Risotto Explosion

2007-04-12T11:28:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, lightly sweetened oat bran flakes.

It rained very hard this morning and there were puddles all over Park Avenue. The women of investment banking teemed at the corners, afraid to slosh into the street. It was a scene reminiscent of nature footage of wildebeest preparing to ford crocodile infested waters. Or Frogger. In this context, I had a flash of nostalgia.

In 2nd grade, my teacher introduced our class to the wonders of plant vascular structure, capillary action and food coloring. We all had Tupperware vats of blue liquid that we stuck celery into. In our marbled composition notebooks, we jotted down our unfounded hypotheses about the fate of our celery. Peyton Eisenstein-Nichol confided in me that she though the celery would melt. She always was a stupid girl.

Of course, my bachelor’s degree now tells me that the blue coloration would climb up the celery’s xylems, progressively choking off the poor plant’s life as the hypertonic fluid drained its cells of precious turgor. At the time, some little shit dared to eat a piece of the blue celery. Alas, my 2nd grade self was a huge pussy—and everyone knew it.

I was reminiscing about this as I huddled among the stylish metaphorical wildebeest this morning, thinking how my pants were like that celery. Since the beginning of 2007, I’ve lost 3 inches off my waist, but I’ve yet to replace my work wardrobe. As a result, my pants are always sliding off my freshly crafted ass, making brushing contact with whatever was on the ground. The mucky rainwater would slowly ascend my leg via trouser solvating not food coloring, but dead rat proteins, taxi tread and possibly the residue of a used condom.

It is now 3 hours later. My pants are still wet and endearingly grayish. Rat blood and lube sure make great surfactant.

2007-03-14T11:18:00.001-04:00

Blogspot, EVERYONE IS GONE FOR SPRING BREAK.

As this blog is a comprehensive narrative of my life, it's safe to assume that a lack of entries denotes that absolutely nothing has happened in my life in the few three weeks. Bimbos die and VA hospitals go unmanaged in the world outside, but in contrast, early March has been a personal statis for which Tony Kushner's angels would have sautéed their own wings to effect upon a world of progress. Ahem.

Oh, but I am being facetious! I am, as always, chock-full o' anecdotes--mostly about the weekends. Turns out employment makes longform partying (spreading the joy out over the week: Tuesdays are the new Thursdays are the new Fridays) impossible, so fun becomes condensed into those magical hours between 5PM Friday (assuming BossBoss decides to keep Sabbath) and 7:15 Monday. A badger must rend many of tunnels to find his quarry, and the weekend is one’s bloody ground squirrel after days of digging through the mud of employment. It’s ancient wisdom. I know—for I am Chinese.

So: I will detail my last two Saturdays. Booze notwithstanding, there will be no themes overarching the two. Pay me and I might consider trying to divine meaning from my pathetic social life—much too Carrie Bradshaw otherwise.

Item One: March 3rd

If Tony Kushner’s aforementioned angel (let’s call her Emma Thompson) tried to stop time’s militant march towards certain catastrophe, failed, and ended up accelerating the flow of time in a given town, you’d have Hoboken. It celebrates St. Patrick’s Day 2 weeks in advance (a good holiday approximation of catastrophe). Our lovely neighbor-upon-Hudson becomes an ocean of wasted sluts dotted by policemen bobbing gently on its green waves. The whole event has the feel of a forceful rebuke, as if the masses are saying “Fuck you, Gregorian Calendar. We can celebrate green leprechaun beer whenever we want.”

That Saturday I went to a party hosted by my co-worker Michelle. By coincidence, it was also St. Patrick’s Day themed. Although I had my concerns that it would be one of those famed Ivy-League clusterfucks (Omg, you were on the Princeton squash team!), it turned out to be quite fun. I met some super friendly people, for example Michelle’s on again off again manjunk, Will. Will has an ultrasound stimulator on his hand. He claims it’s to encourage bone growth after some undoubtedly awesome accident he had—probably whilst working for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. This employment status makes me suspicious that he’s not using the ultrasound as a weapon—disorienting dolphins competing for the East Coast’s limited supply of delicious mackerel. Management of aquaculture indeed! At one point we went on the roof to enjoy a 60 degree day. The brilliance of the sun caused my exposed forearms to glow with the pale halo usually attributed to Cate Blanchett under cinematic lighting. It’s significantly less sexy on me. Also: doobiez—my cheek muscles hurt for days from the laughter.

Item Two: March 10th

This party began, like all good ones do, with an internet banner ad about potato chips. J.Hart and S.Lim, dapper hosts, spent $20 and received a box filled with the following:

6 Bags of Flavored Potato Chips Unreleased to the General Public
1 CD of World Music (to be played in the background)
Instructions on Food and Drink Complimentary to the Chips in Question

Each bag of chips had a national theme to it (Chile, Jamaica, Aztec-Land) and was to be paired with food and drink brought by the guest. Thinking back on the experience, that party resembled a Chia Pet in a “just add people and booze” kind of way. At the end, we voted on which chip should be released into the fierce potato chip market. In that sense, the party was a focus group. We are all pawns of the corporations (but there was booze so who cares!?).

J.Hart's invitation threatened the well-being of our loved ones if we didn’t show up on time so, true to form, only the Asians showed up on time. Our people are, if nothing else, united in our punctuality (and love of Sanrio). I was supposed to bring gazpacho but freaked out after I realized that I didn’t own a blender. So instead I mixed some tomato paste and salsa together and called it a day. Other people put in relatively more effort—for the Thai chip compliment someone made a lemongrass-coconut soup and our last course was a risotto with shrimp on top. I had tons of fun, but more importantly, I picked up a lot of MySpace friends. Success!

2007-02-22T14:51:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, block o' nonstop Queen songs.

Go to weather.com right now. Check your local weather. Look at the Doppler radar. You are seeing the future.

At first I was shocked that the forest-greens (heavy rains) and oxygenated-blood-reds (severe thunderstorms) of my youth had been replaced by this mess. The new version looked pale and sickly, like a mat of green scrambled eggs with flecks of ugly yellow parsley overlaid on a map of New York. Then I started playing around with it and realized: Praise be to the host of hosts--this is Google Earth WITH WEATHER.

Blows my mind.

I'm currently looking at a map of cloud temperatures of thunderstorms over the Philipines. It's a good thing I'm doing laundry today because I just creamed myself. Twice.

2007-02-11T15:00:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, dispatch from baby's first fashion week.

Wikipedia once told me that The Nanny, Fran Drescher's masterpiece sitcom, was inspired by her interations with her friend Twiggy on a cruise they once took. That Pygmalion tension of mixing rich and poor, fabulous and horrifyingly unclassy--I was meditating on these issues as I urinated at the Gotham Ballroom after the Cynthia Rowley show on Thursday night.

I had just physically collided with Alan Cumming as he came out of the bathroom. He, being fucking awesome, brushed it off with a 'oh, terribly sorry.' My response was 'Oh my God', followed by a weasel-quick fleeing into the bathroom.

Thinking of this experience now, a story of one of the physician's assistants I volunteer with comes to mind. During a female pelvic examination in her early years, she had taken a peek into this one woman's vagina, stepped back and shrieked 'Oh my God.' This is perhaps a little more mortifying than my collision with celebrity, but in my mind now, Alan Cumming and massive yeast infections will be coupled until I die.

As for the show itself, I took issue with some of the detailing on the shoulders. Remember in middle school Home Ec when you made stuffed animals and had to leave about an inch between the seam and the edge of the fabric pieces you were sowing together? Probably not, but they disappear when you flip the sown fabrics inside out. The shoulders on two or three of these dresses looked like the edges of unflipped 7th grade stuffed animals or the crinkled edges of a well made empanada or pot sticker dumpling.

I took issue with one of the looks in particular, a metallic dress with flame print covering the bottom of the skirt. I'd like to RSVP on this invitation to call this dress "The Firecrotch." Granted, I didn't have the greatest view of the models, but I did have the most amazing vista of Tim Gunn's grimaces. He was clearly not digging the empanada shoulders.

But I a lot of fun and bonded a bit with the gays. And the open bar at the afterparty was nice. Cynthia Rowler herself is adorable and elfin. She even deigned to speak with me! A big thanks to Svedka for sponsoring both the fashion industry and my Friday morning hangover! A big thanks to Leigh Watts, the greatest publicity intern ever. Whoever is reading this: hire him.

2007-02-08T14:19:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, delicious on steak, soups, seafood and pasta.

Lately at work I’ve been largely ignoring the task at hand and reading TV reviews of shows I don’t watch. Generally, I enjoy reading reviews. It makes me feel more like I’m part of the zeitgeist. It’s also interesting to experience media through different lens—a movie as impressed on someone else, then transcribed into words and then posted on the internet. Interesting, yes, but not always pleasant. For example, reading a Stephen Holden review is a little like looking through lenses that are irrelevant and retarded.

But I do love me some David Edelstein.

I think TV reviews are a little different from most. For the most part the shows being reviewed only air once (unless it’s on Vh1) so it’s not so much like a movie review, where the point is to gauge whether or not Shortbus might have been worth my hard earned $10 (as it turns out, no).

Regarding my views on TV critics: Writing about a medium as closely intertwined with the mass and popular as television, I think these people are freer from necessary pretension than their counterparts in cinema or literature. Television’s vapid, as it were. So to mirror that, it’s generally acceptable for a review of a TV show to say absolutely nothing beyond “this show is shit”—which is why it’s a really nice surprise when TV reviews are really well written. Since, as social animals, humans have an inborn desire to systematize life-experiences into a hierarchy, in my head I have arranged TV critics into a pantheon—a system akin to a media criticism Santeria. In such a spirit I shout ‘Ashanti, Ashanti!’ to my choice for chief among these saints, Salon’s Heather Havrilesky.

She almost makes me want to start watching 24, only seven years behind the rest of Amerika! Almost.

I like how she references her 2nd grade experiences in her reviews. It reminds me of innocent, non-English speaking times. Jesus Christ she is funny! Ok. Now that that’s out of my system, back to work.

2007-02-05T21:08:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, gift of sight.

Six years after my first attempt, I finally went ahead and got contact lenses. The optometrist I went to confirmed what I had suspected all along, that it is more difficult to get the lenses into my eyes because I'm Asian. My mom's theory for why I failed last time is that I couldn't bear the thought of touching my precious peepers (read: a loss of resolve on account of me being a spoiled princess).

This is not the case. As it turns out, I have no problem raking my hand across my eyeball in order to remove the lenses. Insofar that I have no regard for the physical well-being of my eyes, I am very manly--I daresay an anti-princess of opthalmological health.

Such an anti-princess am I that it might just be an inborn thing. After my eye exam the optometrist told me basically that my fovea (the part of the macula responsible for discerning detail) is crazy-shaped and my optic disk is gigantic. This all means that I'm at high risk for developing glaucoma later on. The upside of this I guess is bascially that I might have a good excuse to smoke lots of pot in the future. The downside is blindness.

But back to the contact lenses! I'm getting used to putting them in already. On Sunday morning it took me about 20 minutes in the bathroom of my parents' place to shove these puppies in. I was expecting a similiar ordeal this morning so I got up early, but it only took about ten tries with each eye. As a result I got to work about half an hour early and realized that the sunlight really pours in the window at 8:20. It's nice to sit in for a few minutes, especially on a cold day like today.

So that, combined with that whole thing where I can now see shit, is the good part. Bad part: Being unable to discern detail at any distance, I never noticed this before but--Jesus fucking Christ--winter really kills my complexion (insofar as crushing self awareness of my skin tone, not so manly).

In other unmanly news, I'm going to a Cynthia Rowley show for fashion week on Thursday. Emaciated teenagers! Handbags! Unnatural stomping down runways! God, I can't wait. I'll even be able to see them now, so that's a nice bonus.

2007-01-30T21:47:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, Abandoned Pools song,

I bit my lip on the elevator down from work yesterday. I didn’t bite down awfully hard, but I did it with one of my sharper teeth and in the middle of the scar of a recent cold sore, so I drew blood. It turns out, a good amount too—I could feel a drop coalescing and beginning to roll out of my lip.

Thinking back on it, I wonder what the lawyers from the 21st floor, my elevator-mates for this ride were thinking. On one hand, I guess a single drop of blood sliding down the corner of some young thing’s mouth is a little romantic. Then again, I don’t think I've ever made a very convincing consumptive libertine.

As it were, I guess it was pretty gross, so I wiped it off with the back of my hand. People on the street would just assume it was a burgundy tattoo of an amorphous streak--all the rage among the downtown kids, I'd say. To stop the bleeding, I started to lick the wound, figuring that if it was good enough for White Fang, it’d be good enough for me. It kept bleeding for another minute or so (my powers of healing rivals those of Wolverine’s obviously), during which time I ate enough of my own blood to make me a little nauseous, like during a nosebleed.

An interesting side note: one of my co-workers went to medical school at Mt. Sinai for a year and tells me the nosebleed nausea stems from taking in too much iron at once. A tip for you anemics out there: When you feel faint, just drink your own blood.

As a whole, other people’s blood doesn’t bother me all that much anymore. I saw a heroin user this Saturday while volunteering at the ER who had a huge abscess on his arm. One of the physician’s assistants opened the abscess lengthwise with a scalpel. Pus and blood rocketed out and hit him on the face shield. To clear the area, the PA pushed on the surrounding tissue. The extruded liquid ran progressively less pea soup colored and more red. A couple years ago I might have been grossed out more by the experience, but my verdict: pretty fucking sweet.

In contrast, I had to have my own blood taken a few months ago as part of a checkup. The nurses tell you to ball your hands into a fist when they insert the needle and tell you to relax after the sample reaches a certain volume. To hear the nurse tell it, I was so fixated watching the vial fill up that she had to tap me on the shoulder to tell me to un-ball my fist. God help me if I ever need dialysis.

A weird contrast: seeing other peoples’ blood as a vessel for gas exchange, nutrition and hormone transport and seeing my own as red(dish) gold. Just another way in which I am selfish, I guess.

2007-01-16T16:19:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, far from cell phones, emails and deadlines.

I've been recieving travel brochures from state tourism agencies at work for the last month. They're piling up in a box atop my PC tower. The only reason I haven't decoupaged the computer is that I'm afraid it might jam the DVD drive. The latest, a pamplet from the Gettysburg, PA bureau of tourism telling me to "Come for the history, stay for the fun!", has a glossy cover and keeps sliding off onto the floor. It's annoying.

I'd thought this was a harmless prank until today, when I seriously considered popping in a complimentary DVD about sailing aboard a Maine Windjammer. I'm reminded of that storyline in Amelie, where she sends her father's garden gnome on a postcard-documented tour of the world in an effort to get the elder Poulain out to see the world. Someone out there wants me to take a vacation, and a confluence of forces...

At work today, a client made a request that lead me to daydream of booking a flight to San Francisco just to stab his face (maybe grab some Rice-a-Roni, but mostly for the sheer thrill of sudden violence)
My recent dissolution of a 2.5 year LTR
Endless grey days. This year's El Nino makes me feel like I live in a cement mixer.
Syzygy

...make me inclined to agree.

Well, it's a good thing I have all these pictures of nuclear families fly fishing.

*I'm blogging at work. I am. so. sick. of this pancreatic cancer bullshit.

2007-01-14T13:41:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, purple potato.

Last night I went to a dinner party in Williamsburg that was different from most dinner parties I've experienced, as the emphasis was clearly on the meatloaf and mashed potatoes, not the wine or whiskey. For me, attending a dinner party where the accent actually fell on the food felt like seeing a film populated entirely with character actors (perhaps with Julia Roberts playing the supporting role of the kindly librarian) after a lifetime of watching Ocean's 11 on a loop.

But beyond foreshadowing the diminished post-college role that alcohol is fated to play out in my life, that party supported a vision of my future absurdly similar to my memories of childhood (or, more accurately, my parents' early adulthood). Fucking terrifying.

Let me explain: At one point during the night, all the males at the party were sitting in the living room talking about the logical incongruity of India's continued existence as a democracy despite the perverse gap between the country's rich and poor. Meanwhile, all the ladies were in the kitchen making us dinner (later, washing the dishes).

I'd like to think they were also talking about makeup, shopping and child-rearing. Say hello to separation of spheres! Say hello to every Chinese barbeque I've ever been to. Fucking terrifying.

I had lots of fun though. I am secretly fond of talking about things I don't understand (i.e. India). They also had a really cool coffee table book with an electron micrograph of pollen on the cover. That was pretty sweet.

2007-01-10T16:30:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, Warner sibling.

This is my 75th post, which isn't a big deal, considering that TV series only become ripe for syndication after the 100th episode (RIP: The OC). Nonetheless, it's only fitting that this post arrive after protracted hiatus (what, 4 days?). I like to think of it as time bided, in order to increase the moment of the moment (planning the queen's Golden Jubilee didn't happen overnight).

So I'd like to use this landmark event to talk briefly about my new George Foreman Grill. My co-worker Pia gave it to me for the 'holidays' (bitch is Hindu, they believe in nothing), citing her belief that, of all our firm's employees, I'd benefit most. I must say, the grill is magnificent. Had she been born with the soul of Sylvia Plath instead of that of a Tyrannosaur, Star Jones could easily cook her head in this baby.

And yet, such power came in such an innocuous package, since Pia decided to transport it to me in a giant, garish Talbot's bag. The night I took it home, I told my boss I was making dinner that night with Pia's present, pointing at the bag. Now she probably thinks I'm a wild beast who feeds on raw pork chops he 'cooked' by smothering in ugly sweaters.

Do you think that's what Tyra Banks does? Harriet Meiers?

2007-01-06T10:00:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, foul social construct!

So I wake up with a hangover. Other stuff happens (my room is covered in roach poison, purple molasses is flowing down the staircase) and then, cliche of cliches, I wake up.

...with a hangover. I'd seen Waking Life with Joe a few years ago, a movie wherein our protagonist cycles through an unusual number of dreams before coming to realize that he had died. Death, in the mind of some wacky color block animator-director, involves moving through an endless corridor of dreams. So I wonder aloud, to myself, still in bed: "Did I just die? Am I damned to involvment in horrible elevator accidents, to repeatedly lose the teeth in my lower jaw, to go on nonsensical field trips to Disneyworld with my Intro to APA studies recitation ad infinitum?" Turns out, no--as I reasoned that the likelihood of having the same hangover dream twice in a row as my first two dreamings of death was unreasonably small. Combinatorics saved my soul.

So I moved on. And since my life is defined by movies*, I thought about that scene in the first Matrix wherein Keanu Reeves falls off a skyscraper in the simulacrum. Waking up, he discovers that his nose is bleeding and our wise sage Laurence Fishburne says something to the effect of "the mind makes your imagined injuries real." (How this would vindicate all my self-pity!) Is this hangover the result of a dream of a hangover?

Well, turns out I'd gone hardcore drinking with work friends last night, a motley assortment of Irishmen, crazy people and an alcoholic brown biomedical engineer. I remember talking to one of them about tittyfucking Giada de Laurentis (jaws ahoy!). So no, as far as I can tell, I'm not cycling through progressive layers of perception. I'm just very hungover.

*
Dear Baudrillard,

Hello!

xoxo,
Byron

2007-01-03T13:39:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, feature 981.

Joe and I formally broke up last night (there was a treaty signing and a dignitary luncheon) and it was, above all, a civil parting. I think there is no better way to gauge your boyfriend's character than through observing how he handles the end of a relationship. We had a good run.

I'm glad Joe didn't react by trying to kill me and I didn't have to protect myself using martial arts moves that I pulled out of my ass. My life is not an Ashley Judd movie.

2006-12-29T14:29:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, balls.

In Salon's enumeration of this year's celebrity births:

Makani Ravello Harrelson, third daughter of Woody Harrelson and Laura Louie, whose birth announcement read: "In this crazy patriarchal world we live in, we are doing our part to balance the energy. We are proud to announce the completion of our goddess trilogy with the birth of our third daughter."

Right.

2006-12-25T22:17:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, tea leaf egg.

Stop the presses! It turns out that parties with middle aged, middle class Chinese folk are boring, strictly dry affairs (redundancy?). They leave me wondering if this is what biology grad student parties at Brigham Young University are like: lots of lively, sober conversation about Pfizer's failed clinical trial, anecdotes about happenings at church, a violin recital by an 8 year old.

To be fair though (given the spirit of Christmas and all that jazz), these are very well-intentioned partygoers, especially my parents, who go out of their way to include me in the card game they are playing (but not for money! we do not gamble here at BYU). From what I've picked up, the game's got quite a burst of old-country flair. For example, if you have a pair of the 4 of diamonds, you can "start a revolutionary movement" and change the starting suit, which matters somehow. Taken as a whole, the rules are pretty arbitrary--I would even venture to say ridiculous. I could tell my mom was disappointed when I bowed out of the role as her cardholder / apprentice.

In the living room of this house, the elderly have collected to play MahJong. I wouldn't dream of participating here. Old Chinese people are hardcore, and I couldn't want to get reparitive veneers for Christmas. The only girl here even approaching my age (I'd estimate she's 16) is playing with the grandmas. She has not spoken a word all night. I suspect that she is mute.

In contrast, the under-10 set are literally bouncing off the walls (I saw the hostesses' daughter run into a wall, giggle and then hide under a table). Earlier, the kids were playing that game where one kid hides some artifact (in this case a tiny stuffed rabbit) and shouts hotter/colder to direct the other players to his quarry. I believe this game may be called "Hotter/Colder." It's very strange to hear a 7 year old boy shrieking alternately "Isabella is the hottest!" and "Jason is the hottest!". Defined sexual orientations be damned!

I pass the time by reading. The host is a doctor, so his shelves are lined with medical dictionaries and texts. From perusing them, I have found that the existence of many congenital defects necessitates the existence of many pictures of autopsied babies.

I have now spent more than seven hours at this party. That 16 year old girl still has not spoken a single word. At this point I'm wondering if she is the human vessel for some unspeakable rancor against man. The other option is that, like me, she is really bored.

Merry Christmas!

2006-12-21T11:26:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, liar.

A few months ago, my iPod and computer crashed simultaneously (Andy Rooney cries for me at this, duh). I had to rebuild my music collection, previously collected over the course of 4 years. To date, the task is woefully incomplete, as noted by a co-worker, who regularly harasses me about having 4GB of music on a 20GB iPod.

Last night, I finally restored my former collection of Abandoned Pools songs--my favorite being an upbeat number titled "Ruin Your Life." It reminded me of my senior year of high school, when my friend and I would cut class and drive to Trenton on a semi-episodic basis to thrift shop among indigents, listening to Morrocan ethnic radio (no lie) and above-mentioned band on the way. Every marking period I'd recieve letters from the Board of Education in the mail informing me that that I'd missed Calculus four times and if I missed it again, I'd fail the course. I got a B-, which, in Asian terms is failure anyway.

Once, instead of going south, we took the PATH into New York for the purpose of shopping at Screaming Mimi's, which our Modern Europe teacher had recommended to us. That was the day I learned that, unlike the Trenton thrift warehouse, New York's garments of yesteryear cost a truckload of money. My knack for recollection spinning up to maximum drive here: It was a rainy and windy day--winds that snapped Zach Bushnell's umbrella basically the second we exited onto Christopher Street. A billboard with bottles of Snapple dressed as the Village People welcomed us to the city with a gay, gay hello. We made a midday of it, and made it back to school in time to catch absolutely no classes.

It was fun, despite the weather. Of course, this doesn't hold a candle to July 2002--a perfect summer day in Washington Square Park that, ironically, I never actually experienced while actually attending NYU. A story for another day, I think.

2006-12-20T14:06:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, aged to perfection for three years at the McIlhenny cellars.

A couple weeks ago Joe won the Williamsburg Spelling Bee. I was munching on a panini when he spelled his final word. Unfortunately, none of us remembers since it was impossible to pronounce. His final word wasn't exactly a "winning word" in the sense that Rebecca Sealfon's E-U-O-N-Y-M was. Unlike in the Scrips Spelling Bee, where the bee mechanics ensure that the winner claims their victory by spelling something right, the Williamsburg Bee crowns a winner when the runner-up spells something wrong. It basically boils down to: In Williamsburg, every victory is necessarily sealed with scads of negative energy. I myself cannot spell for shit. They had a layman's mini-bee during a break in the competition. I wasn't in it, but I played along. I was eliminated on the word cantaloupe (reproduced correctly here).

As part of his prize haul, Joe won two prime seats for the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which I went to last night. The songs were pretty mediocre (A song without any motifs? Balderdash!), but the dialogue was snappy. Joe commented that it would have been amazing as a stage play. I'll disagree here, as without musical interludes it would have been tres difficult to peer into the home lives of the contestants: a fat dancing asthmatic boy, blazer-wearing girl who is the head of her elementary school's Gay Straight Alliance an incredibly adorable latchkey kid in pink overalls and...some other characters. The three above were the ones I fixated on. Actually, there was an overacheiving Asian girl. During her solo, I leaned over to Joe and whispered in his ear, in as Gollum-esque a manner as possible: "my child."

Still, I wish the tunes were a little more musical.

Afterwards, Joe stayed over and we cuddled--awkwardly, as I found out come daybreak. Now I have this intense aching running down the left side of my back. When I swivel my head in that direction, I feel like there are 3000 petite Japanese masseuses digging their toes into my back muscles. It's very unpleasant. Trying to cross 16th Street this morning, I couldn't check the street for traffic, so I did had to do a full-body 180 to make sure I didn't die. (To be fair, Beth Israel is right there, so if the impact didn't break my face/heart/brain/lungs/kidneys/GI tract, I stood a good chance of getting away with just being a paraplegic for the rest of my life. Still.) It's times like that when I wish I was an owl, or the girl from The Exorcist--in fact, probably the only time.

2006-12-19T13:27:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, Destroyer of Bonnie Lasses,

Working at my current job, (henceforth referred to in my own personal history as the job that taught me to always (always, always) ask for more money), I've had to feed myself in Midtown. I haven't exactly found niche methods of obtaining food, as have my spiritual brothers: the fishing cat and alligator snapping turtle. Rather, my recent forays into eating 'habits' have been pretty absolutist--that is to say: I have the same fucking deli food every day. In Midtown, there are no choices. Chipotle is a crowded and distant luxury.

So for the last few days I've been going to the Liberty Deli and buying the same roasted chicken on yellow rice. I take it back to my desk, where I feast with my hands like I'm at Medieval Times--popular theme restaurant of Rutherford, NJ slash my youth. It's a quiet time in my day, and I enjoy it. True to personal custom, I take my sweet time and leave virtually nothing on the bone, taking the remaining skeleton and dumping it. Since I don't throw away any paper trash, instead piling it on my desk (in hopes that I one day become Jonathan Pryce's everyman bureaucrat character in Brazil), those chicken bones are all that ever appear in the trash bin.

I wonder how it must feel to be the cleaning lady, who nightly sees the same thigh and shin bones, polished as ivory beacons gleaming in the flourescent lighting, set agaist the jet plastic of the trash bin.

"Surely this is the work of no man!" I imagine her thinking to herself. "And that arid smell! It is as brimstone!" Actually, it is tabasco, courtesy of a bottle I stole from Chipotle two weeks ago.

Continuing her line of reasoning, she infers that my spit is a miracle solvent, kills me, isolates my salivary glands and wins a prize from the American Chemical Society.

2006-12-18T11:02:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, vessel of my return to the internets,

I'm at work right now, alternately reading a Slate diary piece by David Rakoff dating late 1990s and piecing together the skeleton of a report that will one fine day, God-willing, be perused by those haughty, misunderstood lords of the urban jungle: hedge-fund analysts. In so doing, I've recognized that after you read Author X's book, you come to see bits and pieces of that book's prose show up in, say, an article they once penned about my favorite Chinese restaurant. In plundering their past work, Rakoff brings together sundered bits of long living as a gay Canadian Jew into a Kefka's Tower (or a Frankenstein--for those uninitated in the ways of 1993 era RPG dorkdom) of words.

Oh oh, here! A sentence about how staying thin is the central preoccupation of our intrepid protagonist's life in a story about a dinner party! I remember that from his book, in a piece where he climbs New Hampshire's Mt. Monandnock (incidently, this very blog recounts my story of the same feat of strength). Being thin has always been one of those things I could count on, like fanatical Christianity or the inherent goodness of man, but lately it has been faltering. My friend and I used to barter information. I would help her with her organic chemistry work, and she would relay me the latest from my cusp-of-forgotten homeland (North Jersey, not be be confused with China) and useful eating-disorder tips (drink lots of water, eat boiled celery). I should make overtures to reignite this cultural exchange once more. Note to self.

Sure, I am reading--but, being a multitasker of uncommon caliber, I am also chatting with boyfriend and coworker alike (all the while avoiding the sweeping gaze and honed talons of our lord and savior, the COO). In this conversation, I play the intermediary, Ctrl-C-ing, editing and then Ctrl-V-ing snippets of thought from one window to another. In my own way, I am making the office environment a sad hotbox of social interaction. Oh look, we just coined a term!

Tacomagentic (Adj):
1. The quality of an item attracting tacos through the interaction of tortilla with d-orbital electrons
2. Being possessed of Tacomagnetism (see: thesis-induced hunger)

It is not in the huddled laager at the top of a lexicographer's tower where neologisms are born, but in the mid-levels of 444 Madison Avenue.

I am losing my shit.

2006-08-27T11:11:00.001-04:00

Blogspot, tentacles flapping in the wind.

My NYU email quota of 100MB was almost up this morning, so I went through my email mass-deleting items when I came upon this gem, which was written by Justin in July 2005 in order to secure a 4 bedroom triplex in Brooklyn. Mike ran it through gizoogle.com. We got the place, by the way.

Dear Debora n Jason,

First of all, I want ta say how funky ass it was messin' bizzoth of you the otha day n how beautiful yo hizouse is. My roommates n myself (izzles those who kizzle `bout tha apartment only through Mike n my descrizzle of it) is completely in love wit tha apartment n are very anxious ta find out if we git it or not sho nuff. It is far n away the funky assst place weve looked at, n weve dizzle quite a bit of look'n.

That being said, we completely understand any reservizzles you may have `bout us droppin hits. If I had just put a year of renovizzles into a house, I would be hesitant me ta rent it ta fizzy college students, two of whizzom you wont git ta meet until we mizzy in. I thought i told ya, nigga I'm a soldier. And while I assure you that were all good kizzids, we absolutely understand tha nature of tha situation bitch ass nigga.

Our hearts is set on yo apartment, but we wizzay of course understand should you choose ta select different tenants. Were rhymin' tizzle you not spare our messin' in that case, n let us know as soon as possible, as our current leaze runs out on August 1st n we may have some last minute scrambl'n ta do ta find a new place.

i in no way wizzy ta indicate any lessened enthusiasm fo` yo apartment, as all of us is extremely stoked by tha prospect of liv'n there, nor do we want you ta in any way rush tha process upside yo head. we understand thiznat adecision of this magnitude takes some tizzle. were jizzay ask'n ta be informed of yo decision as soon as you makes it, n although sippin' vizzle mizzy tizzle it wiznill be in our favor, we would S-T-to-tha- izzill like any bad news as soon as possible.

we also strongly recommend tizzle if you hizzle any reservizzles `bout the two roommates whom you have not yet mizzy nizzick n byron, that you call them n rap ta them n git a fizzle fo` what theyre like fo' real. though i imagine you have they contact info on tha application, they phone numba are, respectivizzles 917.287.xxxx n 617.947.xxxx. pleaze do not hesitate ta contact any of us wittany questions. It was a pleasure mobbin' you, n heres hop'n we can be yo tenants.

On behalf of all four of us,
Justin Sowa

2006-08-06T15:21:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, word vomit.

Last night was the second time I snuck beer into a showing of The Devil Wears Prada. Arriving several minutes into the previews, my friends and I were forced to sit so close to the front row that whenever Anne Hathaway got reamed onscreen for wearing synthetic fiber I swore I could feel the moisture glistening in her colossal, anime-like eyes. The movie remained excellent the second time around--the thrill of watching skinny bitches with uni-bangs trotting around in panic while yourself munching on a plastic container of super-nachos is…irreplicable.

*I deleted like two pages of stuff because I read it and was ashamed of phrases like "sartorial semiotics." Be glad.

2006-08-01T20:15:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, melty, melty cheese.

I once saw a documentary on the Discovery Channel about areas near volcanos in Africa where gases dissolved in the magma chamber seep out into the atmosphere. On stagnant days, the carbon dioxide displaces all the oxygen at ground level and suffocates animals on the ground and the occasional four year old.

The Lexington and 51st street subway station works the same way with heat. One of the entrances features a shallow set of steps down to the platform and today, I could feel the hot air lapping at my legs. This is a radical departure from a week ago, when the cool Atlantic water washed over my ankles. In my mind I am in Rehoboth Beach again, staring at a ruined jellyfish and contemplating throwing it at Joe--the quaintest possible act of bioterror.

Back in Realityland, the heat index peaked at 108 today. I don't understand. Past 90 degrees, I basically bake, marinated in twin juices of sweat and Haterade. And that's when the air isn't even so humid as to resemble atomized jacuzzi water. As I stepped on the subway and started drying off, salt crystals started forming on the edge of my mouth, like I was a fucking margarita glass. Later, when a pair of tragically cheery Quecha walked in and commenced with a high pitched, Andean rendition of Simon and Garfunkel's greatest hits, I could have dismembered their panpipes and shoved each carved tube of yew (yewtube, ha) into their eyes.

Epilogue: I have struck all Simon and Garfunkel from my computer.

And, just for the hell of it:

2006-07-03T10:44:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, lumbering idiot man-child of my heart,

Until I started working, I never completely understood the appeal of beaches and pools and wilderness. Nowadays though, all I can think about is fishing and hammocks. Employment really makes you old.

This weekend I went to my freshman suitemate's upstate abode. The following is an account of my harrowing visit to the unholy grounds that spawned Alexander David Barrow.

Rhinebeck sits in the Hudson River Valley and is accessible by MetroNorth. The rail itself runs alongside the river and provides spectacular vistas of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants on jetskis. Twisted chunks of old track lay on the side and I twice mistook them for rust-colored waterfowl. In all honesty though, the train running so close to the water reminded me of the tram from Spirited Away and the glacier-carved bluffs on the opposite side of the river (the lower Hudson isn’t actually a river, but a tidal estuary) really were beautiful.

The area around Rhinebeck is home to several big Dutch names—Roosevelt, Vanderbilt, Van Cortlandt. In contrast, Al’s upstate country house is relatively new, having been rebuilt after a fire six years ago destroyed the original antique wooden floors and killed one of the family pugs. After 9/11, the Barrow matriarch went on an Americana rampage, so that the doors to Chez Barrow are guarded by imposing, if slightly eroded, red ceramic eagles.

Al's mom also happens to be an editor for one of the big New York interior design magazines. So, with the exception of a completely ridiculous leopard print couch (pinpoint fug explosion), the house oozed carefully maintained rustic charm. It’s the type of house for which regular watchers of Barefoot Contessa (a loathsome show on the Food Network hosted by the behemoth Ina Gartner) would murder a hundred immigrant maids and a hundred immigrant landscapers. The only element in the parlor that gave away that we were not, in fact, living in the Age of Robber Barons was a dehumidifier that helped ensure that everything looked, but didn’t smell, old.

Most of my Saturday was spent dead on a floatie or face down on the grass like some beached elephant seal, complete with muffled barks for a bottle of Newcastle. I haven’t been in the water in a long time, so when I took the first plunge, I was surprised by how substantial the stuff is. At some later point, drunk as shit, I thought to myself “No wonder people are so fat. It’s not our fault. We’re full of water! I have such empathy for diabetics.” After spending six hours under the upstate sun, I am about as tanned as I am apt to become: still several shades lighter than a glass of Poor-Man’s-Ovaltine.

On Sunday I drank whiskey drinks and watched Catwoman and Janice Dickinson’s Model Agency. I’m glad to see that Sharon Stone now looks like Draco Malfoy and that Janice Dickinson is still batshit insane.

Guys, I’m writing this at work when I should be designing a categorization system for Allied Health Professionals. Shit, I am so fucking punk!

2006-06-17T11:46:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, sweet Lardo of my dreams.

In Jerry Spinelli's children's novel Maniac Magee, our protagonist spends days slowly untangling Cobble's Knot, an infamous maelstrom of rope fiber, in the town pizza joint. Although I have not read the book in over a decade, the image of Maniac scraping away the shell that had crusted around the knot with his fingernails and then pulling the knot's infinite tendrils into a terrible array has remained with me to this day.

Cobble's Knot is basically how I envisage my heart. Having lapsed into the very picture of a dying 50-year old investment banker lusting for a child's untimely death so he can have a heart transplant, I set off about a month ago to untangle the ruined monstrocity my heart has become.

My friend Celeste lives in the Sculpture for Living on Astor Square, a many storied baby-grand-piano-prism of glass. So along with automated lighting, a closet with a washer/dryer and bedrooms where the beds literally feel like oceans of down, she has access to a private gym. Episodic encounters with ultra-intense powerwalkers notwithstanding, we never run into anyone, so nobody can see my secret shame.

I go to the gym after work about three days a week. The first time, I didn't own any workout clothes, so I went to a KMart across the street and blew a whole $20 on supplies. Fun fact: my workout shoes are velcro.

Celeste's roommate Sasha has made her a Kylie Minogue-intensive workout mix. In contrast, when I run I put my iPod on shuffle and get stuff like The Beach Boys and Weezer. Basically: Worst. Workout. Music. Ever.

To feel sexy on the elliptical the other day (an oxymoron if ever I spoke one), I cranked up the wattage to 115 and proceeded to imagine my movements powering an industrial grade lightbulb somewhere in a North Jersey Home Depot. This proves to be a poor choice, since the electronic display soon flashes a marquee in all-caps "HEART RATE HIGH." Of course, given my great concern for my health, I keep going, since I am so out of shape that I get that message every time.

By the end of every workout my shirt is completely soaked--not a problem, since there is a mini-fridge perpetually stocked with free bottles of Poland Spring. Besides, the sweat forms fun Rorschach patterns on my chest. A couple days ago, it was an oak tree, my glandular homage to Ted Leo.

2006-05-27T22:26:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, Claymation dude.

My favorite result of being a salaried employee is that nowadays, I have the funds to vary my diet. Whereas 80% of my senior year consumption consisted of the "Mix-and-Match", a $5 curry on rice confection from the local Pakastani joint, I have been to no less than five restaurants in the past week.

Unrelenting march into happy yuppie verisimilitude notwithstanding, this has been a welcome development. I'm no longer starving all the time. During the week, I can be considered what some describe as bright-eyed and bushy tailed. The fact that my newly minted breakfast-habit is heavy on the peanuts and sunflower seeds makes the squirrel metaphor all the more accurate.

My boyfriend recently wrote a blog entry about food-as-pornography, which is an idea he hopes to expand into an honors thesis (I cannot wait to tell my mother). If so, my quest for five servings of fruits/vegetables at the Union Square Farmer's Market today was nothing less than a submarine mission through Jenna Jameson's fallopian tubes. Joe and I ended up buying rhubarb, blueberry ginger jam and a 3 ounce hunk of organic goat cheese. I even considered buying a tuna steak at Whole Foods.

So basically, money is glorious. Oh, what's that? I'm being a jerk? WELL, I DON'T SEE YOU WORKING TEN HOUR DAYS, SO YOU CAN LICK MY ASSHOLE.

2006-05-20T23:49:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, shuttlecock in hand.

I'm starting work on Monday. Sorry for the neglect. I'll post tomorrow if I have the energy. For now though: sleep.

2006-05-11T23:06:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, Pralinenmacher seit 1909.

I just found this in My Documents. I wrote it a couple weeks ago.

Like all good stories of failure and dejection, this one starts with alcohol. A few empty bottles of cheap Australian wine grace the area behind my laptop. Their labels each feature a color-coded representative of a different vertebrate taxonomic class. The orange lizard of Jindalee. The kangaroo of Yellow Tail. The black swan of Black Swan. It's like a list of rejected team names from Legends of the Hidden Temple.

I need this booze after Republican Guard style interrogations for jobs I don't really want at all, namely, Associate Scientist I in drug discovery. A mere two weeks from graduation, when I shall be forcefully torn from the famously bureaucratic bosom of NYU, I realize that my father was right: the job market is impossibly heartbreaking, especially if you are a science major looking to work in (wait for it, this is funny) publishing.

It all started when I renounced my proud middle-class North-Jersey-Asian heritage and decided not to attend medical school immediately after my undergraduate studies. It's not that I doubt my proficiency. For all the glib insecurities I might present to the outside world in the hope of projecting some mutant kin of "charm," I know I'd be an excellent doctor. It's just that medical school is essentially a pricey eco-tourism package promising to bring you by helicopter to the pristine frontiers of human suffering. And my friends, there is no complimentary continental breakfast included.

Another metaphor: it's like crash-safety testing for the soul—expensive, horrifying and only profitable if you get a five-star rating. If you need someone to sew your pinky back on, who in their right mind would want the Ford Pinto of physicians? I figured I’d be ready for medical school when I could commit to being an extended metaphor BMW 7-Series.

Clearly wary of saddling hundreds of thousands in debt to effectively disappear for four years, I decided to spend a year gaining real-world experience, working at something that married my broad science background with my ability to produce concise and informative copy. A craftsman lives deep inside of me and nothing pleases me more than when I can hold up a crisp, finished project and declare with the divinity of Tim Gunn: “I made it work.” Editorial Assistant: the position reeks of new beginnings and a tragic, bohemian pay scale. Despite friends who warn me that it is quite literally "the worst job ever," I dove boldly into my task and prepped my cover letters and writing samples.

Unfortunately, that is where it all goes to hell in a hand basket. It turns out that editorial assistantships at science magazines are not only rare, but virtually mythical. Furthermore, most companies look for English majors to fill that capacity in mainstream publications. This is irony at its cruelest: an employer would prefer the indolent English major over the schmuck who slaved away to attain his pre-health credentials in three years. I listen to the opening song from Avenue Q, the play starring foul-mouthed puppets, wherein the protagonist poses the question "What do you do with a B.A. in English?" I think to myself: "everything I can't" and break out in funereal sobs, mourning my stillborn future.

It doesn't help that my internships thus far have been in research. Through intensive practice, I have acquired the ability to completely fillet three mice in ten minutes, separating their lymphatic tissue into Next-Food-Network-Star-caliber towers of murine flesh. In the shining world of publishing, this apparently isn't considered nearly as useful as experience faxing rejection letters to freelancers. Re: Your non-Future.

It's also no comfort when your friends get fed-up with the defeatist mantra you chant thrice daily to the origin of the four winds: "I am never getting a job."

"There's always McDonalds', my dear," says my friend Celeste. It takes several seconds for my monstrous inner bourgeois to erupt in a plume of indignation. For that magical moment of hope before that, I mentally revisit that aforementioned tower of mouse meat and consider how impressed the branch manager would be. I did learn marketable skills! Gloria in excelsis deo!

Dejected, I break into Celeste’s liquor cabinet for some hearty discount casket wine. But I must show temperance tonight. I have an interview in the morning for a developmental biology research gig. Oy.

That having been said. I got a rather high paying job doing work I am likely to enjoy. Ha. Ha.

2006-05-01T23:15:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, King of Spirits.

When NYU requested a personal essay in its admissions requirements, a friend of mine chose to wax poetic on her superior personal qualities in the context of her rhinoplasty. The essay was entitled “n.j. in NJ.” It is a testament to her uncanny charm and striking intelligence that she got in anyway. Based on this preface, it may be odd when I say that she would make an amazing doctor, but such is the case. This summer, it’s time for her to apply to medical school, but she is conflicted.

The problem stems from her finances, as her pediatric nephrologist father will only contribute to the Med School war chest if she agrees to attend UMDNJ. It’s an excellent school, but Piscataway, the central-Jersey town where it’s located, is less than glamorous. And, as she puts it, she wants to maintain the illusion of being an Upper East Side princess. This means a brand-name school with a brand name bill that she’ll be feeling well after her ovaries become prunes. So when I said that the problem stemmed from her finances, I didn't tell the whole truth. It also stems from her pride.

I’m hardly one to judge. Despite my complete lack of experience in a non-research setting, I adamantly refuse to take a job that does not come fully equipped with at least health insurance or the bohemian veneer of poverty. This, of course, is declared in the name of perpetuating the delusion that I am hot shit / dedicated to my noble cause to educate the masses in the ways of science. Thankfully, my erroneous beliefs concerning my employability are probably the last vestige of a formerly-held battery of fantasies about life in New York. As this job hunt continues to render me mad, even that is eroding. Soon I will be whole. My awakening is almost Buddhist.

We all came to New York with preconceived notions of what urban life was like. Airing out my dirty laundry, I will admit that mine were heavily linked to Will and Grace. The depth of my ignorance was on-par with the sins of legions of would-be Carrie Bradshaw. My shame is great, but I suppose I find solace in having grown out of it. Some of those young harpies carry on their erstwhile search for their Mr. Big long after their best-laid plans for sex columnist glory have crumbled into an indentured servitude at a faceless publishing house.

2006-04-19T01:52:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, ofenfrische croissants.

As anyone who has even remotely kept up with the state of American healthcare knows, McDonalds' profit wagon has been pulled by a largely Black and Hispanic population for whom obesity rates have been setting records once every ten seconds.

For a long time I wondered how someone could let themselves (or their children) become so strikingly fat. Sure, salads and whole wheat cost extra, but I had always subscribed to that old saying--that even with the ex-boyfriend who just dumped you for another man, even with the dead-end job, even if your teenager has burned down your apartment building: you still have your health. It's a truism, one that is infuriating if any of those things actually happened to you, but it's a truism that always seemed close to universal: staying physically alive comes first.

(Cool people are, naturally, exempt.)

This was before I realized what I was missing. I've just found out that the McDonald's Dollar Menu features, among the usual 6-piece McTurds and medium frozen McBilgewaters, the Double Cheeseburger. This is a deal that is simultaneously breathtaking (for the as-of-yet-unemployed 20-something in me) and unspeakably horrific (for the flamingly liberal pre-med in me). Suddenly I understand what effect such sinisterly cheap junk has on the psyche. When I see that 99 cents next to 'DOUBLE CHEESEBURGER', I become every peckish twelve year old Latino kid that has ever walked into a Mickey D's with $1.43 in pocket.

The only thing keeping me from stuffing my face is the knowledge that burgers are just glistening oil-cakes sandwiching patties that would have made Upton Sinclair cry. Fast food is scary. Poorly educated on nutritional topics, the communities most adversely impacted by the fast-food being marketed to them lack this paradoxical safety net of fear. So while I'm not saying that maintaining an unironic Morgan-Spurlockian diet does poor people any favors, I at least find that type of behavior more understandable.

2006-04-15T11:57:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, flavored with dill and love.

As I open my eyes and crane my neck to check the time, the display of Joe's digital clock sears my eyes like a miniature arrangement of rubidium flares. It is 7:47 as I rouse myself to urinate--it's an apt time, given that I feel like an economy class passenger on a jumbo jet who just spent a trans-Pacific journey across the aisle from a particularly needy and lachrymose child. Despite a full six hours of sleep last night, I cannot remember a more zombielike trip to the toilet except for that time in 1995 when I actually did fly to the other side of the planet.

It is a testament to my weariness that, despite literally passing out with my shoes on, I had imbibed nothing so much as a goddamn hard lemonade last night. Fatigue alone whisked me off to a completely dreamless sleep with all the efficiency of an elixir of Nyquil, Ambien and Sodium Thiopental.

I had arrived at Joe's apartment a little before midnight, after a four-hour marathon of laboratory work performed to a backdrop of our TA's mid-to-late-90s musical sensibilities, that is to say: Pantera. Before that, I had an interview with an unapologetically terse hiring manager at Memorial Sloan Kettering--a Republican Guard style interoggation which stretched my ability to detail how to pluck out tiny murine lymph nodes with a set of talon-like tweezers (in essense, stealing mouse souls). That was the third morning interview of the week and*, on the way home, I missed my subway stop after falling asleep to the beguiling, wistful voice of David Rakoff.

The inability to understand this newfangled "rock" music. The exhaustion. The unabashed enjoyment of NPR contributors' audiobooks. These are the signs that I really am seventy years old already.

...weakened by the relentless sun and his exertions in digging out the Gastonia corpse, Raptor Red's mate sank inexorably into the pit. As the tar flooded his nostrils, he gave out a little burble--and then he was gone.

(If you get this reference, marry me.)

2006-04-13T00:23:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, open bar raffle,

Reading my blog, the inadvertant publicizer of my deepest joys and fears, it's likely that people think that, in real life, I am as emotionally transparent as a forest stream refracting the kiss of an early summer sunbeam. Sadly, the truth of this matter is not unlike The Truth About Cats and Dogs (or the truth about the much less joke-conducive Cyrano de Bergerac) in that what you see is rarely what you get. Nobody can ever tell what I'm thinking.

What I possess is less of a inclination towards acting and more of a talent for deceit. Despite its intrinsically evil nature, my Kremlin-like knack for being unreadable does its part in maintaining my image. This mechanism is of paramount importance partially because, in reality, I am actually a thirteen-winged beast dispatched from the Netherworld (and nobody likes those).

Lately, what with the prospect of an upcoming graduation, the uncertain job hunt, and genetics lab worries all gnawing at my sanity like so many tapeworms of the brain, I have woken up in abject panic too many times to count (4). In these moments, my facade is set to crack, and I am in danger of tearfully revealing both the benthic depth of my insecurities and the bourgeois monstrousness of my sense of entitlement.

My only consolation then is the bearded, disco-loving Catholic next to me, upon whom I pour my frustrations like a lava flow of anguished gravy. His unequivocal support for everything I attempt, his invitation to Easter dinner, his forgiveness for my drunken jewel case hurling trespasses, his pleas for me to lay off the chocolate covered espresso beans--they keep me stable. They keep the illusion alive.

Joe, I love you!

2006-04-08T23:12:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, best email ever.

So I'm writing an article about the combination Asian cultural exposition and runway show I attended last night. I open my email to send a draft to a friend for proofreading, and I get possibly the most wonderful message ever to grace my inbox from a mysterious "Valeria":

hey walked along listening to the singing of the brightly colored birds and looking at the lovely flowers which now became so thick that the ground was carpeted with them. There were big yellow and white and blue and purple blossoms, besides great clusters of scarlet poppies, which were so brilliant in color they almost dazzled Dorothy's eyes.
I`m bored :(
wanting a friend for L0VE, kiss, touch, lick and f*ck me!
my photos, phone on my homepage here
:) :) :)

"But I thought you had gone to visit the Wicked Witch of the West."

The glorious confusion that followed: indescribable. Somewhere in Eastern Europe, a porn-obsessed hacker has earned his wings.

2006-04-06T15:52:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, parenthetical attack!

The following is my singular real-life brush with the Plamegate brouhaha. In condensed, Powerpoint-ready form:

It is last October.
Joe needed to look super gay because he was attending a Halloween party as Charles Nelson Riley.
So we went to Rags-a-Go-Go.
I found a button down shirt from the 70s with asterisks and red squares that was totally adorable.
That happened to be the same day Scooter Libby got indicted. Joshua Suzanne, everyone's favorite thrift store proprietress, was overjoyed.
I got a 25% discount on it because I knew that Libby had been indicted on five counts.
I save money. Scotter Libby goes to jail. Best scandal ever.

The reason I tried to avoid mentioning Valerie Plame in any context earlier (say, last October) is that, like a million other things (skew-Hermitian transformation mapping, the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a slab of concrete), politics is completely opaque to me. I figure most people don't like being lectured by the uninformed. In my case, this distaste for clueless pontificators (and pontiffs) borders on mania. Knowing this, I put in the extra effort to blog only about items that fall squarely within my knowledge base (ex: Top Model, biotechnology, emotional terror).

However, I'm beginning to feel like there are no unseen circumstances which can help explain the Bush Administration's actions. Thus, there is nothing more to understand and any prez-bashing on my part is free of "unfounded" in "obnoxious, unfounded liberal whining"!

So here, again in a pre-chewed form, is my understanding of the scandal:

The Administration, in addition to being incompetent, is genuinely sinister.

Could I possibly have wronged those unshaven Union Square protestors? Only Time (and possibly a Senate inquiry) will tell.

2006-03-29T23:47:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, drunk heterosexual theatre major.

I once saw a documentary on the Discovery Channel about the psychology of serial killers. For many of these people, the desire to kill a random person and throw their dismembered chunks into the river is literally a medical condition. It is untreatable. Upon learning this I wondered: what does this imply about guilt?

A new study published in the journal Nature today suggests a strong correlation between IQ and physical brain structure in children. As much as expectant mothers blast Baby Mozart into their bumps in the hopes of birthing the next William J. Sidis, there’s little she can do about how far her kid’s medulla will extrude. So then, what does this imply about achievement?

I ask myself: Who really controls who I end up becoming? Just how much does biology inform fate? Then I ask myself the hard question, a reductionist neutron bomb: Am I just a controlled set of chemical reactions?

And suddenly it is 2003 and I am drunk in my freshman dorm with friends again.

2006-03-29T00:24:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, reporting winds at 5 to 10 mph.

When I was five years old, I lived under a relatively busy flight path near Minneapolis. Every twenty minutes, the dull roar of an airplane would bubble up from the background noise until you could hear the screech of the wind right before it got sucked into the turbines. Once, this sonic bubble grew so huge and unstable that I was sure it was to pop, taking my delicate eardrums with it. This would be right before a hundred tons of twisted titanium alloy smashed through my living room, taking my television and Lego pirate colony with it. It was at that tender age that I realized that airplanes could, under the right conditions, fall out of the sky in a blaze of ruin.

There's no further development for this anecdote. I wrote it because I was thinking about Snakes on a Plane.

Also, concerning boyfriend:

Right?!

2006-03-26T22:30:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, fried crown of meats.

A quick glance at the health section of today’s New York Times online reveals a headline that should have literate pork chop fans worldwide heading to their favorite meat supplier: Pork That’s Good for the Heart May Be Possible With Cloning. These cloned animals produce Omega-3 fatty acids, which have been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease.

However, before you go on that 24-hour bacon binge, take some time to read about my experiences with genetic engineering and another of my favorite foods: rice. It’s a story that starts, oddly enough, in the Netherlands.

I remember my family’s Summer 2000 vacation to Amsterdam for many reasons, among them my initiation into the dark world of reckless European taxi drivers, Madame Tussad's wax statues and penis postcards. Oddly enough, another notable part of the trip was my visit to an airport magazine stand. On my last day in Holland, knowing that my remaining collection of Netherlands guilden (the Euro was still unfashionable) was too meager to be worth exchanging, I spent it on a deck of cards and a copy of Time.

The cover story for that issue involved “Golden Rice”, a genetically modified strain of Asia’s starch-du-jour engineered to express three daffodil genes integral to the synthesis of beta-carotene. This molecule, which also makes carrots orange, imparts a warm saffron glow to each grain of rice, hence the engineered strain’s appealing moniker. Beta-carotene is a precursor molecule to Vitamin A, so the hope then was that this new rice would alleviate Vitamin A Deficiency, which results in the deaths of between one and two million children per year.

It is a testament to my high school faith in the greatness of science that when I got back home, I did a little research online and became consumed in self-righteous fury that anybody would have reservations about the genius of Golden Rice’s creator.

However, like every apparent breakthrough technology that appears, Golden Rice had its share of problems. Genetically modified foods were (and are) considered suspicious for safety reasons. The question of who would benefit most from Golden Rice was complicated by economics. Furthermore, a skeptical populace in rural Indonesia might have rejected this new rice, no matter how pretty it was, because it was foreign and off-color. Not least of these flaws was that, according to one estimate, to derive a sufficient level of beta-carotene, a child would have to consume nine kilograms of Golden Rice a day. Consumer groups called it a hoax and a failure.

In an age when we are reminded constantly of the rapid pace of discovery, it’s sometimes easy to lose perspective. As anyone who’s ever conducted research knows, disappointment is part of the game. What's worse, even the most airtight protocol might not yield satisfactory results. Going back to the pigs, the New York Times article says that their health benefits are still theoretical.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t try to explore new technologies, which is what Laura Bush hinted at when she asserted in 2004 that stem cell research was too preliminary to allow for unrestricted federal funding. Paradoxically, her words obliquely mirrored those of groups like Greenpeace who refer to Golden Rice as dangerous.

So where has Golden Rice research progressed since then? Well, a year ago (almost to the day), the BBC ran an article detailing a British company’s creation of “Golden Rice 2.” Syngenta, the firm in question, claimed to have engineered a new strain which contains nearly 20 times the levels of beta-carotene as the original. There’s probably still an appreciable level of spin to Syngenta’s assertions and their claim to have no commercial interest in the whole affair seems fishy. In addition, their press release admits that it is uncertain how long it would take to work out the international legalities surrounding the crop.

Nonetheless, it is clearly a step in the right direction. Even if it’s not the silver bullet that obliterates worldwide Vitamin A Deficiency (it is unlikely to be), at least it is an addition to our disease treatment arsenal. It’s also a bit of a kick in the teeth to nay-sayers who thought the promise of Golden Rice was some lunatic’s fever dream.

So to those of you who fantasize about a day when eating pork tenderloin will be like taking a dose of Lipitor, that day is unlikely to come anytime in the immediate future. However, humanity has a long track record of genetic engineering. If polyploid strawberries, fluffier sheep and Golden Rice are any indication, that ham-based theme party you’ve always wanted is on the horizon. All you need is patience.

2006-03-25T21:46:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, Norweigian stud.

I think I'm staying in tonight and repopulating my decimated hard drive with mp3s. My musical taste at this exact moment, this instantaneous slice of time, is for songs that are relentlessly, even brutally, sweet.

I want music that makes me feel like I'm watching my fourth grader singing a duet in the Riker Hill Elementary production of The Very Bestest Present.

Luckily, the malt liquor makes a lot of music sound that way.

2006-03-21T23:39:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, honored guest at the pity party.

Eventually, I plan to go to graduate or medical school. In that sense, I’ve yet to permanently enter the real world. Nonetheless, applying to salaried jobs with health insurance feels at once like waltzing through a shining gate to my future and falling into a den of unspeakable horrors. This den is called Human Resources.

My ragged messenger bag, with a strap that fits uncomfortably across my chest, is my pathetic seat belt on this little trip down. I doubt the calculator, lysine lip balm and crushed ticket stubs contained therein would confer the adequate inertia to anchor me should I be blindsided by a truck, so it doesn't do much for my physical well-being. Still, as something for me to clutch in my old lady claws, it makes me feel safe. What I need right now is such comfort, because I am moving into another one of those high strung periods of debilitating self-doubt and I'm feeling very much alone.

In the two weeks since I started hunting a foggy notion of my figurative tomorrow, I've probably managed to alienate virtually all my friends. Annoying everyone with incessant pleas to 'read this cover letter' or 'edit that writing sample' in such a short span is a feat worthy of admission to some pantheon, to be sure. It strikes me as terribly sad that nagging is not a marketable skill.

2006-03-20T16:33:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, messenger from the hunt.

(excerpt from "Letter to a Former Employer")

I’m a big fan of ending letters on a happy note and so I have attached a picture of adorable puppies for your enjoyment.

I am losing my mind.

Someone. Please. Hire. Me.

2006-03-16T13:49:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, blog (how postmodern).

New York is a hotbed of perversion. My parents are quite set on that. As if prompting me to schmutz about for years with alcoholics (Everyone), queers (Ryan Kalb) and Nick Rizzo (Nick Rizzo) weren't enough, New York has convinced me that a career in science publishing is something I want to do. With the way my mom reacted to the news, I might as well have told them I was going to be a crack dealer, a helicopter pilot or a Commie. To your surprise, I'm not going to write about my arduous and freak-out inducing job hunt. It is on the topic of New York as Babylon that I would like to launch a narrative of my bus ride as I passed Stamford, Connecticut.

In the southbound direction on I-95, Stamford's mid-sized office towers seem to gleam in the sun, even on days when it's snowing. In SimCity 3000, these generic edifices would first prompt the City Planner talking-head to congratulate you for your efforts to support commerical interests. The entire financial district looks so fake that these buildings resemble nothing more than a detailed re-rendering by a graphic artist of a city built with Duplo blocks.

Nonetheless, I welcome Stamford's sight, as it represents an end to both the wilderness of Western Massachusetts and the quasi-urban squalor of places like Bridgeport, which, through the plexiglass windows of a bus, looks like a city inspired by the color scheme of Saving Private Ryan. I treat Stamford not as its own entity, but as the bus gateway to New York. In the Babylon metaphor, Stamford is a modular Ishtar's Gate. It's pretty, but not terribly inhabitable.

As I pass, I am in the middle of an article concerning Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane. Having just finished a four page article about shopping and a nine page article about an art auctioneer, I found this week's New Yorker to be decently gay. The was even before the two page photo spread of Slimane coaching his male model on how to look more like a girl slash rock star.

Despite two full years of Project Runway fashion camp and tireless coaching from Leigh, I can assuredly say I do not understand fashion. The only reason I know how to pronounce Slimane's name is because of episodic audio slideshows on The New York Times. In fact, whenever I read his name, my own internal voice is transplanted by Cathy Horyn's smug, yawning robot voice. 'Head-ee Slimannnnnnne.' This became a problem when the author quotes a song that goes like this:

I want pants like Hedi Slimane.
I wanna dance like Hedi Slimane.
Live in France like Hedi Slimane.
I wanna fuck like Hedi Slimane.

Had anyone been able to tap my brain's audio output, I would have sounded like a schizophrenia patient who's supressed ego was a middle-aged fashion critic. Either that, or Horyn's spirit was trying to possess my body through astral projection so she could commandeer a Chinatown bus and kill us all.

Yep. Those were the thoughts running through my head as I rode the Fung Wah bus this time.

2006-03-05T11:50:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, first Apple computers to feature Intel processors.

When babies in ancient Judea inexplicably died in their cribs, stricken parents could always leave it to Rabbi to blame the supernatural (Lilith did it!). Hard drive failure is the Circuit City version of such a death-from-nowhere (we call it SIDS), making it especially ripe for wacky hypothetical jaunts into the eye of Fate. As such, I posed a number of questions to myself:

Did the so-called 'blue screen of death' herald the effective spiritual end of my college career? Is it why I've stopped hanging out with everyone? If it is, am I now a member of the real-world? Should I attempt fixing this computer, since, on the flipside of that metaphor, it would mean mucking through the real-world with the shattered shell of a collegiate mindset still dedicated to the ideal that 'Tuesday is the new Thursday is the new Friday'? Is it finally time for a Mac?

The memory of a freshman year alarm clock that died sometime during my last exam in the May of 2004 further buttressed my belief that, 'Yes. This means something.' After all, the ending of freshman year demanded the death of an alarm clock. The death of college logically demands an even bigger sacrifice*.

Unfortunately, the postal service doesn't operate on Sundays, which pushes back the expected delivery of a laptop restoration CD from California by a day. Toshiba charged me an insane 5-7 day shipping cost of $40, so I'm expecting more of a laserdisc than a CD. Ugh. Laptops are such a pain in the ass.

*In my mind, that sentence conjures a scene of an Aztec temple where a priest rips out the still whirring CPU from the bound laptop while a stream of liquid crystal flows down the steep temple steps for the dogs to lick up.

2006-02-27T18:03:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, beverage containing no less than two grams of taurine.

Having done no work over the weekend, crunchtime really does suck. I've consumed nothing today but a sip of a sample can of "Monster Energy Drink" which I got from my friend who got it off a dude on a street corner. She was too afraid to drink it and passed it on to me as a sign of affection and fealty, obviously.

I can imagine drink technicians intending to emulate the taste of Red Bull with this. For the first second it hits the tongue, they succeeded. However, about two seconds later, the fetid aftertaste of socks and aspartate creeps in. Oddly enough, a review of the ingredients label reveals that it contains neither sock extract nor aspartic acid, so I figure what I'm actually tasting are the waste products of a radically mutant, possibly extraterrestrial bacterial lawn that, fed by unnatural sugars, instantly overgrows and cripples my tongue like the virus does in The Andromeda Strain.

Girl, this shit is nasty. Normally, looking back on the tasting experience and noting its shady origins, I'd worry that the drink was just a bath of anthrax spores. In this case, I worry not--I don't believe spores of any extant organism could survive being immersed in this liquid atrocity.

*Based on this entry and the one about the cookbook, I think I should just start a blog where I just hyperbolically condemn things.

Teflon Orchid

Nick Verreos' Barbie Dress

2006-02-23T17:16:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, the keyboard, the eyes.

I present another papercut. It glows due to the magical nature of my artistry--also because I held it in front of a lamp.

2006-02-20T22:27:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, chef and guru my ass.

I once watched a documentary about the human brain that couldn’t stress enough the mind’s limitless control over language. The word ‘limitless’, as used here, might range from a stretch to a lie depending on whose State of the Union speech you’re watching; but today, in the comfort of my own living room, I witnessed the precision of language firsthand.

Last night, Allison brought over a copy of Raw: The Uncook Book, which Justin, Annie and I read during lunch. Although complaints against West Coast demento-cuisine been lodged many times many ways, and in all cases the core concept being ‘I'd rather just eat a potato chip’, we managed to recombine expressions of outrage in wholly novel ways. Thanks a lot, human brain!

Written by a dude with a penchant for tank tops named Juliano, the book is “DEDICATED TO THE PLANET.” After a brief autobiography in which the author describes his awakening (“…in Palm Springs I began to understand that everything following nature’s natural order lives in harmony with the planet and in complete health) and touts his credentials (“My mentor was not some fancy cooking school, but the earth itself”), the book goes on to display strangely disturbing photos of him caught mid-leap like an impala foal or rising from the ocean foam like Venus--but this Venus is creepy.

If nothing else, this cookbook is a paragon of audacity. By page 13, it demands that your kitchen be stocked with:

1 bottle of extra virgin olive oil, 1 jar ground cumin, 1 jar ground curry, 1 jar ground cinnamon, 1 bottle Nama Shoyu, 1 bag Celtic sea salt, 2 pounds raw kamut, spelt or wheat berries, 2 pounds raw buckwheat, 2 pounds raw chickpeas, 3 onions, 5 heads fresh garlic, ¼ pound fresh ginger, 4 jalapeno chilis, 7 lemons, 10 oranges, ½ pound pistachios, 1 package golden miso, 1 bottle raw honey, 1 jar tahini, ½ pound raw walnuts, ½ pound raw sunflower seeds, 1 bottle marinated sun-dried tomatoes, 5 to 20 Nori sheets, 2 bunches cilantro, 1 bunch parsley, 1 head of red leaf or romaine lettuce, 2 bunches basil, ¼ pound mushrooms, 3 pounds tomatoes, 3 ripe avocados, 5 non-ripe avocados
1 bottle black miso, ½ pound dates, 1 pound raw carob

After being asked how Allison could possibly sustain such work-intensive gastronomical punishment for any length of time, Justin’s response: “She’s probably doing this short-term to cleanse herself” prompted my own response of “Why doesn’t she just fast?”

For those of you who have never shared spiritual communion with me: The idea of not eating anything but strained broth for two weeks was previously unfathomable. The fact that “Why doesn’t she just fast?” rolled off my tongue with all the ease of “Oh sweet, the milkshakes are ready” suggests nothing short of a paradigm shift, the idea of spending upwards of 13 hours preparing raw toast forcing me into a perverse alliance with Hunger itself.

Hence, I will not be preparing the 30-ingredient ‘Raw Stir-Fry.’

Reading this post, I feel like I just channelled a lot of Justin Sowa style rage. Such frightful power! It takes me back to my freshman days, when this entry would have been about my defeat in MarioKart.

From the Crotch: A Papercut
This was inspired by a picture of Grace Jones in concert. Photo by Sarah Lim.

2006-02-20T02:39:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, self-progeny hermaphordite.

Valentine's Day Cards!

Dude Holding Flowers.
I got the idea for that one from here.

Dragons
Thanks Wikipedia!

2006-02-13T22:00:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, essence of meatloaf.

Although traction was probably terrible citywide due to the mounds of santorum-hued slush, most of the time people could hop over the meltwater puddles that collected at the corners of New York streets or, at the very least, go around--but not in Union Square. During lunchtime, there were so many people collecting at the corners waiting to cross the streets that jumping was largely impossible. So, like the wildebeest of Africa waiting to migrate to savannah pastures made lush by the rainy season, crowds waited for their turn to walk through ankle deep water. Had those urban myths about alligators in the sewers had substance (and had those alligators somehow evolved endothermy to survive life in ice water)(also, had those alligators been crocodiles), 14th Street might as well have been a Discovery Channel documentary hosted by a dryly voiced Brit who would flagrantly abuse the phrase 'survival of the fittest.'

Unrelated: I made a card for someone.

2006-02-10T16:21:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, fire phallus.

From The New York Times:

The caption reads: Yuri Chechi, one of Italy's greatest gymnasts and a gold medal winner, swung a mighty hammer onto a bronze anvil. And so the pageantry began.

This is the second time I've ever sent Gawker a tip.

2006-02-08T17:34:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, in command of the legion Scythica.

I made Joe a card for Valentine's Day and gave it to him thinking 2/14 was Friday and it would be a nice surprise two days early. Oops.

In anycase, inspired by a Citibank commercial, the card was a Chinese papercut of two identical dragons holding a heart mounted on white paper.

To make sure that I had the technical skill to execute a complex pattern, I decided to make a basic version for practice using printer paper and a paring knife. While the initial product proved that the project was doable, a certain quality was missing--quality, which can only be bought at a store for roughly six dollars (paper, glue, exacto-knife).

After taking notes for me while I slept through a lecture about imperial Rome, Myra accompanied me to Utrect Art Supplies. Sadly, the store only sold crafting paper (100 grams per square meter) in large sheets--sheets that do not comfortably fit in my bag. I was meeting Joe later that night, and it would be suspicious to walk around with reams of red and white paper sticking out. So, in the five minutes before Endocrinology started, I carved the sheet into roughly 8x11 pieces with vulgar slashes of my new exacto-knife.

Cutting up the paper the way I did, my fist clutching the handle of the knife like an assassin's dagger, reminded me uncomfortably of an A&E documentary I once saw about Michael Alig, wherein he explains how he injected a drug dealer full of Drano and proceeded to dismember the corpse.

On a note that is, at this point, secondary to how much I enjoy tooting my own horn: I was glad that Joe liked the card.

I don't have a picture of the card I made, but this is the motif I used to make the cutout. I imagine I'll get a picture up soon, but know that the product emulates the above to the hairs on his chinny-chin-chin.

2006-02-06T13:14:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, Brown and Bubbly.

Liveblogging the Super Bowl

6:34
Whoops, I only start Liveblogging after the first half hour has passed. In that time, a grandiose Burger King musical ends with Brooke Burke topping a pile of girls dressed as condiments in a bun-shaped hoop dress. This adds a welcome element of cannibalism to my Whoppers.

6:35
The Associated Market was closed, so our household ended up going to KFC for our needs. Joe remarks that boneless original recipe was a good choice, which is untrue, since I’m a huge fan of ripping the cartilage off the ends of bones.

6:40
Although I figured that a Seahawk was a synonym for an osprey or some other fishing eagle, I’m told that it’s just a football team. Joe remarks how awesome it would be if the team was actually comprised of seahawks. This leads into a death spiral of non-sequiturs, ending with speculations about the supposed properties of the physical manifestation of the Miami Heat.

6:43
Justin cannot imagine life without the superimposed yellow line on the field. It becomes obvious that, much like wars are responsible for innovations like nylon and radar, the Superbowl is responsible for innovation in the field of little windows that pop up onscreen. I ask what the line means, for I do not know what a 'first down' entails.

6:45
Why yes, Nicholas. I would like another beer.

6:53
Joe looked-up the kid who shot up that gay bar in Massachusetts. It turns out he was a fan of Insane Klown Posse, apparently called a “juggalo.” Why is there a special name for them? I’m not sure how a conversation about a Pepsi commercial happened to spawn that conversation.

6:55
Our supply of wings is low. These football players have very appealing forearms.

6:59
Leonard Nimoy is in a commercial for Bayer. He does the voiceovers for Civilization 4, so I’ve already been hearing his voice for days.

7:01
Justin’s trying to explain the rules of football to Annie, which is a futile effort because she totally, like, doesn’t really care. Her attention is mostly fixated upon what the female sportscasters are wearing, and I’m not being sexist. They really look like they’ve been covered in cheap coffee ice cream and are wearing bicycle chains around their fat necks.

7:03
Joe kissed me about half a second after burping. He tastes of honey barbeque and acid.

7:06
My mom called to ask me if I wanted her to mail me immunization records. I told her I was watching football like a real man; whereupon hearing this she immediately apologizes and hangs up.

Annie just referred to me as both B-train and B-slice. I want to bang her so bad.

7:07
Our house is several weeks behind in our recycling, and our output of non-domestic beer bottles is mythical. Joe just joked that our kitchen table is like the Beer United Nations.

7:09
The yard-markers look like Roman Legion Standards in a fetching shade of international orange.

7:10
We are discussing the technical aspects of deleting our entire Tivo repertoire in anticipation for recording every single event of the Torino Olympics. Goodbye: Stella episode from mid-August.

7:14
In a commercial, a baseball player throws the ball and it strikes the camera. Reflexively, I draw back and raise my arms in defense. That is how good at sports I am.

7:17
Annie just got an update via cell phone that the Black Labs are winning the Puppybowl. A quick Google reveals that it airs on Animal Planet. Upon inspection, we find the cutest game ever—ever. There’s a camera at the bottom of the water bowl!

7:18
We realize that there is actually no way the Black Labs can possibly be 'winning' the Puppy Bowl, as the whole show is just puppies running around being mind-warpingly adorable.

7:27
Oh my God. It’s time for the Bissell Kitty Halftime Show!

7:29
After returning to the actual game, I was ignoring the television entirely until I heard the following. “They just pulled his pants down in order to tape up his groin.” Football hurts, I guess.

7:30
I contend that Ben Roethlisberger is attractive, but according to Joe, he’s ‘no Joey Harrington.’

7:35
The vaguely accented Overstock.com commercial lady becomes increasingly terrifying with each iteration of the franchise.

7:43
In a review of a disputed touchdown, the announcer says that this particular referee has only ruled to overturn an original call 23% of the time. It reminds me of the attention given to Samuel Alito’s ruling percentage in reference to employee discrimination lawsuits.

7:52
While the Burger King commercial was amazing, on the other end of the spectrum, is a spectacularly insipid hip-hop ode to Diet Pepsi. However, a brief romp on the 'rejected videos' section of brownandbubbly.com reveals a neo-dadaist interpretation of Diet Pepsi that has Joe dying of laughter.

8:02
Why yes, Nicholas. I would enjoy another beer.

8:06
Scrolling through the New York Times, I realize that I don’t much care for the Rolling Stones. Joe, whose eyes are still on the TV, refers to the halftime show as “flaccid.”

8:09
We’ve gone to Tivo for last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live to sustain us until the halftime show is over. Prince’s backup singers are great.

8:15
So much for my first liveblog ever. I've given up and started playing MegamanX. As of the time of my signing off, the score is

Seahawks: Whatever
Steelers: Some Multiple of 6 or 7

Also: Leigh's sister got married!

2006-02-02T22:39:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, even thinner than the Razr.

When I removed the iPod from my bag, flipped off the lock and pressed play, I expected a melody, or at least, pre-intro-static. Instead, what I heard was nothing more than the continued droning of early evening Little Italy. Fiddling with the locking switch for a few seconds, it dawned on me that my iPod was stuck in its own dream world, completely unaware of external command. In a way, looking at its screen was not unlike gazing into the eyes of a man with irreparable shell-shock. He understands your presence, but cannot respond in any way. Should my iPod fail to respond before its batteries die, I will have no choice but to give it up to God--cause of death: Strokes, The.

Wandering up 2nd Avenue alone and with no distraction, I am forced to concede that the magic of New York is all but gone. Passing a Wendy's, I remembered my first meal as an NYU student with Trevor. I looked down 15th Street and saw the playhouse where Leigh and I attended opening night of Yeardly Smith's one-woman retrospective on her dual roles as bulimic and as Lisa Simpson.

I have a tendency to romanticize the past. I am like one of Walter Benjamin's rear-facing Angels of History. In addition though, I am not only wearing rose-tinted glasses, but am drunk and stoned as well. Compared to yester-year, how can the present day ever compete? As for the magic of New York, regaining it would require a complete paradigm shift on my part or, failing that, a shitload of money.

2006-01-30T16:57:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, ass-flavored muffin over-risen from the pan.

According to Wikipedia, the story of Stone Soup actually traces its roots to a Portugese village, but the copy Laura Wolff brought into class in 2nd grade clearly pictured an old woman wearing a babooshka. A majority of the population of our town was Askenazic Jew. In retrospect, the politics of children's books make sense. At its core, it's a parable about pooling resources when the going got tough, a message that ran the risk of galvanizing the affluent-seven-year-old-in-the-famine-stricken-early-90s demographic into ushering in a communist utopia.

Our assigned homework that night was to bring in a vegetable to contribute to the class 'cauldron' (it was a restaurant grade pot on loan from Rana's Deli). Most of the kids brought in standard vegetables like carrots or tomatoes. The gross kid probably added raw onions. Kids' whose parents were especially competitive type-A monsters brought in hydroponic acorn squash.

Angela Huang and I, dumb shits that we were, drew attention to ourselves by bringing in a daikon radish and a napa cabbage, respectively. After some boy called these vegetables weird, the class had a nice chat about multiculturalism, during which I foolishly revealed that my Green Card had the words 'Resident Alien' printed on it. I was such a fool!

2006-01-29T19:50:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, given in the name of Germanicus and Drusus.

I just bought my first audiobook off iTunes entirely because in the preview, the author describes Nolita as being 'a few city blocks positively metastatic with handbag stores'. Adjectival (<--an odd, self-serving modifier) brilliance like that seemed worth the $10.95 I just forked over to Apple and Random House.

Now, fifteen minutes later, I realize that perhaps certain authors are not suited to the .mb4 file extension. As readers of this blog know, I'm a huge fan of verbosity, tacking unwarranted clauses onto sentences in the same way a sparrow living above a party supply store might progressively festoon his nest into a parade float (the avian Santino Rice). But while complex sentences seduce me in print, it's not so great when you hear it lisped in high speed.

When I think about how my brain is handling this onslaught of insane sentence constructions, I am reminded of tar pits and associated scenes of plexiglass mammoths slowly drowning.

2006-01-28T11:20:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, 100% Whole Grain.

A plumber came over last night and made our shower operational again. A hair clump had gotten lodged in the drain, so our tub quickly filled up with a soup of toxic goo. As my raven locks are actually rooted deep in my brain, I cannot be at fault. I wanted to shower Thursday, the morning after Justin's birthday, but had to endure physics lab smelling like a combination of Joe's sweat and my tears, as if being forced to calibrate a Coulomb Balance hungover wasn't bad enough already.

2006-01-27T19:18:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, Grande Reserve.

On an episode of America's Next Top Model, the contestants shot a commercial for Secret Ultra Platinum and revealed a lame fact about themselves. I guess telling the camera they sleep with the nightlight on lets them feel earnest and exposed. In the same vein--my secret: I grocery shop to make myself feel better. The produce section is oddly comforting, and I feel peaceful everytime I find an orange that feels denser than the others. It's one step away from comfort eating, but I guess it's better since I'm not getting fat, like Tyra. Speaking of, a pubescent kid called me a chink on the way back from the grocery store. In retaliation, I called him fat and he looked pretty hurt. The round little shit deserved it.

I just had a forty, and I've been depressed for a month. Ugh.

2006-01-12T21:57:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, herbal assault.

So my mom was screaming at me from about five feet away and I was trying as hard as I could to screen her out. At the same time I was looking through job listings but found it impossible to read with so much noise pollution. Eventually I focused in on one word--'heterologous'--and tried to find words within it. Her shouting was so persistent and intense that the only word I could find in three minutes was 'hetero', which, despite the shrieking, I recognized as being a mere neologism. Then I found 'log'. It was only after she had left that I found 'gout'.

2006-01-05T12:16:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, la batarde.

Now, I don't have any sort of body dysmorphic disorder so I know I'm not actually fat. Nonetheless, when your grandmother, a woman who's been stuffing you full of pig meat for the last twenty years, says your stomach is too big, you freak out. Joe says my love handles are cute, but in my heart of hearts I know he's desperately drafting break-up letters that won't make him sound shallow.

For Christmas, I was contemplating asking for a DDR pad, because I remember freshman year when our suite had two. Trevor and I must have collectively lost one of our weights, jumping around like lepromatous swans to the same three songs. So desperate were our efforts that we had to duct tape the pads to the floor to keep them from being torn from the Playstation. Swetha asks whether DDR is good for trimming tummy fat, to which I replied that DDR is like cocaine--addictive and with no specificity whatsoever. The pounds melt off everywhere and collect like a gel on the floor. It can be used to lubricate gearshafts.

This concern with weight is in odd, given what I asked Joe for Christmas. The conflict between my hunger and my fat midsection is one that I believe is, in the end, unreconcilable. Throughout middle school I ate sandwiches made of thinly sliced deli meats, which was fun, but I always wondered what it'd be like to have my mouth completely filled with Butterball. Though he has yet to deliver, I have confidence that Joe will eventually buy me a full turkey breast, in a belated expression of holiday cheer. In exchange, he gets tickets to Mamma Mia.

forrizzletizzle: it would be funny if he got you suzanne somers workout equipment

This is untrue.

*The Justin comment about Island of the Blue Dolphins concerns an entry that was originally in place of this concerning about my grades this past sememster. I've since deleted it in the fear of appearing to be a douchebag (which I am, but you'd never know from reading this).

2005-12-20T00:00:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, Daoist princess.

At Leigh and Al's Christmas party, I punched a wall and wounded my hand grieviously. The breach was a long, canyon-like gash along my left index finger, its smooth bed lined with dying tissue, but punctuated by cute scraps of dirty flapping skin. Joe tells me I looked at it, giggled, and continued to tie little red bows onto the string of beads I was wearing like a very-special pageantry sash.

Later that night, weakened from my rum and egg nog exertions, I fell upon the ground and prayed for a swift end. Unfortunately, Leigh saw it fit to prolong my life and literally dragged me by limp legs along a hallway coated in dust and rancid tomato sauce in an effort to return my carcass to my boyfriend.

He had left thirty minutes earlier to smoke, so Leigh followed his nose, hauling me up through a chemical gradient of aerial canniboids. On the seventh floor, Joe unceremonially dumped me on a bed, my ruined hand coming to rest on a mat of cashed stems.

Two days later, all three sets of articulations on my left index finger look like the raw beef I use to make curry. I joked that marijuana plants might soon spring from the wound, but was secretly more afraid that I might contract something like a multi-drug resistant Staph infection. It seemed like a good idea to pour April's Listerine on the wound. Now my entire hand feels like fire. I resist the grotesque pain because I am a man, but my deepest desire is just to be held.

Merry Christmas.

2005-12-13T13:32:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, useful for a host of skin disorders.

Times I have had cold sores this semester: 3
Number of cold sore patches I have now: 3
Duration (in hours) of progression from prodrome to blisters: 3

It's a layered trifecta of pain.

Somebody please bring me a cake and some lysine pills so I can put them in a blender and drink the mixture for lunch.

2005-12-07T14:37:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, 100% whole grain.

Tonight is both the season finale of America's Next Top Model and the season premeire of Project Runway. The continuity is almost too perfect.

With this, the serpent has bitten its tail. The alchemy wheel has been completed. The great circle of life begins anew.

Q: What is scrumptious?
A: Three hours of television.

2005-12-06T01:14:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, in health and disease.

My mom called this afternoon to tell me that I got my first medical school solicitations, one MD/PhD ad from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and another med school one from Columbia*. More are likely forthcoming.

When I asked myself how I felt about it, I told myself that it was both scary and exciting. It has since occured to me that 'Scary and Exciting' would be the perfect title of a public service special about your first trip to the gynecologist. Having shared in this combination of emotions, I feel I understand what it means to, one fine day, begin to randomly bleed from the vagina.

*In addition:
Columbia emailed me a pamphlet regarding their program for a Masters in Nutrition.
Suhxie emailed me a deal involving roundtrip airfare and three nights in Jamaica for $450.

2005-12-05T01:44:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, lightly scented allergen reducer.

Any party where I end the night spraying people with Febreze must be have been stupendous at a minimum. If one were to add, say, a liter of Jack Daniels, midnight snowfall and apple crisp baked by one's boyfriend, this party might be misconstrued as magical, an outstanding bookend to a long-ago weekend of unicorns.

Combining the numbers of a severely overcrowded apartment party with the density of a yacht club brunch--Thus did Nick Snow's birthday extravaganza come to pass, renewing Beverley Square Massive's legacy of infrequent, but acclaimed revelry.

2005-12-01T23:43:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, cruel redeemer.

Starbucks on Astor Place is full of the Christmas spirit. Over the course of an hour, Jamie, Casey and myself gorged on free gingery cakes (that were delicious) and eggnog lattes (that tasted like cow piss). We decorated gift wrapping with provided crayons and told stories about Berlin youth on the rampage. It was fun--so much fun that I called my tutoring client to push back a session, pretending I was at a fundraiser. Sneaky!

2005-11-30T23:38:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, masked dyer of Merv.

Having eaten a wide range of foodstuffs throughout my life, the link between my imagination and taste buds has become sophisticated in a dimension undreampt of by mortals. When I try to think of a description of the texture closest to a Chipotle burrito tortilla, I think of Joan Rivers' forehead. Meanwhile, the green salsa in a Chipotle burrito has the tang of her skin's palpable botulin load. Of these two I can only say: immaculate.

2005-11-28T22:25:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, pirate widow.

Through Mother's eyes I am a loser in the game show of life. She is reminded of this every time she sees me.

My coat is forever falling apart.
I smell like old ladies because of the Fung Wah Bus.
I still kiss a boy on a regular basis.

When I leave, she always packs me food. The parting gift always feels like a consolation prize though, like her own version of a Huffy bike or a microwave. It's a real shame I'm not a winner. Food, while super, still isn't an all expense paid trip to Nickelodeon Studios at Universal Studios, Orlando, Florida.

A month ago it was a bucket of ginger barbequed lamb. This time it was peppercorned drumsticks and boiled shrimp. The shrimp confuse my roommates because the shells are still attached. I eat them like pink, chitinous potato chips. They are delicious.

2005-11-16T12:33:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, King of the Dancing!

The last time I got worked up about a song was about ten minutes before my MCATs. It was eleven hours of wanting to dance and answering hard questions and I was gassy. In other words: unmitigated disaster.

The last time I tried downloading a major pop song was in the year 2003. The RIAA had flooded Kazaa with nonsense versions of Miss Independent. Along the way, the song's coding mutated itself to become malignant, either spontaneously or with the aid of a Taiwanese hacker. Three days after I started scouting for functional copies of that song, my old computer detonated.

This brings us up to the present day--Madonna's completely awesome Hung Up (she samples ABBA!): Worth the risk to laptop (Skzsp) and iPod (Wanda)? Or should I just watch the video online over and over for my gay to get its fix?

Last night Justin and I did google image searches on abstract words like "freedom", "majesty" and pandas.

2005-11-14T01:05:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, dark-skinned, quick-witted Indian whose gifts are practicality and sensibleness.

Last weekend, driven by the ecstacy of St.Thankgiving, Joe baked a pumpkin pie. When it first came from the oven, sectioning it into discrete pieces was like dividing up Jello, mucus or magma. I respected The Pie, for it was a clever strategy for avoiding consumption, but now the jig is up. Having spent some time in the cryo-slammer, it has become easy to cut discrete pieces out of its cinnamon-laden body. In fact, its surface has acquired such a perfect texture that it almost fractures into flawless slices the moment the knife touches it. From the top it resembles a Powerpoint pie chart, or a textbook illustration of the fraction.

I thought about how a baked goods problem might appear on a math test:

(10 points)
It is one in the morning and Byron is hungry. He notices a partially eaten pumpkin pie in the refrigerator. 3/8 of the pie have been already been eaten by raccoons. Byron cuts a quarter slice for himself and browses Allrecipes. When he finishes, he finds that he is still hungry. Sneaking back to the refrigerator like a bandit, he cuts off 1/3 of the remaining pie and eats it while updating his blog. What fraction of the original pie is left?

Extra Credit Bonus (5 points): Prove Fermat's Last Theorem

Next weekend, God-willing, Joe will make a baked Alaska cake. It will present an opportunity to teach the classroom in my mind the dynamics of phase change as the creamy vanilla ice cream melts in my mouth.

2005-11-12T02:27:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, I wrote this entire entry completely wasted.

Several days ago, I had a dream where a medical school admissions committee asked me which flavor of dork I respected most. My subconscious gave an ultra-cogent argument in favor of Sci-Fi geeks. I know some of these people from high school and they are, as a generality, DESPICABLE human beings, but it requires palpable brainpower to think through the plausiblity and ethics of a good space-novel. I respect that, maybe.

When I was twelve years old, TBS acquired the rights to the movie version of Carl Sagan's Contact. In trying to wring the maximum benefit from this investment, the Superstation showed the movie at 8PM at least three weeknights in a row. My mother and I watched it every single night with rapt fascination that, to this day, has yet to be observed again. Despite well-documented inconsitencies in her logic, she was born bound to the romance of science, and I think 1998 have been the last time we ever saw eye to eye on the content of a movie. We fell so deeply in love with Jodie Foster that either of us would have gladly shot Reagan to get her autograph.

(Last year, Leigh and I founded a Jodie Foster Facebook group.)

Since time immemorial, my mother worked at a pharmaceutical company in nearby Summit, NJ. As a responsible member of the immigrant middle class, she was unable to pick me up from school until five. This was not a problem in elementary or junior high, when school was a short hike down a tree-lined street or up a shallow hill, but when I was fourteen years old, I started hanging out in the Ruth L. Rockwood Public Library, a five minute walk from Livingston High School, a forty minute walk from home. There, on the second tier of the fiction mezzanine, I found the book version of Sagan's masterpiece novel. While the movie was Jodie-tastic, the book was so much more.

When I was fourteen years old, I experienced my own geek-analog of awful teenage poetry. While others were beginning to discover the artistic horror of prog-rock and emo, the book spurred my personal infatuation with mathematical coincidence in numbers both rational (Divide one into 243) and irrational (pi/4 = 1-(1/3)+(1/5)-(1/7)+(1/9)...) in the same way that an element might trigger an infatuation in normal kids with, say--Satan. Among the craziest suggestions Sagan made was that pi, by virtue of its ceaseless coda of numbers, would eventually come to represent some sort of message (presumably encrypted by God). So you see how stupid 9th graders are.

It literally took me half a decade to figure out that ANY irrational number (not just pi) will eventually encode some sort of message. Furthermore, a particular irrational number will eventually encode ALL possible permutations of ALL information. Nevertheless, for the five year gap when thoughts concerning unknowably complex mathematics popped into my head, I would be keenly aware of this bizarre quasi-emotion called wonder.

Yay, Joe is back. Let us sleep.

2005-11-10T23:37:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, chocolate meltdown!

So my non-secret is that I have this huge boner for the well-dressed. Tonight's party at the Met suggested black and white attire, so this particular trip to the museum was satisfying in a way a normal excursion to a Calatrava exhibit could never be. The dress code was intended to mirror a black and white photography exhibit. We never found it, so we ended up wandering the modern art section noting things likes how a Miro painting called "The Potato" may actually have nothing to do with food.

Among the non-art attractions was a set of Christmas trees upon which you were supposed to hang your deepest wish, written in 1998-era silver gel pen on a black card. It had a very Postsecret feel to it, and the trees became rife with wishes ranging from the enchantingly hopeful (I wish Perry would notice me) to the creepily hopeful (I wish Leila would do me) to the insipid (I wish for world peace) to the misspelled (I wish Carl Rove would get indicted) to the hilariously desperate (I wish I wasn't so fat) to the gross (For great head, call me: 646-798-5555).

The bartenders only served juice and sodas. I ordered a ginger ale so that on the way back to Joe's, I took my first ever sober taxi ride. The driver had AM radio on, and we were amazed that the pundit was liberal. Now that the country is falling apart and Kansas has redefined science, I figure it's the stylish position to take. As three New Yorkers decked in monochrome, having just eaten truffles in an art museum, winding through the mean streets of the Upper East Side, we felt weird. We were so haughty, elite and out of touch with the retarded redneck on the radio that for a fleeting moment we felt like those born of privilege. Then we got to Joe's apartment and people were playing beer pong. What a drag, eh?

2005-11-06T19:15:00.000-05:00

Blogspot, faceless blog in a sea of blogs.

So I'm on line to buy a Chinatown Bus ticket on Friday afternoon and there's this black lady in front of me handing the cashier $20. Ok, so I was going to describe the situation in great detail, but what happened was that I, being Chinese, got shuttled onto the bus before this woman who clearly bought her ticket first. In the absense of any mitigating circumstances that I could see, I'd like to say that Fung Wah is blatantly racist and I am not using them again. What's really galling is that Rosa Parks had her funeral yesterday and that sort of shit still goes on. I am pissed off.

I came back from Boston with two buckets of meats (no lies) and I'm going to go downstairs to feast and watch TV.

2005-10-21T02:06:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, who I will eventually stop addressing as a person, maybe.

I had lunch with a former model today, one of Alis' friends. After taking a hiatus from her studies, this girl had an epiphany during a photoshoot and returned to NYU with the intent of wrapping up her chemical engineering degree. We spent two hours talking about vaginas, Triceratops and Naomi Campbell. Three years in, I am still reminded daily that this school is bananas.

2005-10-14T12:56:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, run by the Bohemian Citizens Benevolent Society.

I vomited last night right after getting my MCAT scores back. To be fair to me, this wasn't just a result of a defunct stress-handling system. I had already indulged in a number of drinks made by Blaire, a girl who, historically, kills her victims with potent booze innocently disguised to taste like pumpkin pie, creamsicles or candy.

That the scores were already posted on the AAMC (Aardvark and Armadillo Mutual Compact) website was a tidbit handed down to me by Ashish, a twisted knob on the internet grapevine. Three people had to walk me through the website registration process because I was so nervous that I refused to read the title of the fields before I filled them in. My date of birth almost became my social security number.

This morning Ashish and I talked about our scores at length, and at a certain point, sounded like gossip. Gossiping about standardized tests toke me back to the days when I would do the same in gym class with Leah Feder as we scrambled across the pickleball court in heated battle. It's a little (a lot) shameful that we'd be using scores as a gossip item and I imagined a world where overachievers ran the tabloids-- a world where the front page of The Mirror would speculate on how the Federletus would score on his Iowas. Just as The National Enquirer did with its coverage of the Heidi Klum-Seal marriage, parallel-universe tabloid would ask tough questions about race--like why Asians require much higher scores to get into medical school (thanks affirmative action). It'd be a pretty shitty world.

I did well enough that I don't plan on a retake, btw.

2005-10-11T02:57:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, neglected kinder.

When I hear about the remnants of a tropical storm affecting my area, what I usually get is rain and hot air, the type that pampers your skin with the gentle caress of a soiled jockstrap. That was Saturday. Now it's just cold and rainy, thank the Lord.

I went to Boston this weekend to help my parents prime windows and french doors. Since (in addition to being behind on the times regarding how 20 year olds conduct themselves) my parents operate on barter, I acquired two pounds of beef and pork and an entire broiled eel for services rendered.

Now, I understand that being the house chef imparts great responsibility, but in this case I have failed. I have neither the ancient knowledge or prodigious skill required to make broiled eel palatable to white tongues, so I think I'll just eat it as a midnight snack, now, alone. Certain qualities about me--weight, choice of shampoo, relative gayness index*--may hop around like a bunny, but it's nice to know that the fire of my hunger will burn at a constant high--Byron Lu, America's most trusted name in overconsumption.

*Gay club at 3AM Thursday. Index up 0.2 points to 6.4%

2005-09-28T00:44:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, who will never be good as your Canadian doppelganger.

I'm sorry I've been neglecting you, but I have a valid reason, given by a simple expression:

+

The N only has four or five pieces of original programming, which means we Tivo about seven episodes of Degrassi: The New Generation per night. Needless to say, this sequesters virtually all my free time.

Manny does porn this season. Canadians are so gosh-darn progressive.

2005-09-18T01:43:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, you fucking dyke.

The CMJ festival is in town (CMJ = Cumulus Monkey Jamboree).

As hurricanes are fed by the rising water vapor of warm oceans, so is the CMJ festival fed by the envy of biology majors who don't get show passes. Since I live with a music business kid and a writer for a bite-sized weekly, the disparity is all the more apparent. From my perch in front of the television, watching a Tivo-ed marathon of America's Next Top Model, alone, I ooze scorn.

There are good things about the whole affair too! Long story short--Blaire works for Universal Records and they gave her an executive suite and an expense account. She held a party last night where there was a lot of jumping on the bed. Upon leaving sometime around noon today, I jacked an upscale food and wine magazine chock full of recipes, went to Chinatown, went home and cooked the best chicken ever.

(I bought four chili peppers for 50 cents and Joe had to spot me. I am so classy.)

So while you, gentle reader, browse blogs hijacked by stories of the rapture of Arcade Fire or Regina Spektor, remember the little people who spent this weekend doing Genetics homework and cooking for their boyfriends.

2005-09-08T19:30:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, king of Prussia.

On day one of my first week of senior year, my iPod broke for no reason, which is nothing new. My tech support consultant has always been an Indian woman--hurray outsourcing. She recommended I send Wanda (name of the iPod) in for a repair I know will be fruitless, like it was with the last three Wandas. I expect my 4th click-wheel to be sent to me by next week, the iPod being not unlike a mail-order bride.

On the bright side, not zombie-ing out on the subway has allowed me to finish books, and not just school-related books, in record time. My roommate Mike is a Sarah Vowell fanatic, and I take secret joy that his signed edition of Assassination Vacation was inscribed with a mere 'To Mike, Sarah Vowell' in big loopy letters. David Sedaris took the time to draw a pumpkin on the title page of my copy of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. In the game of Which-NPR-Personality-Signed-Your-Book-Better, I am undisputed champion. Anyhow, I finished Mike's book in one day. Two days later, I am halfway done with One Hundred Years of Solitude--only fifty years left (of solitude)! Haha.

As for today, and every Thursday henceforth, I will have a three hour class at 8AM, which is like watching Titanic half asleep once a week. School is pretty intense. Anticipating this, I crashed at Joe's apartment last night, where I didn't sleep until 2AM because of his roommates' surprise Wednesday night beer pong jamboree. God. Damn. It.

On another note: It's easy to pick out the freshmen at this stage because they travel in huge, socially disjointed clods. Hipster bassist chicks, theatre faggotrons and gross biochemistry majors live together in harmony, if only for another few days. The lion lying with the lamb--it's like the second coming of Christ. Also, the girls all dress like Mary-Kate.

2005-08-31T02:36:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, writer of words, channel of fear.

One of the great joys of digital cable is that for any change in time t, there are d[2(e0)x]/dt instances of pre-3rd season Will & Grace showing (where e0 equals the permittivity of free space). In 8th grade, the show made me long for an elevated kitchen and a lucrative career in corporate law more than anything. I'm not kidding--Will and Grace is the major reason I did mock trial.

Of course, since new episodes are as fun to watch as a seven year old sitcom about faghags, all avalible shows are syndicated--which means they've had commercials injected into them with a turkey baster. The average commercial break goes something like this: A woman is dancing in a club when she suddenly realizes she sports a colossal, glowing pit stain. Shoulda used Dri-Pits! After this comes an ice cream commercial, followed without delay by advertisements for tampons designed for those heavy days. Do you see the pattern?

Fag hags who spend Sunday morning reading Cathy are unfortunate realities. There are good one though. My friend Blaire uses her charm to collect gays like stamps or mini-bottles of barbeque sauce; I suspect her secret intention is to pickle us and sell our shriveled corpses on Antiques Roadshow. I respect her.

Changing channels, Justin and I notice the demographic that watches The Science Channel are uniformly balding and lodged in a death-spiral of debt. I, for one, agree with the attractive, yet approachable, blonde spokeswoman that consolidation is the answer. I, for one, also agree with experts that there is going to be a killer asteroid in 800 years and we may go the way of the dinosaur.

*I drank 2 liters of green tea today to avoid overheating and that shit is driving me up the wall.

2005-08-28T19:58:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, owner of many cats.

I got wasted last night and I ate 20 dumplings in a sitting today. We Tivo-ed Kelly Clarkson falling off the stage during the VMAs and watched the ten-second loop of her descent continuously for two minutes. During commercials, we jumped to the Weather Channel's round-the-clock coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Far-away storm surge and celebrity instability are my favorites, and I'm glad they're my roommates' favorites too.

The gang and I shopped for ingredients in Chinatown and came home with 25 pounds of rice, a bottle of 'Depressed Chinese Woman' brand chili oil and fruit pops that look like ice sausages. I plan to make MaPo Tofu tomorrow night before I go to my boyfriend's DJ set. I will drink martinis, he will play Joy Division, and it will rule.

The past spring was unusually cold, and I've come to associate the city of New York with chilly temperatures. The saturating humidity calls me out on my idiocy, so I will be sleeping shirtless tonight with the windows open. I had the exquisite sin of air conditioning in Boston, but I don't mind the change.

2005-08-21T20:10:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, soiled teenage girlfriend.

I got up at 6:30AM to take a motherfucking test. The people who had shown up to take the MCAT were alarmingly attractive, as if the hospitals of tomorrow were primed to be backup sets for ER. The Kaplan practice books had somehow implicitly led me to believe I would be vying with trolls, so the impending competition with people with cheekbones more statuesque than my own came as a shock.

Our test was administered in the largest room of a high end Boston hotel. Desks were arranged with creepy precision as tacky chandeliers swung eerily above our heads. As students flooded in, the space came to resemble a cross between the ballroom of a haunted cruise ship and the lecture hall Albert Speer never got to design.

Our proctor, a high-strung Indian doctor, took his sweet time reading instructions. In fact, he spent so long handling administration that I sat in that room from 8AM to 7PM. At one point, people needed to pee and wanted to leave the room. In response, the proctor lifted his hands and, in exasperation, and began swatting at an unseen assailant. I couldn't help but see his resemblance to the dark priest from the second Indiana Jones movie. Let these promising minds be a sacrifice to the almighty Kali-Ma! Let me remind you now that everyone's a little bit racist.

I sat in front of two kids with heavy Bostonian accents, the Massachusetts equivalent of Jersey shore-trash. Nonetheless, as they discussed matters such as the renin-angiotensin system and complementary RNA interference, I realized that they were clearly the most intelligent shore-trash to whom God ever saw fit to grant life. It was unclear whether I should have been impressed or repulsed.

Finally, as a note to prospective test-takers: Before a major exam, do not listen to catchy pop music. It is clear to me now that the poor performance I forecast for myself on the biology-organic chemistry section should be attributed to Stephin Merritt and the French girl from Ivy. Damn you, Dominique.

2005-08-16T20:29:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, factory of human chorionic gonadotropin.

In the week leading up to SATs, I was nervous--so much so that I had spent several hours a day compulsively doing yardwork. In retrospect, working with sharp tools under duress seems a damn fool idea. In my family, the prospect of failing at a standardized test undermines one's reason for life. It would call for a ritual suicide only made messier with the gas-powered chainsaw we used to clear the wall of bramble bordering our property. What a gory suburban scene that would have been: a chestnut sapling, sprouting from freshly mown grass, splotched with an elegant arc of clotting blood--and bits of shattered bone distributed like bacon bits on a salad.

Three years later, I am once again worried about standardized testing--this time, the MCATs. They are this Saturday. It's unusual for me to wait so long to start freaking out, but I guess it's no surprise that procrastination has finally extended its spindly fingers this far.

Recently I had a nightmare where I was taking the Physics portion of the exam. Halfway through, I discovered that the problems had nothing to do with electrostatics or whatever and actually tested one's skill in cake decoration. In the end, my creation, a torte covered in pink icing topped with a single cookie seashell, garnered me a combined score of zero. When I awoke, I jumped from a desire to laugh to a desire to cry with the regularity of an AC current.

Wish me luck. If I don't return to New York, they're probably scraping my intestines off my boss's windshield after my ill-fated compulsive attempts to wash moving vehicles.

2005-08-10T21:04:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, protector of the forests.

Some days, when my boss and I become weary from our charges, we take a trip to the local chocolate store. The Lindt Boutique is located in the Longwood Galleria, a food court that was disembodied, much to the chagrin of community activists, when its associated mall was bulldozed to make way for yet another goddamn cancer institute. I know. It's sick.

The idea of mass produced swiss chocolate is about as bourgeois as things can be, but since the white truffles speckled with light, crunchy, chocolate orgasm flakes actually constitue fine art in sugar, we don't care. It's not like we even buy the chocolate. Andra and I mostly go there to get free samples served by the hottie who works there. When we hold out our hands, childlike, and mew "chocolate please" in our softest voices, I feel like a character from an old-time movie or a Charles Dickens novel: you know, the one where the gay guy goes with his Romanian boss to the candy shop so we can oggle the clerk 3 days before her wedding to the hot Argentinian Jew who isn't quite divorced yet.

2005-08-07T19:30:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, deity of interior design.

With a sole exception, I have had trouble with the parents everytime I've seen a movie in theatres. I got disowned after Star Wars, disowned again after Madagascar and sent to therapy after Batman Begins. Last night, a day after seeing March of the Penguins, I could be seen running down my block in full hysterics without a shirt on (not even kidding). I'm beginning to think they are more concerned with my taste in film than with my homosexuality.

In anycase, Friday's movie made me empathize more completely with the sorrows of penguins than I had thought possible. Really, animals are generally more sympathetic than humans. Why? Well for starters: adult Emperor Penguins don't disown their children and the chicks aren't forced to maintain a complex web of lies in response. I feel guilty because in the last two months, I have become way more skilled in the business of deceit than I ever hoped to be. I keep around enough red herring to restock the North Atlantic.

As of late, my flesh and blood have been stepping up efforts on the bigotry front. So the deceit is all necessary. Clearly, the only way to combat ignorance is with subtlety and lies.

Recently, my mother told me a story about a young Chinese student attending Stanford. Under mysterious circumstances, his parents pulled him out of school--the implcation being that said young man liked to kiss boys. Momma proceeded to describe the whole unpleasant affair as being justified. Now, for a university-pretige whore like my mom, pulling a child out of a top-notch school like Stanford is the equivalent of an art scholar burning a Rembrandt because it doesn't match well the mauve wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom.

I am no longer allowed to shop at Banana Republic because, as Schmucky Ken's mother tells my mother: 'That's where some gays shop.' Of course, and as you will note entering its designer doorway, the store is practically an orgy. I also hate to tell you this but: gays shop at a lot of places--but don't tell anyone. It's a secret!

As of now, my parents are literally in Wyoming, visiting Yellowstone National Park. Peace and quiet might be good for me, methinks. Geysers and grizzly bears might be good for them, methinks.

2005-08-03T22:33:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, icy manipulator.

Starting out at my job, I felt bad for these mice I work with because half of them develop prostate or colon cancer by the third week of life. The other half have non-functional immune systems and cannot leave the scary sterile room (which I call the MJ Music Video room).

Today, I got pooed on one too many times by female sixty-two so that now, I kind of just want to kill them all.

I am not a mouse bigot because no matter what color, strain, or mouse religion, I hate them equally. At this point, it's reasonable to say that I despise all rodents. If I come across a beaver, I'll kill it. Maybe I'll take a shard of shattered incisor as a fetish trophy. Who knows?

Moving on, let's talk Christian values. Today, my roving eyes found that a male I had misplaced at its weaning two weeks ago had impregnated not one, but four of his sisters. There were 17 pups in the cage. Overcrowding violation reports for everyone!

The worst part of mousework to endure is putting on those ugly canary yellow protection suits. At first I thought there were to keep me from getting mouse herpes. No--turns out it's to keep the mice safe from murine parvovirus. Murine parvovirus, really--Who the fuck cares?!

So after this summer, I am done with animal research.

So you--aggressive 9-month old unbreeding males--if you try to bite me one more fucking time, remember: when your time comes (and believe me, none of you will make it past August), I'm going to raise the carbon dioxide concentration just a little too fast for comfort. Then, after you have stopped spasming, I'm going to break your fat, disgusting necks for good measure.

Then I'm having a party and you are not invited because mice don't deserve pizza or lines of blow off the bathroom sink.

2005-08-01T20:48:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, wellspring of eternal joy.

It'd be different if I was JK Rowling or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I no longer have the imagination to fabricate the stories of my life. Reality can't outdone by clever storyboarding.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Boston Fens, let me describe their most obvious feature. The reeds that line the river are some four times my height. From them, Egyptians could have woven together an aircraft carrier in papyrus.

The giant reeds that make the Back Bay Fens so spectacular are the same reeds that make the place such a good place to get anonymous head. My parents, unskilled in the rituals of public sex, decided on their last confused visit that the Back Bay Fens were merely pretty--which is why they brought me on their second trip yesterday evening--to show me this pretty place.

When the first leather daddy strolled out of a homemade trail through riverside thicket, my mother was quick to take notice. However, she didn't realize who he was and thought the red hankerchief in his right pocket meant he was carrying a gun or a knife. As it turns out from quick internet research, it actually means he enjoys having an arm up the ass.

Oblivious, my parents trekked onward through an obvious gay cruising area and I followed, making an apologetic face towards the gaggle of Spanish queens on the roadside. It wasn't until my father decided to see what was actually happening in the reeds that I panicked.

Half an hour later: The setting is in front of Boston's Christian Science Center. I am assuring my father that I do not have anonymous sex in parks. I agree with him that there is nothing more atrocious in the world than a public blowjob, not having the heart to tell him about the people who drink pee or the people who crash jets into buildings.

No, my dears, that would break his wee heart into a zillion pieces.

2005-07-31T13:05:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, giver of life.

Not to be a jackass or anything, but I love our new house truly, deeply, madly. Let us enumerate the benefits: It is two blocks from the subway. It is three stories tall. It has the cutest kitchen. It has private security. It has 60% redone walls. It is lorded over by an Australian TV executive who formerly worked at Nick GAS. This lack of variation in sentence structure can stretch on ad-infinitum because really, our house is the very-very-very best house.

As a rule, we, as members of the American collegiate population, are highly mobile--much like dandelion seeds or Mongolians. This means we have few possessions, which is the reason (beyond mere passive-aggression) nobody wanted to take the master bedroom, which is the size of a helipad. I, proud owner of little more than a Toshiba laptop and a yurt, could never make such a room bear aesthetic fruit. The barrenness of the room would mirror the barrenness of my future. And really, what college student wants to be reminded of that?

Our friendly neighbors approached us soon after our lease signing and introduced themselves as Maya and Arturo. In addition to being impossibly attractive artists, they also throw parties every Friday (also: they're named Maya and Arturo). When Christmas comes I must remember to bake them a nice fruitcake. We can go caroling.

This is the part where I announce that our house is a Victorian, and looks like the one from The Amityville Horror. The fact that we're only paying $625 for it makes me wonder whether or not we'll end up mysteriously dying one-by-one. The third floor bedroom features a private bathroom with nothing more than an old tub in it. Assuming Michelle Pfiffer doesn't pop out of it and drag him screaming to hell first, Nick can use it to make moonshine.

2005-07-29T13:16:00.000-04:00

Blogspot, my lover.

This summer has been challenging--and I don't mean like a good ski slope. I've tried to live in the interphase between the sublime and the nightmarish but at this point, I think it's pretty clear that I've failed. Honestly, I think the only thing giving me some semblance of sanity is my undying love of The Discovery Channel (I Mythbusters, therefore I am).

Besides the catatonia that allows me to lie for hours staring at my nipple-shaped ceiling lamp, my condition affords me many other benefits. You see, I now have an elf-like ability to remain awake through the night for multiple nights. People would think I'd take this time to address why my life isn't worth living, but no. I think about furniture--specifically Ikea furniture--specifically the rugs that look like they were designed by retards.

Why am I still so drawn to them? Well, Trevor thinks it's the influence of nordic black magiks woven into the fine mesh of polyester. Then again, since when has Trevor ever been right?

Now imagine having this two-way monologue in your head at five in the morning. What's that astute, gentle reader? Oh, why yes indeed--you are correct! It does suck.

One night, unable to embark on another of these odysseys of the mind, I started reading anything just lying around: my Organic Chemistry textbook, an issue of Newsweek from 2001, the lunch specials for a Cambridge Taiwanese restaurant named Mulan.

The best, and worst, find that night was my elementary school yearbook. For those of you who have yet to find such a item, let me warn you that it is a document of ironies that exceed the scope of words like rapacious and excruciating. It's natural to expect that some aspiring doctors will grow up to be crack rock addicts. This happens everywhere. However, the trail of Riker Hill Elementary's shattered dreams are so much more complex and stare back at yearbook readers with such smarmy vitriol that you would have expected it to come from Williamsburg.

For example: In 1996, Livingston was a town dominated by Asians and Reform Jews. A quick glance at Mrs. Wertheim's first grade class turns up names like Wen, Felberbaum, Moyal, Finkel, Schachtel, Lin, Tulloch, Lu, Levine. In our own class of 52, there was one Muslim kid. Among all the career goals listed, only one among 52 kids aspired to be an airplane pilot. Guess who?

In the "Imagine If..." section, the same kid imagines if "I was a pilot and I never stayed home." Imagination is cute! In the section entitled "In the Year 2003", even obvious predictions like "I will graduate from high school" managed to not come true.

I wonder at what age children realize they were not born into a blessed world. I imagine it's taken me long enough.

Risotto Explosion

I`m bored :(wanting a friend for L0VE, kiss, touch, lick and f*ck me!my photos, phone on my homepage here:) :) :)

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I`m bored :(
wanting a friend for L0VE, kiss, touch, lick and f*ck me!
my photos, phone on my homepage here
:) :) :)