23

I really wasn't that excited about this song/video when I first heard this a few months ago but now I'm all over it.

look at this prague

is it not the most amazing thing?

Notes from the road

Driving down the La Jolla coast. Ma is complaining that the woman doing yoga in a bikini on the side of the road is going to cause a car accident.

Merry Christmas

Having a toddler in the family is like having a little psycho at the dinner table

puppies

new take on that dream where you're in a play but you've forgotten your lines: last night i dreamt i was in a puppet show but couldn't find my puppet

bad daughter

this is a bad thing to say but i really wish my dad wouldnt talk to me when im trying to watch long island medium

goldilocks strikes

khenkel and i went out for a lively night in weho on friday night, culminating in one of our friends being forcibly thrown out of the club at 2 am. i was happy to leave because i felt like a zombie on EST. i spent the night on khenkel's couch bed and in the morning i was too hung over to drive back to the suburbs so i went to mcdonald's and then let myself into bagel's empty house and ate a sausage egg mcmuffin in his bed and went back to sleep.

i snuck out before noon confident that my layover would go unnoticed, but on the way back to the car the neighbors' daughter, sierra, caught me and brought me bagel's purchase of see's toffee bites from her candy sale to give to him. i had to go back into the house to write a note and put it down, at which point i gave up on covering my tracks and threw my mcdonald's bag in the kitchen trash. 

the bird cage

i just watched the bird cage and laughed until i spilled red wine all over myself

greek

totally forgot that this happened to me

ssn 2, episodes 18 and 19

char dinner

Tsa

"if your bag is bigger than a bin,.you don't need a bin."

Cologne on the j

I can hardly believe I'm going to the airport again. I got to see the sunrise this morning and decided that it may be one of the most pleasing times of day for my neighborhood. This is the first time I'm taking the J to JFK and someone is wearing a lot of cologne. I'm 15 stops from Jamaica Center.

Za dryzhby

Last night at the winter show afterparty Yuliya P. and I clinked our glasses together with various Russian drinking toasts and she said I could pass as Kazakh and I was very pleased. She also said that when she was little in the 80s her family moved to Sweden and then they moved back to Russia and there immigration wasn't a common thing at the time so when she went back to school and could only speak Swedish the other kids thought she was completely insane.
She forgot all the Swedish when she moved to the US but recently had extreme language flashbacks when she watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

The greatest gifts

It snowed and snowed all say. Tonight I had a beautiful pre-Christmas  dinner by a Christmas tree at Mrs tuckersmans with Mrs tuckersman, pig, dan, Andy, and Dave. We ate delicious shepherds pie and lentils and cobbler and I couldn't stop picking at all the plates even after I'd had my fair share. Afterwards it was pouring rain and Mrs tuckersman Lent me a pair of sweatpants to wear under my dress and  pig Lent me her umbrella to walk home with, which turned out to be probably the best presents I'll get this holiday season because even though I was burning up in the torso area but simultaneously soaking wet in the shoes and feet and literally panting like a dog when I finally got home at 1:45am, my legs and computer were dry.

I believe aijia, who says that Griffin knows when you're sad and comforts you because I've been feeling a lot of complicated, bittersweet feelings and tonight he snuggled and snuggled with me.

Goodnight Wednesday

330am, in bed. I feel like I had a very exciting day, even if parts of it were miserable. I just rolled around on my floor in my underwear and cracked my back thousands of times.

the end is nigh

almost two am, i'm at school in the shop stripping wires and shaking my empty can of red bull red. i don't think i'd be as tired if we hadn't had to stand for two hours for our last choir rehearsal before the friday's concert. i feel all wobbly

Automaton pathetic

Update: it is just past 6pm and this is my automaton now

pathetic automaton

This is my automaton. It's due as one of my two finals for tomorrow.

ny thievery

It's Rothy's birthday and she had her phone stolen on the subway when we were coming home from school tonight. We chased the guy off the train and confronted him on the platform of the Lorimer stop but there really wasn't anything we could do.

cebiblat

i do believe it's snowing a lot

maybe it's the finals talking but i'm feeling blue - it would be so magical to have snow tomorrow

jupiter bringer of jollity

i feel immense relief that no matter what, this week will go be unstoppably fast

touchdown

getting home time during finals week is anytime between 2 and 4 am

facts from watson

Oral tolerance is believed to be the reason why teenagers who wear metal braces, before they have their ears pierced, are less likely to develop an allergy to nickel. Ear piercing is the major cause of nickel allergy.

finals food blog

On Monday I killed my first clams. I bought a dozen Littlenecks on Fresh Direct and when they came in their two baggies I wasn't sure I could do it because they were a lot bigger than I'd expected. My family always cooked manila clams growing up, which are smaller and less intimidating. I stood and watched the moment when their shells sprung open and their clam souls floated to the skies. They were so delicious that I would do it again.

Today I accidentally dropped my tupperware in the residents' office at school and all my pasta spilled out on the floor. I collected it and everyone awwed and said that's too bad but I left and ate it anyways because there are people in the world with real problems.

skyfall

When I booked a red-eye from LAX to JFK, I figured that I'd sleep on the plane and arrive bright and early for a full day's work. It somehow slipped my mind that most of that sleep time would be lost to the time change at that arriving at 5:30am would be the equivalent of getting rudely kicked out of bed at 2:30am.  On the way to LA my seat had felt like the most comfortable cradle in the world, but on the flight back I felt like I was trying to sleep in the cardboard airplane seat Rothy and I made for our puppet show skit.

so uncomfortable

I at least achieved 2 hours of sleep on the plane, unlike Rothy, who stayed up the entire time watching Black Swan. I didn't watch any movies on the plane though this past week in LA I did have many indelible movie moments: Hunger Games I and Skyfall. Both were so riveting that my heart was racing all the way to the end. Hunger Games was visually striking, silly dramatically dystopian, and delightfully tacky. Ma and I tried to go to see Hunger Games II at the theater but it was actually SOLD OUT. I was shocked and disappointed. In Skyfall, there was a pivotal moment when lines from Tennyson's "Ulysses" were recited, and I had flashbacks to the choral arrangement of that poem which I sang at USC with Mrs. Tuckersman ("Untravelled Worlds") and could pre-hear each next line and my heart almost stopped.  
 
We arrived stupid early at the airport and proceeded to drive in circles with a cab driver who wouldn't listen to our directions. $$$. Promptly went back to bed at earliest possibility, slept until midday brunching at Owl Juice. Very productive! I don't recommend taking anymore red-eyes to myself. Unfortunately, I already have another booked for January.

This late afternoon I realized I had a sore throat. I had shoyu ramen and draft Sapporo for dinner and it felt much better afterwards. Now I have a swollen lymph node. It feels like a cherry in my neck. I think I will just refuse to become sick.

Gate 58

I'm waiting for rothy at the boarding gate for our impending flight. I'm looking at my calendar and feeling astounded by how bad the next two weeks are going to be. I have four final projects and two performances to pull out of thin air.

being sad for everybody

i feel really sad about paul walker's death and i can't decide whether i should or not. i'll think about this more on the plane. back to the east i go

you may call me baby rose, or multiflora rose because these are the English names for 蔷薇, from which the first character of my Chinese name comes.

thanksgiving photos

my thanksgiving domestic chen pie extravaganza. i spent all of wednesday making these while watching a marathon of the saga of The Little Couple's adoption of their Chinese baby Will. they turned out even better than expected and a request for a repeat apple pie for christmas has been filed by mama chen.

some nice thanksgiving pictures taken by my cousin

walking dread

i've had a wonderful thanksgiving this year surrounded by handmade food and beloved family in my favorite city. i'm feeling grateful for that but also endlessly conflicted and troubled by neverending unknowns and variables about school (short-term: finals, long-term: thesis), employment/career/fate, human relationships, geographic situation, etc. and it all feels like a very heavy weight on the heartmind. i'm very much dreading going back to new york, place of dread.    

old man river

what a beautiful lady

residential pov

do you ever see pictures of people's trips to new york and marvel about how your life in new york looks nothing like that? last night i paid almost $40 for a cab to take me home from times square because no arrangement of trains would be able to get me home before 4:30am. so fucking glamorous.

soyum

tonight's one am snack is a glass of mashed potatoes in bed

charbaby

caritas et amor

how is it possible to feel too sad to sleep? shouldn't it have the opposite effect? i'm just up looking at pictures of sloths but it's making me kind of too emotional.

lilo

anybody else want to watch liz and dick?

jorge bday

birthday party in the east village a few weeks ago

knockdown maspeth

Had a meeting in a Whole Foods today. There was no shortage of snacks.

your daily internet

my bucket's got a hole in it

i'm home alone for the first time in the longest time i can remember. yessssss thursday night in with me me mememe meem em em emem me m eem em em emm em e mem 

hello kitty band-aid premium

i cut my finger open deep on the jagged edge of the saran wrap box. i feel like a wet rag, terrible, heavy and moldy. 

it's just us

text from my mom a few days ago. so it's just us. except that right now it's 1:39 pm and 37 degrees.

dog island

Dogs never want to leave the island once they experience it, so you will not be able to have your dog again. You can come to the public visiting days, they are three times a year. Sometimes, someone sees their dog again. Usually the dog has either forgotten them, or has grown to resent all the years of captivity. Even with the sweetest relationship, it was always wrong for the dog to not be free.

sad day

how much of my hair has been woven into birds' nests?

mazu

Mazu is usually depicted together with two guardian generals known as "Thousand Miles Eye" (千里眼, Qianli Yan) and "With-the-Wind Ear" (順風耳 Shunfeng Er). Though their iconography can vary, both are usually represented as demons; "Thousand Miles Eye" is often red with two horns, while "With-the-Wind Ear" is green with one horn. They are said to have been two demons whom Mazu conquered. The both of them were in love with her, but she said she would marry the one who defeated her. Using her martial arts skills, Mazu defeated them both and they became her friends.

dog woman tired

yesterday morning i went to morristown, nj to an automata museum for a field trip and then i came back to school to work at 4p and then i wasn't home again until 3am. i woke up at 12p today in a daze

i've been stress eating every day at two am for a week and then i wake up in a daze

бессонница

awake late again for no reason. felt very heavy today

our harpist came to rehearsal tonight to practice for the choral concert in two weeks. she was very pretty. i wonder if there is a prerequisite for harpists to be pretty or if growing up playing the harp made them that way? i have the most excellent last line of 'This Little Babe' from Britten's Ceremony of Carols stuck in my head. "If though wilt foil thy foes with joy then flit not from this heavenly boy." 

the witching hour

why do i stay up so stupid late talking to air?

here's some igloo hotel in finland where i'd rather be right now

rhinorrhea

i appear to have severe rhinorrhea

nice hair

a girl called out to me on the street, "Miss! You have nice hair!" which was more pleasing than the last time i was communicated with on my way home late at night, when a girl yelled, "Filipinaaaa! You know you want some black coochie!"

glitch face

we had a skype meeting a few weeks ago for a pitch project and while we were having a serious discussion between him me aijia and rothy i heard cerrito take a screenshot and he was laughing because he said i looked crazy

tia

my new cat roommate moved in yesterday. her name is tia. she is very angrey about being here. i would be angrey too if i had just moved from a swanky manhattan high-rise by central park to bushwick, brooklyn.

you can see her, as well as my former cat roommate trouble, as well as me, in my friend sammy's project below: 

Cat Car from Sam Brenner on Vimeo.

doppelganger halloween

halloween day at school. me, schoolmates, and our evil twins

frozen like snow in shadow

before anyone had a chance to ask what happened, today new york became dark at four pm and the weather turned to the thirties. i had chipotle. 

cento: the true romantics

I hid my love when young till I
Heard the thunder hoarsely laugh,
Heard the skylark warbling in the sky,
For the eye altering alters all.

But with a sweet forgetting,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
The awful shadow of some unseen power
Hath had elsewhere its setting.

I would build that dome in air
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
For the sword outwears its sheath,

And whom I love, I love indeed,
And all I loved, I loved alone,
Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.
Lehman

i hear babies cry

black man subway crooners love singing What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong. the subway is the last place where i feel like it's a wonderful world.

never alone

a day meant for hiding, of course ruined by relative visiting from out of town

how would you describe sunset to an alien?

As our Earth rotates in an orbit around the sun, the time when your part of the Earth is exposed to sun is considered to be "day." When your part of the Earth begins to turn away from the sun, this process is called sunset and it occurs in the sky in vivid warm colors.

halloween time

tonight during automata class my dinner was sushi, coca-cola, popcorn, and mini reese's peanut butter cups. happy halloween god bless america

the elephant tree

i got paid $250 today to talk about South African liquors and liqueurs made from the marala fruit (which elephants like to eat) for 3 hours. not bad but now i'm tired.

i just got home at 2:30a from working at rothy's for about four hours on our puppet skit. we were walking back from the bodega on a beer run when we saw a black trash bag on the street come alive. it was contorting and then it was squeaking and 4 rats ran out of it and there were still more rats inside making it a monster bag.  

the bats

my insoles are lost in the mail :(

an animation about bats

dogoween

I originally wanted to be Wishbone as Robin Hood, but the Robin Hood portion of the costume looked god-awful, so I scrapped it at the last minute. This year for the school Halloween party I was a dog in a dress. I maintained Wishbone's coloring.

that confused look dogs have

dog and cat friends

im getting insoles

what happens when i don't respond to my dad's e-mails quickly enough. gotta love that dad

baby growing up

One of my pitcher plants caught its first bug (under my supervision) today. I am so proud.

Also, our fucking frat boy neighbors have raucous idiot backyard parties every single weekend and the bass is so high that my brain is throbbing as I lie in my underground bedroom. Just go die in a hole.

new elvis discovery

this is so good. i've listened to it 20 times today.

things i saw on the internet today

Ol' Fish Eyes looking breathtaking here

a really amazing and fucking scary automaton

All that interneting must have tuckered me out because I'm having a grand ol' time being anti-social and staying home by myself

favicon madness

i updated my wordpress bullshit about a month ago and have now stayed up until 2:30 am for no good reason other than putting my favicons back in place. rah rah rah

proposed monument

Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Monument for Mill Rock, East River, NYC:
Slice of Strawberry Cheesecake, 1992

dog tired

I think school is going fairly well but I don't think this lifestyle is sustainable. I was in Chinatown buying acrylic at 9:30am, installing a climate change project at the Union Square Farmer's Market until 3pm, started learning about gears and cams and ate my single meal of that I had today (McDonalds), went to choir from 7-9, fucked around with my broken Vectorworks/Adobe Illustrator file until finally fixing it and laser cutting the acrylic at 11:30p. Left school at midnight, got home via subway and shuttle at 1am, sleeping now at 2a with a myriad of undone assignments due tomorrow.

yes yeah

we found back-end web class to be pretty damn boring today

adding the form to my homework took me a dedicated, silent, non-distracted 7 hours of coding, frustration, fear and panic today, so please fill it out: http://chendex.herokuapp.com/

also, i was the focal point of rothy's homework. bask in my glory: http://valerie.herokuapp.com/

other people on the train

On the subway this morning there was a homeless-looking person in an erratic altered state, stumbling violently and looking very unpredictable. His or her (I really couldn't tell) smell was completely rancid and filled our side of the car and I held my breath. I was marveling at how people were literally running out of his/her path, jumping out of their seats, grabbing their children and scurrying, when I realized that I myself was cowering into the young man sitting next to me. 

big brass band

I was at school for fourteen hours on Friday. Everyone was getting all cranky at everybody else. I bought two bags of groceries and trudged home at midnight. The L train has been running on limited service, meaning that on weekends or after 11:45 pm on weekdays you have to get off the train two stops into Brooklyn and continue on a shuttle bus. Naturally, not as many people can fit on the bus as just got off the train. However, because of party night traffic impeding the shuttle buses, when I got off at the Lorimer stop there were no fewer than 200 people crowded around the shuttle stop and quickly becoming an angry mob. I would've been angry too if I weren't already so impossibly tired. I wasn't able to get on either of the first two shuttle buses but finally found my way onto the third and nodded in and out of sleepytime consciousness. During a moment of wakefulness I realized that Craggs and her boyfriend Frank were on the same shuttle bus as I was. When I hollered at them they decided to get off at my stop instead of theirs and we all jumped off the bus at the Jefferson stop. We could see that there was a huge party going on with a brass band playing on the second floor of a loft. In a spontaneous moment of spontaneity, we followed the sound and ended up in a sweaty vivacious party full of young people dancing to a 15-piece brass band, many of the musicians women, which I really enjoyed. It was so loud and so fun that I regretted being the square with a backpack and two plastic bags of groceries. I wanted to stay forever because it all felt very fated and symbolic that there is a hidden big loud light at the end of the tunnel.

i entered in this

i know i'm the only one who looks like she's sitting in front of a trash bag, but it was a "table cloth" from the dollar store. http://worldofcolorhonorchoir.com/gallery/e101cac2

school week

The week goes quickly.

The way I see it, it starts on Friday, when I begin to source materials for my next puppet. Shopping takes up a surprising amount of my work time. Friday, Saturday I'm mostly working on the puppet and the performance with a little bit of other work and chores wedged in the in-between moments.

Sunday the day is organized around going to ballet for an hour, which is the one hour when time stops. I do my pliés and think only about the alignment of my body.

Monday I start my website coding for Dynamic Web, perform with my puppet, and finish the website Tuesday, moments before class starts.

Wednesday I stage some crazy public art intervention, edit the documentation, read a heap of academic readings about the environment, write a response all to turn in the next day for Renatured, and start building some mechanical moving thing for Automata, also due the next day. That night I get drunk for happy hour and then go to choir, and time stops again. I sit next to Jessica, a dancer who is my choir friend. We're learning to sing some very beautiful songs, including Beethoven's Hallelujah Chorus. I'm amazed by how conductors are parcel out two hours a week between so many different songs and correct the notes, pronunciation, and phrasing for every voice part. Our conductor is a wonderful, expressive Wagnerian-type who isn't nearly as dictatorial as conductors I had in undergrad but produces great music by knowing how to appropriately woo an unruly crowd. After choir my brain is in music mode and it's nearly impossible for me to think about work anymore.

Thursday, finish moving machine, go to class, go to class, go out to a bar with schoolmates and stay out late until it's the new week.

outsourcing

I've begun outsourcing my apartment's composting by collecting all my vegetable goods in the freezer and dropping them off once a week at the farmer's market in Williamsburg. They then turn into soil for local urban growing: http://www.grownyc.org/compost. It's pretty great. The walk from the subway to the farmer's market is really calming with lots of trees and birds and when I was paying for kale, the vendor put two jalapenos in my hand as a gift and said they're "extremely hot. Like you." whoop whoop 

a spider

A brown spider the size of a half-dollar coin has been living in my room for some time. I had accepted it like a pet dog that I would see hustling around on my floor every other day until this morning, when I was sitting on my rug and saw that it was coming charging at me, at which point it had forfeited its peaceful co-habitation rights and I captured it and sent it to the great uncomfortable outdoors. 

underpuppy

Look out - diva coming through. I bought that puppy headband online for myself but, surprisingly, it turned out to be for child-sized heads so I gave it to Char.

le petit naked mole rat

enjoy -

Le Petit Naked Mole Rat from valerie jean on Vimeo.

CHVRCHES

I'M SEEING CHVRCHES TONIGHT IN MANHATTAN . THANK GOD.
This was probably the anthem of my personal summer -

naked mole rat

the entirety of my past two days:

amazon horned frog

chinese dragons

Chinese dragons are occasionally depicted with bat-like wings growing out of the front limbs, but most do not have wings, as their ability to fly (and control rain/water, etc.) are mystical and not seen as a result of their physical attributes.

starve feeling

I have been insatiably starving this entire day. I had cereal and coffee for breakfast; a large bowl of rice, onions, edamame, and mushrooms and half an orange for lunch; and a cheeseburger, onion rings, and some of Aijia's french fries for dinner. And yet I starve again. Can't fight this feeling anymore, I've forgotten what I started fighting for

growing up with missy

Lost years: 1995-1999

I'm sure there are pictures; I just need to find them.

Kitchen sink bathtime

My 11th birthday party, pink glasses

My Esmerelda watch and butterfly overalls

My friend Vickie's birthday at my house, advent of contact lenses

I LOVED this skirt

More bathtime, braces happen

The beginning of the phase where lime green was my favorite color

When we had a rabbit of the same color

High school gym shorts, braces off, living room black leather couches become tan leather couches

Advent of digital photography, the college years, post-jaw surgery, a sunflower I planted from seed

Visiting Silverlake LA

Koreatown Chalfonte apartment

Russian club party

Before I started drawing my eyebrows on

Blonde streak era

Obligatory college rave days

Orange hair era, matching baby blue outfits

Visiting Bagel's new house

First boyfriend, night before moving to New York for grad school

Last Christmas

Just hanging out