pre-weekend regret

i signed up to be in an intel hackathon this weekend. what the fuck was i thinking. months ago i downloaded steel magnolias to save for a rainy day and tonight when i opened it i realized i had inadvertently downloaded the 2012 remake with an all-black cast including queen latifah. fml. next i watched a really lewd video with kreayshawn in it and now i'm rewatching my favorite part of cheburashka episode 2, when gena goes to the bottom of a lake to fetch metal junk to donate.

self-portrait

bedtime

it's only 11:06 pm but i feel fucking awful horrendous so goodnight. 

пусть бегут неуклюже пешеходы по лужам

I had a really fantastic and validating day at work but now I'm home and feeling sad and bleary so I'm drinking Jim and watching Cheburashka and waiting for tomorrow. 

hamster train

New York is all wet. It's almost midnight and 80 degrees and 53% humidity and I'm lying in bed wearing a head of sweaty hair. I think the days of showering every other day are over, which means more wetness. I'm enjoying the heat and the humidity much more than I thought I would. It feels primal and reminds me very much of fun times living in Shanghai, though the heat and humidity are nowhere as rabid as Shanghai's yet.

Last night on our way to a birthday party in Williamsburg, Aijia and I sat across from a girl on the L with a hamster cage in her lap. She had two hamsters and their new litter of 12 babies. Mama and Papa Hamster were really cute and I asked the girl if she had intended for her hamsters to have babies and she said no. She said, "I have 14 hamsters!" Seeing all the babies reminded me of a million memories of when I was also in elementary school and my hamster Sally secretly escaped and snuck into Calvin and Hobbes' cage and got knocked up. I didn't even know she was pregnant until I saw many tiny squirmy feet in the nest she had made in her spinny wheel. Ma made me take the little furry babies to Petco in a little plastic container and ask an employee if they would take all these baby hamsters. He said they couldn't do that so we turned our garage into a hamster farm instead.

At the bar, we were sitting in the back drinking beer and there was a single firefly flitting around and flashing green. So whimsical and distracting - I need more!

Saratoga

Here I am in Saratoga with aijia, where we just attended her cousin's high school graduation party. this is my first trip to upstate new York, which is essentially the wilderness. Trees trees trees. Things flying everywhere, biting, sucking. Dragonflies, mosquitos, hummingbirds, and my first fireflies ever. So magical. We drank jim.beam black label an Aijia's uncle smuggled 100 pounds fireworks from new Hampshire and set  off a portion of them in their forest backyard. The weirdest thing about this trip was that even though I've had tons of fun, I've felt location panicky and extremely homesick all day, for I don't even know where.

young and beautiful

surely you've already heard lana's song for the great gatsby soundtrack? the bridge is phenomenal

midsommar

"Today a lot of Swedes will eat herring, make babies, drink too much schnaps and dance around phallic structure covered with flowers. With other words, it's midsummer's eve."
- erik

trump house

Today I discovered that my office in Midtown is connected to Trump Tower via an atrium. Trump Tower happens to be where our closest bar and Starbucks are located. I went in for the first time today on a pre-work journey to iced mocha. The inside of Trump Tower is tacky, tacky, tacky, with a two-story bronzed fountain gushing down the side of a wall, marble floors, a retail stand selling shirts and ties, and large, round tourists everywhere taking pictures even though it's only 9:30 in the morning. It's great. Can't wait to enjoy happy hour there.

film festival queen

last night after work i dragged myself to a film festival in the lower east side, where rothy's and my stop motion was playing as part of the animation night. rothy suddenly couldn't go and i didn't want to go alone but forced myself in the name of adventure. i arrived at the theater too early. so i walked through an ugly little park. then i wandered into whole foods; it was beautiful. i bought two toothbrushes, thai curry, and a packet of taco seasoning. i wandered back. before the screening started we were all gifted with a cup of wine and katy perry's popchips. i was instantly drunk. the animations began and they were pretty good. ours went up. the colors looked worse than i'd remembered, but people liked the short and they laughed. a lot. i won't attribute this to the wine. after ours, the animations were extremely good. my favorite was a hand-drawn-over-live-action black-and-white animation of a polish? girl who works in a bar in england?. all the patrons morph into animals matching their respective breeds of belligerence. after the last screening and i was still drunk off of one cup of white wine when i was shocked when they called out the filmmakers in the audience and they called my name (only two of us were present) and we had to stand up. i didn't know what to do so i waved and sat back down. people were instructed to go find us in the lobby and talk to us? filmmakers? i stood in the lobby and drank copious wines and people came and found me and talked to me and were very generous with their questions and compliments. i refrained my mouth from telling them that according to my measurements, we had practically tied for worst animation of the night but had edged out the competition by a nose hair.

afterwards i was actually drunk and not really understanding how to get back to the subway, since i still don't have a phone or a sense of direction. i wandered the street in the general direction of my suspicion. lo and behold, i bumped into jason from my unity class standing in the street outside of a bar, like my drunken smoking gay guardian angel. i explained to him that i was trying to find union square and he said i was going in the right direction! i went home.

father's day

my dad taught me to frame photos by including a portion of the foreground, and to hold my breath before pressing the shutter release. i'm proud to say that i think his vacation photos look a lot better than mine do. 

spin me round

i lost my phone post-bar. again. i feel really frustrated about it.
aijia and i have been trading off making dinner for each other. last night i made clam pasta and ice cream and we drank a bottle of wine. tonight she made salmon and ice cream and we drank two bottles of wine. and then we watched Up and i cried until my eyes fell out. something i like about bushwick: on my walk home from her apartment, a guy gave me a high-five on the street.

there there

smells dreamtime ibm

during my recess in Los Angeles, my bedroom in renee zellweger's house stopped smelling like me, coffee, candles, lotion, and hair serum and went back to smelling like cat, cat vomit, and mysterious gross smell. being immersed in its pungency makes me feel like i'm back in last october, when i'd just moved in and this room was an alien place.

last night i used the dohm again. different roommate, same old story. i dreamt that i was attacked by an overly friendly porcupine that kept jumping into my lap and that my tongue, face, arms, and legs were covered in thousands quills that were more like cactus needles and that i needed a nurse to pull them out.  i also dreamt that i was  being secretly watched by my dad's cousin, who looked more like he was my dad's identical twin except for one difference in birthmark, who was an eccentric wine expert with a bizarre name who had never gotten to know me.

this morning i woke to find that my real dad had written me an excited e-mail about finding out that i'm working with IBM and that "many be it was meant to be that way!?" i think he's referring to how i worked at IBM in shanghai in 2007 except that i'm pretty sure all i remember about that time is eating lunch alone every day at KFC and watching a lot of Youtube (this was back before youtube - and facebook! - were blocked by The Great Firewall). oh - and chatting with mrs. tuckersman / metacomrobotron on AIM about vitas! yes, the world has come full circle!

my fresh direct has arrived!

Dohm time

Sticky all over and raging bug bite on my arm. It must be summer. It's midnight and I'm now a full-time working stiff and my roommate just brought over a buddy. Going to crank up my brand new white noise machine. Angry sleepless nights no more? Let's hope.

syrah syrah

Here I am in Cambria in the region of golden staggered hills and rolling Steinbeckian beauty. Today I lunched on roadside Carl's Jr., drank great red wines, petted two cats, dined on sliced calamari and prime rib and sang evening karaoke in front of an innful of strangers and my parents.
Lights out

foiled again

on friday i got a call from intelligentsia saying that i had left my moleskine there the previous day. i drove across town to pick it up. when i got out of the car in silverlake, i realized that the zipper on my dress had completely split and i was exposed from back to butt. thankfully i had a jacket in the car and i ran overheating and delirious in and out of expensive boutiques on sunset junction on a hot day, looking for something new to wear. i grabbed a funny yellow too-short dress thing off the rack in front of the ragg mopp vintage store and told the store clerk that i needed to buy this and i needed to wear it now.

today i figured out that my missing debit card was left at trader sam's at the disneyland hotel last wednesday when i had drinks with rhiannonnk. since i'm leaving on a trip to paso very early tomorrow morning, i decided that if i wanted to hold cash in hand anytime in the near future, i would have to drive down to orange county from la and back again. i find the best method for dealing with very annoying and exhausting tasks is to tackle them immediately, before you have too much time to dwell on how much you resent having to do them. i drove 34 miles down to anacrime and claimed my delinquent possession, walked around downtown disney, felt overwhelmed by all the shopping, bought a terrible chicory coffee from the creole cafe, and drove back 34 miles.

why am i so absentminded? i am in good spirits nevertheless and have been enjoying driving my car, walking barefoot, very agreeable weather, barbecues, attending birthdays, shopping, meeting friends' old and new boyfriends, seeing friends' new dwellings (1 apartment, 2 houses), and otherwise catching up on the developments in the lives of others.