brooklyn in the summer

Every time I come back to LA it's the same question - do I still know how to drive? Muscle memory does not disappoint yet because I'm slightly groggy in the Starbucks on Melrose Ave. Last night, Rothy, Yotam, and I flew out of JFK and were bored for five hours as we traveled a great distance with little effort. The highlight of the journey was three, solidly funny episodes of Portlandia to foreshadow and foresatire my trip to Portland next week with my parents. The day leading up to the night flight was awful, as always. Every time I pack is a sepulchral affair. Categorizing my objects according to their necessity somehow pokes at my sense of mortality and makes me feel like I'm at my own funeral. Meanwhile my petulant side refuses to believe that any other place could be as great/awesome/wonderful as my current place and I want to have a tantrum.

Granted, the time leading up to the departure was particularly vibrant and New Yorky in the best ways. Youjin, Fangyu, Kang, and I had fancy BBQ and then ate ice cream from Duane Reade on the waterfront at night in front of the Manhattan skyline. Mrs. Tuckersman and I went to the Ai Weiwei exhibit and then sat in the park and then ate burgers. Cerrito, Kelsa, Caroline, Jill, and I went to jazz club in the West Village that's been standing since the 1930s and listened to dixieland jazz performing by old men who'd been playing that timeslot for the past 30 years. I had ramen with my Texan cousin and her Tennessean boyfriend in the East Village and then went to a Bushwick loft rooftop 40th birthday bash that was broken up by the cops. Cerrito and I went to a Belgian beer bar that looks like a monastery and forces all patrons to speak at a whisper, and then we went to another Belgian beer bar, and then we went to a dive bar and played skeeball and almost the entire Lana del Rey Born to Die album on the jukebox. Aijia, Oscar, subletter Lenka, and Jed's bff Nate and I had vegan Ethiopean food in the neighborhood and it was delicious. I didn't expect that. Buca, Mrs. Tuckersman, and I went to a very fancy Williamsburg rooftop bar and then Yotam had a birthday at another Williamsburg bar where we ended up having the most amazing conversation with a group of young, secretly liberal Hasidic men who said that their lives had been changed by the internet, and then went home and basked in the ethereal light of laser stars as they danced across faces.  

power foundation

It may have taken most of this summer, but I recently finished the official Adobe After Effects intro tutorial and animated this beautiful masterpiece. Great.

will

today in yoga i had an interesting teacher named will. he did a lot of the kinds of inner-fire-generating breathing exercises that i truly hate, but he also said a lot of strange and funny things during class like, "Imagine your armpits have eyeballs, and they're looking at each other" and "With each breath lift higher... like Kirby" and "Pretend it's the 70s and you're in an ashram."  

life goes on pt. 2

did i just give up the job that was going to pay me more money than i've ever made in favor of an internship in a place i don't want to live?

life goes on

herculean dreams

On the night of April 19 of this year I pointed my phone at my ceiling from my bed and saw on Google Sky Map that I was sleeping directly under Hercules.

oh dear

princess has changed her mind

I woke up early to go to yoga at 10:30am and yet it's 10:32am and I'm sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee out of my princess mug.

seal swipe

three's company

They released some photos today that were taken at graduation at the Rockerfeller Center in May, and subletter Lenka discovered this sitcom-style gem:

it's me, valerie

Missy, take the wheel

tricky decision

have you ever had a dream? i'm terrified i'm about to be offered the occupational thing i've always wanted.

eating ice cream and watching sex and the city. who the fuck have i turned into?

i cook sometimes

I let myself make chicken alfredo this week. Pouring in all the butter, cream, milk, sour cream, and cheese was exhilarating.

Apparently the bulk of this year's effortful cooking happened in April. 

All the things that happened in one month:

ramen, shrimp, and broth baked in foil packets. They were strange and terrible.

 

clam linguine

Taiwanese braised pork belly rice

mushroom kale ricotta galette

The whey from making the ricotta became this beautiful ciabatta

bedtime with auntie val

2 am. "Griffin, time for bed! Bedtime!"

kicks

buncha foot coverings i'm lusting over

somar animals

i stepped outside yesterday into our sunflower garden for a matter of minutes and in instants was covered in mosquito bites up and down my legs which i've been scratching furiously ever since. tiny millipedes have invaded the downstairs bedrooms. i'm not sure how they come in but one night around 3am i looked around and they were everywhere the eye could see. 

astute advice

stir fried hair

i'm not allowed to cook for other people because i keep finding my own hair in the food i just made

body art and soul

Yesterday Mrs. Tuckersman and I went to a coffee shop / bar in Williamsburg and we talked and talked and talked and ate coconut curry shortbread until we had not much left unsaid. It was still too early for dinner so we got our ears pierced in the closest tattoo/piercing parlor.

new baby

khenkel adopted a catbaby

poison in my face

i have a bug bite on my face. who stood on my face without my knowing it?

chandelier

It has been an odd week.

I spent last weekend catsitting a big orange cat named Jackson in a beautiful Williamsburg apartment. My only duties were to play with Jackson an hour a day, scoop his box filled with what looked like white crystal diamonds, and keep the water and dry food flowing. However, the extremely kind catowners invited me to enjoy their Netflix, their air conditioning, and their private rooftop patio and its glorious views of Brooklyn and Manhattan. I felt like I was on vacation in a penthouse getaway. Netflix is an bogglingly addictive thing and I watched the entire first season of Portlandia and that documentary on the portrayal of women in the media, Miss Representation. It was okay. Felt a little exaggerated at times. I watched my new favorite music video, Sia's for "Chandelier," over and over and danced extravagantly in the living space and practiced my wannabe-splits. I stood on the patio woozy from my own wine and watched the sky change from day to dusk to night. It was completely otherworldly to inhabit this incredible quiet space when I am so rarely alone.

Monday I decided to take my laundry to the laundromat across the street just to try it out. As I was walking in I ran into a boy I went to undergrad with in Los Angeles. Apparently he lives on my street and moved in the same time last year that I moved in. I hadn't seen him since we were both on the undergraduate student government's programming board's concerts committee circa the 2007-2008 era. He's now in New York, starting a job as an editor on Teen Mom. What's funny is that the laundry ended up being more expensive than I'd thought so I took it back to my building anyways.
That night I attended a wholly audience-performed Mariah Carey musical in Williamsburg with Brenner and he was cast as Nick Cannon and I was Mawaiah and together we sang Hero. After our show-stopping performance I ended up talking to another person I haven't seen since undergrad. The only time I'd ever spent time with her was when we went clubbing together in Shanghai in 2007. She'd just moved to New York and fate brought us together at a Mariah Carey musical in the back of a shitty bar in Brooklyn.

Tuesday I started at that new yoga studio. Wednesday I went out to dim sum in Chinatown with anyone else I could think of who is currently unemployed. That night I went to a virtual reality event at school. All of us starry-eyed students thought it would be about how people are pushing the VR boundaries and doing cool things. In reality it was a bunch of start-ups trying to monetize the Oculus via 360 video and a lot of other people lining up to put Oculi on their faces. Youjin Jay and I abandoned ship to eat Chinese food and feel a little confused about who we are now that we are masters. Thursday I wasn't feeling too great so I decided to go to a cemetery. Aijia came along and we walked to a graveyard a few blocks north of us in Queens and we sat and talked amongst the graves and then afterwards were overcome with an intense desire to do things that living people get to do, so we had happy hour beers and and then hot dogs and sliced potatoes. I then discovered that I'd been invited to interview for what could potentially be a dream job, but that it would force me to move away and that gave me an insurmountable amount of anxiety so Youjin came over to be my therapist. She told me to imagine my life as a book, and to imagine what that book contains so far and what I would want the next page of the book to be. Then we sat in the backyard with Jed and our summer subletter Lenka and drank whiskey by fairy lights while large fireflies came to visit us and flash around our heads like ideas.

Friday Aijia and Lenka and I tried a new neighborhood bar on Troutman for happy hour. The neighborhood has been changing before our eyes and suddenly there are more glamorous bars nearby than we can count. One even has chandeliers. Saturday we went to our friend Rios' housewarming but the house was already so unbearably hot inside that we ended up spending the night outside sitting on the stoop. On the way home Lenka and I went dancing until 3 in the morning. Yesterday I watched the World Cup and it was mildly entertaining and then I went to a going-away party with a lot of our crazy Chinese classmates for a girl who's moving back to Singapore. One of the girls in attendance had just gone to an S&M club in Manhattan for the first time and was telling us what it was like inside by making everyone act out the different scenarios she'd encountered.   

feels

I feel very gross and leaden from four contiguous days of heavy drinking and I feel like I need a lemonade and some charcoal to chew on. I've been feeling stressed out and anxious about work prospects, big life decisions, and interpersonal relationships. I self-medicated today by listening to Taylor Swift all morning with our subletter, Lenka, and I've been reading quotes out of a self-help book. Aijia thinks I need to "take back the power" and I agree.

my current theme song

inman

On that fretful night, the pictures flowing into her mind unbidden and dreamlike were of Inman. And because her knowledge of anatomy was to a degree hypothetical - founded only on various animals and boy-babies and the amazing statues of Italy - the images that appeared to her most clearly were of his fingers and wrists and forearms. All else was speculative and therefore shadowy and without true form.
frazier 255

Fifa

I'm watching the final world cup game of Argentina v. Germany at a bar in Williamsburg right now and I think I could hands down win the award for lowest blood pressure in the room.

family bus

When I was Skyping my parents tonight, Ma sent me this picture of the bus my uncle just paid half the cost for for their hometown's elementary school, which is at the top of a mountain. The other half of the money was footed by the local temple to Mazu, the goddess of the sea. In the second line of text you can see the name of the temple, then after the backslash the names of my grandparents. 

I'm feeling excited and proud about this bus.

usain

good advice

cold mountain

I've been intensely reading Cold Mountain, "a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished America in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor" and the source which spawned one of my favorite movies, Cold Mountain. Every time I put it down I keep looking at the book from wherever I am in the room and itching to open it again. Today I started at a new yoga studio, my fourth in the neighborhood since Jai, Loom, and Good Yoga. The instructor was the tannest white girl I have ever seen and at the beginning of class she told us a story about Ganesh and his competition with his brother to win a mango and I think the moral of the story was something about the subjectivity of what encompasses your 'world.' At the end of class when our eyes were closed she asked us to visualize our own worlds and what is your world and there was nothing I could do to not see the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Civil War. 

third and fourth of july

cerrito's pictures of our third and fourth of july festivities:

jeff koons retrospective at the whitney

willoughby

craggs' roof

poseur

Averie must be the most horrifying not-my-name-but-looks-like-my-name that I've ever seen in print

kopi kopi

yesterday i went to a brunch in an indonesian restaurant in greenwich village to commemorate a friend's one-year survival after getting caught in a drive-by shooting in brooklyn 

his blog about it is here - 

http://gunsurvivor.antoni.us/ 

Boom

My room is where Griffins hide from fireworks

Arthur

Im on the outdoor platform waiting for the M train, which is quite late. It's 88 degrees and 66% humid and sweat just dripped all the way down my leg.

three particles

Some particle stuff I started trying yesterday in three.js

I've never quite been able to figure out why humans love particle systems so much. Do bears like them too? These remind me of the fireflies who've begun to make their presence known this summer. I realized a week ago that we have tens of them in our neighborhood, and that they can be clearly seen from our rooftop flashing in our neighbors' leafy backyards.

the infante and her dwarfs

My former Russian Lit professor showed me this beautiful drawing by Bruno Schulz