happy ny

Got 2015 off to a big start by being so hung over yesterday that I couldn't get up from the couch until 5:30pm. I alternated cycles of drinking juice, eating, napping, and chatting other people hung over in their apartments until I gave up and ordered overpriced sushi delivery. Once I started coming out of my haze I met Youjin in Williamsburg and we went out and sat at the waterfront and looked out on the Manhattan skyline until we were so cold that we had to find shelter in a restaurant/bar where we shared calamari, drank juice, and told ghost stories.

winter-garden-bound

I have one day left in NY before I take off for my four-month job in Central Florida. I know that I should feel excited about nabbing a job I've always wanted and I had a wonderful going-away party in my backyard last night with tons of school friends congratulating me on making good life decisions, but I'm currently feeling only very sad, lonely, and heavy-footed. I've historically enjoyed putting myself in new and uncomfortable situations, but as I age I must be losing some of my taste for adventure.

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.  

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.   

long journey home

I had a long but productive and fun ten-hour day of work, starting with picking up thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment in the West Village in the rain and then scurrying around like a mouse for the rest of the day, hauling cables and sand bags and lights, learning how to use the strange proprietary software, and making a lot of bizarro strange slow-motion videos of myself. Around 12:45am we finally called it a day and headed home. Unfortunately, along the way the train hit two emergency stops and ended up shutting down completely two stops from home. The air shut off and it became very hot as we were parked in a tunnel for about twenty minutes. One thing about New Yorkers is that they become very vocal when they feel they've been slighted. The girl to my left, who'd already been insufferable and entitled even before the train stopped, said the operators should go fuck themselves. A man who had had a seat the entire way woke from his sleep to rant and ramble. I could sense the crowd becoming panicky, and I felt glad that I've made earplugs a habit in my public transportation experience. I sat down on the floor and a guy offered me one of his printed out sheets of Sudoku. I've never played Sudoku because I don't get excited by numbers, but I tried it and failed miserably. It made my tired brain felt like it was in mathmagic hell. Eventually we got started again, only to stop again one stop away from home. I feel like a person with no small potential for anger, but watching other people get so stupid mad made me feel inexplicably only more happy and satisfied with life. Got home a little past 2.

bos

This weekend was Bushwick Open Studios, which is when artists in Bushwick open up their apartments and art studios to the public to come in and see their work. It's a really fun/crazy/cool idea because Bushwick is such a barren-looking neighborhood but you know that there's a lot of creativity going on behind closed doors. People seemed to have come from all over to wander around the Morgan/Jefferson/Dekalb subway stops. Yesterday Rothy, Yotam, their friend from LA Neil, and I went into an apartment on Knickerbocker and played some video games and a board game (I'm just as bad at video games as ever), saw lots of paintings in a man's kitchen and bedroom on Troutman, and saw sculptures made from wigs by an artist/recruiter I know on Thames. We overheard a girl liken the experience to Halloween and it seemed kind of fitting. We've talked about it for two years now, but hopefully next year we'll actually participate and show stuff?
And then we went to Williamsburg to have Korean food for dinner and Wiliamsburg was deserted for once because everyone was at BOS. 

residential pov

do you ever see pictures of people's trips to new york and marvel about how your life in new york looks nothing like that? last night i paid almost $40 for a cab to take me home from times square because no arrangement of trains would be able to get me home before 4:30am. so fucking glamorous.

frozen like snow in shadow

before anyone had a chance to ask what happened, today new york became dark at four pm and the weather turned to the thirties. i had chipotle. 

other people on the train

On the subway this morning there was a homeless-looking person in an erratic altered state, stumbling violently and looking very unpredictable. His or her (I really couldn't tell) smell was completely rancid and filled our side of the car and I held my breath. I was marveling at how people were literally running out of his/her path, jumping out of their seats, grabbing their children and scurrying, when I realized that I myself was cowering into the young man sitting next to me. 

big brass band

I was at school for fourteen hours on Friday. Everyone was getting all cranky at everybody else. I bought two bags of groceries and trudged home at midnight. The L train has been running on limited service, meaning that on weekends or after 11:45 pm on weekdays you have to get off the train two stops into Brooklyn and continue on a shuttle bus. Naturally, not as many people can fit on the bus as just got off the train. However, because of party night traffic impeding the shuttle buses, when I got off at the Lorimer stop there were no fewer than 200 people crowded around the shuttle stop and quickly becoming an angry mob. I would've been angry too if I weren't already so impossibly tired. I wasn't able to get on either of the first two shuttle buses but finally found my way onto the third and nodded in and out of sleepytime consciousness. During a moment of wakefulness I realized that Craggs and her boyfriend Frank were on the same shuttle bus as I was. When I hollered at them they decided to get off at my stop instead of theirs and we all jumped off the bus at the Jefferson stop. We could see that there was a huge party going on with a brass band playing on the second floor of a loft. In a spontaneous moment of spontaneity, we followed the sound and ended up in a sweaty vivacious party full of young people dancing to a 15-piece brass band, many of the musicians women, which I really enjoyed. It was so loud and so fun that I regretted being the square with a backpack and two plastic bags of groceries. I wanted to stay forever because it all felt very fated and symbolic that there is a hidden big loud light at the end of the tunnel.

the machine

One week ago, Aijia and I threw all of my worldly east-coast possessions into a Uhaul truck and we drove away. She valiantly drove this great beast of a vehicle half a mile away, parallel parking it like a pro, and, I'm sorry Trouble, but we haven't looked back since. I now live in an illegal basement room in a beautiful, plain white apartment that we found at the very last minute with Aijia, her cat Griffin, and two new friends who have just started school with us. Thank goodness. And we just got our internet installed yesterday! I need nothing else.

Tonight Mrs. Tuckersman and I went to see a play at the Park Avenue Armory called The Machine. It was about the 1997 chess match when Garry Kasparov played against IBM's Deep Blue and it was powerful and fantastic. I feel funny about how there's no way to properly convey how great some things were. The play was staged in a historic armory from 1880 currently hosting "unconventional works in the performing and visual arts," the acting was really really good, and we had front-row seats to it all. The excellent theater experiences that Mrs. Tuckersman finds are one of my favorite things about New York. Afterwards we had late-night mozarella sticks and beverages at TGI Fridays, which is the kind of activity that is one of my favorite things about life.

It's New York Fashion Week and all of a sudden there seem to be leggy, Brobdingnagian, urbanesque model people everywhere stalking about on the streets, subways, etc., laughing and looking young and carefree and not hungry.

This is what the stage looked like -

In 1997, Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest grandmasters the chess world has ever produced, arrived in New York City for the match of his life. He was playing against Deep Blue, conceived by IBM as the most powerful super-computer on the planet. What started as a bid by IBM to raise its profile and stock price became a historic encounter that pitted Kasparov against Deep Blue and its creator Doctor Hsu, a genius in his own right with a lifelong dedication to the game.

Staged by Donmar Warehouse Artistic Director Josie Rourke, this new work by British playwright Matt Charman explores Kasparov’s dramatic battle with Deep Blue and its wunderkind inventor as the world breathlessly watched on live television. The Drill Hall will be transformed into an intensely intimate environment to capture this epic struggle of man against machine.

“An arena extravaganza … a whirl of activity”
–The Guardian (London)

“... the pace and grip of this theatrical thriller made for a memorable evening.”
–THE INDEPENDENT (London)

“Josie Rourke… is no ordinary director, as was shown by her skillful pacing of the action, by turns fast and furious, and then dramatically breaking into moments of unexpected poignancy.”
–The Independent (London)

“[Matt] Charman is no ordinary playwright, as his immensely compelling firecracker script revealed.”
–The Independent (London)

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.   

sarah

A common book that the young people like to read on the subway in New York is Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I often find this puzzling, because Nabokov is already so dense and challenging to navigate that I don't understand how anyone is making heads or tails of it while being jostled left and right, back-to-front, poked from the sides, and repeatedly fallen on by that girl who won't just hold the fucking railing.

Tonight I went to probably my favorite yoga class so far in New York. It was really soothing and I loved the teacher. I always worry that when a yoga teacher touches my face, she'll smear my eyebrows off.

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.

words from james

I hate NY. Welcome to my life - don't ever think that city is normal. Keep your West Coast sensibilities about you. I love that you understand my feelings about that festering hell hole. heh

- jr, across the pond

spring springing

oh my god it's so sunshiney out. i can feel my seasonal depression lifting. yesterday it snowed in big heavy clots of snow, inches and inches of it making an amazing magic wonderland. this morning i ran out to buy eggs at the bodega in a dress and coat and it felt not cold. i took a waltz around the block just to get out of the apartment and there were people spilling out of the subway, dressed in their saturday finest (mid-forehead straight bangs, stylish but not heavy coats, unflat shoes, red lipstick, peroxide hair) to walk the streets of bushwick. what they do here is beyond me, because i always feel like there's never anywhere to go.

non non non

Many of the truck’s patrons are American expats, but even more are young Parisians enamored of the informality of New York-style noshing. “We see it on all the police shows on television,” said Sophie Juteau, who was among the first in line for Le Camion Qui Fume’s dinner shift. “Eating from the ice cream trucks, the hot-dog carts: that is, like, our dream.”

hell is other people

something is happening to me where i am no longer willing to live with other people. i used to feel the most fulfilled in the company of others and empty when left to my own devices. but the crowdedness of new york city is real and it didn't take long to feel bone-weary of it. i hate feeling like there are always other people underfoot, standing in my way, squeezing me from the sides, listening to my conversations, staring at me, panhandling, being fucking insane. it's not charming and it's not romantic. at the end of every long day i come home to my new-york-sized room in my apartment filled with new-york-style tension stemming from idiosyncratic roommates, omnipresent and increasingly confrontational. 

ahoy houston

I've just landed in Houston. The air here is moist. I hear there will be between 3 and 30 inches of snow in NYC this weekend.