic skull-bashing NFL violence and endless hours of nauseating commercial crassness -- unless the woman is, you know, a cheerleader. Now rush off to bed kids, and read your Bibles while Mommy and Daddy pop some Zoloft and Levitra and crack a few Bud Lights and head off to the fetish dungeon to lick our new Ford GT. Got it.

Yes, a woman's flesh is unspeakable evil. However, umpteen erectile-dysfunction commercials and crotch-biting pisswater Bud Light commercials and toxic-junk-food commercials and faux-macho truck commercials and the ad featuring two old people beating each other up over a bag of greasy potato chips, why, that's just tasteful, healthy capitalism. Is that it, Mike? Politicians? Just want to be clear.

Because there is no outcry. There are no snide FCC honchos or uptight politicians hurling the terms "vile," "disgusting" and "crude" at the true poisons of the culture, like those above -- not to mention politicians' own oil cronyism or easy lies about war, or the decimation of our foreign policy. You want to talk vile and disgusting, senator? Have you seen the new BushCo budget?

...

But in the final analysis, which is more harmful to your innocent unsoiled perfect child? Hearing Bono say "this is really fucking brilliant" during the Golden Globes and ogling Janet Jackson's PR-happy breast for all of 1.7 seconds, or the endless stream of blood-soaked images of BushCo's bogus war machine interspersed with never-ending commercials featuring misogyny, bestiality, cheap beer and toxic sodas, along with arrays of pneumatic bleached-toothed cheerleaders doing the splits while sweaty 300-pound men in tights pulverize each other like gorillas on meth?

Verily, congressman, and truly, Mr. Powell, why are you not out there screaming and clenching your fists and protecting our innocent children from the endless array of sociocultural lies and abuses and corporate whorings you yourselves support and help perpetuate?

Why are you not, in short, ranting about the need to protect our children from the likes of, well, you?

i was catching up on current affairs (i.e. reading US weekly and Lucky) at borders at stones today with jokey, and i came across this article about the sf dating scene. it was a boring read, but an interesting acronym caught my eye: "I started talking to a guy, who was not only too young but also GU (geographically undesirable, because he lived in Mountain View)."

although i will freely admit to having a superiority complex when it comes to being a san frncisco native, i've never necessarily marked a guy down for where he lived.

HAVE I?!?!?!

thinking back, it might be subconscious. my friends love to essentialize people based on where they grew up or what school they go to, but it's all a joke....right? is it really ok to judge a guy based simply on where he hangs his hat?

on second thought, i'm not sure if this writer labeled the guy as GU because Mountain View is so far from The City or just because it's Mountain View. one can be GU if one lives too far away; but one could also be GU if they live in a place that's, let's say, culturally impaired. but if the latter is the case, i'd say about 94% of American guys even qualify to be GD (geographically desirable), since only one city really gets respect from sanfrncscans, and there aren't that many guys who live in new york city. personally, the only other city besides nyc that i would consider GD is berkeley: oakland thinks it has more street cred than sf, san jose is too far, and all the other places in the bay are suburbs (enough said).

but this GU thing really got me thinking: as if guys don't have enough to be insecure about (not tall enough, not cut enough, bad dancer, bad breath, etc.), now they have to worry about whether or not they live in a GD place. it can probably be proven, though, that the further one lives away from a major metropolitan area, the less action one can expect. i mean, seriously, what would you say to a guy who said "Hey, come back to my place....in Mountain View"?

how is it february already??
on friday for some reason i can't remember at the moment g-lo suggested i set up a counter on my site, to track who is reading my blog. i guess i wasn't really that drunk cuz i remembered the website the next day and set one up. scratch that, the site isn't hard to remember, and i was faded to the point where i was sitting there "listening" to steve pontificate about hb allthewhile thinking "goddamn. i'm faded." the point is i've got a counter now, and i can see you muthafuckas. yeah, YOU. it's weird, someone actually found my site through miguel's blog. odd. STALKERS!

moving on. i've realized that my ex-boyfriends have all gone on to be better at things that i considered myself talented at -- one's currently in journalism school, and another is just a better goddamn writer than i am, the fucker. i'm not sure what the other one's up to, but i'm sure he's better at something that i think i'm good at, too, like parallel parking or kissing or drinking or mocking. something, damn him. as the woefully underrated nikka costa said, everyone's got their something -- i guess, but why do they all have to take mine?

i was in berkeley three times last week. on a not unrelated note, i cracked the 1PM wake-up, a few times, as well. i am a goddamn lazy ass bastard! if you see me online at 1 PM, and i've just signed on, please call me a lazy ass bastard, cuz I AM.

now that my teeth aren't bothering me anymore, i've been eating like crazy recently trying to gain the weight back, trying to put some junk in my trunk to make cherry proud to call me pilipina. speaking of, my dad just put up a new painting of his in the living room, and i love it. it's a really serene ocean landscape, with tiny yellow birds, a big rainbow, and a happy little boat sailing off to warm clear waters you can swim in. i told dad how much i liked it, and he said, "when i die, i want you to remember: i am the boat." my dad's the cutest, and he can cook a fish like no one.

i'm not sure what it is, but there was way too much sexual tension last week. is it that whole feb. 14 thing? *eye rolls*

and now, a list of small obsessions:
"me, myself, and i," beyonce knowles, remixed with the "uptown baby" (tariq and peter gunz) beat
"yeah," usher feat. luda and lil jon: DAMN YOU JOKESTER. DAMN YOU.
persepolis, by marjane satrapi: my second graphic novel; in sam's words: "Lisa, what has happened to you? You've changed, you've definitely changed."
"toxic," britney spears: i know, i know, my ibook's going to hell because i downloaded it, but it's still a good song.
"go it alone," noonday underground
"scream," and "let's talk turkey," ima robot: no one trusts me about this ima robot thing, for some reason, but you'll see. you'll see!
"a favor house atlantic," coheed and cambria
the grey album, dj danger mouse
"inside of love," nada surf

who are these people?
haven't blogged a real entry in a while, too busy with my ziggy stardust lifestyle. here goes.

so you think you know a person, but you really don't. even the people you see every day, for say, eight weeks, or ten weeks, or 23 years. how well do you really know them? it's even more strange when you grow close to people in a short period of time in an isolated place away from home, and then, when you see them again, it's as if they're totally different people. you notice things about them that you amazingly overlooked before. makes you wonder if you ever really knew them at all, or if the person you knew was somehow incapacitated in an accident and this person is just masquerading as them, or if it was all just a facade from the beginning. i guess it's the ultimate truth that we are products of our immediate environments, that we can change chameleonlike to fit the situation. we can change our spots, bringing some characteristics to the forefront while drawing back others.

and i'm no better than anyone in this way, not even bitch-ass girls who blog shit about me and my friends while being nice to our faces. if anything, i'm probably worse. with each new section of my life, i've been able to successfully reinvent myself, improving upon each previous version. there's a drastic difference between personal growth and reinvention. the point is that when you live in the moment, like most of us do, it's hard to really know what's real. we try on different hats, different personas, see what works, what sticks to the wall. but i like to think my core values stay the same, although my actions might not, and i haven't actually changed so much to the point where people who knew me before would say about me, "who is this person?" i think i treat people the same across time and locations, and i definitely don't front about how i feel about someone. as most of you know, i have a really hard time masking on my face what i'm thinking. and why should i?

one of the most unforgivable traits i find in women is deceit. i say in women specifically because i feel women are more predisposed to deceit than men and more adept at it. honesty, almost brutal honesty, is something i will always welcome in both men and women. most people will say it's one of the foremost traits of my character.

...or is it?