deadmau5

If you are one of the people to whom I complained earlier this summer when I got back from LA that my apartment truly smelled like death and was absolutely horrid, I have an update for you. This morning I thought it was kind of cute that the cats seemed to have overturned the corner of the living room rug and Trouble was sleeping on the folded-over corner (typical Trouble behavior: never slept on this side of the rug behavior - better try it). It wasn't until I came out of the shower that Trish pointed out to me that there was a dead mouse that one of the cats must've hidden under the rug. She blamed Trouble but I'm sure it was Renee Zellweger. Trouble can hardly breathe on his own, let alone catch, kill, and hide a mouse. I stood there, wet, naked, and wrapped in towels, and stared at the mouse with Trish, who was dressed but had wet hair. This mouse looked like it'd been under the rug for a long time - it was all dried out and completely flattened from being repeatedly tread on. That thought gives me shudders - someone was the first person to do it and it might've been me. I said it was like a mouse pancake. Trish said it looked like a little mouse rug. 

We both decided to leave it there and go to our respective works.

murmurs

I feel like I should probably say something about the play I saw last week with Mrs. Tuckersman, Murmurs, because it was one of the best plays I've seen.

I've been putting off saying anything because it is rather difficult to describe, but it was something like magic and puppetry with dancing, acrobatics, and slight-of-hand. It starred Charlie Chaplin's beautiful granddaughter, Aurelia, who is an astounding actress, puppeteer, and performer of other strange physical feats. She danced on a table with her feet in mugs. She was an aerial acrobat on a clothesline. She walked impossibly in midair. She was on the run from having to move out of a condemned building and the detritus and her boxes and packaging materials gave rise to living creatures and trap doors which led to faraway buildings, rooms of drunk and horrifying puppets and walls with eyes and a tiny tap dancing man. It felt dreamy in that bizarro way, like my head space when I'm falling asleep. It was the best and exactly what I wanted to see.       

What if objects could speak their own personal histories? What if walls could breathe our stories of disappointment and desires? Aurélia Thierrée arrives at Lincoln Center Festival this summer with Murmurs, a dreamlike, largely wordless rumination on a woman's adventure into a surreal and shifting landscape of deteriorating buildings and objects--a collaboration with her mother, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin. Chased by faceless gray people, and alternately wooed and menaced by featured performers Magnus Jakobsson and Jamie Martinez, Thierrée enchants and delights in this wonderful spectacle of low-tech circus artistry, filled with visual trickery, fantastical monsters, and magical sleight of theatrical hand. Innovatively using set design and puppetry to transform everyday things--cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, umbrellas, ladders, and staircases to nowhere--into manifestations of the soul, Murmurs straddles the delicate line between imagination and madness.

baby animals

baby animal 1

 baby animal 2

baby at dinner

laika and enos

Some windy music from Laika and Enos, your favorite neighborhood two-man band

i hate my apartment

one of my roommates or one of the three european floozies they brought home from a party last night drank my energy drink without asking. i hope it gave him or her uncontrollable and frightening heart palpitations.

call the exorcist

sammy davis junior junior

My grandmother died two years yore of a cancer in her brain, and Grandfather became very melancholy, and also, he says, blind. Father does not believe him, but purchased Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior for him nonetheless, because a Seeing Eye Bitch is not only for blind people but for people who pine for the negative of loneliness. (I should not have used "purchased," because in truth Father did not purchase Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, but only received her from the home for forgetful dogs. Because of this, she is not a real Seeing Eye Bitch, and is also mentally deranged.)

Foer, 5

cinderella

Today was dedicated to brewing hot coffee, hanging clothes, performing feats of sweat-runs-down-your-legs yoga, boxing my online shopping returns, blowing an unreasonable sum online shopping for more things, eating leftovers and watching Say Yes to the Dress: Big Bliss, making mediocre Thai curry with sauce out of a bag, e-mailing with Katya, drinking iced coffee and laughing with Aijia at Swallow, getting caught in a full-sun rain storm and getting soaked and screaming through the streets, scrubbing the shower free of its multi-colored molds, washing dishes, watering plants, caring for Leonardo da Fishy, stitching broken things,  meticulously picking air fuzz out of my air conditioner filter, not drinking, myopically staring at my computer screen, and conversating with the Bagel for our telephone hour which apparently lasted two hours but blew by when time snuck away from us. Chatting on the phone while kicking around on my bed always makes me feel like Gidget. Tomorrow: hopefully more intellectual endeavors and band practice with Mrs. Tuckersman. 

dumbo rat

Dumbo rats are my new "thing," which I will add to my list of other "things," like Cheburashka, carnivorous plants, ice skating, hair bows, crazy asian 3-D nails, dumbo rats.

summer flies

For those who asked for asked for summer, it's here. It's hot and it's humid and I like it as long as my air conditioner stays faithful. I can't put a glass of wine down in my room without turning around to find six fruit flies got a swimming pool full of liquor and they dive in it. In the kitchen the big black flies reign supreme and zip around in swarms and perch and rub their hairy little legs on our dishes. I was toweling off in the shower the other day and saw a tiny tiny leech? inching along the shower floor. I was mortified. I washed it down the drain because I didn't know what to do. I googled "tiny leech in my shower" and it turns out that there are flies that grow their young, which look like tiny leeches, in your drains. I continue to feel mortified.

The summer sun stays up late and makes broad daylight past 8 o'clock post meridiem. It's also particularly white bright and blinding. I hear summer in New York explodes with fun things to do, but I guess I haven't heard as much about them because I've been working full time. Last week, though, I did attend a lecture by one of the partners of BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), an impressive architecture firm based out of New York, Copenhagen, and Beijing and the company that designed and built the Danish Pavilion (of which I have fantastic memories) at the Shanghai World Expo three years ago. They're also apparently building a fancy beach resort near my mom's hometown in Taiwan. He talked about the reappropriation of industrial structures for public use and enjoyment and showed a maritime museum, park, and a waste management plant with a ski run on top as examples that were built in Denmark. Yeah, I liked that.

wao

I sent Ma a link about the corpse flower that's about to bloom in Washington DC and asked her if she remembered when we went to see one at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles when I was little. 

Aforementioned pictures from that day:

Me and my cousins. Note my skort and Helly Kitty headband:

delivery for my face

Ma sent a large and generous delivery of Lancome goodies to me to rub all over my face in New York :) :) :)

junk

I went to see an apartment yesterday in Williamsburg. I didn't like it. On my way back to the subway, I stopped by a large overpriced thrift store off the Bedford stop called Junk.

I was surprised to see large numbers of old personal photographs for sale. How did the shop come by all these pictures? They were very captivating to look at - birthdays, smiling people, biracial couples, graves.

Lots of these old phones for sale. Sale I use figuratively, because they were actually $40 each. wtf?

more wtf?

Also, I found the same clock that Cerrito inherited from his brother and hangs in his apartment because his grandmother hates it.

Also I want?

full

Lunch was catered with our big mid-internship presentation today and I ate so many dumplings that my chest feels tight.

lobeltime

Cerrito sent me a picture of an Arnold Lobel book last night and it sent me on a spiral of Lobel memories and Lobel Google Image Search.

 

remember coney island and how we went into the water

wonderful 1914 oil painting of coney island by Edward Henry Potthast

faraway sessions

Ma and Pa Skyped me tonight. 

Some background: I have a red-eared slider that likes to escape its pond.

Ma: "I FOUND YOUR TURTLE. IT WAS NEAR THE TRASH CANS. WHEN I FOUND IT, IT WAS JUST A CIRCLE. NO HEAD, NO FEET. I ACTUALLY FOUND IT ONCE BEFORE THAT, BUT I PUT IT ON A TABLE TO TAKE A PICTURE FOR YOU AND FORGOT ABOUT IT. I CAME BACK AN HOUR LATER AND IT WAS GONE. I THOUGHT IT FELL AND DIED, BUT THERE WAS NO BODY!"

From last week: 

I command-shift-3-caught the Bagel in a moment of pensivity at work.

that gidget look

this hacker is a hack

On top of trying to try new things every week, another way I keep my life tumultuous is I will every so often put myself in a situation that makes me extremely uncomfortable. This is why I participated in a hackathon this past weekend, where we sat from 10am to 8pm for two days trying to make a something in the cafe at work. People from Intel gave us each one of their new gestural cameras and told us to do something cool with them. I certainly would not have survived without the saving grace of my partner, Youjin, who was very knowledgeable, patient, and willing to drag me along for the ride. We worked together on integrating a map she'd been making at work that marks on a map every time someone says tweets the word "love" on Twitter with some of the hand-tracking capabilities of the gestural camera. In the end, you could wave your hands around in the air to navigate the map and it felt like magic or Minority Report. We were well fed and generously watered (XX is a client) and all the technical difficulties and coding frustration felt very worthwhile in the end. And we got to keep the cameras.

top secret confidential

top secret confidential shot of all the medical chart-making i did today