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

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.

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.       

Leaving the falcon nest

Back in my bed in winter garden, dreaming feverishly of not sharing a room ever again after the end of next week

WWWD40D?

I'm such a light sleeper that it isn't exactly altruism, but I bought a can of WD40 at Target and lubricated every squeaky damned hinge in this apartment, from my roommate's walk-in-closet doors from hell to our shared bathroom's rolling door and even to our roommates' regular swinging bathroom door and no one seems to notice or voice appreciation (except for Sinay, bless her). It reminds me of all the little things my dad did silently and thanklessly around the house all our lives to make us comfortable, like changed the air filters and pulled long girl hair out of the drains, like the time that I was in the garage about to leave for my hourly job at Disneyland and he watched me expectantly as I put on my work shoes and voiced his sadness that I hadn't noticed that he'd shined them for me.

a spider

A brown spider the size of a half-dollar coin has been living in my room for some time. I had accepted it like a pet dog that I would see hustling around on my floor every other day until this morning, when I was sitting on my rug and saw that it was coming charging at me, at which point it had forfeited its peaceful co-habitation rights and I captured it and sent it to the great uncomfortable outdoors. 

not dead yet

I've just experienced my last day in Los Angeles for the summer. This trip has been really grounding and good for my mental health - almost purely family time, quiet time, bagel time, and physical space as medicine for the daily trials. This last day, however, has been plagued by physical and mental torture. The morning began with my new apartment building backing out of giving us a place to stay for September 1st - four days prior to moving. The process of procuring and negotiating this apartment has been a real nightmare of being caught between liars versus liars for the past month, only to completely implode at the near-last second. I have affirmed in my mind that real estate is truly one of the most fucked up things about New York - may I never deal with it again.

After eating some insanity breakfast, it was comparatively soothing to go to the orthodontist, where my crumbling permanent retainer was yanked out of my mouth, the old glue painfully ground off, and a new retainer glued in. Afterwards, I donated some Missy's old lady diapers to the animal shelter (I bought them but she never wore them) even though I don't believe that any animal in the shelter lives long enough to need to wear them.

In the afternoon, my mom gave me a flu shot that hurt more than I'm used to and when she withdrew the needle I bled mightily down the arm, an actual stream flowing downwards and pooling in the crook of my elbow. My mom screamed, "Aaaaah!! aaaaaahh!! ARE YOU ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO BLEEDS TOO MUCH?!" and my dad was unhappy and ranted about how she didn't do it right and I couldn't stop laughing because it was so shocking and so fucked up. The way it spewed out was as if the head-bursting blood pressure from all my morning rage had finally found its exit. Later Ma came to me and said, "I'm very sorry. You probably won't die."

The evening became quieter. Ma, Pa and I went to Souplantation, where I ate all the favorite soups, salads, and carbs that I've been eating my entire life. On the drive home Ma was trying to come up with a Chinese name for baby Char. Every name she came up with we could turn into a joke by interpreting it as its homonym or changing the tone of one word slightly. You mean Bowl? Little Fish? Oh, Summer Shirt? Ma came up with a new one and tried to translate it for me. 

Ma: It means "prostate."

Me: PROSTATE?

Ma: Yes. Prostate. 

Me: Are you sure?

Ma: No..."prostitute"

Me: WHAT

Ma: No... ..."protest?"

Ma has traditionally rhymed my Chinese name with Fat Pig, but Pa came up with a new one for me today - Scarf.   

last moments of hatred

On a night when I needed to get up at 6:30am, I had to clamber out of bed at 3am to tell my idiot roommate, Artist, to turn down his fucking music. He started blasting jazz out of the large speakers in his bedroom to entertain his girl "friend" in the living room, who, by the way, showed up last night with 3 suitcases and looks like she'll be staying a while, of which I had no prior knowledge. The same girl for whom Artist entertained earlier in the evening at around 11pm with his electric guitar. Thankfully, I'm up this early because I"m leaving for Rhode Island for the weekend. I'm blockading the entrance to my room with suitcases and jaggedy open drawers and should probably booby trap the room floor with many forks hidden in the rug or something in case he tries to put her up in my room while I'm gone. I hope you have a horrible life.

happiest move ever

Happy August! I just officially declared that I'm moving out at the end of the month.

No more
- having my drinking cups used as paintbrush washing cups and left standing with dirty paint water in them
- living in a drug den with people coming constantly to pick up
- being woken up by the TV blaring in the middle of the night
- being woken up by electric guitar being played plugged into an amp in the middle of the night
- listening to other people have sex
- having a revolving door of floozy girls in and out of the apartment every night/morning
- having no access to common space because of constant habitation of living room of roommate and girlfriend
- competing for the bathroom in the morning with roommate girlfriend / often losing the race and running late in the morning as a result
- having all of our toilet paper used for god knows what by OCD roommate
- no one ever buying toilet paper when it's clearly anyone's but my turn
- worrying that asthma cat will die
- cat vomit on my rug and the smell never ever coming out
- having all my beers stolen out of the fridge or my energy drink stolen off the table
- having every single dish, utensil, pan in the kitchen used to cook one extravagant meal and left in a pile in the sink for over a week
- clogging the kitchen sink with food even though it's a fucking sink and not a garbage disposal, continuing to use the sink until everything in it is standing in a pool of stagnant water
- dead mice everywhere
- apartment that smells like weed, incense, never-cleaned litter box, and dead mice
- being propositioned via text in the middle of the night for over an hour to the point of turning my phone on silent and locking my door because a roommate is "joking" about coming into my room / waking up to 15 more texts
- getting texts about how we "all need to be cleaner" from the person who makes the apartment a stinking garbage heap / aggressive text responses when i point out how much cleaning i do
- being sent a passive/aggressive/more aggressive e-mail for being in the kitchen drinking wine for 45 minutes while a roommate's DATE was happening
- room so small that i knock something over every time i turn around
- internet so bad that i can't watch anything without pre-loading it for 20 minutes
- fridge completely full of rotting food belonging to one person
- same person cleaning out the fridge randomly and throwing out all my food without asking
- living with someone who won't get out of bed to open the door for me when i'm locked out, even if it means i have to stay overnight at someone else's house because i can't get in
- having to let a roommate stay in my room while i'm in town so he can put up his parents in his room / not giving me more than a day's notice on this request
- living with someone who neglects to feed his animals, so that i end up having to do it because i can see they haven't eaten in two days
- living with males who prowl on my friends and blatantly look them up and down
- being the only one who ever cleans the bathroom counter, sink, toilet, or shower
- entertaining stupid conversations with blacked out drunks
- being pressured to not cook in the kitchen because it's summer and i'm going to make the apartment hot

FUCK YOU.
Next.

i hate my apartment

one of my roommates or one of the three european floozies they brought home from a party last night drank my energy drink without asking. i hope it gave him or her uncontrollable and frightening heart palpitations.

summer flies

For those who asked for asked for summer, it's here. It's hot and it's humid and I like it as long as my air conditioner stays faithful. I can't put a glass of wine down in my room without turning around to find six fruit flies got a swimming pool full of liquor and they dive in it. In the kitchen the big black flies reign supreme and zip around in swarms and perch and rub their hairy little legs on our dishes. I was toweling off in the shower the other day and saw a tiny tiny leech? inching along the shower floor. I was mortified. I washed it down the drain because I didn't know what to do. I googled "tiny leech in my shower" and it turns out that there are flies that grow their young, which look like tiny leeches, in your drains. I continue to feel mortified.

The summer sun stays up late and makes broad daylight past 8 o'clock post meridiem. It's also particularly white bright and blinding. I hear summer in New York explodes with fun things to do, but I guess I haven't heard as much about them because I've been working full time. Last week, though, I did attend a lecture by one of the partners of BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), an impressive architecture firm based out of New York, Copenhagen, and Beijing and the company that designed and built the Danish Pavilion (of which I have fantastic memories) at the Shanghai World Expo three years ago. They're also apparently building a fancy beach resort near my mom's hometown in Taiwan. He talked about the reappropriation of industrial structures for public use and enjoyment and showed a maritime museum, park, and a waste management plant with a ski run on top as examples that were built in Denmark. Yeah, I liked that.

smells dreamtime ibm

during my recess in Los Angeles, my bedroom in renee zellweger's house stopped smelling like me, coffee, candles, lotion, and hair serum and went back to smelling like cat, cat vomit, and mysterious gross smell. being immersed in its pungency makes me feel like i'm back in last october, when i'd just moved in and this room was an alien place.

last night i used the dohm again. different roommate, same old story. i dreamt that i was attacked by an overly friendly porcupine that kept jumping into my lap and that my tongue, face, arms, and legs were covered in thousands quills that were more like cactus needles and that i needed a nurse to pull them out.  i also dreamt that i was  being secretly watched by my dad's cousin, who looked more like he was my dad's identical twin except for one difference in birthmark, who was an eccentric wine expert with a bizarre name who had never gotten to know me.

this morning i woke to find that my real dad had written me an excited e-mail about finding out that i'm working with IBM and that "many be it was meant to be that way!?" i think he's referring to how i worked at IBM in shanghai in 2007 except that i'm pretty sure all i remember about that time is eating lunch alone every day at KFC and watching a lot of Youtube (this was back before youtube - and facebook! - were blocked by The Great Firewall). oh - and chatting with mrs. tuckersman / metacomrobotron on AIM about vitas! yes, the world has come full circle!

my fresh direct has arrived!

quiettime

painter has been been working on a movie with a 6:30am call time and photog just left for LA today, so i have mornings completely alone for the next week. SO happy.

hurricane holiday

aside from the overall tragedy that the hurricane has inflicted, this week was the perfect break and exactly what i needed to get away from the madness of school and to get to know my new roommates a lot better.

i'll be in los angeles in two and a half weeks. i've been trying to compare my bushwick home to my midcity home. they feel completely different. midcity living was wooden and country french, very unusual, beautiful, and coquettish with savory barbeques, strawberries with sour cream and brown sugar, furry sweet and mischievous animal company, a real friend family and acoustic music. bushwick is freelance grungy crisp and boozy and full of swagger, loud music, and constant surprises and has a smell that i can't put my finger on but it's definitely related to boy. i like the present and i loved the past. these are material descriptions of a feeling that i can't put to words, which is the feeling you get in your head and chest when you wake up and see light each morning, and when you pad around and touch things when no one else is home, and how the outside looks from inside and how much you can see in the dark from your bed at night. if i could really encapsulate those feelings i'd get them tattooed because they're what i would like most to preserve and flaunt.

queen of the thames

i'm up late in this alien place called home and it feels weird in an unnerving way. i smell cologne and it confuses me.

rz's house

today is the mid-autumn festival, but i did not get any mooncake.
I started moving into Renee Zellweger's house in Bushwick today. I feel relieved and excited and happy all over. I have these dreams now of being peaceful and catching up in school and actually completing my assignments and not running all over Brooklyn every waking moment to look at the various shitholes where people cage themselves at exorbitant prices. I love my new digs and I just blew a bunch of money on buying a bed and mattress. I'm back at Piggy's for the night, but more exuberant nesting to come.

ny home four

it only took 228 e-mails, 5 weeks, 23 visits, and 8 offers, but i do believe i've found my barbie dream house. i'm going to be the queen of bushwick.

closing time

moving seems to be an overly traumatic experience that continuously happens to me. given how attached/picky/needy i am when it comes to living spaces, i can't believe i've lived in four different places in the past year and i have to start putting myself away into sad boxes again, so i can move into a borrowed foxhole, just until i can find an altogetherly new foxhole. 

new digs

1913 craftsman - living room and kitchen

да здравствует наша TITANIC

lying my head east of la cienega

it rained all of last night and today was beautiful beautiful beautiful. a beautiful day for moving. here's the welcoming crew -

clementine and jenner