Catching up with DC

I had dranks with my friend from grad school in La and got so sad telling him about this year that I got drunk and went home and chugged a lot more wine and now I'm at the airport and I kind of want to throw up

steel magnolias

ma made our entire household sick over the course of thanksgiving weekend. i have a fever and a cough and body aches and an intermittently stuffy nose. i'm hiding in my bed in hopes of getting better in time for our big team-building night on friday. last night i watched steel magnolias, which was not i'd expected. i thought i'd heard somewhere that everyone dies at the end of steel magnolias, so i spent a large portion of the movie thinking one of them was a murderer and waiting for the big slaughter.

the forties are here

it was 48 degrees when i walked to my car this morning. winter is finally here. good thing all my cold weather clothes are in california.

i ended up crashing vana's tinder date in downtown yesterday and this morning i was so hung over i bought mcdonalds, got to work, parked my car outside of my work trailer and felt so ill that i leaned the seat all the way back and slept in the parking lot for 35 minutes. don't think i ever anticipated doing that as a grown up. this was at the tail end of a long week of IAAPA, the big annual convention for themed entertainment and attractions. more on that when i'm less weak  

sleepinghead

Another close call - this morning I was supposed to be at work at 7am so we could take a van out to the cruise ship in Port Canaveral to see some recently completed projects and to take measurements for documentation. However, I was a dummy and forgot to even set an alarm and woke up in my bed, in downtown, at 6:40am. I woke up in complete shock and horror and ran out the door like my hair was on fire and luckily my manager held the van for me as I ended up being 15 minutes late.

Spent a really nice day in perfect weather on the ship and now have a lot of productive work hours to make up this weekend. After work I met up with my old mentor and his wife, who are back in town for a Halloween vacation. We went to the campfire singalong at Fort Wilderness and watched the annual outdoor screening of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and roasted oversized marshmallows over the fire pit. After that I gorged myself on food at their cabin and we went out at midnight to see all of the campsites decorated for Halloween. The families at Ft. Wilderness create an incredible Halloween spectacle every year, with inflatables and ghouls and projections and pumpkins and lights strewn everywhere.

It's almost 3am, the witching hour, when drunk idiots haunt the streets and hallways of my former hotel.

license and registration

Yesterday I got pulled over on my way to lunch for doing 51 in a 35mph zone. The officer must have taken pity on me and the two intern goons I was driving and let me go with a warning. I've never felt so washed over with joy and excitement as I did in that moment. Now I feel at least $200 richer

here's the competition

sticker shock

sunday is the day when i look at my bank account and all my expenses and think, oh my god

when you were small

slow go

is there a word for the kind of love you have for another human being when you realize you're driving and softly as you can so you don't wake it up in the passenger seat

boxes o' bits

i hereby dub myself the most ultimate queen of trinket hoarders

we're doomed

"sexy men under the age of 35 are all scary dickheads"
- aijia 

welcome to the metro

night two in my new apartment in dtwn orlando. im sleeping on the floor until i can figure out how to get a bed and i have the place to myself until vana gets back from working on a cruise ship in the bahamas. yesterday on my first night i opened a beer with a pair of nail clippers. sinay had helped me move in and then we went out to my favorite orlando bar and two strange men bought me a shot even though i kept saying not to and then it turned out that one of them lives on the floor above me in my new building.  

spinach rupaul

i literally went back to the office/trailer at almost 10pm to check on my fish and make sure his heater wasn't making him too hot because i've never left it on overnight before. the thermometer reading seemed okay. i've decided to name my fish spinach rupaul, though i will probably keep calling him booboo most of the time.

neverending to-do list

i really don't recommend moving (set up cable/internet install, buy router, jump on all friends' old beds that are for sale, turn on electricity, get money order for rent, get locked and unlocked out of bank account, pick up keys, change all addresses), starting a new job (end old insurance, find new insurance, set up 401k), participating in a week-long focus group (record videos of self talking about beauty products, make millions of blog posts about beauty), and taking up a health insurance claim dispute (fight with clinic, fight with insurance) all at once unless you're cruisin' for a bruisin'. 

old prune

1. i've had no alcohol today
2. i totally randomly picked funds to invest my 401k money in from 34 options
3. i feel like my life is the neverending to-do list

every day is an uphill battle with store clerks of florida to not give me plastic bags and let me use my hands and arms to carry things

tonight i watched house of flying daggers. like most other wuxia films that i've seen, it was beautiful and entertaining but the plot was totally bonkers

grown woes

i just looked at all the charges on my bank account and went through all my bills and thoroughly stressed myself out. good morning, saturday

the former harley hotel

i signed a new lease last week and vana and i are moving to downtown orlando in two weeks. it's gonna wreak havoc on my commute but it's going to be almost like living in a city again. and i'm going to be living in the former harley hotel, an infamous party hub from the 60s, now a run-down converted apartment complex that smells weird. mostly i'm excited that the building probably has ghosts and that i'm going to have my own bathroom.

then:

"I just loved the whole vibe; it was so old and so creaky and so weird."

"I think I had one of my best dates ever on one of the balconies of one of the rooms."

"But what I always wanted to say about the Harley was that the Harley was the Orlando rock hotel. L.A. has the Hyatt Regency, Atlanta has the Highland Inn, and Orlando had the Harley. I don't know where we're gonna go."

"I was in the pool at 5 in the morning one time, but I don't remember much about that. I was clothed, and I think that's the point."

"We played music really loud and drank beer and nobody said anything to us. We smoked pot, and, um, I think the place is haunted. Crazy noises were coming out of every wall! Every orifice! When I left there, I felt like I had been touched by spirits."

"I was like, "You're staying at the Harley?" And they were like, "Yeah!" Just their reaction was like, "Of course! Where else would we stay in Orlando?""

" We did our band photos in the elevator at the Harley. Five guys in the elevator, wearing polyester, as was in fashion at the time, sweating through make-up, which is not something I'm used to or comfortable with."

"I just remember having great times, with parties and with people. It was a great common ground for downtown. People who didn't want to drive and drink could just get a room there at a fair price, and you never knew who you were gonna see there."

now: 

hmmph.

this will be my eleventh move in recent herstory.
revised list:
08/2010 Pudong / Shanghai
11/2010 Normandie Ave / Los Angeles
09/2011 Bach Way / Cerritos
02/2012 South Point View / Los Angeles
04/2012 West View Street / Los Angeles
09/2012 Butler Street / Brooklyn
10/2012 Thames Street / Brooklyn
09/2013 Willoughby Avenue / Brooklyn
08/2014 Cropping Street / Winter Garden
12/2014 Overstreet Road / Windermere
10/2015 East Washington St / Orlando

thoughts on tomorrow

i appreciate each coming day as another opportunity for something interesting to happen

i've been up and making content since 8am this morning

starbucks history

yesterday i randomly pulled over to pop into a starbucks i'd never been in before and ended up spending two hours talking to two men there. one had been an officer in the US Army, stationed in korea right after the korean war, and the other was a man from ethiopia who had just moved to LA from africa during the rodney king riots. the latter lived in koreatown on ardmore, just one street over from where i used to live. 

betta believe

my new boss says i can keep a fish in my cube. i'm excited. i have so much love to give.

manic zone

i don't sleep i just act like a psycho all night

Silver airways

I'm on a horrifyingly small plane about to head to Charleston for Cathy's bachelorette party. They are literally moving people around the plane for "weight balance issues."

iz

today i spent 3 hours trying to install the correct driver for a printer and another 2 hours looking for a fake candle in a mountain of equipment boxes. first effort was eventually successful but the second was not.

there's this man at work who always insists on listening to hawaiian music in the shop, especially when he's wound up. today we listened to the pixar "Lava" song 3 times in a row.

Rainy Sunday chores with gentlemen

Another southern moment: I'm sitting in an auto repair in Ocoee waiting for my tires to be changed and an older man in a veteran cap comes over and apologizes for the language he just used - he had cursed and not noticed that I was sitting here. Naturally I had been too preoccupied on Tinder to even notice.

wdi

any job where i can wear my beyonce shirt to work is a good job

the theory of everything

Sunday night kev and i watched the theory of everything, the stephen hawking biopic, and it made me feel like this is a sick sad world, which i don't think was supposed to be the intent of the movie.

at a count of three, this has been a record-breaking movie-watching week for me, which means i must need a lot of escape these days.

talking flower

saturday night i went to universal studios by myself and drank 40 oz of beer in harry potter world and then talked to a girl on stilts dressed as a flower in the dora the explorer parade for a long time. she's from virginia. 

back to grown-up

hopelessly shuffling through a pile of papers, some upside down, others backwards or just plain out of order, i think i just had the revelation that i think i need a 3-ring binder

with visor

how long do i have to live in florida before i start wearing full-body camo?

shh

I've decided once and for all to not watch movies with people anymore outside of the theater, because they're always talking through it, particularly the emotional parts, or opening things or crackling things or checking their phones and I'm a huge hardass who needs to be alone all the time.
But hey at the age of 27 I just finished Star Wars IV-VI (non-consecutively).

27 weddings

i received a new wedding invitation yesterday, which i am reallly excited about attending in january. it will be added to my pre-existing wedding itinerary, which was the bachelorette in LA in july and the wedding in TX that just happened this past weekend, cathy's bachelorette party in SC in three weeks, my housemate's wedding in december in FL, then this new wedding in january, and then cathy's wedding in LA in april. i have an invite to another in LA in early november that i think i will have to decline because it's so far geographically but so close chronistically to thanksgiving. naturally, i spent this evening watching '27 dresses' because i hear that's relevant. there was a part of the movie when i was mentally screaming to myself, THAT'S ME THAT'S ME, and just at that moment was when the movie music cued VALERIE by amy winehouse.

moving weeks

I think I've lived a million lives in the past two+ weeks. After a year of having one foot in and one foot out of New York, I finally moved out of my apartment in Bushwick. I had conversations in the street with my Puerto Rican neighbors, who lent me their grocery cart so I could take packages to the post office and told me, I'm gonna miss you, girl. I discovered that the person who dumped me two months ago can always find new ways to be cruel, but that I have an entire orbit of friends who will drop everything to offer counsel, corroboration, indignation, home-cooked meals, irresponsible amounts of alcohol, their sofas, and the keys to their apartments. I left my belongings in piles around the neighborhood and they were whisked away to new homes, so evidence of my existence there lives on in the paleontology of my cups and bowls and clothes. On my last day in the city I bawled into the arms of my yoga teacher. Two weeks spent mired in the meditative state of subway travel, practicing yoga every day, feeling emotionally raw but receiving kindness from all around, I feel like I came out at the end of the tunnel wiser and also kinder.

Harman

Here I am, a refugee on Rothy's couch yet again, a little over 2 months since the last time. I was thinking today about how there's nothing better in the world than your friends' indignant rage on your behalf. And, if anything, this year has proven that in New York I have the best damn friends.

mew

Tia kept me up all night crying outside my door. I wouldn't let her in because as soon as she comes in she wants to go back out. She came by at least 4 times and was back in the morning, crying and trying all the different vocalizations in her vocabulary to see if any of them would magically open the door. She pawed at the door and stood up and pounded with her hands and small body weight. I couldn't feel mad with her because she's lonely because no one in this apartment loves her anymore and I can commiserate because it's the worst feeling. 

I am a sentimental man

Moving day 8:
I find myself having trouble throwing away used and half-empty red hair dying supplies

wah

i need to chilltf out

boa

i need to stop losing everything

SD&P

The shop lead of my new team told me today that everyone loves me. This is a refreshing change. I like this team too.

wendies

wendy appears to be a common name in the south. my mentor's wife. my roommate's mom. my friend's coworker. also, there are a lot of red cars here.

charleston

just bought my flight to cathy's bachelorette party. why are flights so $$$? i can feel myself just entering the phase of life where i'll be endlessly jetsetting to weddings and wedding-related events for the next 8 years or so

eloise

this is how i generally feel these days. how many times can i listen to it on repeat?


the last thing i expected one year ago has happened and it looks like i'm staying in florida for the foreseeable future. i've been transitioning into my new group, doing 50/50 with my old job, all week. working two jobs at once has been rough but i like my new job a lot. i'm sitting in a fabrication shop with a bunch of men and at the end of my first day we sat in a circle and ate ice pops and listened to techno music. now i'm hard at work piecing together the logistics of how i'm going to get out of new york and shape chapter 9482992 of my life.

also, i lived in a hotel for for a few nights of this week, dropping off and picking up my car from the valet, and i felt like eloise.

bah revit

2 tired for 2torials

houses

Encounters with Houses

Wednesday night Sinay and I helped finish the food and alcohol belonging to three Norwegian boys on their last night in Orlando. They were staying in a sprawling vacation home rental, with so many bedrooms that countless beds were left undisturbed. The decor was decidedly 'model home,' with a fully set dining table with accompanying wine glasses for a formal dinner that would never happen. The living room was very interiorly decorated and the wall-mounted TV was playing TV Land playing Gilligan's Island when we walked in. It was comical that what looked like the perfectly crafted nest of the species 'suburban housewife' was actually inhabited by a trio of rowdy drunken vikings. They blended pitcher after pitcher of raspberry and strawberry daquiris and poured ersatz Moscow Mules made with Canada Dry instead of ginger beer and we sat on the kitchen bar stools and talked about American tourists, theme parks, the way Disney calls everything 'magic,' Florida, Norway, and the funny way Danes talk. We swam in the pool outside as the sun gloriously set and we attempted to climb on the pool floaties, one of which was a big yellow duck which would inevitably flip over as soon as you claimed your throne. We put on diving masks and swam to the bottom of the deep end - a cavernous 5-foot descent. I asked about one boy's tattoo of an anchor and he said it's because anchors are stable and they keep the boat safe. There was something magical about the way that strangers from the internet could so easily be friends for a day.

Vana is currently catsitting a 21-year-old cat named Sneetches in a house on Lake Jessamine. Last night we went out on the town, running around a bunch of bars and eating late-night barbecue, and then we came back and I stayed in the guest room of this most beautiful little house which belongs to an interior designer from our work. Everything, from each piece of furniture to every piece of art or shelf object was a quirky, precious thing, like the mid-century-meets-The Jetsons armchairs and the dining table's big bowl of blown-glass ornaments and the paintings with the same cardinal printed out in different sizes and pasted all over them. The back of the house opens to the lake, with a small dock leading out to a tethered kayak. On Saturday we spent all day watching cooking shows, eating popsicles, and watching Sneetches tip over a glass of water.       

honey bee

i had a fantastic time at my cousin's bachelorette party in los angeles this past weekend staying at the w hollywood and participating in an unprecedented level of debauchery. on the first day we lied in an expensive cabana by the rooftop pool, dined in a four-dollar-sign japanese/peruvian restaurant, karaoked in a bar hidden inside of a parking garage, and danced all night in unreasonable shoes. 

the next day our plans to go shopping were rained out by an unexpected thunderstorm and we relinquished any plans to do anything productive or classy. the day was spent boozing unreasonably in the hotel lobby bar, schmoozing with the bachelor party bachelors, dragging drunks back to their rooms and feeding them, watching people start fights, and looking for love in all the wrong places. i think we did everything right because the amount of scandal successfully achieved was enough to convince a bride why she might want to settle down for the peaceful, committed life. 

Traveling again

I'm in a new and sad position where I have no one to tell that I just boarded my plane and that I'll be taking off soon. And this teenaged girl on my left does not appear to be uncomfortable about the fact that her arm keeps touching mine.

ibis attack

Tonight I went to Epcot with Tom and Bobert for the last time before they move to California at the end of the week. We had dinner at the quick service restaurant outside of Mexico, where a white ibis, now also known as an ol' chopstick face, jumped onto the table and stole one of the pieces of fried fish out of my fish tacos.

Then we watched Illuminations together for the last time, which was bittersweet because we've watched it together so many times before.

rainbow springs

I remember the time before I moved to Orlando when the pictures of Central Florida's natural springs seemed like an unbelievable dream. They also don't disappoint in real life. Within an hour or two from the barren cultural wasteland of mini-golf courses and regular-sized gold courses, shitty chain restaurants, and tasteless souvenir shops, are some of the most beautiful blue bodies of clear water I have ever seen. So far I've visited Weeki Watchee, Wekiva, and Blue Springs, and today Vana and her friends and I went to Rainbow Springs, Florida's fourth largest spring.  It produces over 490 million gallons of water daily. The water stays 72 degrees year-round and made for perfect swimming temperature.

what is grown up

what is grown up? i worked until 5:30pm. i drove home and thought about my to-do list. i walked in the door and put my laundry in the washing machine first thing. i started defrosting chicken and touched all the cabinets with my chicken hands. i timed the rice to finish cooking when the curry was done. i browsed reddit as i ate. i had one beer. i was rejected from a job i applied to a month ago. i washed all my dishes. i moved the laundry to the drying machine. i cleaned my room and answered e-mails from work and my parents. i worked on a new job application for two hours but didn't send it. i put away my clean clothes. i watched true life: save my teen marriage. i wrote a postcard. i kept checking who was on google hangouts and wondered how long they would be there. 

rumble grumble

the thunder outside sounds like people dropping boxes all over the place

feelinvs

people stop having feelings nowadays, so i hear

weird cat

i'm trying to learn zbrush and i'm pretty obsessed with this cat i just made

closing time

i thought i saw the turtle dead on the side of the road today but i couldn't be sure.

this has been a terrible day and i'm glad it's about to be snuffed out of existence.

a new hope

My roommate and his GF (aka my dancercise partner) just got engaged this week on the teacups in Disneyland. In the meanwhile, the most monumental event of my life this week thus far is that I watched Star Wars Episode IV for the first time last night with Sinay, who has just moved back to Orlando from Ohio. It was fine.

A thing I feel terrible about is that on the drive home today there was a softshell turtle on the road again and there were a ton of cars around and no one had hit it yet as my other roommate and I passed by but it seemed like only a matter of time. The turtle had sucked its head into its shell so it was hard to tell it was a turtle. Afterwards I couldn't stop thinking about it and feeling like I should've tried to pick it up and move it and now I'm scared there'll be a dead turtle on the road when I drive into property again tomorrow. 

forest spirits

Uggg I'm going to try to make a comeback from my recent period of silence. The uncertainty of my life has been feeling sort of demotivating. I recently discovered that the key to enjoying the weekend is to do as little as possible. When you spend most of it lying around, it feels like it lasted a hearty length of time. If you go galavanting around, it feels like it never happened at all.

This morning I woke up unnecessarily early, so I visited the nature preserve by my house for the first time. It was really serene walking on a flat, easy trail guarded on both sides by saw palmetto. With every step I scared away unseen animals in the bushes, sent scrabbling with terror at the sound of my approach. I could never see them; I could only hear their violent thrashing and it felt like I was in a Miyazaki forest.

A person I know took this delightful photo of a perhaps perfect weekend spent on a platform boat in Venice, CA

sigh

I've accidentally put my cell phone in the fridge twice this week. The second time I left the house at 12:30am and actually drove back to the bar I had been at to look for it unsuccessfully and came home to discover that it had been in the fridge all along.

hellokitty episode

watching this week's episode of rupaul's drag race last night made me feel angry and restless for hours and i had to go to bed early. i rarely disagree with ru's eliminations but this time i felt the fire.

cat aunt

last summer, me and steve buscemi

frogsong

i've been trying to get a good audio recording of the fireworks from our neighborhood for my mentor, who moved to california this past january and doesn't get to hear them from his house every night anymore. last night i sat parked by a lake while the audio recorder nested in tall grasses. a mosquito got into the car and bit the shit out of me and my legs and hand have been swollen and painful all day, but i'm listening to the audio recording right now and it might have been worth it. 

my life in seasons

i recently had my first experience of having someone i was previously involved with get married to someone else. it's not a relationship i pine for but it's a really unsettling feeling, even when you haven't responded to his e-mails in literally years but only out of anxiety.

lately i've been thinking about my life in seasons of game of thrones. first season, i was dating bagel who wanted to watch the show because he had seen people talking about it on reddit. i spent most of the episodes too drunk to understand what was going on, but enjoyed it nonetheless. second season, bagel abandoned ship and i continued watching the show on my own. my housemate in mid-city, chlom, always referred to the show as bone of thrones. third season i watched in bushwick at aijia's apartment, where we'd cuddle griffin and drink wine and watch the show while perched on craggs' bed and attempted to avoid drunkenly splashing the wine all over the sheets. aijia had read most of the books and was always able to explain wtf was going on. by season four we'd moved in together and watched it in our apartment huddled on the living room couch on willoughby, boozing and waiting for the new episode which had just aired to be uploaded for the pleasure of pirates everywhere. during the show we'd pause the show every few moments to discuss wtf was going on. fifth season is the first season in two years that i'm watching without her, where i'm in florida gchatting to ask if she's watched the episode yet, and i've watched the first two episodes thus far with my housemate/little bro figure kev, who sometimes talks during the episode but i forgive him.

midnight purchases

i just bought a dancing hula girl for my car dashboard on amazon

short

last night I went to a bar for St Patty's Day and met a young guy in a wheelchair with no legs. he told me he lost them when he was he was in the army and went to Iraq and told me the exact month, day, year (2006) that it happened. he held my hand and kept apologizing for being short and it made me feel sad.

flagyl

I am overjoyed to be off of Flagyl, the worst antibiotic. It has to be taken three times a day, makes you horribly gaggingly nauseous, is bitter as all hell going down, afterwards makes your mouth taste permanently metallic like you've been sucking on a chain, and combined with alcohol creates a toxic effect that makes you so sick that it has been likened to the disulfirum used to turn alcoholics away from the drink. Good riddance, Flagyl.

shine a light

do you ever worry that everyone you know is sad?

yo-yo

i haven't eaten food in two days. i've been living off of juice and soda. i fell asleep on the couch this afternoon because i couldn't maintain consciousness and i had a dream that i had a blue yo-yo that was alive and i would hold the string and it would take me places.

Celebration health

I am in the emergency room of the hospital of Celebration. I contracted some kind of horrible disease during my trip last week and have been feverish with chills and cramps and bleeding for the past five days. Today I gave up the fight and took myself to a walk-in clinic in Kissimmee and they kicked me out and told me to go to the ER. This hospital is funny - it's really theme-y in a very Disney way. I've been moved out of the room with the hospital bed and am now in an observation room with a sodium chloride drip in my arm and House Hunters on TV while my blood samples are analyzed.

i might be dying

my food poisoning hit on my red-eye flight from LAX to MCO. i spent the duration of the flight vomiting repeatedly - once i couldn't stand up in time and ended up throwing up into the airplane blanket and then wrapping it into a ball and throwing the blanket away in the bathroom. i alternated between chills and sweats and flailed about, often knocking into the person sitting next to me. i was literally going to ask the stewardess if she would let me sit somewhere in the back because i was feeling so ill but then i saw that the plane would land in 30 minutes and i toughed it out. today my stomach has been in knots and now i have a fever?

Dry time

I think the main difference between the United States and Taiwan is that in Taiwan your blankets always smell like mold and in the US they do not

sheep year

As we hiked through my ma’s hometown yesterday fresh off the bus and laden with heavy bags full of clothes for ourselves and vitamins to give away, I asked her if coming back to NanFang Ao makes her miss her childhood. She said, ‘不會! (NO!) It’s not such a great place!!!” 

It’s been three years since my last visit. Many things are different. Chinese New Year used to be a grand event - red ribbon and lanterns festooning the streets and traditional cakes and snacks sold in every stand by the road. Every night leading up to the new year you could hear firecrackers going off outside, loud and startling like gunfire being opened again and again. Now it seems you would hardly know that there’s any cause for celebration. I’m told that people are less interested in going home for the holiday and nowadays prefer to go on vacation instead. The biggest change is that my grandpa no longer recognizes me. He asked ma who I was and whether I had ever come here before. She showed him the baby picture of me that hangs in the house and said that I am that baby, and he pointed at the picture and said but this one is small, and pointed at me, and this one is big. He sits in a reverie and then occasionally bubbles up with stories that never happened, like how my aunt is trying to become an OB-GYN but no one will hire her because she is so small, or how there is a bank across the street that has so much money it’s all over the floor and no one knows about it, how his uncles are all alive and well into their 100s, and how he was once hit by a car and left for dead in a cave but a child found him and noticed that his finger was moving and took him to the hospital. 

There is an Indonesian girl in her early 20s who lives in the house. She comes from a very big family with little money and was sent abroad to work and support the family. She’s already worked here for three years as my grandpa’s caretaker and is planning to work here for three more before going home and getting married. This is the first time I’ve met her and she’s extremely sweet, has learned a little bit of Chinese in her time here, and I can’t imagine working as hard as she does. At 6am she is up cleaning the house and the rest of the day she spends every moment by my grandpa’s side, helping him walk, brush his teeth, and eat and sleeping in a bed by his at night. I feel a sense of guilt and estrangement to see someone else taking care of my grandpa while I either watch or am absent.   

There is also a rambunctious lady called A-su who originally comes from the south but married into this area and comes by every day to cook and help take care of the house. Yesterday she took me on a tour around town in her rickety old car that smells like mold and has one of the passenger-side windows held in place with mailing tape. She dropped me off in front of a friend’s store and told me to go in and pick whatever snacks I wanted while she parked the car. I went in and it was a store full of dried and canned fish. She told me about how she once found a very large hermit crab and kept it as a pet and showed me the beach where she would let it take walks once a week. It lived on fruit for about 6 months and then suddenly died. At the harbor she showed me what kind of fishing boat she and her husband used to own, before his health began to decline and he passed away. She says when her son was recently married they slaughtered 15 pigs for the event but that she was too scared to watch and didn’t go over until it was all done. In the evening she came back from checking on her grandson, running up the stairs and declaring it was time for us to drink and set out cans of Taiwan Beer. This morning she took me to pick up chickens from her classmate (I later found out they met in her weekly fortune telling class). Her classmate is an artist who lives in a nearby town and brews drinking vinegar in thousands of large ceramic jugs in the yard and her husband has a few hundred free-range chickens that he raises. The classmate had a headscarf on because, A-su told me, she had a fight with her husband and shaved off all her hair and moved to a monastery for a few months.  

German party

'Every year, a local artist would put on a crazy party called “Bimbotown” in one of the warehouses in the Spinnereistrasse neighborhood of Leipzig. The party was crawling with machines that this artist made — giant metallic worms slithering across the ceiling, bar stools that would eject their occupants at the push of a button from across the warehouse, couches that caved in and dumped you into a secret room, beds that could be driven around the party and through the walls.'

tour guide

cathy and willy were in orlando this past weekend celebrating their fifth anniversary of dating. i met up with them yesterday for a fun-filled day crammed with as much of the entertainment florida has to offer as possible. we started off the morning with a trip to lake eola in downtown, where we ambled through the farmer's market and took pictures with swans by the lake shore. afterwards, we went to gatorland, where we saw probably thousands of alligators and were perched upon by parakeets and saw wild egrets rotate their three blue eggs in their nests. then it was off to disney, where we first stopped at animal kingdom and watched the lion king show and looked at baby gorillas and animatronic dinosaurs. then we went to epcot and rode the agriculture ride and the weird dinosaur ride and walked around the entire world showcase. then the day wasn't over yet because we still had to go to hoop dee doo for a wild western dinner of unlimited ribs, fried chicken, cornbread, mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, beans, corn, strawberry shortcake, sangria, and beer. after that i delivered my lovebirds back to their hotel and then took myself home to the swamp. i don't think i've ever done so much in a day.

7/11

this is kind of what my home life is like 

critters

I should be voted most likely to be distracted while driving because I can't not look at the deer and cows by the road. Today I saw a little fawn next to two deer grown-ups on my drive home from work. Bobert has been telling me about how there are otters that live near his apartment and today he saw one dart by on his way home and he jumped out of his car and followed it into the bushes, tearing his pants on thorns along the way. He said although he couldn't see it he could hear where it was splish splashing and now he knows where they live.

jammies

i want to do a photo series of all my friends in their jammies before going to bed. everyone is so wonderfully unstyled and fluffy, amorphous and flowing and harmless.

the hours

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was awkward, unsatisfying, more kindly than passionate. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
- cunningham, 98

27

for my birthday, khenkel had a pillow made of my guinea pig painting that i gave to him in 2011 and mailed it to me in florida 

"I don't have a wife, but I yelled at my dog earlier and he got pretty scared. I had a bad day. I'm going to go apologize, give him a treat and curl up with some Netflix."

Gemini

It's past my bedtime and I'm awake and anxious in my new bed for the fourth night now and it's not even approaching feeling normal yet. According to the Google sky map, these days I'm sleeping under Gemini. I can't verify that from under this ceiling but I can confirm that sleeping alone keeps me up at night.

old, sensitive

I have become that person who moves into a new space and immediately WD40s all of the squeaky door hinges. I live in Windermere now. Last night I had dinner with an alumnus from my grad program and his friends, all of whom are in town for an installation; spending a few hours with urbanites was a dose of fresh sanity.

ave maria

On Friday I had one of those occasional overwhelmingly spiritual moments in yoga class, when I was having a class for the first time with this intense tiny Latin American man and he was helping to support me in a forearm stand for an intensely long amount of time at the tail end of what had been a very physically challenging class. As my arms were beginning to shake and become slippery in a way that I thought my entire body would slide to the ground in a heap he commanded me to explore the dark side of my heart, to explore my ego and explore my vanity. Meanwhile, a track of Ave Maria being sung by an opera singer in what sounded like German played in the background and I felt like I was on a completely different planet.

happy ny

Got 2015 off to a big start by being so hung over yesterday that I couldn't get up from the couch until 5:30pm. I alternated cycles of drinking juice, eating, napping, and chatting other people hung over in their apartments until I gave up and ordered overpriced sushi delivery. Once I started coming out of my haze I met Youjin in Williamsburg and we went out and sat at the waterfront and looked out on the Manhattan skyline until we were so cold that we had to find shelter in a restaurant/bar where we shared calamari, drank juice, and told ghost stories.

charles bukowski was

Charles Bukowski was the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in 1946 and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways.