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.