bearika

Next level

I've been doing yoga for 6 years and today I did a handstand (with some help from a wall) for the first time on the first try

magazine chef

what do you do when you feel like you've just experienced some kind of real-life magic/serendipity/magic and you're astounded but you have no one to tell who will really understand?

i used to subscribe to bon appetit magazine when i lived in new york because i loved looking at the pictures of food. stunning. when i moved out of new york, i grudgingly tossed the whole collection. however, i for some reason still own one orphan issue, issue October 2014, which has now survived two states and three moves, and it has lived with me at 4 separate addresses total.

today i decided to flip through the issue and i stopped on a page about a young, up-and-coming italian-danish chef and i realized it was the same Christian whose pizza restaurant i ate at in Nørrebro on my last night in copenhagen this past july. i'd had dinner alone at the bar and ended up befriending the staff and drinking with this man in the magazine and one of the waitresses. he told me about how he just bought a farm and showed me pictures on his cell phone of the dairy cows he'd purchased and was going to start producing his own milk for the cheese for the pizza in the restaurant. after i forked over some extravagant sum for my lavish treat-yourself last-meal, i'd jumped into the basket in front of his bike and gone with him to a cocktail bar in the neighborhood to have repeated shots of mezcal with the same waitress from before, her boyfriend (the sous chef from the restaurant), and a handful of random internationals in the copenhagen fancy food industry (one was the nerdy American boy personal assistant to the owner of Noma, the current 5th best restaurant in the world). 

words feel so astronomically inadequate and any attempt at description fails to capture the lightning bolt shock of seeing his face in this magazine that i've been hoarding for the past almost exactly two years. when this issue was mailed to me, i had no idea that i would still be living in florida in two years' time, or that i would step foot back in copenhagen anywhere in the near-to-far future. i would never say that i feel like i inexplicably carried this magazine with me for two years because anything was meant to be, but this event provides concrete evidence for the spiritual enlightenment that i stumbled upon on that solo journey, where i came to the suspicion that there is far more serendipity in the world than i will ever know.

messages texts e-mails

early in the morning or late at night i fire off missives in all directions, some responses overdue, others unexpected and unasked for, one after another all around the world, and then i sit back and collect the answers that sparkle and rain down. 

mcmaster

i've been experiencing a very strong vacation withdrawal, which is most prominently characterized by an overwhelming disgust with every aspect of my current surroundings. i didn't expect to feel as heartbroken as i did when i was on the plane leaving copenhagen to return to the states and i've been haunted by a desire to abandon everything and move to scandinavia ever since. it's not fair to compare your real life to your vacation life, but i can't shake the suspicion that life there is more fulfilling in all arenas.

on my saturday in copenhagen i had the good fortune of seeing mcmaster, who moved to stockholm a year ago, and who happened to be changing trains in copenhagen on her way back to sweden from a festival. serendipity. i met her at central station and we lunched at bankeråt, the cafe where she, erik, and i had beers 7 years ago. then we had equivalent-to-7-euro iced coffees at a fancy coffee stand called the coffee collective. we sat in the grass at dronnings louise bro all the way up until we had to head back to central station, passing tivoli, to put mcmaster back on her train to stockholm. it's been 7 years and she's still one of those mythical beings, with unchanging magical vocal intonations and whose thoughts on life and humanity are a revelation.

kh

danish language forum, on the use of "KH" as a shortened form of the valediction "kærlig hilsen," ("love")

journey beginning

as of this morning i have returned from a grand adventure to europe, where i first went on a road trip with a carful of my high school girlfriends, and then on my first ever trip by myself, on a gran return to copenhagen 7 years post-study abroad. i consider no trip complete until i've irresponsibly lost my neck pillow somewhere on the planet, so, farewell pirrow (the one pa bought me for christmas to replace the one i lost) - i'm back in orlando. i'm going to write about my adventure snippets as they come.

in the week prior to my departure, my last grandparent, my ah-gong in ilan, passed away unexpectedly. though he no longer recognized most people he had known, we expected to have a few more years with him because his physical health was good. the funeral was already set for the 19th, which would be my last night in ireland before flying to denmark. i immediately thought to cancel the trip to attend the funeral, but decided with ma and pa to go on with the adventure and then go back to california in a few weeks to be with the family. it was a difficult decision but i think it was the right one.

because of perpetual geographical distance (america, taiwan) and perpetual language barrier (english, japanese/taiwanese), my grandfather and i were never close in the way that i think other people are with their grandparents. my strongest and warmest memories are of when he would take me out to the harbor when i was little to look at the fishing boats, when we would play mah-jong during chinese new year, and our shared love of his orchids, his stamp collection, and of photographs - family photos in particular. in chinese belief, after death, a person's spirit roams the earth for (7?) days, visiting family members and familiar places. i don't know what i feel about that, but i couldn't stop imagining that my grandpa, for the first time, might finally be seeing my life and understanding my personality and i felt good about what he would see.

on my last visit, feb 2015

 drinking beers

watsky

remind me how magnificent my life is

doppelganger

there is a girl in this cafe named valerie and i feel like i'm having a full-blown identity crisis

zika

my parents cancelled their cruise in the fall and subsequently their trip to see me because of zika?

don't worry

this is what dads are for 

reflections

i have learned an immensely great deal over the past two years

summer plague

i've been waking myself up in the night scratching my bug bites

old & heartful

pig life

i feel like last weekend was one of the best weekends ever and all vana and i did was drink and eat in excess for three days straight. day one, late night carrot cake and 3 entrees at the new 24-hour diner downtown. day two, korean bbq. day three, dim sum.

bonsai wisteria

now what

in roommate-boyfriend exile again and i've already finished all my whiskey ? 

primarily an adult

the only grown-up thing i did today: called and confirmed that my absentee voter ballot will be coming to florida

media sponge

tonight i watched two episodes of bad girls club, this week's rupaul's drag race, finished an episode of channel 4's embarrassing bodies, and watched a documentary on virgins. 

Bgc

My new dream job: producer for bad girls club

bushmills aftermath

you know you were being manic and crazy last night when you receive a text from your main squeeze of the moment saying, "Hey, how you doing? You in a less vengeful mood today?'

inspired opinions

why didnt this focus group call me back

Frontier

Everyone on this plane smiled at me as I walked down the aisle and it was really sweet but really weird. Also it took only about ten minutes in the airport for me to lose my neck pillow :(

no glamping in the everglades

vana, sinay, and our friends from work jb and ah just got back from the everglades. on friday after work we drove down to miami, where we went to some really cool artsy bars in wynwood. the five of us crammed into one bedroom in an air bnb where the host's parents were staying in the other room. we weren't really sure what this was going to be like but our new ecuadorian parents roberto and ximena were the nicest people ever and made us all scrambled eggs and brownies for breakfast. there was a sweet tiny sheep-like dog named lily and she was the sweetest cutest cleanest half-bichon half-cocker-spaniel creature and all she wanted to do was sit in roberto's lap all day even though she was a little too big.

from miami we drove down to the everglades, where we rented canoes to row 4 miles to our campsite. we loaded vana and jb into one canoe with all the gear and ah and i rowed the other canoe with sinay in the middle. as we rowed you could see fish jumping out of the water, sometimes several feet high, and you could only imagine the swamp creatures that must've been chasing them. after 3 hours of rowing we found a horrendous little beach to pitch camp. somehow ah made a stove out of an aluminum can, a penny, and some everclear. as soon as the sun started to suggest to set, clouds of millions of 'no-see-'em's' - tiny biting flies - appeared and descended upon us, driving the 5 of us into a two-person tent to sweat profusely together and cower in fear. once it was night the fireflies came out and were a wondrous sight to behold, blinking magically near and far while the sky was wild with stars. vana and i shared a tent and the ground was so hard and uneven and the ocean was so loud and there were so many mosquitoes inside our tent and the night had gone from blisteringly hot to extremely cold that i hardly slept a wink and once even sat up and wondered when this night would be over. in the morning i woke absolutely smothered in mosquito bites. they're so profusely and densely dispersed on my arms and my back and full side torso that i look like a smallpox victim. we extremely wanted to get the hell out of this campsite which had been so little payoff for all the hard work it had taken to get there, and we knew the return would be worse because this time both the wind and the tide would be against us. the tide was at its lowest and the winds gusted at 11-15 mph so that it literally took 4.5 hours for us to row back to the visitor center.   

bye vana

whenever my roommate is out of town (she's in miami) i am a complete fucking heathen. music on blast, no clothes, booze, dishes everywhere

Hb trisha

It's 3:50 pm and I think I can get out of bed now. My day unfortunately consists of a birthday dinner in 2 hours and then a bar crawl. I think I won't drink.

There is a god

Psychic moment of the day: I woke up thinking about the my chemical romance song black parade from 2006 and how I should listen to it and now I'm sitting in a coffee shop and it came on overhead

i hate your boyfriend

i am hiding in the space on the floor between my bed and the wall so i can avoid my roommate's tinder bf without having to close the door to my room / so i can pretend i'm not a passive aggressive bitch

hello

this has been one of those inexplicable days where i've been reached out to by so many people i hadn't heard from in some time with warm words and good news that it feels like we all must be connected somehow

riptide

that vance joy song makes me nostalgic for all those years in portland and austin that i never actually lived

This does suck

I am sitting in the dark in a parking lot in Davenport waiting for triple A because I locked my keys in my trunk retrieving the work boots I accidentally left at the gym last week. I also had to sign up for this AAA membership because of this incident, for which they charge you an extra $25 for needing service the same day you sign up for service. What a scam, am I right?

Ways in which my life doesn't suck

There's this guy who works for one of our vendors. When I met him we were trying to give him some work because he waa newly homeless. Now he has a place to live but he walks 3 miles to a bus stop and commutes for 4 hours by public transport to get to and from work. It rained all day today- poured down so hard on the 2-walls-and-a roof sheet metal structure which we've been working in that you couldn't hear your music or the voices of other people or the sounds in your head. I ended up giving this guy a ride downtown because I live there and that's where his first bus takes him. On the way he told me about a bunch of the crazy things that have happened to him, like when a guy tried to kill him in a parking lot and the time he went to jail for a month.

seven years later

It is truly astounding how much Danish I can pull out of the gutters of my mind when I'm attempting to impress a boy.

What light

Felt sad and hid in my bed under all my blankets all night and ate ice cream and drank all the red wine and watched Shakespeare in love

twenty-eight now

woke up the morning after my birthday in bed under my covers with my boots still on and a sandwich in my purse that i don't remember buying

orlando nye

spent new year's eve sitting on a sidewalk with vana in downtown orlando, leaning against a building and talking and not even noticing when the clock struck midnight. no countdown, no kissing couples, perfect.