nothing like looking back and sharing stories, especially embarassing ones.



on july 6, 1982, my family celebrated my aunt's birthday by eating three lunches at three different restaurants. my mom had indigestion that night, and i was born by morning.

my happiest memory is somewhere in bangkok, under a palm tree, with sun tan lotion and sticky rice, and somewhere in the shade my mother sleeps.

when my brother was born i was so happy i jumped as high as i could and crashed into a table. i still have the scar on the back of my head. i would make faces at my brother and he would try to smile under his big overgrown cheeks.

my best friend before my brother was a plastic toy shark named monstro the whale. one time i took monstro to ocean park (hong kong's theme park) and i accidentally pooed in my pants. in public. in front of everyone.

i grew up in an apartment on the 14th floor of a green-tiled building somewhere in hong kong. i would bike in my building's parking lot, dip cookies in soy milk, and hold funerals for broken gi joes. when my brother slept and my parents worked, i'd sneak to the balcony and watch the sky turn black over the city.

my mom stuck me in an english pre-school, a chinese kindergarten, and then a french school. i couldn't speak a word of french so i had trouble making new friends but i didn't mind. i playing by myself and pretended leafs were spaceships.

i was at my friend's eigth birthday and i fell in love with a girl - a love only nine years olds know. i would whisper into her ear, share stories, jokes, and silly things, and when i ran out of words, i would yell "tag, you're it!" we only knew each for one day. i would only run into her again much later. it was mid-autumn full moon at a park, all children ran around red with little lanterns. i nearly bumped into her and the only word my nine year old mouth could mutter was a "hi." we then both stood shy for a moment and walked away in opposite directions. i remember sitting by myself on a swing set and really watching the moon for the first time.

in paris, france, my brother and i drew norse gods in my grandparents' dusty living room. loki was my favorite god, such a prankster. while mami napped on a recliner chair, my brother and i got into a bitter argument over absolutely nothing that tragically led to the two of us tearing each other's drawings to shreds. we woke mami up with our bickering and we both cried.

she, little blonde girl, broke her arm while climbing a hill so i, little bowl cut boy, rushed to her hospital and gave her a kiss.

benjamin jumped off a building. erik hit by a taxi. they're still so small in my dreams. benjamin shy and lanky (all the girls liked him, i think.) erik with the quick wit and warm smile. it's ten years past and i still can't say "goodbye."

my worst memory is somewhere in a bedroom lurking under the curl of my father's belt.

by then i begun to notice that my classmates were either considered cool or uncool (often calculated by the circumference of the waist of their jeans and how low they could sag.) i had tight jeans. i figured i would become cool, someday. perhaps by thirteen. if not, definitely by eighteen. if not then, surely by twenty one.

nope.

i was fifteen and feverish the day before i moved out of hong kong. i spent the evening neck deep in a hot bathtub. "cook the germs out," i thought. i was delusional on the plane trip to los angeles, singing michael jackson's "black or white" in my head as a farewell tune to the small island.

it's very shallow of me, but the memory that comes to my mind right now as i think of high school is a drunk tony danza yelling "who's the boss? you the boss!" to me from the visitors bleachers of senior homecoming game.

i got to college and i learn (or re-learn) to simply dooOOOOOOOOOOOooo it.




(much more later. but now i rush to my bed with a swifness no one knows save the wind. no, that's not me trying to sound like a poet. i still have all the fanciful hobbit and middle earth lingo stuck in my brain.)

i am preparing myself for my next journal entry. memories of 2003 (sorry for the cheesy name.) it hurts to write it out but i promise you i will say what is hardest for me to say, yes, i am actually writing a preview to my next blog entry. new regions of nerdom has been reached. now i have created expectations not only for myself but for the audience as well. bad move. bad move. forget you even read this journal entry. move on to jamie's blog. she updates everyday if you haven't noticed. just click to the left.

ps:

j-live was off the hook! pigeon john too. didn't dig la symphony. living legends were fun. missed typical cats cause the line outside was too long too slow!

nightmares say hullo to me at night. maybe this house is haunted. or maybe berkeley is haunted and i took the ghosts home with me. lost confidence when i checked out my grades online. did i really do that badly? i sort of saw it coming. sadness over grades is sorta foolish, but these grades suck, let me feel sorry for myself for a few days. i'll regain my confidence once i start spiking my hair again. when will i really grow up. do i want to be an architect. will i survive if i trust in my passions and not in my securities. i've been reading a lot of good stuff lately. junk on world economy, international politics, terrorism, marx, development policies, and soap opera-ish samurai stories. i like to diversify my literature. i'll rock the architecture digest, new yorker, maxim magazine, and socialist worker in one sitting. cosmo too. especially cosmo.

there is more poetry in a mother's smile then there is in the history of this blog.

s

i want us to be nightingales, gypsying over the yellow candle lights of a city without electricity. the laughing moon will be over our heads and we, plus our shadows make four, will dance through the sky and earth, while children stuck in stopped trains point to us squealing "look, oh my, look!"

s

i want to be three inches tall, trying to catch the songs dangling out of your mouth with a butterfly net

s

i want you to be the wind knocking on my window at this very moment

tomorrow we will go to war in what may be the most significant fight of our generation.

the force that has propeled, influenced, and redefined our generation is (unbelievably) the internet. no other cultural phenomenon has gripped and changed our lives quite like it, and it will effect our future in ways we can only imagine. the internet, with its file sharing, blogs, e-mails, and countless websites, means only one thing: us. the internet is often dismissed by those who don't understand it as a high velocity way of wasting time. and, like the internet, we too are often dismissed by those who don't understand us, by the people who often make the most important decisions of our lives for us in congress, senate, the white house.

only two people have a chance at winning the democratic nomation and go up against george w. bush come 2004 . wesley clark has regional advantages (have you noticed that every democratic president since JFK have been southerners?) and has been raising good press lately with his accomplishments as key witness at dictator milosevic's trial. howard dean has something quite different. he is all that anyone can talk about. the other candidates rage and attack on him without remorse. the press repeatedly dismiss him as having no chance of winning (quite condescendingly, if i may say.) but somehow, amazingly, he keeps on climbing the polls, he continues to lead the race and pulls further and further away from the rest of the race.

the secret to his breakthough is the internet. like FDR and the radio, like JFK and the television, howard dean is bringing new meaning to the internet. while other candidates simply use it to advertise their latest press releases, howard dean brings boldness into the internet and turned it into a movement. countless debates and discussion are wage online. news that doesn't get mainstream press get launched acoss blog to blog to message board to e-mail. activist strategies are constantly thrown around. meet-ups with other organizers happen on a weekly basis thanks to internet resources (type in a zip code and you get contacts to other activists in your area.) the dean campaign managed to race $15 million dollars through small donations from hundreds of thousands of people (i gave $20) in three months through internet organizing.

his campaign is unbelievable, and should he win the nomination, we will have a battle between two very different world come 2004. we have bush and his CEOs dictating their agendas on one hand, and on the other, we will have ourselves, throwing our voices from the bottom up. this is the fight of our generation, encoupled with our internet. radio and television were powerfool tools that lost meaning once the people were taken out and the corporations moved in. we lost radio and television but we will not lose the internet. we have ourselves and our warm hands, and what we have we will never lose.

my favorite songs right now are the beatles' "i am the walrus" and andre 3000's "hey ya"

but cds i have on heavy rotation right now:

kiwi's writes of passage (fucking dope, you're the shit, kiwi...)
jonny greenwood's bodysong (insane jazzy wacky songs)
primal scream's dirty hits (dark, sexy, brooding, fun)
postal service's give up (it's pretty)
andre 3000's love below (finally, booty music for cocktail parties)

actually, no this is my favorite song right now: iron and wine' "such great heights"

so i half-jokingly ask my architecture professor, "how will architecture get bush out of office?"

and she sighs, half-winks at me, and coolly replies "Tokyo has some really lovely buildings, but not many. Mostly this is a mean city, and it does somehow wear on people. I am always having little old ladies tell me how beautiful they find Chicago or Paris, and speculating why there are no cities - I mean none, not Kyoto, not Nara, none - that are lovely, or even have parts that are lovely in Japan. I think architects have not been able to offer a voice about the importance of urban space, and the result is that people have been happy for a long time to abuse this poor land to a degree even Bush can't contemplate. There is dioxin in the air, asbestos is not removed in any way that protects people walking around on or near the sites, and the sulfur content corroded my bike fittings in about 4 weeks. (No joke.)

Being in places like this makes me realize that architecture does matter to me, because it can enhance human dignity. That is not the only answer, but it is one I believe in. If you don't, you must find the one you can embrace and commit to."

my eyes are crying ashes. i'm so burnt out.

this semester i've organized a big concert against proposition 54 (war on 54), co-curated a student art gallery, wrote and co-directed a cartoon, read poems around the east bay, co-wrote and co-directed a multi-media play about the war, designed a webpage, and designed two buildings, while balancing two part time jobs and classes.

i've done way too much. i've embraced the things that i loved but instead of letting them enrich my life i let them take it over. i'm not sure if i'm a student anymore. it's hard to prioritize and hard to find time to actually learn from classes.

how can i let my outside activities feed my main work?

i need to admit to myself where i really want to be. i need to land back on my feet.

this winter break will be about confrontations.

a beautiful chapter from italo calvino's "invisible cities"

he said, "it is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city."

and polo said: "the inferno of the living is not something that will be... if there is one, it is what is already here. there are two ways to escape suffering it. the first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. the second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

a snippet of a conversation at thai temple this day

if i'm a coke, and you're a pepsi, is he's a coke?

no

but listen, if you're a coke, and i'm a coke, is he a pepsi?

denise was the first to die. tony is innocent but no one listened to him as they threw him deep into the icy lake. ronnie likes to start riots and lynch locals and doesn't appreciate the irony when he is stabbed away in the middle of the night. the townspeople still hear the ghost of towndrunk jimmy laughing at them as they struggle to sleep. kathy bach is a brave doctor who saved ben but forgot to take care of the knife in her gut and bled to death. sara is a murderous doctor so the townsmen hung her for it, leaving her rotting corpse displayed for days. andinh broke from the vietnamese gangsters to team up with luca and incite the people to bludgeon bruce in broad daylight (they later regretted that.) andinh was shot later that night. luca, even though he wasn't the killer, had too much blood on his hands and just had to die, cold and alone. mike richter didn't cry for anyone and found loneliness in being the last one alive.

dina and mike nguyen got away with all the murders.

dina was mafia twice in a row.

from ohio congressman sherrod brown:

Never before has the House of Representatives operated in such secrecy:

At 2:54 a.m. on a Friday in March, the House cut veterans benefits by three votes.

At 2:39 a.m. on a Friday in April, the House slashed education and health care by five votes.

At 1:56 a.m. on a Friday in May, the House passed the Leave No Millionaire Behind tax-cut bill by a handful of votes.

At 2:33 a.m. on a Friday in June, the House passed the Medicare privatization and prescription drug bill by one vote.

At 12:57 a.m. on a Friday in July, the House eviscerated Head Start by one vote.

And then, after returning from summer recess, at 12:12 a.m. on a Friday in October, the House voted $87 billion for Iraq.

Always in the middle of the night. Always after the press had passed their deadlines. Always after the American people had turned off the news and gone to bed.

i just woke up. slumberland is slow snowed with ballerinas stuttering across frosted flake lakes. the rain falls the sheep so we have to count with our fingers. dust bunnies hopscotch with scotch on the rocks. legolas is not the coolest lord of the rings character. you're in for a surprise if you think this is just gonna be one of those new year's again. i'm getting ahead of myself, school's not even over yet. i haven't even started to think about oh well i'll get it to it later. i have bed hair.

sara and i might have been food poisoned and cafe strada. possibly the milk. yes. the milk is suspicious.

lili dreams of peking duck and honey, andinh yearns to wrestle, denise is haunted by dogs being thrown out of speeding cars, and sara pulls me in, sings karma police, and lets me sleep against her shoulder

unbelievable!!!

"Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed a 100% elimination of all college outreach and college prep programs, which include Early Academic Outreach Programs, MESA K-12 Programs, High School Puente, ALL Transfer outreach programs,
Assist.org, UC LEADS, test preperation, financial aid, student run health clinics, graduate and law school programs, research programs, and many other programs that prepare students for higher education. All of these, will be GONE without action.

The Governor's proposal will be voted on sometime between Dec. 6 to early January. If this bill passes, all of these
educational access and support programs will be GONE starting JANUARY 1, 2004, meaning that all staff for these programs will be receiving a pink slip for the Holidays. Also, the negative impacts of these cuts will be a direct blow on education."

fuck you arnold! fuck you!!!

gfeihgliejlkjgpieihwpapkwj!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!fgbjlkq!!

today's new your times states that the Iraqi census came up with a detailed plan to do a population count so that they will be able to hold national elections by next september. but the Bush administration rejected the plan, fearing the daunting logistics that it would take to give Iraqis a direct election. the Iraqi Governmental Council never even got a chance to review it.

a commentary from the daily kos: No census, no voter rolls, no voter rolls, no direct elections. What�s the story? It�s amazing when the puppet-master doesn�t even trust the puppet. First, the Governing Council wasn�t given any advance input on how to spend the $20 billion U.S. taxpayers are contributing to reconstructing Iraq. Now we learn that the IGC was never consulted about holding a census.

Not content with their general record in the employment arena, the Bush Administration seems determined to put satirists out of work as well.

e-mail that i sent to my friend an in paris:

"i would write you a longer e-mail but jerry informs me that i must use the
bathroom now.

i will think of you as i poo

bruce"

instructions on how to take back a country

1. know that politicians in the backseats of limousines are not chariot riding gods. that they know fear when walking through the city street at night.
2. whether you write web-pages or take out the garbage for a living, as long as you have a body come out and dance on the empty streets at midnight tonight. whether you swing six-steps, salsa, or simply nod your head, your body will be the beginning of the revolution.
3. food will win the war. cook, imagine the kitchen like an orchestra, strum the oven, let the water boiler sing, play the microwave like a piano. cook a symphony, and wrap it in your best tupperware, and share it with strangers. our cooking will scare fast food chains, meat packaging industries, and all the petit bistros into fighting on our side.
4. simply do what we do best to win the war. animal trainers get birds to swoop over the capitol and to drop poo on unsuspecting suits. actors pretend to be over-seas ambassadors, talk your way into a conference with the tyrant and, at an opportune moment, break into a belly dance and spit confetti into his face.
5. when the war is won, do not rejoice just yet. sing a song and maybe the world will listen, and maybe they will forgive us for all that our tyrant did in our name.

tonight is the night when breakdancers summersault into sparrows, when computers explode into chicken wings, when bicycles become birds. we�ll play tag over the bay, the milky way is home base (only cheaters hide behind clouds)

on my knees, i cry into a door knob, begging it to open. someone punches the door from the other side. there is wood dust all over the ground, as if the door was crying too. i peek through the cracks and i see him, barefoot in bed with his face buried under a pillow.

when brothers grow distant, it's not like the plump drop of an orange from a tree, or the sharp sting of a pianist hitting the wrong key, it's more like the soft sadness of a shepard losing sheep, because then there wouldn't be a shepard at all.

fantastic films

lost in la mancha - hilarious/heartbreaking documentary of terry gilliam's failed potential masterpiece "the man who killed don quixote"... an insightful look into not only director gilliam's filmmaking process, but his wonderful (and insane) imagination.
nine queens - a breathtaking argentinian movie by fabi�n bielinsky about con-men, double-crosses, sex, and stamps.
genghis blues - it's about blues, throat singing, and mongolian vodka
dithers - art film featuring david choe, sam flores, shepard fairey, bigfoot, seen, and a whole army of other street artists
lost in translation - dreamy!

films i still need to see

les triplettes de belleville
21 grams
in america
amores perros
talk to her
happy together
capturing the friedmans

roaming from lipman room humming with rattering drums, swashbuckling hips, and solo saxophones, pouring onto the street while singing songs about robots all the way to the korean bbq parlor then to hold a loved one on a futon to wake up to poetry reading after poetry reading, rocking out with viet poets, painters, and freestylers and making a sister cry in the corner, boomblast to san francisco to peep sam flores and david choe on the go, spraypainting horses and cars while people pop on the dancefloor, trip over architecture models, gluegun days together, jamie turns twenty by fake-surprise cake candlelight, speak softly with heartbroken jerry, hold hands with a girl as she avoids cracks on the sidewalk, fall asleep in the dark city and wake up on an airplane, to rush into a mother's arms

after many hours of creative brouharhar, i'm now burnt out. officially burnt out... but i still got a ton of stuff for architecture due for monday. oy, i'm fucked.

in my dream last night i was lost in a beautiful book that i didn't know who wrote until i realized the writer was me, the dreamer. i woke up in a furious haze and rushed to the computer to try to type all the haunting lines i read in my dream but by the time i got there i had forgotten them all

a cheshire cat moon tumbles into clouds black like burnt bread and chokes on nitric smoke.

... a child counts the stars in a ravaged sky to keep the howl of bombs distant

why don't we ever hear about how many iraqi civilians die over there? a british report suggests that between 5000 and 7000 iraqi civilians have died during the US invasion, and 2 to 3 thousand more have died since bush's declaration of "an end to major combat in iraq." but no one can know really for sure how many have died since our white house refuses to count the number of people we've deciimated to "free" a country.

"The citizens of Iraq are coming to know what kind of people we have sent to liberate them. American forces and our allies are treating innocent civilians with kindness," declares our president.

i celebrate the triumphant return of a computer to my room with milk and cookies and some delicate hip hop just loud enough to annoy (but not wake) my roommates in their sleep.

i gave every ounce of soul i had left in me to theatre rice last weekend and architecture this past weekend and now i am just a spine and a shadow. i look forward to a week of simple poetry (i'm set to perform four times this week.) i tried writing tonight and once again i am taught that there is no trying in writing.

this is definately my last semester of theatre rice. i'd love to run another round of troupe but yeah, i got other priorities now. theatre rice has been good to me (and vice versa) and i'm glad that i'm leaving on a good note. i'll miss it like maddogs. next semester, we will fill the loudmouth asians project with a renewed strength of freestyle creativity and come together with our molotov tongues to french kiss (in theatre, poetry, music, and movie) and spit fireflies...

tonight, i want to plummet into my room so messy with papers, books, and old t-shirts, and dig through the dusty clutter until i find relief curled in a corner under a napkin. relief will be shy to speak to me but i will hum a lullaby about the chubby moon to her. she'll relent and cup my cheek with her transparent hand. "it's good to see you again," i'll think but won't say. she'll lean in close and her lip will almost touch my ear...

i have a present for you, she says, a set of eyelids so that you can close your eyes when you dream.

the rain comes down to pet me on the head and i bite back a "fuck off." not sure what day it is. if today really is saturday that means i've been awake since thursday. take one guess why i'm not sleeping.

but, by-the-by, thank you sara for staying up too.

go-go yarubi turned 22 today. she survived the massacre of the crazy 88s and escaped to a wonderful apartment dizzy with alcohol and photographs, and a cake highjacked by icing. happy birthday, lili, queen of the demons. and happy birthday, diane lin, twas fun festivities on friday... always a pleasure to hang at the cyrus crib. an is still off galloping through france. i must remember to send her a postcard.

i've got beautiful friends.

in dire need of break, too tired of traveling. everyday is so packed with meetings and class i barely have any time for myself. these days of heartbreak and white hairs are worth it though, i've never had such a productive semester (war on 54 concert, winter is coming, architecture, soulstice II, poetry 4 the people...) gonna burn out soon, i can feel my nerves rebelling against me, crackling under my skin. they need some rest and my back's got no comfort. oh please, let me get through these next few weeks. if i do, i promise to catch up on lost time with you, dear bed.

it's weird, i feel more stressed out at the apartment then i do at architecture studio. i think it's because when i'm at home, i'm reminded of what i neglect.

it's nuts, but i'm young. i can spare the wrinkles.

"senorita extraviada"

we shoot angels from the sky the same way we black-eye girlfriends
we blame them for getting in our way

see a long time ago
mother was not a dirty word

we leap to beat when the words motherfucker/son-of-a-bitch hurl at our ears
we sprint to split the jaw that dared to deem our mothers to be
the toys of men
their used things
because deep down
we�re afraid that such a thing
our mother a used thing
could be true

our daughters are betrayed by dolls
that teach them only how to be mothers
and nothing else

our sisters strap themselves to the sweatshop lines and stitch sorrows
with calloused fingers without a tomorrow
our sisters stand in line for milk stamps for their babies
bearing the hoarse cry of a thirsty child in their arms

among the worldwide labor force, women (particularly women of color) are the majority
among the poor, women and children, are the majority

the bible boasts eve to be evil because she sought knowledge
because she defied the male
head of the household
creator of the universe

so she is raped
of everything that she had
(while adam is given a second chance under the pseudonym hey-zeus)

we strangle angels with umbilical cords the same way we hollow our women
we don�t hear the word �no�

no one knows who is massacring the women of the city of juarez, mexico
(300 or so raped and murdered in the past ten years)

but
it�s probably me
it�s probably me

i am clipping angel wings in my sleep


(to learn more about the juarez killings: http://takenbythesky.net/juarez/articles.html or watch the shattering documentary "senorita extraviada" http://www.lourdesportillo.com/senoritaextraviada/)

halloween. jason's hunter s thompson, jamie's princess of the hicks, jerry's a man who got hit by a car, jimmy's himself with sunglasses, luca's party boy in a thong, tad's captain jack sparrow, julia's punk rock, denise's o-ren ishii, andinh's a crazy 88, sheng's fred from scooby doo, reggie's jericho, kaelynn's bindlestiff studio (save her), mike's jules and stephen's vincent, and somewhere in the hazy mix, in baby blue and pink, are ritchie and margot. where oh where is mortecai?

happy 6 months. my dear friend, we have no road. we make our road as we walk (lost in translation is such a beautiful thing.)

thank you to ronnie for the butcher paper limo. i am your indentured servant.

my room has: a broken computer, a broken picture frame, and a broken lamp. must adapt to creative challenges. architecture is a cool major, folks. stress over design details is way more fun than stress over math problems (but incredibly terribly heartbreaking nonetheless.) cartoon project goes cool. the creation of an opera for children (or "chopera" as ed the musician exclaims.) wrote an epic poem tonight in one sitting. this project is a step out of my safety zone (taking steps out of my safety zone has been quite common place this semester.) apparently i pout in my sleep. all my roommates are sleeping. i should too.

enough about me, i'd love to hear about you.

ps: apologies to those who've e-mailed me and i haven't gotten a chance to e-mail back. i'm not ignoring you. i just lost my glasses and this typing stuff is sort of draining on the eyes.

oh, and jerry, thanks for letting me use your laptop. how goes it, jerry? i hope the heartache is bearable. let's write love haikus together over $2.50 food at sun hong kong. just call my cell when you're free, i won't be home for a while.

DAMN! i'm going crazy i can't sleep. see, some musicians and a poet got together today and cut a song and it's absolute bananas. what happens when a crazy clash of dancers, playwrites, musicians, filmmakers, and poets amplify and get as loud as they absolutely fucking can?

LMA.

(loudmouth asians)

in two weeks, we're on.

(after jimmy's soundtrack of the evening)

soundtrack of the morning:

cardigans - the boys are back
pixies - hey
jurassic five - doo woop
dj shadow - midnight in a perfect world
cure - subway song
radiohead - blow out
weezer - only in dreams
sonic youth - candle
beth gibbons & rusty man - tom the model
echo and the bunnymen - people are strange

i have 100 hours until monday.

i can't even begin to fill those 100 hours with everything that i have to do.

asked once what his idea of heaven was, elliott smith replied, "george jones would be singing all the time. it would be like new york in reverse. people would be nice to each other for no reason at all. and it would smell good."

rest in peace, elliott smith.

who here won't weep whenever "needle in the hay" comes on...

this past saturday, we turned my apartment inside out in watercolors.

let the sun drop into the ocean like a sugar cube into a cup of coffee... i'm waiting for the sky to rain. summer time reminds me of sand between my toes, and the absence of beaches in berkeley reminds me of the absence of my brother, scruffy haired and shirtless, yelling across the pacific, barking Joe Strummer and Dr. Dre as the sky skips to black.

walking through rain at night, especially in the city, against car lights and pink glows of store fronts, must be how walking through a kaleidoscope must be like. i want it to pour.

i haven't picked up a new book in a few weeks.

thanks to jimmy's encouragement, i went out and rocked a poem about gambling and war at cal slam last night. felt very intense and vulnerable. slamming was coo... it's all love there, not as competitive or cutthroat as i imagined it to be. good environment there, it's actually quite chill.

wonderful e-mail from junichi:

"The discrepancies in how we value human lives shows up every day. As of October 14, over 9000 Iraqi civilians may have been killed and at least 20,000 civilians injured in Iraq since the opening of George Bush's war. 329 United States servicemen and 51 British servicemen have died, and 1,815 U.S. servicemen have been wounded. The US is detaining 5000 people in Guantanamo Bay. Since they're not letting in international observers or the Red Cross and since we don't even know some of their names, for all we know, this could be another concentration camp.

In her radio show yesterday, Laura Flanders (weekdays at 10 am, 91.7 FM) pointed out that of the $87 billion of the Iraq and Afghanistan Reconstruction package, only 1% goes to Kabul. Afghanistan would get $800 million and Iraq would only get $20 billion, which is almost 25 times as much. And yet, the populations of the two countries are roughly the same. Today, after decades of war supported by the United States, Afghans are in horrendous shape.

Have we come to the point that believing every life is equally valuable is a revolutionary idea?"

thanks sara for waking me in time for class.

i'm an architecture asshole, never on time for class these days. sad, sad.

we have a new friend named rosemary. she has blue hair and she always walks around barefooted.

you'll meet her soon.

kill bill is dope!!!

"Those of you lucky enough to still have your lives. Take them with you. But leave the limbs you've lost. They belong to me now."

movies i still need to desperately see
- lost in translation
- capturing the friedmans
- swimming pool
- millennium actress
- school of rock
- intolerable cruelty

this past weekend, a girl sang on stage and i felt like i had fallen asleep on the inside of a raindrop, waking up into a dream. she's soft speaking, and i feel sweet regardless of what the morning brings.

war on 54 was an event of dopest proportions. but even though prop five-four didn't pass, i'm still not happy. just relieved. we fought so hard for something we shouldn't even be fighting about to begin with. i feel like a soldier with a victory i can hardly appreciate, but i can't imagine how it must feel to be a real soldier, to be in iraq, to be fighting and to be never coming home. someone tells me about his cousin, how he fought for independence in a country i can't pronounce (shame on me) in africa, how he is a hero, but how he is now in america and no one knows who he is (but does anyone really know anyone else)?

sorry to depress everyone.

tonight, i mourn june jordan. funny, i don't even know you.

ps:

what do a kangaroo and an eagle have in common.

tonight is one of those nights when you just know something is going to go wrong. it's red in the air. i leave wurster to hear the sound of sirens crying across bancroft. something is wrong. i'm drawn by the sound. i don't take my usual walk home (through campus.) by the time i get there, the sound is gone. but i hear an old man (homeless?) screaming a ways away. he's shouting something i don't understand.

i then see a girl in trouble. i was the only one there who could help her. on this street at 3:45 in the morning, it was just me, her, and a black car that won't go away. i hesitated a moment and now i can't sleep.

am i a coward? and if not, why did i hesitate?

devastated by arnold's win.

i don't switch off the news, even though there aren't many cheery things to read about. i feel very down but that just motivates me to fight harder. ise lyfe said something last night that all we do is react, react, react to bad shit falling upon us... it's time that we stop reacting and start attacking. we can't simply stand up for change. we have to propel it through the roof of this burning house.

we recalled gray davis because we were pissed about the economy. bush is the real reason why the economy is so jacked. oh, you'll see, we'll recall his ass in 2004.

please please please please vote no on the recall

please please please please do not vote for arnold.

sorry i haven't had much time to blog.

lots to say, will share soon.

some words from arianna huffington:

In 2000, we were taken in by a charming, affable man who promised us compassion but gave us war in Iraq, a soaring deficit, millions of lost jobs, two million more people living in poverty, and the rollback of vital environmental protections. I look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, and see more of the same. We don't need another figurehead for all the usual Republican special interests. Let's not be fooled again.

When this race started, Arnold Schwarzenegger was an unknown quantity. And a week before the election there is still far too much we don't know about him.

If, as he says, he is going to balance the budget but raise no taxes, shouldn't he have to tell us -- before the election, not after -- precisely what vital programs and services he proposes to cut to make that happen -- and precisely who is going to feel the pain of those cuts?

Arnold Schwarzenegger has spent millions of dollars crafting and selling a political persona that is completely contradicted by reality:


He promised to take no special interest money, but then turned around and raised millions from special interests for his campaign.
He painted himself as an outsider, but then surrounded himself with Pete Wilson operatives and a Who's Who of GOP insiders.
He went on Oprah to appeal to women, but didn't include a single woman on his team of economic advisors. In a state where there are tens of thousands of women in positions of power, including both U.S. Senators, there was not even one woman who he thought worthy of adding to the mix?

A vote for the recall is a vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger. We must not vote for a fantasy leader and end up with a nightmare: a Bush Republican who thinks the answer to all of California's problems can be found in making life even easier for businesses and giant corporations.

these past two days have been about escape.

and breathing.

relief that architecture project the first is over and i can finally have a weekend to just chill (first one all semester!) inspired by progress of concert (everything is coming together)... until this morning, that is. too much drama and heartache and it's all because of... yes, you know the magic word... money.

by the way, latest polls say proposition 54 will pass.

if it passes i'm moving to the bottom of the sea, living in a submarine with turtles.

to understand the radiohead concert experience, imagine a company of dancing imps, a freight train with wings careening off a cliff, apple juice on hot nights, and indiana jones pausing for his breath as he dares to push open the lost ark.

thank you thank you thank you

it was a splendid experience beyond the most senseless imagery that i could ever imagine.

i'm listening to michael franti sing "don't fear your father/because a father is just a boy without a friend/don't fear to walk slow/don't be a horse race/be a marathon/and don't fear the long road/because on the long road you got the time to sing a simple song" and my heart is erupting, my soul is swinging along my hair, and a living light is exploding out of my spine.

why michael franti still isn't recognized as one of the soulful musical legends of our times is sadly beyond me...

"you can bomb the world to pieces but you can't bomb the world to peace."

for the dreamers and daily strugglers, please peep his cd and blare it loud wherever you may roam til your speakers blow out but never your beautiful words, your voice will never run low.

fritz and lucy are swiss children who eat gelato ice-cream every day. their father is a german nazi officer who had a forbidden love affair with an american woman and desperately fled to switzerland (what makes a good love story is the degree of desperation.) they hid well but one unfortunate foolhardy mistake led to their apprehension and inevitable execution. fritz and lucy grew up alone, except for the quiet friendship of their ice-cream desserts. while fritz dreams of owning a hat store (hats remind him of gelato ice cream), lucy is haunted by the ghost of her grandmother, a cranky peg-legged woman who was once hitler's girlfriend (hitler has a thing for stumps.)

i don't know why but i'm unable to properly channel my creativity into my life right now. i feel like a ghost, ungrounded from my body but bairly hanging on by the strands of my hair. i'm too old to wish for fairy godmothers.

another political post (third in a day!):

damn, i've been a howard dean (progressive democratic candidate for president) supporter these past few weeks but today i discover the potential coolness of retired four star general, former supreme comander of nato, wesley clark...
- vehimently against the patriot's act
- firmly pro-choice, pro-affirmative action
- anti-war

yes. the same general my dad loved a decade ago during the gulf war just might be an alright guy. i think this cat's got potential. let's hope he turns out to be the real deal.

this is a desperate must-read, from michael moore himself (written on september 15):

"
1. GEORGE AND LAURA ON 9/11 -- A BARREL OF LAUGHS!

The following is an interview with the First Couple from the current issue of one of my favorite magazines, Ladies Home Journal (Oct. '03). They are asked about what September 11, 2001, was like for them personally, and, although over 3,000 people had just perished, George W. was able to find some humor by the end of that day:

Peggy Noonan (the interviewer): You were separated on September 11th. What was it like when you saw each other again?

Laura Bush: Well, we just hugged. I think there was a certain amount of security in being with each other than being apart.

George W. Bush: But the day ended on a relatively humorous note. The agents said, "you'll be sleeping downstairs. Washington's still a dangerous place." And I said no, I can't sleep down there, the bed didn't look comfortable. I was really tired, Laura was tired, we like our own bed. We like our own routine. You know, kind of a nester. I knew I had to deal with the issue the next day and provide strength and comfort to the country, and so I needed rest in order to be mentally prepared. So I told the agent we're going upstairs, and he reluctantly said okay. Laura wears contacts, and she was sound asleep. Barney was there. And the agent comes running up and says, "We're under attack. We need you downstairs," and so there we go. I'm in my running shorts and my T-shirt, and I'm barefooted. Got the dog in one hand, Laura had a cat, I'm holding Laura --

Laura Bush: I don't have my contacts in , and I'm in my fuzzy house slippers --

George W. Bush: And this guy's out of breath, and we're heading straight down to the basement because there's an incoming unidentified airplane, which is coming toward the White House. Then the guy says it's a friendly airplane. And we hustle all the way back up stairs and go to bed.

Mrs. Bush: [LAUGHS] And we just lay there thinking about the way we must have looked.

Peggy Noonan (interviewer): So the day starts in tragedy and ends in Marx Brothers.

George W. Bush: THAT'S RIGHT-- WE GOT A LAUGH OUT OF IT!

(end)

Although America had just suffered the worst attack ever on our own soil, somehow this man was able to end his day on a funny note. I wonder how many of the 3,000 families who lost someone earlier that day had a funny ending before they went to sleep? Please read the above exchange aloud to anyone who will listen. It speaks volumes.

2. WE HAVE JUST WRECKED OUR KIDS' FUTURE.

The first paragraph in yesterday's New York Times story on how Bush has taken a record surplus and demolished it into a record deficit was one of the best lead paragraphs I have ever read in a newspaper article.

Here's how it went:

"When President Bush informed the nation last Sunday night that remaining in Iraq next year will cost another $87 billion, many of those who will actually pay that bill were unable to watch. They had already been put to bed by their parents."

Bingo. Gee, I hope the kids thank us some day!

Here's the next paragraph (my emphasis added):

"Administration officials acknowledged the next day that every dollar of that cost will be BORROWED, a loan that economists say will be repaid by the NEXT generation of taxpayers AND THE GENERATION AFTER THAT. The $166 BILLION cost of the work SO FAR in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has stunned many in Washington, will be added to what was already the largest budget deficit the nation has ever known."

Every conservative friend of yours should weep when they read that, and then you should hug them and tell them that it'll be okay, once we all do what we need to do.

3. WHAT WOULD $87 BILLION BUY?

If you can't get through this list without wanting to throw up, I'll understand. But pass it around anyway. This is the nail in the Iraq War's coffin for any sane, thinking individual, regardless of their political stripe (thanks to TomPaine.com and the Center for American Progress)...

To get some perspective, here are some real-life comparisons about what $87 billion means:

$87 Billion Is More Than The Combined Total Of All State Budget Deficits In The United States.

The Bush administration proposed absolutely zero funds to help states deal with these deficits, despite the fact that their tax cuts drove down state revenues. [Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities]

$87 Billion Is Enough To Pay The 3.3 Million People Who Have Lost Jobs Under George W. Bush $26,363 Each!

The unemployment benefits extension passed by Congress at the beginning of this year provides zero benefits to "workers who exhausted their regular, state unemployment benefits and cannot find work." All told, two-thirds of unemployed workers have exhausted their benefits. [Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities]

$87 Billion Is More Than DOUBLE The Total Amount The Government Spends On Homeland Security.

The U.S. spends about $36 billion on homeland security. Yet, Sen. Warren Rudman (R-N.H.) wrote "America will fall approximately $98.4 billion short of meeting critical emergency responder needs" for homeland security without a funding increase. [Source: Council on Foreign Relations]

$87 Billion Is 87 Times The Amount The Federal Government Spends On After School Programs.

George W. Bush proposed a budget that reduces the $1 billion for after-school programs to $600 million -- cutting off about 475,000 children from the program. [Source: The Republican-dominated House Appropriations Committee]

$87 Billion Is More Than 10 Times What The Government Spends On All Environmental Protection.

The Bush administration requested just $7.6 billion for the entire Environmental Protection Agency. This included a 32 percent cut to water quality grants, a 6 percent reduction in enforcement staff, and a 50 percent cut to land acquisition and conservation. [Source: Natural Resources Defense Council]

There you go. In black and white. A few million of you will receive this letter. Please share the above with at least a half-dozen people today and tomorrow. I, like you, do not want to see another approval rating over 50%."

an inspiring e-mail from peter gee. i feel like i'm in the fight club.

"The election is STILL ON for October 7th.

For at least the next seven days, the election is still on! Although the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals voted today to postpone the election, the decision does not take effect for seven days (September 22nd). The pro-recall parties have said they will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and we will have to wait to see whether the Supreme Court decides to get involved before we know whether the election has really been postponed.

Given the uncertainty in this situation, we must not relax our efforts to educate and mobilize voters across the state. If the Supreme Court decides to allow the election to proceed, we will only have two weeks to get our voters to the polls, and we must build on the momentum of the past few weeks. So we must continue � and even intensify � our efforts to Defeat 54! Now, more than ever, we still need your energy, your time, and your financial support.

Victory is in sight.
This October 7th, Vote NO on Proposition 54."

one of those nights where you grow red like sunsets. one of those nights where we all dance like lunatics and if you're not dancing you must be the crazy one. i thank my blog for any poetic imagery i can come up with in a freestyle. jimmy's got mad verbal hops, it's unstoppable. wonderbar for tan for freestyling too. tan has hair that dares to box with heaven. our philosophies are diamonds, i want to enclose them into an earing and carry them close to my ear wherever i go. tonight we destress and realize how blessed we are. incredible friends. congratulations to scott for becoming a palindrome.

creative focus has been all over: on architecture, on concert organizing, on poetry, on personal writing, on moviemaking, on poster designing... i'm excited about a lot of projects that i'm working on, but i'd rather not talk about them. rather show, not tell. if you see cool stuff from me, great. if you don't, you will soon.

godbless the skyful eyes of her star-by-star smile. a make-belief miracle, fireflies in a bottle, ultralight, and giver of bread. yes, she, she who can make honey dance out of the tea cup. when i hold her hand i know the sun must be jealous. oh, she's beautiful, but she's a PILL.



on an unrelated note, i'd like to sing all my melancholy out, pour it all into a jar, and toss it into the ocean for some lonely fisherman to find. be forewarned, i don't sing like a singer, but like a poet who patches a broken voice with bandaids of words.

"i get so excited everytime a new radiohead album comes out because i KNOW i would be able to write non-stop for the next two months!" - saul williams, on his favorite music.

a lesson reminded after hanging with saul: you will find your voice when you embrace the unknown. make it a daily practice to leave your comfort zone. discover the blank page and fil it. if you're not careful, you'll end up where you're heading.

sometimes we have to live poems first.

you�d tell me dance like an imp with an idiotique grin, and perhaps an oversized trucker hat. to throw dictionaries against walls and watch vowels summersault across words to become "aaaaaaaahs" or "aiiiiiaaaaiiiis." to yell, in song or gregorian chant. to rummage through old photographs and make fun of old hairstyles. and once sufficient "donutizing" has taken place, discover the state of being "cheered up," like someone discovering the smell of raspberries and mint leaves.

you are indomitable and young.

don't pull a bruce and cry until your hair turns white.

i wasn't invited to return to theatre rice this semester.

i've been acting like a fool for years but it is only now that i really feel like one.

sad. very sad.

i am so overwhelmed with studio and concert organizing. studio is horribly painful, even though i do enjoy the company there (while not bossed around.) i've been having a series of political chats with several people recently. jimmy proposes that children's books might be a small answer to social ills (get em early) jade (not theatre rice jade, a studio jade) laments how europeans make fun of her for having bush as a president, and tallulah and i extol prof. roy and how much of a good mindfuck she is. sorry, that was sort of crude.

a note to the theatre ricers:

i've received a surprising number of responses about my earlier message and i feel bad because i haven't had time to reply to all of them yet. there is a prevailing misunderstanding in the message i wrote: i didn't write my e-mail in hopes of getting a recount. i didn't write my e-mail to "win supporters" of my point of view. i didn't write it to make people feel bad about the way they vote.

i wrote it because i wanted to call into consciousness how things are now in theatre rice.

here is an excerpt of an e-mail (a history thing) that i sent to one of my friends, in response to her asking me what i thought about chris chen's plays as well as the dramatic skits we've done in the past.

"the dramatic skits we had were very daring and beautiful things, but they all came into being because some members were frustrated with comedy troupe and called for something else (back then termed as "tragedy troupe.") the semesters we put dramatic skits up were only a few years ago but came during a time when theatre rice had NO writers and NO real play submissions to choose from. for two semesters (or was it three, i can't remember?), the only play submission that we had was the street fighter play. that was a time when most of our first generation, older members left. we had a lot of young talent with no strong creative voices yet. our only outlet was the comedy troupe. because of that, we created a mid-semester show that was solely comedy. this mid-semester show (spring 2001) made theatre rice mainstream on campus, we had our first sell-out show, and we saw our first "line that stretches all around dwinelle" later on that semester. the audience loved the comedy. it IS a beautiful thing that i would never want to severe from theatre rice.
but understand that the mid-semester show first came into being during a time when we had no absolutely NO play submissions. we live in a different time now, where we are suddenly overloaded with submissions (a result of our
sudden popularity as well as writer's block.) for every chris chen play that goes up, there are a lot more that actually don't. each play is rejected for a different reason. some are rejected because of length, some because of subject matter (there are two plays in the recent past that weren't able to be put up because they were about LGBT issues and our committee felt that theatre rice wouldn't be able to address those issues honestly... even though the written plays were able to beautifully.) but quite honestly, a lot of good plays are dropped because we don't have room for them. i'm not saying that we should put all these plays in. i just want ourselves to realize that we get more and more quality submissions every semester and unfortunately, we have to drop more and more quality submissions every semester."

i'm not calling for instutionalized forced changes. that would be unnatural. i'm calling for consciousness, at the very least. i want us to be aware that the structure of "comedy mid-sem show" and "mixed assortment of everything showcase" was created during a different time of period of theatre rice. i will stand by all decisions theatre rice makes, but i will question it too. i'm not saying that we don't have the guts to change. i'm just saying, when the time comes...

are we ready or not!

we'll move on because we're always moving, where we'll move to is all up to you.

yes, i should learn to not be annoyed with the inconsistencies of some of my friends. some people you can depend on, and some people you can't. lessons you learn in the playground but you forget over and over again.

my truly sincere condolences to a friend who lost his mother's father today.

i lost my mother's father a year and a half ago. my grandfather died alone (even with generations of children,) of a broken heart. i can only offer this advice (born from regret) to those who still have the chance: get to know your grandparents, your parents, you uncles, aunts, cousins, siblings, get to know your own. forgive our relatives before they become our ancestors.

once through so many semesters of theatre rice, it's hard to remember or recognize what theatre rice is anymore.

without a doubt, we, the members of past and present, are theatre rice. we is the body, constantly moving, our artistic direction is always on the grow. we dare to collaborate for change, "to meet, develop, and perform showcases that reflect a modern Asian-American theatre."

and we make choices, some are radical, some are conservative, but all relentlessly shape the direction theatre rice goes in. our committee, representatives elected by the theatre rice constituency of the precious semester, is ultimately responsible for these choices.

last night, our committee chose to keep our mid-semester show to the dual combination of a comedy troupe and improv, and to not allow a play to appear in addition to it. i do not argue with this decision. but i am frightened by it.

before i talk my fears, i would like to say first and foremost that i do agree that certain submissions must meet certain levels of quality before gaining acceptance into our shows. the debate about the quality of this piece may be limitless but is of not much concern to what i want to bring up (but on a side-note: "regret," "flight of the penguins," and "story time with joyce" all needed to be developed but were nonetheless admitted into their respective showcases.)

this piece didn't lose because the committee had serious issues with the quality of the piece (some really did, some really didn't, but to each their own.)

the reason why the piece didn't get in is much more simple and, to me, much more frightening: the committee didn't want to put a highly political and serious play alongside comedy troupe and improv. the juxtaposition of seriousness and comedy would apparently be too strange for our audience.

i go into a few questions to address this:
- doesn't this thought process imply that comedy troupe is not capable of serious issues in their skits, that a skit can not be of comedy but still be of quality?
- is it resourceful to have a short mid-semester show (which will run for three days) while trying to cram in all of our submissions into our showcase (which will run for two days)?
- doesn't all comedy in our mid-semester show create the expectation for more shows like those - an expectation that may be responsible for an audience backlash in the face of anything non-comedy? isn't theatre rice stereotyped to being simply funny? that may not be a bad thing, but isn't that against our purpose of being? is asian american theatre only made of comedy? are our stories only told through caricatures, exaggerations, and satires?

i'm afraid that we, the committee, might not be able to step up to change when change calls. this is a beautiful time to be in theatre rice. it's an incredibly creative time marked by a dramatic rise of the number of creative projects individual members are pushing forth on their own. our submissions are going to grow and more and more. we are faced with the possibilty of evolving with this growth naturally, or restrict it to what we know and what we think can do (opposed to what we really can do.)

no matter how sensational the privilege of our education promises, it promises nothing in the realm of theatre, film, and performing arts for not only asian americans, but all ethnic groups. for a tremendous amount of people, theatre rice is the sole venue for artists to realize their dreams. dreams that we, as committee members, must always respect and consider, which is why we must always real all submissions that we receive (i'm afraid that not all of us actually read the mid-semester submission.) when we don't read our submissions, we not only wrong the artists who submit, we also wrong the theatre rice who chose us as representatives and weavers of our growing artistic thread.

i do not share because i want us to re-consider last night's decision. i share this because i am disheartened and truly worried. i share this because i trust theatre rice, who has always been of the open nature, to always share and listen with our own. this is not an attack on anyone but simply a loved criticism. please, do not be offended.

i would like to end this with words from the author of the mid-semester show submission. we typically always read out loud every submission author's "reasons why..." before deciding on their vote, but we failed to do so at last night meeting. here is a part of it.

"explain why you think this should be a theatre rice production"

"because theatre rice all too often dwells on abstract asian american identity politics when there are urgent issues concerning real Asian Americans in the present.
because no one knows about it.
because NOW is always the time that theatre rice is ready to tackle ANY issue affecting Asian Americans.
because Theatre Rice needs to be respected as a THEATRE group and needs to break away from it�s popular perception as a comedy group.
because the mid semester show sets the tone on how Theatre Rice is viewed in the public eye, especially since it�s free.
because the term �Asian American� is a political term.
because art is about revision.
because an art piece is never ever finished."

we are never finished. i understand that theatre rice is never anything concrete, never like a bird but rather like its shadow, always a blur, a changing beauty, never to be grasped or held down. this is the beginning of a new year. let's see what fire and freshness awaits us all.

ps: the fact of the matter is: i'm fucking pissed and i'll use all my pretty bird, blur, beauty metaphors to express it, thank you very much.

regret is a broken guitar, and when you shake it upside down, unfinished songs rain gently out, drifting slowly, over and over, side to side, before becoming nothing but soft stains on the ground. a soldier on a battlefield somewhere puts his gun down, closes his eyes, and dreams of white lilies. somewhere else, in calcutta, a man sighs at how in america, the richest country in the world, citizenship still does not guarantee home-owning as a right (not a privilege.) in iraq, a man offers this advice to a lightless notheast america: "don't trust the americans to fix your electricity grid, because they will most certainly short circuit and, worst of all, they will blame someone else for it." in berkeley, in one day, i spend 60 dollars on books, 7 dollars on pho, 14 dollars on new speakers, and only 1 dollar on the old woman on the street with no where to sleep. mars is at the closest its ever been to earth in forever and the berkeley sky is red with clouds. my apartment is full of (whether we realize it or not) some of the most educated people in the world, but there is still so much that we don't know: 1 of us can't fry an egg over-easy, 2 of us has never heard of proposition 54, 2 of us can't clean the bathroom when we're supposed to, 1 one of us does not know what a clit-stimulator is, 3 of us can't write and sing a song for someone, and none of us can fix our own ride. but let's focus on what we do know: how to blog. life is full of close-escapes, this isn't one of them, whether we're escaping or we're trapped is only a matter of perspective. this is really a cliche but you are loved.

a teacher's guide on bowlingforcolumbine.com is a wonderful read. go through the "library," it has a small fortune of information. are online colleges really the future?

ps: take the skinheads bowling, take them bowling.

my schedule is in shambles, sorta. re-arranging everything around, i regret dropping architecture 100b actually, it sounds like magic but i'm afraid that i won't be able to honestly uphold my other commitments this semester if i undergo such a passion-taxing (although sometimes passion-fueling) class. it's a big gamble and i don't have the crazy eights for it. first impressions of my other classes:

third world cinema: eye-opening for a first lecture. exploration of the "voiceless" (a tired term but that resonates painfully true in the movies of this class.) the professor is surprisingly young, says "yalls" a lot, and is an anti-establishment "hegemony" fanatic. very fuck hollywood (and not in the superficial "the matrix" way.)
intro to photography: guilty pleasure. i should have gone to my computer 3d modeling class (less fun, but more crucial, especially in this revolutionary time when 3d technology and the internet will have unimaginable effects on the environment, or on our perception of the environment, real or otherwise.) sounds cool, but a hobby's a hobby, and my unit delegation is spare. gonna drop it.
urbanization of developing countries: i feel like crying in lecture. incredibly moving and intelligent. the professor drops all sorts of knowledge from all sorts of spectrums. the reading is immense but it's the stuff that i read for fun anyways. beautiful. i pray that i get past the waitlist.
visual autobiography: never trust a class that has comic sans mas as its official syllabus font. full of fluffy art and snobby hipsters: i spot 4 black rimmed weezer glasses, 5 mop tops (including me, i suppose), and 6 kids adorned in bright colored ironic t-shirts. my politeness made me stay (it will be the death of me) but now i will drop it.
poetry for the people: a whole lot of dirty poets. my kind of people.

i will now shop around for 2 new classes... potentially a digital film editing class (called the "digital video: architecture of time"... the words "video" and "architecture" in the same course title, is this fate, my love?), a landscape drawing class (because my sketch drawings are messy like david choe, but the beauty through ugliness thing ain't coming through, it's just ugly), or that 3d modeling class.

me talking about all my new classes and shit, did i just bore you, or what?

it's that time of month again when we re-evaluate dreams. i felt like a shadow yesterday, like i had forgotten how to love. maybe it's because i had the flu, but let's not point fingers at anyone. this a reconstruction period. i'm not where i want to be yet. i'm almost there though. so close. this semester will be a semester of preparation. i need to get ready. something is coming.

i'm stuck in traffic today. for a butt long time. so i go through my cd case, pull out songs, and assemble a mixtape. err, mix-cd (i christen it "what's that in your cd case? vol I") i burn it at this hour because i am currently unable to sleep (i will regret my postponment of sleep tomorrow morning.)

james brown - superbad
rjd2 - bus stop bitties
captain funkaho - my 2600
lovage - stroker ace
joyo velarde - people like me
dj shadow and latyrx - storm warning
blackalicious - sky is falling
jorge ben - comanche
atmosphere - god's bathroom floor
blk sonshine (ft. masauko chipembere) - building
talib kweli (ft. mos def) - joy
michael franti and spearhead - sometimes
typical cats - what you thought hops
binary star - slang blade
j-live - yes
cunninlynguists - linguistics
latyrx - lady don't tek no
cody chesnutt - look good in leather

ahh, funkay... getchoo soul on, buh, buh.

i was supposed to write poems today. i was supposed to call contacts for the concert/poetry event today. i was supposed to wash the dog today. i was supposed to watch "family guy" with jeremy today. i was supposed to, i was supposed to, i was supposed to, blah, blah, blah.

"wonder boys" beautiful dope movie (and witty, don't you love witty things?) essential watching for anyone who wants to be a writer. "adaptation" too.

i also picked up a gilberto gil/jorge ben cd today. awesome listen! straight up fun and funky all the way from brasil. great music to write to. that and peanut butter wolf's "jukebox 45" joint.

wow. i just bumrushed out a short film script. i think i did a decently dope job, if i may be so cocky, not too bad for a first draft. i still think i could push it even further. i'm adapting one of the most beautiful short stories i've ever read into a potential short film. a love story that deals with the imaginary and the "what ifs" we always get hung up on.

quick life updates:

- home is full of good food. jeremy's hair is crazy long. mom is smiling. dad wears a wig to a barmitzvah. i am blackmailed into wearing a tuxedo. we have a dog named rufio ("small legs, BIG DONG!" says my brother.)
- "regret" will be screened (so far) at the san diego asian film festival and the san francisco korean media arts film festival. we never knew that we would get this far with a project that we almost gave up on (the moral: never give up on your shit, no matter how ugly it looks.) extremely exciting.
- theatre rice is tight, jason and i anticipate some good designing fun. i want to get out of acting, it's just not my thing right now.
- my thing right now: poetry. i will be a student teacher poet for june jordan's poetry 4 the people class. how frigging dope is that!
- my other thing: fuck crecno. trying to organize a concert/poetry to raise awareness about prop 54.
- missing moon: children book will be illustrated by jean, who can make magic happen with the pen. it's going to be unbelievable.
- architecture: i exploded, wanted to give up, sacrificed sleep, cash, and parties, posted sad aim away messages (chris chen: "dude. what's with the 'fuck everything' away messages?"), but still had some serious fun along the whole damn way. rockin' the creativity until i cry...
- school: hey, i dropped cognitive science. alright!
- books: reading the howard zinn reader and "almost transparent blue" by ryu murakami. insane shit.
- politics: can you say "howard dean in 2004?"
- food: had thit kho for dinner.
- rsf: i WILL work out more.
- room: a total mess.
- sara: beautiful.

please, don't let me be a dreamer, let me be a lifer. dreams are kisses we chase, born with a sweet-smell in the morning but soon to grow ancient (maybe it's too late, our dreams have gone to hide beneath the falling pink sky.) a life is the fight that's worth the sorrow. too many people are afraid of the sorrow. let's hold each other accountable. if you catch me dreaming but not doing i'll blush red like a tomato, not knowing how to face you after writing such a brutal blog entry.

september is on its way.

one day, i would like to wake up like a gust of wind, overflowing with mapel leaves and freshness. i would like to dare people to tattoo poems all over my skin (who has the courage to pronounce something permanent?) i would like to sing a song to someone as i wash their hair. i would like to fill a hollow space in my palm with sunflower seeds. i would like to fight for my life, we are trapped in a corner, there is no water and food left, and the sun is going down and "they only come out at night." i would like to dance with you on the thin edge between days and draw it out for as long as possible.

there i go dreaming again.

"uh... actually, you guys go ahead, i, um, forgot to do something," says a sly bernard suddenly after insisting on accompanying sara and me on a meteor catching adventure.

it's an unfortunate potential tragedy that i've discovered the beauty of sputnik 7 right smack in the middle of the brouharhar of my architecture project and its relentlessly encroaching deadline.

have you witnessed thee mad march of the white stripes' "seven nation army"? the rebellious robotron of quannum's "i changed my mind"? the funky impostories of fatlips' "what's up, fatlip" (by spike jonze, no less)? all dope music videos, all on sputnik (home of some real amazing short films too, discovering them is like tasting necterines for the first time, and the beach air is in your hair, and a little dog scoots by on stumpy legs without knees.)

even though i come home from architecture studios at 4:30 in the morning (thank you, sara, for driving me), i find myself unable to sleep at night, no matter how tired i am. these times, with gentle street cleaning machines buzzing in the distance, give me the opportunity (or curse) to think in my room. lately, i've been feeling moody and disheartened because of the desperate political and social landscapes we live in, here in america. it's a terribly tragic time. while the fall of saddam's regime is a relief to the whole world, the war on iraq is a living breathing testament to how our government manipulated us through lies and forged evidence, while costing us (and still costing us) a billion dollars a week to maintain. our economy is bankrupt, (we've lost millions of jobs in the past 3 years.) we're also living under the patriot's act, which grants the goverment's total access to all information, a nightmare straight out of orwell's 1984.

yes, the days are depressing.

but i am cheered.

i am cheered because of the power of blog (not a joke.) blogs are a revolution of free world-wide information for all. there are lot of beautiful and very well-informed blogs out there that are a wealth of information to read, such as the blogs of writer danny goldberg and the "the right christians". insane reads. i'm lost in these and their links for hours sometimes.

i am cheered because of the grass-roots activitsts. there's an incendiary passion at activists meetings (inspiring, until a heated debate.) i am trying to get more involved in activism this semester more so than ever. some amazingly creative and talented kids and i are all trying to destroy creno, one of the most fucked up and dangerous (and unfortunately little known) initiatives to come to california.

i am cheered by do it yourself media. i am empowered to the fullest effect in film (thank you andinh) and poetry (thank you jimmy.) the media is a language that we've lost but must now regain, train, and sing our hearts out with.

i am cheered by my loved ones, loved ones of crab and beer, thai temples brunches, long rides to los angeles and back, drunken freestyles, late night confessions at sun hong kong, songs at cafe jun, "24" marathons, birthday kidnappings, architecture all-nighters, sproul sunbathing, walking the dog, rice pinkies, fried chicken, and waffles, and getting lost on freeways after a late night movie.

i am cheered by jimmy and ed's birthdays.

and now, i will be cheered by sleep.

cheers.

i'm feeling giddy.

today in lecture i realize that i want to die in a village where you can tell what season it is by listening to the songs the villagers sing. school children will sing songs of spring in the morning as i leave home for work and that night as i return on a beaten path, i will hear an old guitarist cry like winter soft rain. maybe that place is somewhere in vietnam, or the southern coast of france, or somewhere that i don't even dare to imagine, somewhere out there in the deep blue wide, a place of footprints in the sands, burnt bread in the air, and the moon dancing on our roofs.

my last words would be "everything in its right place," but quoting radiohead would be corny, especially such words as those.

"Dear Ann:

This really happened in a town near mine and never fails to bring me a chuckle. A woman frantically rushed into an emergency room with one palm pressed against the back of her head. She claimed she had been shot from behind while driving her car and that she had driven to the hospital with one hand while using the other to keep her brains from spilling out. The emergency team reacted quickly, knowing how precious each bit of brain tissue was to the woman's functioning in the future. Soon enough, however, they were able to piece together what had actually happened. The woman had been to the supermarket and placed her groceries in the back seat of her car, which was very hot from sitting in the sun. As she was driving home, a bullet apparently fired from at least a half-mile away passed through the glass in her back window and had just enough velocity to enter the scalp at the back of her skull. The "brains" that the woman thought she was holding in was actually just a mixture of blood and cerebrospinal fluid!"

from ann landers' parallel universe

"just in case there's any misunderstanding, you will be living in studio for the next ten days. you can only go home to eat and sleep."

"what about shower?"

"not even that."

our architecture teacher warning us on the gloom and doom of the final days of architecture.

ps: need another reason to no vote for george w. bush in 2004? how about one thousand more?

read znet to learn about why 11 million children die each year.

micheal moore's website is a very rousing read. if you haven't seen "bowling for columbine" yet, i implore - i say, implore - you to watch it.

she comes to america, america the bright, america the light
she comes to america the same reason a moth comes to a lightbulb
she comes to become fire
to become fire, as in bright, as in fiery, as incendiary as your imagination
she comes to become fire
but instead
she's fired upon
a ghost under the shells of a gun

cau tran
mother of two
you didn't expect this, didn't you?

you dial 911
but when did 911 stop meaning a call for help
and start meaning a call for guns
9 is the trigger
1 is the bullet
1 is the last

thanks to the boys in blue
with the white stars
and now red stains too

when a mother dies, not just a light goes out, a darkness goes in
a darkness goes into not only the home that she leaves behind
but into the hearts of two children alone

(i write as i ride a bus at 2 am, this poem is unfinished, like most poems and, sad to say, most lives too.)

www.tranmemorial.com

in case you don't know, creno (aka classification of race, ethnicity and national origin initiative) is a resolution proposed by ward connerly that would make the collection of any data on racial and ethnic information illegal for the university of california and other state government agencies. creno dreams of creating a race-blind society by keeping information, demographics, and statistics of ethnicity and race out of govermental reach.

this is an illegalization of information.

to ignore facts does not change them. to allow race to be seen but never noted, traced, or tracked, is unimaginably dangerous.

the anti-discrimination movement would be potentially destroyed. we won't be able to note race and ethnicity-based hate crimes, cases of racial profiling, work-place based discrimination, and racism in the housing market.

the chiasm in educational opportunities between racial groups could be even further widened. demographics show that african-american and latino students have less access to ap opportunities, trained teachers, and attend schools with fewer financial resouces. without this information, how can we make change?

there are drastic differences in the type of care, the quality of care, and the availability of health care between whites and racial and ethnic minorities (even when they have comparable medical issurance.) disease patterns also differ between ethnic groups (for example: vietnamese women have the highest invasive cervical cancer incidence rates of all women, and latino women rank second highest.) medical and social research would be hurt dramatically.

to have justice, we have to be able to identify injustice, its causes, and its effects. creno won't make racism or discrimination dissapear.

please, say no to creno.

and then please, do whatever you can to stop this from happening. you know better than i what it is that you can secretly accomplish.

so jimmy and i get together for dinner and spontaneous poetry games. the game are fast and free and fun. prompt one is to study a loved one's face. prompt two is to dream "if poetry was easy money."

i.

my brother's face is a study in winter
my brother's face takes the shape of a round cut watermelon
a radiant red on his cheeks (even when sober) with cool secrets inside
the red roundness of his face is a long story of how he bled to be here
his shaggy hair uncurls the length of his soul, wild, untamed, fearless...
he dreams of having a mullet
there's an assholes who lives in his eyes, who laughs with resonance (more likely at you than with you)
his smile is cocky
but the smile saves my life so it has every right to be so

watermelons are perfect for the summer, but who needs watermelons in the winter?

tonight, his face dreams to be fire but is lit only by the static of a television set
his eyes are dim, like a well in the woods, you look down into it and nothing seems to look back
he hugs with half a hug, hides his hair in beanies, and maddogs the two blonde kids down the street
he's not even here
he's so absent
he could stand against the sky and even the wind would pass him by

my brother
lost boy
saves my life
i can't forget to save his

ii.

if poetry was easy money
i'd hussle a haiku
lie with a limmerick
and push the pen to pick a pocket
a poet is a thief of words
words like
cheddar
bling
lincolns
scrooge mcducks

if poetry was easy money
pablo neruda would live in a mansion in the bermuda
robert frost would pave the road less traveled by in gold
and beau sia would say "see ya" to his civic and opt for that bigass hummer to paint in

if poetry was easy money
the haas school of business would lose its house to the creative writing department
bill gates would be kicked out of his own front gates
and weekly open mics would be held at the white house

if poetry was easy money
war would be fought in poetry slams
people everywhere would be able to read
and poets would never have to worry about the world their kids would grow up in

if poetry was easy money
we'd all be poets and maybe, just maybe,
we'd all start living in the metaphors we dream of

the absurdity of architecture explodes to its highest height today in lecture as lecturers, families of lecturers, and a student dive into a "i'm deeper than thou" debate only to be displaced by the foxtrot of a big black dog onto the stage (where, i assume, he hollered hello to the lecturer's shoes.) the final project is a bittersweet excitement for me. i'm not sleeping at all, ever. i don't think very many people understand how it's like to be an architect major on campus. when i reveal to people about my major, i usually get a sympathetic look in return with a "man, that must be tough" glimmer in their eyes. i'd hate for people to feel sorry for me so i assure to them (no matter how i feel) that it's absolute fun, and anything that they may have heard is probably most likely grossely exaggerated. not true. architecture is a motherf*cking pain. but... pain ain't nothing but change. i'm changing like no other, learning incredibly so much, and growing creatively and intellectually and emotionally. people sometimes ask me where i get all my energy from... it's simple. you go and you go and you go until you burn out, and then you rest, and then you go again. over and over. appreciate your breaths, find what drives you, and challenge your breaking point. when i used to race the 3-mile back in high school, i'd blow-out at the last leg of the race and speed and speed and speed, until i would suddenly collapse out of total utter exhaustion. let's hope i collapse somewhere after the finish line.

don't just raise our glasses, break our damn glasses! shatter the shots into a thousand spilling dreams, over and over, a thousand times over, until we're neck deep in a strange wash of shards of glass and red wine, and then let's go swimming, don't be afraid of getting cut, no one sees the blood in the red of the wine

goodbye duy, thanks for passing on the torch. a loudmouth loves other loudmouths over thai food and wine.

let the saxophone burn and sing like the sun, let the drums storm swiftly and call rain to come, let the guitar bend light and move shadows to run, 'cause lordy, the blues got me down but this jazz sounds like fun

the kenny burrell quartet rips jazz to a room of hushed finger snaps while dennis kim hits the page with an anguish of cries and craze... these days are savored well.

"you can do it. be strong. you have to have the willpower and the determination. you have immense creativity, the greatest tragedy is that you don't apply it to its full potential."

"what a tragedy... can i go cry now?"

"don't cry... no use for self-pity. i'm not trying to make you feel bad. you have to be brave and relentless, crazy and breathless, you can't let your heart and your mind dull, you've just been to a dope magical spoken word jam, you have to grab every ounce of inspiration you've gained and apply it before it flies out, falls, whithers and dissapears. the secret is to go in eyes closed but heart open. no the secret is to believe in the you and the immense possibility of tomorrow that begins today. no, there is no secret, just do it."

andinh and i shared a long morning and then evening and then morning again of refreshing and refreshing and refreshing and refreshing radiohead's ticketpage in hopes of scoring some front row amphitheatre seats. the website releases tickets randomly throughout the day. no one knows when tickets are let out. you can only pray that you refresh the page during those itsy bitsy tiny moments tickets are free for everyone's grabbing.

if you're lucky enough to get to the tickets screen, there is one last obstacle to overcome. radiohead tricks you into thinking that there are no more tickets by taking you next to a sold out page. you have to manually write in the "View Basket" address into your web browser to view your (secret) basket full of tickets. then, and only then, can you buy the most sought out tickets of the radiohead's 2003 hail to the thief north american tour. one false move, such as hitting the back button, or refreshing by accident, or clicking on the buy button more than once, and you are thrown out, launched into the outside world of franctically hitting the "refresh" "refresh" "refresh!!" in dire hopes of being let back in.

guess who got in.

how people's opinions of me vary quite dramatically:

a kathy bach tells me, you make people dream

a jean guo tells me, when i think of bruce all i think of is pain! pain!!!!!!!!

i feel anxious about tomorrow's mad desperate dash to purchase two radiohead tickets. i've never wanted to go to a concert so badly until now. other artists who i dream of rocking to live: dj shadow and unkle, lovage, flaming lips, sonic youth, and typical cats. by-the-by, there is not one but two cheesecakes in the fridge... it's a beautiful time to have a good metabolism. i really want to watch the vietnam war documentary - hearts and minds - that i bought. soon, very soon. i might have to watch it by myself, most likely, the dvds that i own are not for all tastes.

i explored south of market yesterday. damn beautiful city, damn sad city. there's so much sadness in the streets. it's total bullshit how the city is trying to remarket the entire area as a trendy artsy fartsy bourgeois district. a brand new trendy alumminum lofts sits side-by-side a dusty collapsing overcrowded apartment building and guess who's moving out and who's moving in. the streets are filled with the lonely. ginsberg has always been right, there are the starving, the hysterical, the naked... but no one really notices anyone anymore.

anyways, i'm off to bed. to all you cats waking up early to buy radiohead tickets, good luck and see you in the front row.

today i find reaffirmations of architecture. my teacher is encouraging and pushes me incredibly. she makes me believe that mayhaps perhaps a future in architecture is not just an illusive dream. hope. she gives me hope. confirmations from the san diego asian film festival also graces me with a glowing hope in filmmaking. i am grateful to have such things: hope and dreams (cheesy, i know.) fast food nation keeps me in check (read it yall.) scrabble at night is fun but i regret cheating, even though it was just a joke (only nerds cheat at scrabble.) mike nguyen flakes on me but its ok, he's tired and he's still a good guy. sara is quite a sight on nights on dwight. i am burning dope cds for my brother, who just got a puppy by the name of rufio (rufioooooooooooooooooo), jimmy, do not worry, neither of us will ever burn out (we'll make sure of it), i am chilling at the kwon-espiritu apartment now, jamie and sara chat smack about architecture gsis on the couch while josh reads about bizarro (superman's weirdo twin) on the hardwood floor, it's a hot cali night and i wish i could visit prague tomorrow. happy birthday, alex shen, and have a good night.

"norwegian wood" will never sound the same again.

don't you love/hate that feeling?

when a song is forever connected with a memory or an imagination?

sorta like how whenever i hear "who let the dogs out?" i think of luca screaming "who let the dogs out?! woof! woof!"

this morning i stuffed my headphones full of sigur ros and i journeyed to point reyes. the beach is beautiful and windy and full of ghosts stardust dancing gently over the beach. this is a source of strangers, the beach and the sea who don't really know each other but hold hands anyway. there are so many beautiful secrets in point reyes, we have to film a movie here. we have to, we have to, we have to. there's no other way about it.

yesterday i secretly cried (well, no longer a secret now) while finishing murakami's norwegian wood. i'm reading fast food nation right now and i'm already on page 93. beautiful books. i cherish every idle moment i have with either reading or writing. i finished the first draft of a children's book last week, which i was 76% happy with, but draft two is full of potential (thank you, you all who encourage me.) children's book two is hidden in morcels all over my sketchbook. the play hesitates with her lines, i just need a moment to bumrush it all out. the poetry tries too hard, so i'm letting him play. but i really shouldn't talk about my writing...

yesterday was also beer and crabs aplenty.

yesterday is as sleepless as today and tomorrow.

did you catch the full moon rise this weekend?

i missed her too.

sky-gazing, like writing love-letters, has gone out of fashion.

mars will be in full bloom come august. this is not a metaphor but a fact. let us not forget to toast the red sky with our red wine and our bright red faces.

and i am moved by ishle's song "distant stars"

"we are like distant stars, we glimmer soflty, and we live on our dreams, our small dreams, and we dare to be beauty... to be beauty. we are like distant stars, we glimmer soflty, and we live on our dreams, our small dreams, and we dare to be beauty... to be beauty..."

to be an artist is to be lonely, it's inevitable. we are but skin and bones that will scar and break but please, if that means being alive, scar me, break me, how could i have it any other way?

a slight slight regret.

i was holding a copy of radiohead's now out of print "airbag/how am i driving" ep, a beautiful b-side collection of the magnificent ok computer cd, and i wussed out and decided not to buy it at the last minute right before paying for all my cds. what a nerd i am sometimes.

i scored some very beautiful music recently:

antonio carlos jobim - finest hour [we all know how gorgeous this is...]
awol one and daddy kev - slanguage [a jazzeeeey trip...]
cherrywine - bright black [ugh... a very big dissapointment]
christopher o'reily - true love waits [very damn nice]
cunninlynguists - will rap for food [sick]
dj cam - soulshine [pretty good... not very into it yet]
eels - daisies of the galaxy and more [you all know how i feel about the eels]
flaming lips - jesus egg [chaotic goodness]
madlib - shades of blue [gorgeous...]
medeski, martin & wood - last chance to dance trance (perhaps) [very damn good]
mc honky - i am the messiah [it's ok, fun stuff]
serge gainsbourg - comic strip [sleazy, so i like it.]
sleater-kinney - one beat [fresh]
solesides - greatest bumps [DOPE]
stan getz - mickey one [BEAUTIFUL]

i just hooked up onto soulseek. very fresh. i'm scoring a lot of cds online, which might make buying cds a luxury for me instead of a necessity. i just downloaded a ton of music that i've yet to listen (vince guaraldi's good man charlie brown, nutter 08's butter 08, doves' last broadcast, flaming lips' transmissions from the satellite heart, radiohead's my iron lung, a godspeed you black emperor cd, and james mason's rhythm of life!!!)

ok. this music thing has become a sort of obsession. i've found enough music to last me a lifetime. this is not part of a need to expland my record collection. it's part of a need to find good music. i want to discover beautiful music. the bells, the strings, the howls of desperation, funk songs no one ever grooves to anymore, silky voices of regret, songs of redemption, political prophecies, trumpets, songs that make you dance, songs that make you cry your heart out, songs full of metaphors no one understands, breakdown drum solos, old guitarists crying, and that last laugh at the very end of the track...

first star.

the first star that i see tonight is a girl in pink who crosses dwight avenue the same way comets cross milkyways: gently, softly, brightly.

what i miss: the sweet smell of thit kho in the kitchen. i can't cook the way my mom does. but why do i associate the kitchen with the mother? why don't i think about the way she pays the bills, takes care of my brother, does tae-bo, plays tennis, colors her hair, writers half-novels, paints on the computer, dreams of porshes, and sings when drunk. and where is my brother, trucker-hatted and baseball tee-ed, tonight? trucking his way through la? sleeping to surf at dawn? practicing the guitar in his bedroom?

hanging out with the lin siblings, ronnie and diana, makes me miss my family.

the eels makes me miss poetry.

second star.

the second star that i see tonight is a barrel of apples in the fillmore hallway. there's something magical about listening to music while chewing an apple. you eat something as something eats into you.

for dinner we had mexican food and talked about murdered ducklings and a hate for people who verbally approve of humor. you can blame andinh for the later. hater. actually, i joke. andinh is a sincere soullover.

the third star is being at home with the potential of tomorrow.

i am not at war. i am not bombed. i am not starving. i am not alone. i am not at a loss. i am not poor. i am not disgruntled. i am not without a friend. i am not in prison. i am not housebroken. i am not raped. i am not in the hospital. i am not so many things and i am thankful because what i am is something that i can still control.

watch yourself. more art is on the way. from me and from you.

let's promise ourselves a future that we've always dreamt of.

i'm lost in june jordan as i pass into my twenty-first year. a night of a "fuck you!" cake, a blow-up doll in bed, and a little too much indian tea.

thank you, my friends.

thank you for letting me live.

"sara and barry"

this is how we celebrate.

mustard chicken and pears in a pie. a roof with a red dress. an escape to a paranoid apocalypse. a loss for words on lost highways. ghosts of friends through paper heads. chocolate and ice-cream masquerading as cakes. a shuffle and deal of tarot cards. a drive along mulholland. a book in the bed.

a very happy birthday, sara kwon.

a very unhappy deathday, barry white.

a song: barry white's can't get enough of your love, babe