i contain multitudes.

chez panisse

as a californian (transplant, but resident nonetheless), and as a foodie, i’ve always had a quiet reverence for alice waters.

today i heard her speak for the first time. i don’t know why, but i was extremely disappointed that she was not eloquent or even articulate. in a rare moment of self-reflection, i pondered my own disappointment; why do i attribute vision or capability with intelligence?

perhaps the answer lies in the word “genius” which we haphazardly attribute to intelligence or creativity or vision, when there is no fundamental basis for commonality among those disparate vectors. perhaps the answer lies in our culture’s promotion of celebrity to idol-status. perhaps i just needed a symbol, and was disappointed to see humanity tarnishing the forced halo.

2 words

occasionally something stirs me from my weekly week-long zombie walk to the paycheck line.

sometimes that something can be a mere 2 words. i’ve always known that words have power; but when you hear two words in combination and they pull meaning and context out of each other, it’s hard not to face it directly in plain consciousness and think.

today’s 2 words were “the heart and the fist”. ok, technicalities: we are talking about 5 words, but only 2 that are substantial enough to contain even part of an idea (forget multitudes).

today’s speaker touched on something that’s been lurking in my mind and body. am i willing to sacrifice career, money, leisure, comfort for something in which i truly believe?

ever since james gave up his lucrative attorney career and joined the army (despite having a toddler and a loving wife with a baby on the way), i’ve been forced to ask myself this.

it’s also made me face some uncomfortable thoughts. i’ve always known and preached that all motives are selfish, regardless of how sacrificial or saintly they seem. but it’s painful to look at that selfishness within one’s own heart without first surgically detaching it (which i have not attempted). i’m also disturbed by the childish thoughts that still run the hallways of my mind without a hallpass. i want to be a hero. i want to run an obstacle course. i want to shoot people with guns.

i think i’ve done a relatively thorough job of removing decades of brainwashing from my parents from my standard thought processes. sometimes i worry that the purge was too violent, and that some good things were actually baby, not bathwater. i attempt to be impartial and allow my parents to reteach me now so that i can reassess value on a case by case basis. however, i worry that some things are too ingrained in the safehouse of my very core.

i feel strong reluctance to join the military. i start analyzing this option logically, but i merely look at this path and my body seizes up and refuses to walk. logic, logic, logic. is this because a) this is a dumb idea, or b) i’ve been brainwashed? the problem with being brainwashed is you don’t know which of the strong feelings within yourself are your own or implanted there.

anyway, i doubt i will join the military, at least not with my current state of paralysis. for now, i will relish in the occasional jolt to my slumber. when i get those jolts, i feel an urge to come here, to my own little hideaway under the overgrowth and think. i feel a sense of loss when i think about all the ideas that died in my mind at the hands of normalcy; routine curbed my access to tumblr, and without tumblr, my words have outlets into only presentations and socialization.

thought provoking

long airplane rides are mandatory meditation sessions. it is precisely for this reason that some people are not good travelers.

in somewhat unrelated news, i remembered something that i have not thought about in a long time. do you remember making textbook covers out of old grocery paper bags? i wonder if kids these days still do this. i wouldn’t be surprised if they still do, despite paper bags seemingly less ubiquitous than in my youth. but then again, i wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t, with that function now replaced by yuppy-commercialized purchased book covers, prominently featuring merchandised cartoon, movie, and tv show characters.

when did i stop paper bagging my textbooks? i’m sure i did not in college. i’m reasonably sure i did in middle school. high school is the gray area here. well, that is not accurate. it is an entirely white area or an entirely black area, but which one is unknown and unknowable to me, and thus takes on the visual characteristics of both. like the number of paramecium in the world right now. there is a correct answer, but i don’t know it, and cannot get a believable confirmation should i try to guess. easier just to call it gray.

i’m typically anal with my language, except for capitalization, for which i have less use for than hee hee cunnings. my irrational disdain for capitalization has had negative repercussions to my communication: e.g. - should i wish to distinguish between my god, and their God. good ol’ mister cummings imbibed meaning into his capitalization tendencies, whereas i do so out of blunt disdain for convention. but i digress. i’m typically anal with my language. a strong part of me insists that gray (or grey for that matter) should be not be used for questions that are merely difficult. a moral quandary would have a true gray area. the number of birds in flight at this precise moment does not have a gray area. the existence of god does not have a gray area. the only gray areas are ones that have no true answer, or the space in a crayola box between silver and black.

speaking of crayola, “chartreuse” was renamed to “laser lemon”. is the logical resolution the removal of the word “chartreuse” from the english language? what will children color their chartreuse alcohol with? apparently “flesh” was renamed to “peach” long before my time, but i seem to remember “flesh” colored crayons in my youth. maybe old inventory. i don’t remember precisely, but i can easily envision a 6 year-old me that would be confused and conflicted coloring representations of my white classmates as “peach”. “indian red” was renamed to “chestnut” and “prussian blue” was renamed to “midnight blue”. whatever will kids use to color indians and prussians with?

when i was a kid i assumed that indian red was meant for the skin tone of native-americans. not people from the country of india located in the subcontinent of asia, because the word indian was reserved for use with teepees, longhouses, canoes, bows, and arrows. apparently from wikipedia, neither of these were the correct usage of the color indian red, with the name coming from a pigment originating from india. regardless of the color’s intended naming, there’s something culturally significant that millions of children have reserved that crayon color for native-americans and not desis nor pigments.

similarly, i had no idea what a prussian was, although i suspected they were an advanced race of soviets. in retrospect, i wasn’t too far off.

voyeur

i find myself periodically virtually checking up on TTT, via her livejournal, just to see how she’s doing. today, i saw she had 2 updates: first one was about the TI music festival. sounds like she’s having a blast, made me wonder what sonic worlds i was missing out on. made me wish i could join in on that picnic in a backpack. i was feeling nostalgic for the world-that-never-was-but-confused-with-might-have-been.

then i got to her second post about the mountain winery concert. wow, she saw frank black. i love that man. i really, really wanted to be there. how come i didn’t know about these things anymore? i am so out-dated that i no longer hear about event dates.

then i read on. somebody killed themselves at her concert. horrible. i felt many things at once, which made me both ashamed and confused:

• i wish i were there to comfort her
• i remember the time the bicyclist intentionally/inadvertently swerved into an SUV while i was jogging next to him
• frank black is awesome

i don’t know how my parents survived my rearing

my mom called me monday. this is how the conversation unfolded:
“did you call me?”
“no.”
“you called. you no say anything for long time. very long call.”
“oh, i must have called you by accident from my pocket.”
…“i thought maybe you might be kidnapped. so dad and i listen for long time.”

fear and loathing in los carros

i’m a healed arachnophobe. well, maybe not “healed”, but at least i thought i had it under manageability. growing up, mere sight of 8 legs would instantly send me sprinting straight to pleading with the parental units to “kill the spider!”. this proceeded for an embarrassingly long time into young adulthood, and i couldn’t kill a spider (without the aid of a supersoaker and at least 10 feet of distance) until i left for college. but, as i mentioned, i’ve got it under control. when i see a spider, i can contain the fear and channel it into disgust. i’m able to grab a tissue (or in the case of bigger opponents, shoes) and end that motherfucker before it gets any ideas. to me, that’s pretty functional.

this morning while driving into work, a white, gangly, long, huge spider (probably two-and-a-half inches in diameter, with legs) came crawling out of my driver side air vent. fear enveloped me like a cold shower. i simultaneously froze and spastically swerved the car. i could barely swallow and my hands clenched. i had trouble staying in my lane and all i could do was stare at it.

it slowly started to move, crawling further and further out of the air vent. it took a few steps towards the driving wheel, and then started dangling. losing sight of it behind the steering wheel for a second, i almost crashed into a divider. i regained sight of it as it lowered like a pale ghostly pendulum towards the floor, and then lost sight of it.

the rest of my drive to work, i could not function. i would swerve towards the side of the road in an effort to pullover and inspect the cabin, and then swerve back when i tried to “manage” my fear and get to my meeting on time.

after finishing the longest commute of my life, i pulled into my parking space and jumped out of the car. i then proceeded to tentatively examine areas of the cabin floor for the white beast.

i could not find it.

i’m delaying going home from work, mostly because i do not want to get into my car. i went from proud conqueror of arachnophobia to cowering invalid, thanks to a tiny little life incapable of harming much more than a fly.

as i sit here at my work desk delaying the inevitable, it got me thinking… how much are we really able to change ourselves? i mean, truly change. all we are doing is managing around our limitations, quirks, personalities, encumbrances… but they are still there, beneath the surface. all it takes is a little shock to the equilibrium, and the facade crumbles. makes me worried about myself. so many of my “improvements” are just smoke and mirrors.

observations

been on a live music kick; went to the san jose jazz festival (courtesy of my generous employer*), then a free they might be giants concert in the park, and last night saw dave matthews band free (*comge).

the jazz festival was awesome; i was expecting much less. the quality of jazz played is definitely worth a detour from your life path. i really liked the yoshiaki miyanoue tokyo quartet; the guitarist and the pianist were awesome. extra credit: the pianist reminded me of my friend kegs.

they might be giants was also great, although i didn’t care much for the venue. the park was way too small and i ended up about 200 yards up and out on the hillside from the stage. by the encore however, the bottom had cleared out and i was able to see john and john in closer adulation. they played ana ng, which still remains one of my favorite songs of all time. it’s one of those songs that poses many interesting questions without answers, captures a thought everybody has had at one time, but nobody bothered to ever write down. well, they wrote it down and sang it.

dave matthews band was meh. i’ve never been a huge fan,  but heard they were good in concert. the violinist is overrated; i understand there aren’t too many spastic black violin players in the world, but playing the same blues scale over and over again in every song is just not even trying. the drummer was awesome, and fat to boot. how many fat drummers are there in the world? i smelled a lot of pot at the concert. what was surprising to me was that i was surprised to smell it. i guess that’s showing my age.

regarding encores; how stupid and insincere is that? stop your concert, pretend like it’s over, and then come back on stage after unnecessarily boring your audience and forcing them to clap continuously like monkeys for 10 minutes. if i were ruler of the world, my first order of business would be to outlaw encores.

one of the lead singers from tony! toni! toné! was the opener. the jury is still out on which ton* it was. what was sad is that i suspect 4 people in that entire audience of a thousand strong new that james saadiq was a member of tony! toni! toné!. one of those 4 was me, and the other 3 being people i told that i went with. what was also sad was that out of those 4 people, only 2 of them had ever heard of tony! toni! toné!. i wonder what it’s like to go from 1 hit wonder fame to opening act obscurity. also, one of the best songs dmb played was when they asked the members of james saadiq’s band to jam with them. i’m not sure if there is some deeper meaning on the interrelationship of the previous 2 sentences about talent and fame, but i needed to say both and they are both there now for the audience to figure out.

things i learned from the zynga game, frontierville

• “settling the frontier” is a euphemism for clear-cutting forests.
• the best way to confront a bear is to walk directly in front of it and jump up and down while waving your arms. do not forget to shout, “hey, hey, hey!”.
• speaking of bears, they shit money and pies.
• your fiancee will send dozens of letters to you a day, all of them saying the same thing: i can’t wait to see you soon. (the old school booty call)
• corollary to above: that bitch won’t move out to live with you until you build her a store to shop in
• everybody that lives in the frontier lives due east of the gold rush, due north of rattlesnake canyon, due west of buffalo range, and due south of the oregon trail (at least initially. you can magically teleport these destinations by rotating the signposts). this means either the frontier exists in dimensions above the third, or everything is really, really far away from everybody. 
• tree saplings are like vegetable cockroaches.

they’re my sister’s. i don’t have a sister? i meant cousin.

i had a reunion lunch with some people i don’t really know that well, with the exception of one. that one is the glue for this group, and her return to the bay area prompted this latest gathering.

interesting story from her: she recently broke up with some sketchy dude. they never got along very well and had many public fights over inane things, despite not really being very serious or dating very long.

_right_ after they broke up, she went to visit him in NYC. she found an earring (gold with pearls and diamonds) in his bed, and confronted him about it. he said, without hesitation, “they’re mine”.

seriously? of all the excuses that might have popped in his head, he decided to claim that he-of-no-piercing-status owned half a pair of obviously female earrings? it would have been better if he could claim such with a straight face while jamming the earring into his lobe, with blood gushing. that would at least be a better story, AND he would get props for adamantly sticking to his guns.

in other news, the reason why she didn’t dump him earlier was because he is the main social organizer at their MBA school, and she didn’t want to miss out on event invitations.

confessional

i’m logging on from the tail end of my japan trip. swirls of bad karma and misunderstandings are leaking from my だめんず　activities.

i hooked up with aguri. it just kind of happened. now she won’t talk to me. she thinks i told tadashi about her new job assignment. everything is secrets and false faces in japan.

saori dumped my ass. i don’t fully understand what really happened, but something about another guy, and me not willing to make her my gf. i’m sad. she was special. she’s on that list of smiles. she seemed so kind, yet she left me from the cruel side of her phone.

last week was in china. saw hui-min, sandra, and 2 other princetonians (i-shin and nick). seeing sandra almost brought back the old crush. i went to expo. talk about people mountain, people sea. they packed us like cattle in this steel fenced maze prior to the expo opening, and i never imagined it could be possible to be in a wide open football field-sized area and still feel claustrophobic. i learned a new way of dealing with all the rude chinese people. you ask them what kind of nongming they are. the shanghai folks hate that but they know they are doing something wrong. the actual nongming get put into place. there is no way for them to recover with such a heavily innocent question.

i got to see my bro, which was great. i missed him. blood does run thick. definitely thicker than the cocktail i used to pick up saori at heartland.

catcher of the sighs

had a dream about TTT last night. not that i haven’t before, but this one i can’t quite interpret. we were with many others walking amongst the clouds. we had ladles/scoops that we would dip below the clouds into something. TTT and i decided to go up to a higher tier of clouds. i had to fashion some extra long ladles in order to still be able to scoop the something that seemed so important to scoop.

unrelated, or not, jd salinger died last week. i’m contemplating rereading catcher in the rye.

catching up

hey tumblr. long time no see, i think we should catch up. so much to fill in on. i’ve had so many thoughts and emotions over the past few weeks, but didn’t get to capture it in writing. what happens to a thought when it’s not solidified into text or picture or other physical manifestation? sometimes, if it’s heavy enough, it seems to leave an imprint in memory. but otherwise, it seems to just disperse and get absorbed into the ether.

but anyway, been super busy at work, getting all my shit in gear for my japan trip. as murakami would say, shoveling capitalistic snow. now it’s all over, back here in the states wishing it didn’t go by so fast with me wishing it over.

update, tw ex-gf: i kicked her out of the apartment after 3 days. she asked for 3 days to say her piece. now she’s gone, probably out of my life forever. she sent me a 10 page email. i can’t finish reading it, because every paragraph or so, i find it hard to read through the tears forming. i really do love her, but it just can never be. i wish with all my heart that she finds happiness. that she forgets about me. that she could somehow be frozen in time with her smile from the beaches of the caribbean, so that her beauty and true fleeting happiness would always exist in this world.

moving on… japan. awesome. i turned it into a ramen pilgrimage of sorts, i think i ate 8 bowls of ramen in total, as well as bringing back some high quality packaged ramen. had a great time with aguri and ben-kun. going drinking until 6am, japanese barbecue, chillin’ in yokohama. met some really cute girls: saori, ken, ryo, yukari were the highlights. eating wagyu at yamato. i love that restaurant.

now i’m back, with 2 weeks until i take off again for japan and china. ok, i need to be more diligent with writing. tumblr, don’t be a stranger.

fall back into despair

ex gf yf showed up at my door yesterday. yes, the exact scenario dimples was worried about, that i was sure would not happen.

i mean, this time was better. this time was supposed to be different. she stopped emaling, calling, no contact for ~3 months of any kind.

but there she was, hiding behind the peephole. i opened the door and she jumped in, and now i cannot remove her. i told her she couldn’t stay. that she had to go. that i closed that part of my life. that i had moved on. that i was seeing somebody. nothing could move her.

she made a list. she wanted to give me a hug. tell me everything that was on her mind. go back to YFA beach. ride on my motorcycle. it’s a beautiful list.

she pulled my kitchen knife on herself. threatened to hurt herself. i tried to tell her she couldn’t stay. that i would even pay for her hotel. anything, but she couldn’t stay. things got bad, and i had to lock myself in the bathroom, and i was 1 finger touch away from calling the police.

i know i should have called. but i just can’t bear to see her dragged away by force… her on her own, with her luggage, with no friends in the US, no money… her orange and black suitcase that she just bought because she knows i love those colors.

a part of my heart, that i had closed and sealed away, will always love her. but i am not in love with her anymore. but seeing her here, seeing how scared she is, how helpless… i feel the seals weakening.

half my heart aches for her while the other half resents her.

pana week

shit is bizzy.

monday-tuesday: oregon

wednesday: folsom

thursday: gotta wrap up my intern’s shiz, including performance review

friday: customer meeting in EBC

i got no time to think. or savor.