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29May | the toy world has officially gotten out of hand
I saw a commercial for this... can I even call it a toy...? this afternoon and my jaw hit the floor.
Read more about it here. I guess, in the (toy?)'s defense, $599.99 to lure your children away from actual water parks that might injure or kill them seems like it might be a worthy investment. Then again, this page may deter you from the Super Splash Water Park as well. Note: if you are ever planning to go to an amusement park ever again, you probably shouldn't visit those pages. Ignorance is bliss, no?
28May | bad karel
Okay, so I know that I am officially a blogging delinquent. Actually, I'm sort of a writing delinquent since my writing club has slowed to a crawl. (Sorry Lisa!!) All the excitement of May just got to me, I suppose. Hehe. I will try my best to make up the back entries - but here's what's going on with me right now: Brian is coming to visit this weekend and meeting my brothers, and we're taking a day trip to Philly and Haverford which will be nice. Last chance before we leave the east coast...! I am not going to CTY this summer, which means that I'll be around until mid-July. It also means that I will most likely finally meet Lisa this summer...! After NINE YEARS of long-distance friendship! Oh my! What will I wear? What will I do until mid-July? Work at SCORE!, catch up on writing, make jewelry, figure out how best to sell it, see my friends as much as possible, and try not to kill my younger brother as we continue to co-habitate. Oh, and like... find a job in Portland.
23May | i'm speechless
Just when you think it got weirder than you'd ever imagined... IT GETS WEIRDER. (Warning: this is probably NSFW. But I probably could have gotten away with watching it at my old work. Ha!!)
22May | RAR
I don't like this design anymore!! I have like, 924874872 things to write about but no words with which to say them! I am not sad! My brain just is not set to blog function. Also, I think the tan background of this design is starting remind me of diarrhea. Now that I said that, everyone is going to associate my blog with diarrhea and I will lose all of my readership - who are probably impatient with me anyway because I've been blank lately. Oh and who else watched the season finale of Bones? I think I'm still crying a little.
19May | oh nyc how i miss you... and this is why
18May | i am back! (sort of)
It's actually late Saturday night, and I should be getting to bed so I can get up early to catch a train into NYC. I also need to pack an overnight bag since I'm staying there til Monday night. Oh, and my clean clothes have been in the dryer since yesterday afternoon. Oops! Anyway the reason I'm still up and haven't bothered to retrieve my clothing is because yesterday at approximately 5:15pm on Friday I was hit with the sudden urge and inspiration to make jewelry. I've made jewelry before - a couple Christmases ago I decided to make ribbon rings:
But let me tell you. They took freaking forever to make. I'm not sure that I'm ready to venture back into that. No, the jewelry that I was inspired to make was more of the metal and beading style. Luckily, I was stranded at a shopping center (now that Lil Bro's home we share the car) with a Michael's, so off I went to gather supplies. It was quite engrossing and exciting. Then I spent Friday night and most of today experimenting with techniques and coming up with designs and making special orders for my mother. (No joke people) Here are the fruits of my labor:
What am I going to do with these? Well, wear some of it of course. Some will be gifts. I may try to open an online shop and sell them on Etsy. Would you buy them??
16May | taking some time
I'm sorry to let Blog 365 down right now but I need a small hiatus. Only a few days, nothing to be alarmed about. I shall return soon enough. Oh, but I did my May 12th back entry.
14May | this post is dedicated to one question
TATIANA
13May | juxtaposition
I know I owe a back entry. I would have written last night but the hotel I was in did not have functional internet. The countdown of the rest of my summer continues and I'm starting to rack up thoughts about myself and my past and future, and what they mean for the present me. I spoke with an old friend on the phone tonight who I don't talk to very often but still knows me better than many, and in a different way than probably anyone else who's known me even until now. Sometimes I don't think things are as simple as people wish they could be and I'm not sure how to convey that without being esoteric. If there was ever a time this year that I thought I might need to go back to therapy, I think now is it, not for any other reason but a completely unbiased perspective.
12May | mother's day
This year, I was all prepared to go boring for Mother's Day and give my mom practical things like new cutting boards and a bagel slicer, when I had an epiphany while poring through old photo albums for the Recycled Sibling Fashion post. I scanned some pictures and did my best to spruce them up in Photoshop, then got printed them up at Target and framed them. I got misty eyed just finding them in the albums - you can imagine the mist when my mother opened her gift.
Teehee! Oh, you want to see the pics? Okay, I guess.
Aren't we adorable? I should also point out that in the first picture, my mother is only about a year older than I am now. Ack.
11May | things i've learned about urbana/champaign, il
1. it can be cold and rainy even in may Tomorrow we depart with my brother and his belongings in tow. That is, if there is enough room for me after we pack him in. If not I guess I'm flying standby. Oh, what fun!
10May | congratulations brian
You've come a long way and there is only possibility from here. I can't wait to see where your path leads.
09May | road trip...
It is 6:45am and we are running 15 minutes behind schedule in leaving for Champaign, IL for my little brother's graduation. That's right, that adorable little boy asleep on the loo in the post below is finishing college!! Why are we running 15 minutes behind schedule? Why else? My mother. Sigh. 13 hours on the road with Mom and Dad... wish me luck... and CALL ME if you'd like to save me from certain slow death. :)
08May | fun with scanner!
So, fellow Asians may back me up with this... it is an Eastern belief that your stomach is the pathway to your health. I don't mean food (though Eastern food is yummy!), but rather, the exposure of your torso area to cold. In other words, if you don't keep your tummy warm, you'll get sick. To combat this, Asians invented tummy sweaters. They are just what they sound like: sweaters for your tummy. (Imagine a tube top-looking thing made of thick sweater material that goes right around your middle.) In Chinese, they are called dudo. I'm not joking. Today, I went on a search for pictures of my brothers and me in childhood, wearing dudo and to my utter disbelief I could not find a single one. How is this possible? When I think of my younger brother in babyhood, he is always wearing a dudo. Alas, I cannot share visuals of the dudo with you. What I did find, however, is evidence of my parents' extremely frugal lifestyle, aka Recycled Sibling Fashion. RSF #1: The Hat.
RSF #2: The Robe.
Yeah, I don't know why, but apparently I didn't get to wear it. :( Or at least be photographed in it, held up by my armpits. RSF #3: The Vest. (This is my favorite.)
And finally, RSF #4: The Tree Shirt. (It also came in red and green!)
Sorry little bro... it was the only picture I could find with you wearing it. Hehehehhe Now, these next two aren't the same piece of clothing, but I daresay we must have had an entire closetful of these little kimono robes because we seem to be wearing them in every other toddler picture that exists of us.
I'll leave you with one last image of our innocence:
One day, I will dig up a photo of the dudo. There just has to be at least one in existence, in my house. If not, I'm sure we still have an actual dudo, in which case I will put the damn thing on myself and get a picture of it. I promise.
07May | things i need medication for
1. anxiety
06May | blankity blank
Actually, that's not true. A few lovely things happened today. I just can't talk about them yet. Haha!! I feel bad not giving you something to read... so... Here is a piece that I wrote roughly five years ago. I was a junior in college, emerging from depression - though still pretty rough around the edges - and still partially heartbroken. I’m sitting in my soft, yellow-lit room, candles flickering shadows against the walls, a Hershey’s kiss melting on my tongue. A boy is playing a love song on television. I’m thinking of you. I haven’t met you yet, perhaps, but my mind, which has just picked itself up onto reborn legs, is waiting for you to materialize. I see you in many forms now, not sure which is real and which are mere distractions. He was my biggest distraction, a blow to the knees that kept me crippled and unable to heal as long as he held the bat. I used to think he was what distractions held me from attaining. On my feet I think differently, and more lucidly. Life is happening around me. I’d forgotten that all along I’ve been making my own. I see you seeing me and wondering. I see you wanting to make life with me. To live something so inexplicably undefinable that we can only look back and dream. Waiting for spring to wake life back into the air, when everything is about aliveness and breathing, deep inhalations of sweet warm sun, the smell of earth and wind, love is in the air, throw your arms out and fall back into mine, we’ll lay on the grass and soak each other in, lazy days of nothing but wonderful. On my feet. Waking.
05May | i've been thinking
Something about the past week - or really, the past two or three days - has shaken me up. I can't really pinpoint it and it may very well be another one of my short-lived, romantic, cooped up, restless 'I want a change and I want it NOW' chains of thought, but maybe it's not. It all started with our trip to Portland. Yes, it was stressful. Yes, it was peppered with conflict, arguments, and difficult conversations born out of crystal clear differences between us but also the nagging truth that there is more of my mother (and her mother, and probably her mother's mother) in me than I'd previously thought. But it also changed me, in a way that New York City hadn't touched me in my doe-eyed youth and that any other experiences with young love hadn't rocked me in its depth and solidity. For the first time I saw inklings of life that the core of my gut yearns for, has longed for so fiercely yet so indescribably that I never realized it until it was plainly before my eyes. I saw possibility, more plainly and literally than I ever have, even in all of my twenty-something-year-old soul-searching, pontificating, and hypothesizing. Then a series of occurrences that seemed so commonplace that I didn't stop to consider their magnitude, so simple and somewhat silly that even listing some of them seems trivial. A dinnertime comment from my mother that I shouldn't let my writing and eye for design go to waste. An ensuing argument about how misunderstood I am, fueled by my clandestine insecurities that she may be right. A campy television show I happened upon by accident wherein a fashion designer helps a candy store owner transform her shop to save it from failure. A candid conversation with my quiet, secretive father about my future and the lengths he's willing to extend to help me. A glance at the calendar waking me up to the reality that despite all the change that's happened so far this year, the biggest change is yet to come, and it is coming soon. Several nights of insomnia during which my mind churned nonstop with questions about who I am, what I'm doing, how far I've come, how far there is yet to go. Reading a stranger's chronicle of a course of events when she was my age that altered her lifestyle, visions of herself, and her future altogether, and finding her sentiments so eerily echoing my own. I've been blogging quite consistently for seven years. Somewhere in my archives I have entries that I wrote my sophomore year in college. Even as I bemoan my lack of 'finished' writing since college, I have been writing. My words have reached wider audiences in the past, for sure, but I do have an audience now and I know I have the ability to move with those words. I have stories to tell. I am quite sure that everyone does, and that some are more poignant, earth-shattering, and inspirational than mine. But my stories are mine and I know I can tell them in a way that brings out their poignancy and affects people, just as the above-mentioned stranger's story affects me. They've just been sitting in my brain for years, sometimes hinted at in shorter bursts of pieces either on my blog or in my 'zines, but never formulated or chronicled in a way that tells a complete story. I love having a blog. Writing every day so far this year has brought me back to what it is to move my mind constantly, even if it's to talk about something as trifling as a date's resemblace to a dorky public figure. Yet in the past few days I've felt that I want to give more. I want my life to be more than the perfunctory details of forward movement and I want it to be more than waiting for the next thing to happen. No details yet as I'd like to write a few things down and plan things out and decide what the best course of action and execution is. But I wanted to state my intention for something new.
04May | facing may head-on
I've come to realize that without a regular working schedule, weekends don't necessarily feel any more relaxing than weekdays; rather, they feel more arduous to get through because anything that I'm waiting for doesn't necessarily happen unless it's a weekday. This is mostly correspondence from jobs, but also Netflix (heh) and the pace of having the house to myself, as well as the freedom to get in my car and go somewhere without needing to explain where I'm going. Sometimes I just need to leave, and my parents try to understand that, but it just feels very counterintuitive to have to tell them my whereabouts after having lived on my own for so long. Today I went through the task of making a list of the things I will need to buy for my move, then approximately pricing them to come up with a quote for exactly how much money I will need when the time comes. It's not as high a number as I thought it would be, but it's nothing to sneeze at either. I feel good that I've at least done the math, but every step I take toward the future makes me itch for the present to move along faster. At the same time, it's dawned on me that I don't actually have that much time to play with, especially if I go to CTY. My every weekend until nearly the end of June is accounted for, and I'm scheduled to work most weekdays this month. I'd like to plan some get-togethers for my friends so I can see them all before I'm off, but the dates are getting tricky, especially for those who aren't in the NY-NJ area. I want to take Brian to Haverford while we're still on the correct coast, but I'm not sure when we'll have time for that to happen either. Funny that for so much impatience, I find myself also wishing for just a little more time.
03May | i pushed through the block and this is what came out
Calendar Days A calendar hangs in every room in her life.
02May | running out of steam
The past two days I have slept until noon. I'm taking this as a bad sign and I can only conclude that I'm officially going stir crazy. I also think that I would have woken up earlier and just left the house to do something, but my eyes have been having some sort of allergic or infectious reaction to something since Portland and it makes it hard for me to want to do much. It's not as bad as it was last fall but still irritating. I'm starting to feel extremely anxious about my summer plans. I applied to CTY a few months back, which would give me 7 weeks of steady employment with nights and weekends off (I didn't apply to be an RA again, which is 24/7) and help me with a huge chunk of money needed to move. After two months of silence, I finally called them up this week to inquire on my status and now am back in waiting mode while they check into the process on my file. Meanwhile, I've still been trying to get a second job to supplement SCORE!, but apparently trying to babysit is just as tough a process as getting a 'real job,' and the temp agency I've gotten in touch with is unsure they can help me with only daytime availability. Which leaves me with these scenarios: 1. Work at CTY and leave for Portland mid-August. Brian may end up having to go out earlier if he's needed to work. This would kind of suck. 2. Ultimately be rejected from CTY and leave for Portland mid-July, and borrow a large sum of money to furnish my move. Now, depending on when I know about CTY either way, I may or may not be able to do anything about additional employment around here. The worst part is, I have plenty of things that I could be doing with all my free time... I just don't want to do it. I really feel like my life has been interrupted for the past three months and I can't do anything to propel it forward. Trying to take it one day at a time...
01May | may brings...
- hopefully some real, extended, springlike weather!!
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