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.