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.       

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.

weird cat

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

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.

Bowie

My mentor's beloved cat-child has gone missing and last night we drove through the neighborhood from 11pm to 1am looking for him. The car played an audio loop of my mentor's wife calling the cat's name and shaking his favorite bag of treats. In the dark we saw a raccoon, opossum, bunnies, someone else's cat, and even a gator - my first wild gator - peeking its head out of the water in one of our thousands of ponds and glinting its eye under the beam of our flashlight. We saw all the animals but the one we wanted to find most.

Babbys

This morning I was up at 6 and at magic kingdom at 7am to attend the Christmas parade filming, but hilariously apparently the portion being filmed today was not the part with the parade or Neil Patrick Harris or even the Ariana Grande performance, it was the opening number with 300 little girls dancing around in a circle in front of the castle and everyone was supremely pissed to have gotten up so early for it.

Speaking of little humans, in the afternoon I went to Animal Kingdom and visited the gorilla exhibit, where there was a near-stampede to see the mama and her baby gorilla. Everyone was pushing and shoving and I thought it was quite funny how we were all fighting while surrounded by an endless number of human babies who all look basically the same as the baby gorilla. By the way, that was my last task on the intern challenge so as of today I have ridden all the rides and seen all the shows in Disney World.

birds

in florida there are lakes everywhere. they serve as obstacles to triple the driving distance between any two points and blockade the zealous development of tightly packed track housing. anyone can have a house because they come as cheap as eighty thousand dollars. the lakes, however, are amenable housing for the birds. big cartoon birds stand knee-deep in every body of water. i once saw a heron in the night staring into the darkness of a lake. suddenly it plopped into the water and came up with a fish in its mouth, which it swallowed and then the fish stuck out horizontally in its throat, still moving. in the morning on my commute to work cormorants stand on the shore and hold their arms out wide to dry in the sun. the dry birds are big black vultures as big as dogs, always swooping around my apartment complex, and wild turkeys who stand in herds around by the golf courses and baffle me with their existence. the not-birds are the armadillos that root around in the bushes by where i park my car and the 8-foot gator my boss says he saw on property walking around near the contemporary resort a few days ago.

yao ming

Yao Ming aims to save Africa's elephants by persuading China to give up ivory

The 7-foot-6 Yao, 33, said in a recent interview that he had connected with Africa particularly because “many animals there are bigger than me.”

seal swipe

bedtime with auntie val

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

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. 

new baby

khenkel adopted a catbaby

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.   

Boom

My room is where Griffins hide from fireworks

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.

hello jackson

I just picked up a gig where I'll be catsitting a cat named Jackson in Williamsburg for the 4th of July weekend. We'll get one hour of quality time together each day. 

the taurus

Last night Aijia and I took two buses down to Sheepshead Bay, which is all the way down on the other side of Brooklyn, to attend our friend Justin's 30th birthday party. He lives on a converted ferry boat on the marina there. Our journey took a whole two hours and we were so exhausted when we hopped off public transport that we immediately sat down in a Dunkin' Donuts and ate a donut each. Afterwards we boarded our friend's amazing houseboat, where he lives with his girlfriend and twin sister. There was a mini Dachshund in attendance at the party and she was the sweetest, tiniest little dog who would scratch at your leg so you would pick her up. When she wasn't in someone's arms, she was imperceptibly scuttling around on the ground and often getting kicked. Many of the other attendees were Burner-types, vegan-types, and there were all sorts of little snacks like deviled eggs, liquors being lit on fire and breathed in with a straw, and the birthday candles were stuck in a delicious chia pudding.

The boat was not an enormous boat but it exhibited an incredible use of space and had two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a workshop. The bathroom was probably the strangest I've ever seen, with a toilet that incinerates your poop into white ash. We spent some time out on the deck and it smelled like ocean. When Hurricane Sandy hit, there was a fist-sized hole in the basement and jellyfish washed in in the flooding. When it's crab mating season, Justin says he scooped up a bucketful of crabs and fried them. The party music started as Hank Williams but turned to house.

bushwalking

3am walking home from the subway last night i accidentally kicked a rat

why people

in response to:


(for reference, cupcake is my brother's awful cat)

oink

i haven't seen a live pig since 2010