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

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.

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

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.

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.

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. 

cleopatra

I should really watch this

catching fire

feeling scared and pretty quiet post-HUNGER GAMES 2

the sorcerer & the white snake

Ma and I watched the craziest Jet Li movie, called The Sorcerer & the White Snake, which is based on an old Chinese story about a thousand-year-old white snake that falls in love with a human and transforms into a beautiful woman in order to marry him. Jet Li is a monk whose mission is to destroy these sorts of shape-shifting spirits. It reminded me a lot of the selkie stories from Scottish/Irish/Faroese folklore. I liked the movie's bad-looking special effects, attractive women, excellent fight scenes and overly dramatic love angst. I'm feeling inspired to catch up on some more wuxia films.

the bird cage

i just watched the bird cage and laughed until i spilled red wine all over myself

skyfall

When I booked a red-eye from LAX to JFK, I figured that I'd sleep on the plane and arrive bright and early for a full day's work. It somehow slipped my mind that most of that sleep time would be lost to the time change at that arriving at 5:30am would be the equivalent of getting rudely kicked out of bed at 2:30am.  On the way to LA my seat had felt like the most comfortable cradle in the world, but on the flight back I felt like I was trying to sleep in the cardboard airplane seat Rothy and I made for our puppet show skit.

so uncomfortable

I at least achieved 2 hours of sleep on the plane, unlike Rothy, who stayed up the entire time watching Black Swan. I didn't watch any movies on the plane though this past week in LA I did have many indelible movie moments: Hunger Games I and Skyfall. Both were so riveting that my heart was racing all the way to the end. Hunger Games was visually striking, silly dramatically dystopian, and delightfully tacky. Ma and I tried to go to see Hunger Games II at the theater but it was actually SOLD OUT. I was shocked and disappointed. In Skyfall, there was a pivotal moment when lines from Tennyson's "Ulysses" were recited, and I had flashbacks to the choral arrangement of that poem which I sang at USC with Mrs. Tuckersman ("Untravelled Worlds") and could pre-hear each next line and my heart almost stopped.  
 
We arrived stupid early at the airport and proceeded to drive in circles with a cab driver who wouldn't listen to our directions. $$$. Promptly went back to bed at earliest possibility, slept until midday brunching at Owl Juice. Very productive! I don't recommend taking anymore red-eyes to myself. Unfortunately, I already have another booked for January.

This late afternoon I realized I had a sore throat. I had shoyu ramen and draft Sapporo for dinner and it felt much better afterwards. Now I have a swollen lymph node. It feels like a cherry in my neck. I think I will just refuse to become sick.

lilo

anybody else want to watch liz and dick?

film festival queen

last night after work i dragged myself to a film festival in the lower east side, where rothy's and my stop motion was playing as part of the animation night. rothy suddenly couldn't go and i didn't want to go alone but forced myself in the name of adventure. i arrived at the theater too early. so i walked through an ugly little park. then i wandered into whole foods; it was beautiful. i bought two toothbrushes, thai curry, and a packet of taco seasoning. i wandered back. before the screening started we were all gifted with a cup of wine and katy perry's popchips. i was instantly drunk. the animations began and they were pretty good. ours went up. the colors looked worse than i'd remembered, but people liked the short and they laughed. a lot. i won't attribute this to the wine. after ours, the animations were extremely good. my favorite was a hand-drawn-over-live-action black-and-white animation of a polish? girl who works in a bar in england?. all the patrons morph into animals matching their respective breeds of belligerence. after the last screening and i was still drunk off of one cup of white wine when i was shocked when they called out the filmmakers in the audience and they called my name (only two of us were present) and we had to stand up. i didn't know what to do so i waved and sat back down. people were instructed to go find us in the lobby and talk to us? filmmakers? i stood in the lobby and drank copious wines and people came and found me and talked to me and were very generous with their questions and compliments. i refrained my mouth from telling them that according to my measurements, we had practically tied for worst animation of the night but had edged out the competition by a nose hair.

afterwards i was actually drunk and not really understanding how to get back to the subway, since i still don't have a phone or a sense of direction. i wandered the street in the general direction of my suspicion. lo and behold, i bumped into jason from my unity class standing in the street outside of a bar, like my drunken smoking gay guardian angel. i explained to him that i was trying to find union square and he said i was going in the right direction! i went home.

spin me round

i lost my phone post-bar. again. i feel really frustrated about it.
aijia and i have been trading off making dinner for each other. last night i made clam pasta and ice cream and we drank a bottle of wine. tonight she made salmon and ice cream and we drank two bottles of wine. and then we watched Up and i cried until my eyes fell out. something i like about bushwick: on my walk home from her apartment, a guy gave me a high-five on the street.

puppet doc

artist, trish, and i watched being elmo last night. i cried.

never sorry

this year's sundance entry documentary on ai weiwei. need to watch.
he and i could have the same alma mater

animal style

last friday we had a half day at work and were released at 1 so we could all start celebrating passover. the weather was ideal for passover and i celebrated by spending the entire afternoon at in n' out in hollywood, eating a cheeseburger and fries in sunny sunshine. i talked to a boy who is playing at coachella in a band no one's ever heard of and he took off his bandages and showed me the big tattoo he's in the process of getting lasered off. it was medium rare.

yesterday on la brea and third i saw that someone had drawn burkas on the faces of all the women on the American Reunion movie poster.

waste land

i think a lot about work, and working. i thoroughly enjoyed reading de botton's the pleasures and sorrows of work and on this workday eve i would like to present this trailer for a documentary i recently watched about these brazilian people who worked in the largest landfill in the world. there is markedly more joy and community there than i've experienced in the american workplace. disclaimer: the documentary is better than this trailer makes it out to be.

harvey girls

i just watched judy when she was my age in The Harvey Girls (1946) and it was just wonderful. very funny, very charming, stunning costumes. it made me want to be a costume maker in addition to wanting to be judy garland.

leading man was foxy as well

After a short stint in the Army, John Hodiak arrived in Hollywood in 1942 and signed a motion picture contract with MGM. He refused to change his name, saying, "I like my name. It sounds like I look."