Fumbling Through Life

critique

2011-06-12T17:03:00.000-07:00

I just read a book review and thought, if I got a review like that on something I wrote, I would have a heart attack. This is why I'm beginning to think academia is not for me after all. I'm just not thick skinned enough to deal with shit like this. Here's the review:

"[deleted] is at pains to apply the frameworks of several postmodern cultural theorists (most notably Deleuze’s concept of the control society), but these dips into theory never come across as more than dips. One gets a glimpse of rich theoretical terrain, only to be disappointed by the superficiality of its application to the issue at hand. I suspect that this is more the fault of over-editing than a true lack of engagement with cultural theory on [deleted]’s part, but one almost wishes the theory could have been absent altogether rather than left in as under-developed (and sometimes perplexing) tangents."

steam

2011-02-08T19:07:00.000-08:00

I'm running out of it. And I have a lot of writing to do to finish my dissertation by April 15th. Or it might become one of those projects that never gets done. Like cleaning out your desk drawer, or framing photos.

cheeeery

2011-02-08T01:20:00.001-08:00

This template is way too fucking cheery. And since this blog is a receptacle for my hostile and/or socially unacceptable thoughts and musings, the template's gonna have to change. But I don't have time right now. Maybe on the weekend, which is full of events that I am obliged to go to, um, so I'm gonna be drunk every night or I'm gonna demonstrate incredible discipline by coming home early to work on my diss, not likely. My diss is full of ridiculous run-on sentences like that one and I'm having to fix them before I finish the conclusion and send this fucker out. 5 more months of this

chchchanges

2011-02-08T01:15:00.001-08:00

Got sick of the way my blog looked. I think I designed that thing 6 years ago. So yeah, I changed it up in case any one gives a shit since I update nearly never.

I vow to try harder to document my neuroses here on this blog.

Cho

2011-01-15T17:34:00.001-08:00

I laugh every single fucking time I read this:

I was deluged with so much hate mail, but none of it was political .. . . It was like, ‘‘Gook, chink, cunt. Go back to your country, go back to your country where you came from, you fat pig. Go back to your country you fat pig, you fat dyke. Go back to your country, fat dyke. Fat dyke fat dyke fat dyke—Jesus saves.’’—Margaret Cho, ‘‘Hate Mail From Bush Supporters’’ (2004)

Winterizing II

2010-09-13T23:53:00.000-07:00

get lots of failblog and CuteOverload
aromatherapy
fish oils
homeopathic anything I can get my hands on
massage therapy
Korean spa or other source of steam, sauna, heat
get acquainted with my space heater and woolly slippers

Winterizing

2010-09-09T01:15:00.000-07:00

I dread winters in the northwest. It doesn't matter that I grew up here, I've never dealt well with it, not since I was in my teens or so when you actually notice things like weather. But since there's nothing I can do about this, I decided to make a plan to prepare for winter. I know it's coming so if I have a plan maybe I will get through it better, with less laying in bed, sleeping in, napping all day, hating my life, complaining, sulking, eating carbs, getting fat, etc etc. So here it is. Here is my plan winterize list. See? Who says I can't be an optimist? :

take vitamin D supplements like a mofo
use SAD lamp religiously
sign up (pre pay) for evening activities like yoga and dance
buy cute winter clothes and many pairs of lovely weather proof boots (I rarely shop so this would be a huge treat, I don't care that it is a shallow and consumerist way to deal with my issues, we're talking about my mental health here)
also buy lots of cute and technical outdoor workout clothes and work out gadgets so that I'll want to run in the rain (I hope)
sign up for a run so I have something to train for
not let myself stock up on carbs (which make me fat and slow which makes me hate my life)
make lots of soup, I love soup and I make yummy soup
try to get up earlier to get more light (this is a hard one, obviously)

So I've started on the supplements, lamp, and of course shopping online to see what's out there. What else to put on the list?

holy shit

2010-08-28T01:04:00.000-07:00

Just realized I've had this blog for 7.5 years. What the hell? It's been THAT long? What was I even doing that long ago? I think some of you have been reading since the beginning so you must've seen me through life pre-grad school (and perhaps worse, pre-medication, which includes cannabis I should mention since that is medication too). I dunno. I'm afraid to go back and read those early posts even though I've gone through and taken out any mentions of the then-bf because they make me want to throw up, frankly. How far up my ass WAS my head for those 6 years exactly? Jesus. Anyways. Weird. 7.5 years of ramblings are posted here.

ugh

2010-08-28T00:56:00.001-07:00

You know you're Chinese when you get your parents front row seats to a live musical performance and your mother complains that you just get dust kicked in your face by the performers. Somebody fucking shoot me. When I was a kid I wished I had those be-friends-with-your-kid type moms. Instead I got judgmental, nitpicky, backseat driver mother. She needs to find a hobby that doesn't involve criticizing other family members or watching Korean soap operas constantly. You know, like having actual interests. See this is why it is bad to be an only child. Children need siblings to confide in/serve as a distraction for/share the pain when parents get annoying/demanding etc.

dentist

2010-07-07T00:00:00.001-07:00

So it's dentist time again. Every 4 months I have to get my teeth cleaned and maintained instead of every 6 months like normal people. Nope. I have fucked up gums that my dentists have attributed to bad genes, like I can do anything about that, and teeth that are of an unfortunate shape that makes a lot of crevices. So going to the dentist fucking sucks, I fucking hate it, it gives me a headache for the rest of the day and sometimes I have to lie down and smoke pot and take advil for the rest of the day. Yes it's that fucking bad. Apparently, dental pain is hardwired to your brain differently than say muscular pain which go through your central nervous system. So I've been going to the dentist stoned silly. It's the only way I can get myself to go. As a grown-up I understand the fact that I need to take advantage of my dental coverage and all that shit and I need to take care of my teeth and all that. But fuck do I ever fucking hate going to the fucking dentist. So much. It's not what they call "dental anxiety." No fuck that. Here's what it is: I DONT LIKE DENTAL PAIN AND IT HURTS, MOFO! It's not the anxiety about the pain that needs management, if only it were so simple. It is the pain itself that is bothersome. So I decided to consult the internet on how to deal with all this pain and whether it has been actually helpful to be using pot before going to the dentist. Here's something I found from http://www.treatingyourself.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=36309

Cannabinoid receptor sites are primarily in the peripheral nervous system. As cannabis calms the underlying causes of most back pain, the inflammation and tightness of the muscles, the cannabinoids also act on the peripheral nervous system to modulate the pain messages transmitted to the major nerves. The pain from tooth drilling is a bit different, that kind of pain is hard-wired directly into the brain. Cannabis doesn’t block that pain so much as helps a person to simply look past the pain and ignore it.

Then he talks about getting teeth DRILLED without novocaine. That, I think, is nuts. I feel like I'm going to black out just thinking about that. Check this out:

Take cannabis edibles an hour or two before you are to sit in the dentist’s chair. Not flinching while the dentist is drilling your teeth is a big job. You must lie there absolutely still, melted into the chair, immobile. Cannabis is very useful in this process, not so much to block the high-voltage pain from the tooth drilling, but to help your mind reach the meditative state to deflect that pain, so you can let the pain flow over you like water.

So that's how he's saying pot is beneficial when it's dentist time, which is pretty much how I felt all along. It doesn't stop the pain but it helps you make it more manageable, slightly. I like this meditation exercise he talks about too:

Think of your time in that dentist’s chair like body surfing in big waves. When a crusher wave comes in, you must dive down deep, hold your breath, and let it roll over you. When it’s safe, you can come up again for air. The ocean is too big to fight; you have to hold on until the wave passes. And, it’s the very same thing having your teeth drilled without gas or Novocain. The very second the drilling stops, that tooth pain stops, as well, and you can safely come up for air. With modern high-speed dental drills, the actual total number of seconds of real pain are quite few, providing the excavation isn’t the Grand Canyon (your dentist can help you judge). So, just relax, it’s really not that bad, roll your eyes back, and let her rip! With a little pot spice cake behind you, you’ll be quite surprised, you can handle it! And, it’s only going to hurt for a few seconds, anyway. Afterward, when the drilling’s all done, putting in the filling doesn’t hurt a bit.

Again, that is crazy pants. I will never voluntarily go with LESS pain control. But it was comforting to know that it can be used to manage the whole dentist ordeal, even something like getting a cavity filled.

I plan to also take 4 advil, which the hygienist recommended. BTW, yes I get the numbing rinse which helps a bit, and yes I also use a fluoride rinse and also I use a RX strength fluoride toothpaste and it stiiiiiiiiiiiill hurts in indescribable ways just to get a basic cleaning. I have been brushing 3x a day or more, floss every night with the floss doubled over, and also making sure rub up and down on each tooth 10 times each, and finally using the Soniccare. My teeth and gums get better treatment than any other part of my body so I need a reward here. I need to have a dental visit that does not leave me laying on the couch for the rest of the day. I have too much work to do for that.

almost

2010-06-28T22:41:00.000-07:00

Almost there. I did the 3 year master's (should've been 2), followed immediately by the doctoral degree that was supposed to take 4 but never does and is instead taking me 5 years. I am so fucking ready to be done with this chapter of my life. I don't even care what comes next. It doesn't get a whole lot worse than this -- thinking all the time, writing all the time, constantly worrying about what comes next or whether I'll have the mental and emotional stamina to finish this dissertation without losing my mind. I am determined to finish the diss on time even though my thesis went way the fuck past my personal deadline. I stayed on schedule through my BA but the ridiculous amount of reading, writing, and worrying demanded by grad school compounded by the stress of living on a very very tight budget makes it impossible to hit targets from the department (unless you do quantitative type research that is more formulaic and more efficient in terms of writing and publishing). Anyways, I digress.

I'm pretty sure this dissertation will get done no matter how bad it is going to make my life suck the next 12 months. I can't have 8 YEARS of my life culminate in an ABD (all but dissertation). I survived general exams and that seemed impossible, so I think I have enough in me to do this dissertation thing too.

So assuming the above, there is no fucking way I will still be a grad student 1 year from now. Oh shit, unless I get a post-doc. Oh the horror. I don't know if I could do that.

OK assuming I don't get a post-doc I'll be doing SOMETHING else. Maybe being underemployed outside of academia, maybe community college teaching, maybe doing something temporary back in Vancouver, maybe even actually teaching in a 4-year university (chances not high given cuts to education funding nation-wide). Maybe something I haven't even thought of yet. Worst case scenario I'll be unemployed and sticking around on the 1 year practical training allowance of my student visa while cramming into my bf's studio apartment. That's not horrible. I won't be writing a dissertation. And that's comforting. I'll have some time to get my shit together and see what's next.

This dissertation hell is temporary. It has an end, and if I focus on the fact that there IS an end I feel a lot better and I can refocus on writing. This hell will end sooner if I work harder and the reward of not working on this diss anymore is a big one.

So far I'm feeling much less wound up about it...Man, it takes a lot of self-talk to get through a fucking day these days.

visas

2010-06-10T10:38:00.000-07:00

I thought that universities generally agree to do the sponsoring of work visas for the professors they hire, especially those educated in the US. Apparently that has changed. Here is a snippet from a faculty post from a Cal State school:

"At time of appointment, the successful candidate, if not a U.S. citizen, must have authorization from the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services to work in the United States."

To me that pretty much means, you're on your own. And since a worker cannot get a work visa without the employer's sponsorship, it pretty much means fuck off.

And here's another from a 4 year university:

"Successful candidate must provide documentation of identity and eligibility for employment, as required by the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986."

Yet another obstacle to getting a job here in academia.

waste

2010-06-03T18:23:00.000-07:00

I've been in grad school for 6 years and when I finish my diss in a year, it will have been 7. In that 7 years, every other part of my life has gone absolutely fucking nowhere (ok so there are more reasons than just grad school for that, namely bad luck and a waste-of-time relationship but whatever). Thus, I would like in the next 12-24 months to: get married, travel the world, have 2 babies, get a dog, buy a house, and not live pay check to pay check. God, Allah, Buddha, whoever the fuck is listening, please make this happen. Thanks.

writing

2010-05-31T17:28:00.001-07:00

I'm having serious writing anxiety and I'll admit I am blogging to warm up my writing brain cells. I would love to blog more but I'm too busy bitching on Twitter, and worrying about how I'm going to finish this gigantor project called a dissertation. Here's my sports analogy. I need to be competitive at the international level in order to feel comfortable taking part in the tiny tots category. For better or worse, I'm not the type who puts work out there and thinks it's awesome when everyone else thinks it's a piece of shit on a page. Not that I don't pity those people. I'm embarrassed for those overconfident pricks. Those who have so much confidence but no content...sad, but sometimes pretending gets you a long way. But I'm not a pretender.

clogged

2010-03-14T22:54:00.000-07:00

I don't know how much longer I can stand this. I'm going to complain about something that is very trivial and is not even an illness or anything. It's my fucking allergies. I think it's been about 7 or 8 consecutive days now that I have spent at least half a day completely congested, or congested with a runny nose as well. This means I can't taste my food, I breathe through my mouth, and I am in danger of inhaling my food when I eat. Also I am really fucking uncomfortable and tired. Feeling like shit makes you tired. Now I know there are so many other ailments and issues that are worse - Lupus, fibromyalgia, arthritis, etc. but it doesn't change the fact that my present experience is one of misery and discomfort.

I have allergies in some form pretty much all the time - a runny nose, itchy throat, itchy mouth, itchy tongue, a little asthma, sneezing, hives once in a while on my face or body or both, itchy eyes, sometimes my eyeball swells up such that I can't close my eyelids all the way because I look like those fucked up goldfish in the Chinese restaurants with the bubbly eyes. So most of the time I have at least one of those symptoms going on and I've had this pretty much all my life so usually I take a Benadryl and/or go to bed and life goes on. Usually I don't even notice it, especially the runny/stuffy nose and itching part. That's kind of constant. Anyways, when I get a combo of these symptoms or one of them really extra bad, that's when I just want to be sedated or something. Right now I am just really sick of that cat-in-my-sinus-cavity feeling. I'm over it, please make it stop. Neti pot helps but the snot all comes back and I can't be pouring water into my nostril while it drains out the other continuously because there are other things I need to do but stand over the fucking sink with a plastic blue pot shoved up my nostril.

Sometimes walking briskly outdoors helps clear it but I haven't figured out how I'm going to do that and write a dissertation at the same time.

lightrail

2010-03-12T14:32:00.000-08:00

Lightrail FAIL that is. I was excited last year that a light rail system would connect Seattle's downtown to the airport. When I first moved here I couldn't believe they had absolutely no light rail or subway system. What kind of city is this? Just buses that occasionally stop to pick you up and once in a while run on time? Seriously? What a crock of shit. Oh and if you want to commute by bike instead, well good luck navigating narrow roads with pot holes the size of the Grand Canyon

The light rail was lovely but at its grand opening didn't even reach the airport. That didn't happen until months later. I thought, better late than never. Well turns out it doesn't actually go to the airport terminal. Below is a piece from a news article in the Seattle Times.

Baggage carts are available for a $4 rental fee [are you fucking kidding me? $4?], and might be helpful for the quarter-mile walk [wtf?] west across a fourth-floor skybridge and through the parking garage to the terminal.

Not an option for all

Nancy and Rod Black of Yuma, Ariz., journeyed 49 miles on transit trains earlier this week... Nancy Black says she prefers light rail, but says the lengthy walk from the airport station to the terminal might be a hardship.

"What if you can't walk? That is a question," said Black, who has arthritis and uses a cane.

People-movers were not built, because those would cost millions, nor do the Port and Sound Transit keep electric carts, rental wheelchairs or pedicabs at the station.

This city suffers from TERRIBLE planning, shortsightedness and paralyzing indecision among lawmakers. Mark my words, the Alaskan Way viaduct and 520 floating bridge, both of with are in need of serious repair, are going to crumble and cause accidents before the city gets around to actually doing something to replace them. Stop it with the townhall meetings and votes and new plans and more votes and all this other bullshit and just do something for Christ's sake. This city's infrastructure is an embarrassment in so many ways.

teeth

2010-03-04T11:25:00.000-08:00

I've had sensitive teeth and gums most of my adult life. I found out what's compounding the problem is what I eat. Here is a list of acidic foods that are bad for that part of your teeth where there's no enamel, down under the gumline:

tomatoes
lime/lemon
ceviche
pineapple or its juice
balsamic vinegar
anything carbonated
juice especially things like pomegranate grape and anything citris

If you know me well you'd know that makes up half of the foods I eat/can eat thanks to my allergies to most fruits. So I have to eat tropical fruits but if they are going to make going to the dentist torture that's going to have to come out of my diet. I'm not sure what fruits that leaves that I can eat without one form of self damage or another. Bananas. Boring bananas. I use balsamic a lot, like a lot. Ceviche is one of my favorite things in the world because of all the lime, which I can't eat. My favorite thing to drink is juice mixed with club soda. I can no longer drink either of those. Same with coffee and tea, my other favorite drinks. She says it's ok if you rinse with water immediately after so I guess I'll do that because I need a source of caffeine or this dissertation is not going to happen. Let me just say, in the spirit of Dr Seuss, that today is a sad day, a day that is sad in many ways. Today I'm going to let myself get stoned the entire day and eat out and eat whatever I want because this, this was traumatic. I floss with the floss doubled over several times a day, I use a Sonicare more than 2x a day and I use mouthwash after that. I thought there was nothing more I could possibly do for my teeth until now. But this diet change is going to seriously suck balls. Anyways my neck hurts so I'm going to lie down before I eat and get some work done.

see

2010-02-22T23:03:00.000-08:00

So if you are up for some ticketless Olympics action here's what's to see and what not to see unless you love waiting in line ups for hours.

Cauldron - easiest thing to see and you can get up pretty close. The crowds look thicker than they are.

Robson Square - be here for the 9:30pm fire and light show; look up and check out the fools who waited 7 hours for the 30 second ziptrek over the street; watch the street performers

Robson @ Howe - CTV is filming live here during the Olympics; this is also sort of the central area downtown where the stuff's happening; this block is closed off to Granville

Granville - also closed off, there is some visual art and cool stuff on the street and folks here are trading pins at little stations. Up the other way the street is also closed off and people are all at the bars watching the games. Great vibe here, Olympics fans galore.

QE Theatre - there is a pavilion here, I think the Canada pavilion. I hear it's okay. There was over an hour wait so I didn't bother

Science World - The Russia, Quebec, Saskatchewan and Hockey pavilions are here. Quebec is just food and beer, there is a REALLY long wait for Russia, I didnt bother with the hockey pavilion. I went to the Sask one and it was a waste of time. Think high school poster board display. The other Sask building is just food and performance. What you SHOULD see here are all the rock balance sculptures along the water that resemble the 2010 logo. Very cool. Getting back up to downtown is a bitch. Skytrain is packed and everything is fenced off and very confusing.

Richmond Ozone - Lots of free concerts here and easy to get to by Skytrain. I saw Our Lady Peace. It's just an outdoor concert stage on a track and field. Lines look longer than they are. Fun, dress warm. Heineken House is here too. I didn't go but on one night it was $20 entry. Even when it's free entry expect a wait and $9 beers.

appreciation

2010-02-22T22:39:00.000-08:00

So I'm back from the Olympics where I spent my Thursday through Saturday. It was awesome. I haven't seen my hometown this busy and this alive since Expo 86 when the Skytrain was first launched. 24 years later and now the Skytrain goes out to Richmond and Burnaby. The Canada Line goes out to the airport and then out to Richmond Center which is incredible. I'm so proud of my city for being so on top of shit. I took these things for granted about Canada until I moved to the US where basic infrastructure is outdated and frail and some streets have more potholes than smooth pavement. I took my friends by the new $13M public aquatic center/gym/community center which is adding on a couple more ice rinks too, and realize that there is no such thing in the US. We watched the Olympics on CTV, which people are saying is inferior to CBC's past coverage, but both are better than the NBC Universal coverage we're subjected to south of the border where coverage of an event is cut as soon the American athlete fails to qualify. Oh and don't forget about health insurance. I will never shut up about that until the US gets its shit together on that one.

So the weekend was about the Olympics and seeing friends and eating about 10 tonnes of food, but it also reminded me to appreciate Canada. We've always been overshadowed our American neighbours but in so many ways, Canada is just fucking superior. Right wing American nut jobs can call our kind of government what they want, it doesn't change the fact that it works, it works better than yours, and its citizens live far more comfortable lives as a result.

Olympics

2010-02-18T00:54:00.000-08:00

I'm in Vancouver until Saturday for the Olympics. I've only really followed the Olympics half heartedly but when it's in your hometown it's pretty awesome. I'm too exhausted to cover details but we took the Skytrain Canada Line down to Vancouver Station, had dinner at Oysi Oysi, and walked around, watched the laser and fireworks show above Robson Square, checked out the Olympic flame, and then headed back out to Richmond. Turns out the panic about traffic has all the local folks getting around by Skytrain so the streets have been empty. Okay, more later.

weird

2010-02-10T23:16:00.000-08:00

I don't have anything to gripe about. That's odd. Okay going to bed now.

check

2010-02-03T22:02:00.000-08:00

I signed a check 2008 a while ago. Apparently my consciousness follows two years behind everyone elses reality. I can't believe I've been here since 2006, 4 years this year. And I have no idea how to get around most places, other than outside of my immediate neighbourhood and a couple of the areas my friends live in. Don't get out much, no money to blow, time to blow it, or people to see. Shitty weather makes it hard to get out too. Probably a good thing for dissertation writing though. I kinda can't wait to end this grad school chapter of my life so I can start a new chapter, one that involves making more than $1700 a month so I can have a home with a washer/dryer again and walls that keep out the sound of my upstairs neighbour taking a leak or yelling at his roommate. The completion of my degree won't guarantee a faculty position, but I won't be able to get a faculty position without the degree. So here we go. My prospectus has been unofficially approved so it's time to write like hell.

7

2010-01-05T22:56:00.000-08:00

Holy shit I've been blogging on this thing for SEVEN years? What the fuck? Really?

2009

2010-01-05T21:53:00.000-08:00

Guess it's a good time to do a little life recap. Here are some highlights of my year. I'm going to omit the shitty stuff because I rehash that shit in my head every day. Don't really need to do it again here. Alright, in no particular order:

1. Visited Austin, TX for the first time. Fun city. Love the rooftop patios. Soooo many of them too. So now I've been to two cities in Texas. I think I'm good now. No need to see more.
2. Passed exams. Advanced to candidacy, became a Ph.D. candidate, got my Ph.C. Yep all that. The preparation for that was pure hell and I survived, barely. The challenge now is to finish. That will be really really hard.
3. Had my first (phone) interview for a faculty position. It was horrifying. But I got that first one out of the way and I know that I'm at least marketable because I was selected for an interview in the first place. I, of course, did not get a second interview.
4. Got my first smart phone. Palm Pre, used but new to me. Love it. Wish the plan didn't cost me an arm and a leg. But it is life changing for sure.
5. Visited Thailand for the first time. Awesome trip and cheap! I wish I could get that much sun all the time.
6. Unfriended a woman who is more self-centered, obnoxious, and offensive than anyone I have ever met in my life. A total waste of my time and energy to even acknowledge. That said, her violent online tirades are pretty fucking entertaining. Like, lol entertaining.
7. Went to New Orleans for the first time. There is nothing more fun than taking drinks to go. The air feels dense with history there. A must see.
8. Got a contract to author one chapter of an edited book! I guess it'll come out 2011. Possibly my first printed scholarly publication.
9. Got my Yelp Elite 09 badge! That means I write a lot of reviews.
10. Went to Korea for the first time too. Great airport. Even better excursions for folks on a long layover like we were, 12 hours!

twitter

2009-11-01T17:06:00.000-08:00

Yep, that's where I'll be. @fumblingthough. Longer posts will still be here.

banking

2009-10-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

That wasn't so bad. So Bank of America recently sent me some letter about a fee increase to my account which turned out to be the Rolls Royce of checking accounts, something I signed up for 10 years ago back when I had something called a real fucking job. Anyways, BOA was taking $20/month out of my checking account so it was time to give them a call. Almost 9 at night is a good time as their call centers close at 10pm and most people are getting kids ready for bed and all that. Oh yeah so also, they were taking $5 out of my Savings account each month starting recently and I needed that to stop. Turned out I qualify for a CampusEdge account for students which means no charge for 5 years, and by transferring $25 from my checking to savings each month, I don't pay the $5 fee on the Savings account either. They even refunded me that $20 charge. And the customer service guy was friendly and not a complete idiot! BOA and I can be friends again, especially since they have ATMs everywhere.

highschool

2009-10-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

I derive a sick satisfaction from seeing former high school classmates on Facebook, especially those who crossed me or whom I otherwise found annoying, shallow, egotistical or ignorant which describes about 90% of them. My high school was in an (at the time) almost entirely white middle class suburb 40 min east of Vancouver. Things that crack me up:

- FB friends list comprised of, guess what, a bunch of people from high school and no one else except siblings in-law
- under fan pages, fans of the local pub 5 minutes from our high school
- nothing under education but high school
- nothing under employment but mommy or bar waitress or other hourly wage job
- status updates about babies and other people's babies and playdates
- photos of nothing but kids and babies
- photos of them bald, fat, or really fat, or really into female body building and tanning themselves silly/wrinkly and unnaturally dark brown
- still living in the same town, or worse, east or north of it in a SMALLER town

All I can say is I'm glad I've gotten the fuck out of there and had a life that didn't involve a marrying a high school sweetheart, having three kids by age 25 and moving deeper into the sticks.

upstairs

2009-10-12T22:29:00.001-07:00

Oh yeah I forgot to update you all on the assholes upstairs. Read entitlement for a refresh.

See I found out that the n-word spewing soccer-playing douchebag frat boys upstairs actually moved out. Yeah, so that means the fucking bitch who was ringing my doorbell a million times is the mother of the NEW FUCKING TENANT. This also means the party that was going on til 4am the other weekend was hosted by the new tenants. But their wireless network name which is called "[lastname]TakesAnal" has stayed the same so I am guessing that the previous soccer assholes just passed their apartment on to their younger asshole friends. Fantastic.

Oh and let me catch you up on what other thing happened with the new tenants before I went on my far-too-short vacation to Thailand. So sometimes I get a little ripped at home here by myself and forget to lock my door. Not a huge big deal since there is another door leading to outside that locks. Well one morning I woke up and I swear to the gods I thought I saw a ghost in my doorway. It doesn't help that I'm practically legally blind so anything more than a foot away is really blurry for me. In fact I just took off my glasses and realize I can't read my laptop screen which is less than a foot from my face. Fuck. Ok so anyways, I'm in my bed and there is a white girl standing there barefoot saying "Joanna? Where's Joanna?" And I grabbed my glasses to see wtf was going on thinking, holy fucking shit, I'm seeing a full apparition!

But no. This dumb bitch keeps saying, "where's Joanna" and I'm like, "who's Joanna? I'm pretty sure you're in the wrong apartment"

Idiot says "I'm so scared, where's Joanna and [we'll call him Klein since he's my neighbor]. I was with Klein and Joanna."

And I reply, "Are you drunk?" (thinking, you better be fucking drunk and have a fantastic drunk tale to tell, or you have no business in my apartment)

Dumb bitch says "No, I'm so scared, I'm so scared. Where am I?"

I gave her one last, I-dont-give-shit-that-you're-scared-get-the-fuck-out-of-my-house look and she walked out the door.

I heard her run into her friends outside and apparently she was sans shoes, sans cell phone and sans clue as to where the fuck she was.

So I listened through my paper thin walls to get the scoop.

Turns out Klein is my new upstairs neighbor and his gf invited this girl, her best friend, to come party with them. They all got wasted and the dumb bitch ended up drunk sleepwalking into my apartment and sleeping on my couch. Even as she was explaining the story to the guys upstairs she was too stupid to understand what happened. She kept saying "but someone put a blanket on me so I don't know how I got there. Someone must've put me there" The guys told her the blanket was probably just there and she must've just grabbed it. They were right. Then she kept explaining that I looked really pissed and the guys said, "uh yeah, you were in her fucking apartment." At least they're a wee bit smarter than she is. Oh and of course she omitted the "I'm so scared" part of the story and played up the "she looked really pissed" part.

One day I'd like to live in a place that has a washer dryer and tenants over 21 whose guests don't end up passed out on my couch. Is that too much to ask?

twitter

2009-10-12T22:25:00.000-07:00

So I can admit I've become twitter obsessed, but I twitter as myself, like my real name, which I hope doesn't bring up this blog when googled.

I wonder if I shouldn't just start a Twitter for FumblingThroughLife so I can more quickly put my misery into pixels for all to enjoy. Hmmm.

bumper

2009-10-12T21:43:00.001-07:00

I'm not going to state the obvious by commenting on the last time I blogged. This isn't a fucking confessional. Anyways, I saw a bumper sticker today that said "liberals treat dogs like humans. conservatives treat humans like dogs." Awesome.

So despite the fact that I'm still working on my prospectus, I'm going on the market. Sort of. I'm putting one application out there for a school in the midwest. Yeah, not really where I want to be but let's face it. Faculty jobs are few and far between and if I can't get my ass into gear and either graduate on time or find another year of funding, I'm going to be paying international student tuition for my dissertation credits by Jan 2011. That's not going to be pretty. My waiver says that my 10 credits cost $7700 per quarter. I'd have to find a full time job to live on and to pay for the credits. I hate having a stressful unstable life. Hate it. Sometimes I wish I had a 9-5 job, husband, 2.5 kids and a dog. Actually the one part of that equation that is truly within my control is the 9-5 job part. The rest still requires luck and timing. Fuck my life man.

At least I'm heading out of town this week to a place sunnier than the northwest.

entitlement

2009-08-10T18:57:00.001-07:00

So I've written many posts about the fucking asshole fratty white boy soccer player rejects who live upstairs from me. Apparently the apple doesn't fall far from the tree because the mother of one of them is a crazy raging bitch who thinks I fucking owe her something. Can you say entitlement? I was putting some groceries away when I heard a woman at the door (main entrance to my part of the building) yelling some sort of lame nickname like Monty or something. I could hear her pretty well because she was right outside my bathroom window. I ignored her because it's not the first time someone stood outside and yelled for my douchebag neighbor to let them in. It's also not the first time someone has rung my doorbell REPEATEDLY trying to reach upstairs. After several minutes of this bitch yelling outside, she decided to take a new strategy, ringing MY DOORBELL at a rate of about a million times a minute. I thought, like the others, she got the wrong doorbell so I stepped out my door and it went like this:

Me: You need to stop ringing this doorbell, you've got the wrong apartment. I live here, you want someone else. Stop ringing my doorbell.
Bitch: I'm trying to reach my son, he lives upstairs, I'm his mother.
Me: Why are you ringing MY doorbell. What do you want?
Bitch: I've been driving since 9 this morning and I'm here to find my son [as if I'm his fucking secretary and I should give a shit, what the fuck?]. Can't you let me in so I can knock on his door?

So I let her in to go upstairs and pound on his door.

What does she say to me?

Bitch: [with snarky bitch voice] Well you probably should've let me in the first time I rang.

Oh my fucking god did that piss me off. The correct response should have been, "thank you, sorry I rang your doorbell for like a minute straight. I'm just mad at my son."

But no, this fucking cunt makes it sound like I'm in the wrong for not opening the door for her when she's screeching at the top of her lungs, banging on the door, and deliberately ringing my doorbell to enter the building. I wonder if she would've talked down to me like that if I were a white man in my 50s...or a white women in her late 40s like her, huh huh? I doubt it. I hope she falls off a cliff and dies.

I have another neighbor story but I'll hammer that one out another time.

thereIfixedit

2009-08-05T02:06:00.000-07:00

http://thereifixedit.com/ This has got to be the funniest shit I've read in a long time. Funnier than awkwardfamilyphotos.com. About as good as failblog.org.

And undoubtedly all of them are funniest when they're for real, not set up for the purpose of sending something they think will be funny on the site.

crash

2009-08-05T02:05:00.001-07:00

Plane crash in Ko Samui. I'm going to feel awesome about flying that same airline to that same airport.

UPS

2009-08-03T17:32:00.000-07:00

K's building no longer allows UPS to leave packages since there have been thefts. Fuck. So now we have to play tag with UPS. Today I waited until 5pm for a package. Awesome waste of my time, especially since I had planned to be working at a coffee shop where I usually get more done. Unless you're unemployed or work at home, who the hell is ever home to sign for a package??? And if you are unemployed, chances are you have no money to be shopping online. People no longer have housewives who sit at home doing nothing because we all need to work to eat these days.

What's more awesome is I'm not allowed to have packages shipped to "work" because the admins will not have it. There needs to be a new way to get packages. This is just too annoying.

Thailand

2009-07-28T01:56:00.000-07:00

Flight is booked, hotel for the first few nights in Bangkok booked ($45 a night for a nice 4-star includes breakfast and taxes). Probably going to hit Chiang Mai as a next stop and then one of the islands for some beach hut laziness. Which island should I go to? Suggestions? Kinda picking between Phuket and Koh Chang (thanks Robyn!) but open to others...

shopping

2009-07-24T00:05:00.000-07:00

I just attempted to fix a long unproductive somewhat miserable day by blowing a hundred bucks on vacation clothes for my upcoming trip to Thailand. But I got lots of stuff for that hundred bucks: 2 bikinis ($12 and $16), a yoga wrap cover up ($17), shorts ($5), pair of (Kids' size) Teva sandals ($35), breathable Teva hat ($9). The last two things from REI Outlet online and the other stuff from Old Navy (all stuff on sale). I'd say that's a good deal. I quite enjoy finding good deals. Doesn't fix the fact that I wasted my whole day doing nothing but being miserable but it helps.

trip

2009-07-21T11:45:00.001-07:00

This was the year I was going to make up for a lifetime of missed opportunities to travel overseas with friends and now it looks like it's not going to happen because of conflicting schedules and travel itineraries. After this all my friends will be having kids, either their first, or even their second. And then there's me, the one with no stability, no control over my future, not even any rights in the country I have called home for 9 years. Add to that the 6 years of that I totally wasted with a loser who cheated on me with the office slut (who was also married with kid at the time). Ugh. Fuck my life to hell. I want those years back.

Seattle

2009-07-20T20:58:00.000-07:00

Went for a run. It felt shitty and not fun. What the hell is runner's high? Whoever coined that term clearly has never actually been high. I nearly twisted my ankle again thanks to these piles of broken up concrete that they call sidewalks in Seattle. Seattle also features long stretches of potholes that they call roads, and this crumbling piece of shit that is going to fall down and kill everyone any moment now called the Alaskan Way viaduct. But hey we have light rail now to the airport....actually no. That is delayed til December this year. But you can take a shuttle bus from that last stop to the airport. That sounds really convenient when you are carrying luggage. Sometimes I wonder if anyone actually runs this city.

suck

2009-07-13T17:54:00.001-07:00

As in I suck at blogging these past few (more like 12-18) months. I think ever since I started twittering, I haven't needed the daily catharsis that blogging offered me. So I bitch and complain in 140 characters instead of 500 words or so each day. But I do miss the long winded bitching that I used to do here. I think I need to come back more often, maybe instead of playing Pet Society and Packrat on Facebook every fucking day.

So anyways, it's fucking cold outside and it's mid-July. Fuck Seattle. At least when it's raining or cold in Vancouver, you can go out and make yourself feel better by eating your weight in izakaya or smoking some BC bud. No recourse here. And Seattlites drive stupid slow to make things even more miserable and frustrating.

Anyways I was up in Vancouver a couple weeks ago and it was awesome. I had dim sum, brisket curry, johnny cakes at the Reefs Caribbean restaurant, izakaya, sushi, barbeque, and I can't remember what else but it was a lot and it was delicious. I miss eating in Vancouver. Also did a nice hike up the Baden Powell trail in Deep Cove to Quarry Rock. Totally fun even though it got pretty hot up there. Spent an afternoon out at Jericho beach too. I miss nice, accessible, big, beautiful beaches. The host's family is a seafood distributor so there were gigantic prawns on the gigantic BBQ that he brought in on a pick up truck. So yummy.

Wow I've forgotten what it's like to type more than 140 characters. I'm tired.

FML

2009-06-15T22:23:00.001-07:00

Fuck my life. Name of a popular blog that isn't mine but should be. In fact it should just be full of tales from my life and my life only because I have plenty. I recently moved back to my department at school after taking a year's leave and working for another department that isn't full of angry old white people who still haven't figured out the value of women of color in academia. It was such a nice break.

However, the office across the pond sucked because it was in the campus "riot proof" building built in the 1960s to house the administration so that people couldn't storm the offices. Riot proof means it's impossible not to get lost in there. The offices are not numbered sequentially and the building has sections that you can shut down and also an elevator that doesn't actually work. It was also kinda dirty and the conference room doubled as a "kitchen" (ie microwave and mini fridge, no sink). So yeah, humanities folks are housed in there along with other marginalized fields of study in academia, with the exception of math and statistics which got a nice shiny renovated floor. Anyways I moved all my shit to my new office in my home department and thought, finally, I get an office with a window and non annoying office mates and everything. Then the IT chick barged in today with some old prof. Like she fucking unlocked the door and let herself in. I was holed in there working on my syllabus for summer. No excuse me, or hello or anything but she sure talked to the prof in a sugar sweet voice. They were talking about furniture and shelves and this and that but I wasn't listening. IT bitch then says to me, did you know you're moving out of this office? and I say, uh no, I just moved in and the admins just gave me the key last week. She says, well they know, they've known for 2 weeks that the office is going to be occupied by faculty. Well fuck me twice. Clearly if they gave me the key and told me to move in, they don't know and I don't give a shit if they do or not. So yeah I'm getting kicked out of the office I just moved into and I didn't even know until bitch barged in and held a fucking open house in there while I was trying to work. I should note that we used to have some super cool IT people but they quit. Not surprising.

Anyways, I decided I had to get the fuck out of there because the whole building gives me bad vibes. Went to the library to pick up my books and realized they just started closing early for the week because it's semester break. Awesome, no books. Decided to blow off some steam by browsing some books at the bookstore. That was nice til I went out to catch my bus. I saw it there at the red light. Light turned green and bam, it lurches forward twice and stops. Driver turns off the display and kicks off the passengers. I should mention this bookended a day that started with me missing my bus on the way TO school.

weekend

2009-05-26T00:45:00.000-07:00

I had a surprisingly eventful weekend. Went for happy hour Friday with a colleague from out of town. Had some great nachos and beer there. Went to the Folk Life Festival here on Saturday, out with friends Saturday night for Tamarind Tree and the Hideout bar afterward, a wedding Sunday and did some grilling at a friend's house today. On top of that, finished all my grading and assignment development for the class I TA.

running

2009-05-18T00:29:00.000-07:00

Ever since it started warming up here, I've been trying to get back into running, mostly because it's free, doesn't require going someplace special, and can be done anytime. I need that kinda flexibility to get off my fat ass. I've worked up to doing 4 miles and getting home with energy to spare, so I'm going to try to get to 6 miles, and maybe work up to a half marathon, maybe.

The coolest thing about running in Seattle (okay, maybe the only cool thing since a fair weather runner like me doesn't get much fair weather here) is that one of our local Seattle Celebs, John Curley, former host of Evening Magazine for years and years and years is a triathlete. So he gives money to charities if you register to Beat John Curley and succeed. I don't think I ever will but what an awesome (and charitable) idea.

I'm thinking of doing the Furry 5K because I love the idea of running among dogs and it's money for the animal shelter.

squirrel

2009-05-16T17:00:00.001-07:00

Today I went to Green Lake and counted 21 turtles sun bathing on the logs and 12 tiny baby ducklings, 5 for one mom, 7 for the other, and many many many dogs. Yay, that made me happy!

This here is a story about a big squirrel helping a little squirrel and it is awesome. I love it when mother nature gives us opportunities like this to stop, forget about all the shitty things going on in our lives, and pay attention to her for just a moment.

momentum

2009-05-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

I know that as with any major event, there needs to be a period of rest and recovery before you get yourself back on track. I defended my exams March 31 so we're coming up on 6 weeks now and I still feel like I'm functioning at only about 70% of my intellectual capacity which wasn't a whole lot to begin with since I mostly want to just sleep and eat carbs lately. Fuck. I have a finite amount of time before my funding expires. No funding means no tuition waiver which means I'd have to pay for taking credits while working on my diss if I can't finish it before my funding runs out. I hate that my money and citizenship/visa issues are all tangled up like this. It makes planning really difficult and leaves me none of the flexibility that permanent residents and citizens have like getting an off-campus job or taking a leave of absence or taking a little longer to finish.

Ah well, day at a time. I had a small success today in that I hooked up my digital converter to my new antenna and it worked like a charm. Cool. Now I have a handful of channels instead of just one fuzzy one.

living

2009-05-07T00:11:00.001-07:00

It rained again today. Isn't it May? WTF? And when it rains, for some reason, the bus always runs late and then I end up both wet and late which is always an awesome way to start a morning.

Knowing full well that I don't deal well with bad weather - I get in bad funks and just want to eat carbs and cheese, and stay in bed - I'm not sure that living in the pacific northwest/western Canada is going to be a good long term plan. I can't waste 8 months out of 12 (2/3 of my life) being miserable. Something is not right with that. Man, I have a lot of requirements for where to live - weather, good Asian food, other Asian Americans, diversity in general, left leaning politics, mountains, water, good healthcare and education. I think this is a mystical place in fact. It's a combination of California's climate and Canada's government.

Meh, it's nothing I really have the luxury of thinking about anyways. I'm here til Decemer 2010 when my funding runs out. Then it'll be up to the gods. For now, teach, publish, and dissertate til I get this degree.

The process of exam preparation at least taught me some things I didn't expect to learn:

taking baths is relaxing and worth the work of scrubbing the ring around the tub left by bath bombs and oils
the first half of a book review is often a great summary of the book
writing happens faster when you don't agonize over every syllable as I usually do
pre-cooking a ton of food and putting it in single serve packets in the freezer is a great way to save time and eat better
this is an extreme test of your ability to manage your time, and more visibly, your ability to handle stress, so it's interesting to see how people deal with it
it's easier to get work done if you schedule yourself to be somewhere so that your day isn't so shapeless
at this point in our education, advisers with fragile egos can actually feel threatened by our knowledge, intelligence, and potential future contributions to the field, and the results can be nasty (learned from a friend. no one feels threatened by me, that's for damn sure)
academia is full of self-centered passive aggressive people with frail egos and poor social, interpersonal, and organizational skills (not on my committee but this is a frequently recurring theme I've noticed)
fatigue feels like it can be cumulative; I'm still tired

no shows

2009-04-29T21:15:00.000-07:00

Today marks the middle of week 5 (of 10) at school. The class I TA had their midterm today and two of my students didn't know which TA to hand in their exam to because, well, they haven't even shown up to one discussion section. In other words, they have no fucking clue who their TA is because they skipped the first 5 weeks of class. Better yet, one of my persistent no show students also didn't show up for the exam. I wonder if she actually plans to pass this class (not possible at this point). I wish we could hand pick students like this and kick 'em out to make room for students who give a shit and can't afford to just register for courses they have no intention of passing.

back

2009-04-22T15:32:00.000-07:00

After a long hiatus I'm back. During my absence I completed my written exams, which I've blogged about and then 2 weeks later I endured my hazing which is a 1.5 hour oral defense of essentially everything I ought to know about my area of research as negotiated with my committee of four people before all this started and I passed! So now I get to replace the M.A. after my name with Ph.C. which means Ph.D candidate. I get the D after I write my dissertation which is looking like it's going to be over 200 pages and about 6-7 chapters long.

People unfamiliar with academia often ask the same questions so here's an FAQ:

1. So are you a doctor now?

No, not til I finish writing my dissertation AND survive an oral defense of my arguments. Probably another 1-2 hour grilling by my committee and possible others. I know at SFU dissertation defenses were public events. Luckily I don't think they do that at my school. So not until I finish and defend my dissertation do I earn my D.

2. When do you graduate?

It's more a matter of completing a project than a matter of time. I graduate when I finish writing my dissertation and pass my oral defense. The more scary question is when does my funding dry up. For me, December 2010. So if I'm not done by then I need to either find an assistantship (research assistant or teaching assistant or other teaching job) at my school to get the tuition waiver, or I'll have to pay tuition out of my own pocket to cover my dissertation credits while I finish up. Either way, not finishing on time will fucking suck the big one and really stress me out.

3. What classes are you taking?

I finished my coursework last year so when I say I'm in class, I'm either in a class that I'm auditing for fun (because it wasn't offered when I was taking classes) or I'm in an undergrad lecture for the course I TA (teach).

4. If you aren't taking classes, what the hell do you do all day?

I TA two hours a week, hold office hours a couple hours a week (when my students come with questions or help or whatever), and attend lecture for the class I TA 4 hours a week. Aside from teaching related stuff and attending talks from visiting scholars (pretty much an expectation for us), I'm not at school at all.

Instead I'm usually at a coffee shop or at home writing my prospectus, which is a 15-20 page detailed plan of what my dissertation is about. At the same time I'm trying to revise and edit old papers and submit them to academic journals for publication because that's kind of the academic scorecard at research universities like mine. Publish or perish (or teach a huge load at a community college).

And the other big thing we need to do continuously is present papers at conferences. So between teaching, trying to publish, attending conferences, and working on my prospectus, I haven't got a lot of spare time on my hands. Which is why when I was prepping for exams I had absolutely NO time on my hands. Essentially I had to do all that stuff PLUS read 2-3 books and articles a day for about 4 months. Now I'm back to a more normal and humane schedule. Thanks the gods for that.

---

So yeah, it's been 3 weeks since I passed my orals and advanced to candidacy so I've been resting, catching up on sleep and exercise, and I also just came back from a conference in New Orleans. Now I'm already behind on getting my prospectus done. It's kinda like running on a treadmill on level 10, constantly.

exams

2009-03-02T00:32:00.000-08:00

So I said I would blog about what these exams are about. I don't have time to get into a lot of detail but basically it's this:

3.5 days to to write 4 essays (15 pages each, for a total of 60 pages)
one essay typically deals with primary methodology we use in our research (mine is on cultural studies)
the other three essays are topical (e.g. Asian American pop culture, development of Asian American studies as a discipline etc.)
each essay should demonstrate our knowledge gained from doing a list of readings for each essay -- about 20-30 readings (mix of books and journal articles)

And here is my preparation schedule to date

April 2008 (early April): my first draft of reading lists sent to committee members to edit and add readings

Summer 2008: did a few readings after teaching A-term (2? credits); continued negotiating and refining the list with committee members

Fall 2008: took 10 credits of reading; continued negotiating and refining the list with committee members

Dec 2008 to Jan 2009: focused on getting through all the Cultural Studies methods readings

Sep to Dec 2008: took 10 credits of reading, 5 for each of 2 committee members (meetings with each every 2 weeks to discuss and review my understanding of the readings and how they are situated in the larger scholarly conversation)

Mid Feb: finalized a date for exams, booked meeting room for orals with admin

Feb 28: Completed 90% of all readings (5 books and 20 articles remaining), Completed final meetings with all committee members; got form signed and returned

March 1:
TO DO: Finish key readings e.g. Lowe, O&W, Wei, Almaguer; review Cultural Studies Theory/ist summaries online ; outline arguments by scholar and by concept for each exam question area, prewrite some arguments, read remaining low-priority readings only as needed in the pre-writes
March 15: rest and spa day??

March 13-16: written exams

March 17-21: grading of final papers for teaching responsibilities

March 22-28: staycation/mini vacation

March 29: review my exam essays

March 31: oral defense

coffeeshop

2009-02-18T15:14:00.000-08:00

Been pretty much camped out at this coffee shop 4-5 days a week, 3-8 hours per day the last month or two with my friends who are also preparing for exams. Usually pretty uneventful. We have gotten to know the musical tastes of the barristas and who makes a better coffee. We even know when they are scheduled to work. Definitely recognize all the regulars. There are a couple women sitting behind me right now though, who are really pissing me off. One of them has her chair all backed up against mine and they won't shut the fuck up. Here an IM dialog between me and R I thought you might find entertaining:

(2:57:29 PM) me: i am going to strangle these bitches
(2:59:32 PM) R: I know they are SOOO LOUD
(2:59:36 PM) R: and the laugh!
(2:59:44 PM) me: what theyre laughing at isnt even funny
(2:59:51 PM) me: if i could laugh too i wouldnt mind so much
(3:09:55 PM) me: why is this bitch all the way up my ass like this
(3:10:01 PM) me: there is like 5' of space on the other side of the table
(3:10:23 PM) R: they were trying to get out of the sun
(3:10:34 PM) R: I don't think you're important enough to worry about
(3:10:40 PM) R: cuz, its all about them!
(3:10:50 PM) me: i should get your full spectrum light and shine it at them
(3:11:50 PM) R: the girl behind you just turned around and gave me a dirty look for talking
(3:11:55 PM) R: I guess Im bothering her
(3:11:58 PM) me: BITCH
(3:12:02 PM) me: shit is going down

school

2009-02-03T22:18:00.000-08:00

I have come to realize that regular people really have no idea what the fuck grad students do. I'm going to do all grad students a favour and tell you all because there seems to be some mistaken idea that we just take courses and assist with teaching here and there and so we have all this free time to travel and fuck around. Wrong. So very wrong. Unfortunately I need to finish reading an article and half a novel (for the lit class I TA) tonight so I can't go into detail but I'll at least share what I did today. BTW, I should note that I have a particularly understanding partner who almost remembers my schedule for each day and recognizes my hell. Those of you who don't will have to send their partners a link to this blog as I edumacate y'all.

- checked my email to see if my paper got into this conference that I really need to go to or people on future hiring committees are going to wonder why I didn't
- there was no such email but I did respond to an email to say that I would be a reviewer of a manuscript for a journal even though I totally do not have time for this but need the experience and it will look good on my vitae (aka CV aka resume for academics)
- then I went to campus and held my 2-hour office hours which is when undergrads in the class I teach are welcome to drop in to ask questions, get help or in this case review a draft of a paper
- this was followed by a 2-hour lecture where we watched a film based on the novel the class just read (there are 5 novels, which means I have to have read them all before the students do)
- 2 hours is precious so I worked on reading the next novel while watching the film
- after lecture was our 1 hour weekly TA meeting where the 3 teaching assistants meet with the prof to discuss what we plan to teach in discussion section friday (which we run independently, 50 students to each TA). We also talked about deadlines for grading their 50 midterm papers due in a couple weeks
- took a bus home, went to a 75 minute yoga class, ate dinner, and now I have to read an article that is on my exam reading list and finish that novel before bed.

So that is a detailed day in the life of a grad student. Note, there is no room for much media consumption on this schedule. Sometimes I turn on the TV to catch the evening news while I cook dinner and eat, but after that, no TV.

Tomorrow I have no obligations on campus so I meet with friends at a coffee shop to read and take notes for our general exams. Last week we scoffed at the grad students at the next table complaining about having to read a book a day. Pssssht. We need to read MORE THAN a book a day to get through our reading lists which are comprised of about 25-30 readings per list (4 lists on 4 different topics so about 120 readings). List is a mix of journal articles (20 pages) and full books. Tomorrow I'm hoping to knock out two books on my list.

Next time I'll talk more about these gang initiations/hazings, I mean general PhD exams.

phone

2009-02-03T22:12:00.000-08:00

I got a new phone and switched over to Sprint so I could pay $10 more for a lot more functionality -- commercial free streaming radio, Sprint TV, and mobile internet access. Unfortunately that also means getting really fucking annoying calls from some some company in Atlanta that I don't pick up. If you get weird calls, google the number and you'll probably find out it's some "marketing" agency wanting to ask why you switched or whatever. That or the call about your car's factory warrantee running out. I hate those.

I haven't had a chance to figure out all the things that I can do on the phone but I do know I can watch clips and deleted scenes from Ghost Hunters. Awesome (especially since I don't have cable).

scheduling

2009-01-25T14:56:00.001-08:00

I really hate scheduling shit. I would hate my job so much if I were a personal assistant or executive assistant or secretary or something. I'm in general exam oral defense scheduling hell right now. Everything is on hold because of some classroom scheduling issues for my co-advisor so we have to wait on that until I can settle a defense date which will enable me to figure out my written exam dates, which means I'll finally be able to use the cool countdown feature on my new Samsung 520 phone, or what I call iPhone for poor folks with its WAP browser and inability to synch with anything meaningful on my laptop. Anyways, blogging is light because I have been doing nothing but reading and notetaking in EndNote. I have been doing some cathartic writing though on Yelp. Look for me by my first and last name, if you know it.

Anyways, it was funny. I just met K's "twin" downstairs at the coffee shop. He's a white guy but has the same name, is also into lindy hop, lives in the same building, and has a gf doing a Ph.D.

hang up

2009-01-22T17:18:00.000-08:00

I logged on to the Sprint web site to activate my new phone today. Obviously they have some kinks to work out in their activation system as my online agent's (Matthew) instructions to make a test call (which I made to K) got routed to another customer service rep at Sprint who told me she was doing a "welcome call."

So I had one agent on the phone and one on my live chat. Matthew, my online agent, kept telling me to hang up on the lady on the phone but she was...talking. He insisted it was ok but it was all a little weird chatting to someone telling me to hang up on the lady from Sprint who was talking to me over the phone in real time.

Here's how it went down on the chat. Kinda funny:

5:11:59 PM	Me	making test call
5:12:08 PM	Matthew L	Ok
5:12:18 PM	Me	it put me thru to sprint
5:13:03 PM	Matthew L	Ok
5:13:03 PM	Matthew L	One moment please.
5:13:48 PM	Me	she's doing a welcome call? wtf
5:14:20 PM	Me	now she says she is doing my activation. this is confusing
5:14:54 PM	Matthew L	That is not supposed to happen. You can hangup from the representative.
5:15:06 PM	Me	she's talking...
5:15:54 PM	Me	she's telling me about billing cycles
5:16:02 PM	Me	and reading me fine print
5:16:09 PM	Matthew L	Ok, but if the steps went through then it is working.
5:16:28 PM	Me	i guess i should sit thru her call?
5:16:41 PM	Me	like will i have to jump thru this hoop anyways?
5:16:44 PM	Matthew L	No
5:17:01 PM	Me	oh i feel bad...
5:17:04 PM	Me	is she in sales?
5:17:14 PM	Matthew L	You can hangup, if it got thru to sprint then it works.
5:17:23 PM	Me	gotcha. thanks so much
5:17:30 PM	Matthew L	Your Welcome
5:17:35 PM	Matthew L	It is my job to ensure that I have fully resolved the issues that prompted you to chat with me. Have I resolved all of your issues today?
5:17:42 PM	Me	yup thanks
5:17:50 PM	Matthew L	It has been my pleasure assisting you today !!

always

2009-01-19T21:39:00.000-08:00

Grad students "always and never have the day off." That's what one of my friends said today about today being MLK day. She was right because the coffee shop where we meet to study along with a couple other women in my cohort was packed all day today. Yup I spent my "day of service" reading for exams for 9 hours and everyone around us seemed to be studying diligently with their big huge calculators and big huge law and physiology and engineering textbooks. It's going to be like this until April 3rd or so when I complete the oral defence for my general exams.

creepy

2009-01-10T13:40:00.000-08:00

It feels like we get notifications of "criminal incident" at least on a monthly basis if not more often. Mostly strong arm robberies, which is pretty scary. This one though is just creepy.

Timely Warning Notification of a Criminal Incident
1/9/09

Indecent Liberties - Seattle Campus

The UW Police Department is investigating a reported case of indecent liberties that occurred on January 9, 2009 at 8:30 a.m. in a men's restroom in Odegaard Library. A male victim entered the 3rd floor restroom and noticed the male suspect loitering by the sinks. The suspect started a conversation with the victim describing his own height and weight, and asked the victim how tall he was and how much he weighed. He asked several flirtatious questions while approaching the victim. The victim attempted to leave the area, but the suspect would not move. The suspect again asked the victim how much he weighed, said "let me check," and grabbed the victim in several places. The victim stated that someone entered the restroom, which allowed him to escape. The victim was not injured in the encounter.

The suspect is described as a tall male with a dark complexion, approximately 6'3", with very short hair in a "buzz" cut. He spoke with a strong accent, origin unknown. He was also reportedly carrying a small black 8" toiletry bag.

Now I'm all for not racializing people since race as a biological concept does not exist, but when it comes to practical matters like describing a fucking suspect so we can catch the guy, I think we need to be more specific than "dark complexion." I mean what the fuck does that mean? Even if they are socially defined, I think "races" (the quotation marks are deliberate and used correctly) at least allow us to use popular ideas of what people might look like because, duh, it is visible. Do we often guess people's race incorrectly? Yup, for sure. But dark complexion tells me nothing. But black or Asian or Latino gives me at least somewhat of a better idea of what this guy looks like.

restaurants

2009-01-04T14:27:00.000-08:00

I got back from my two weeks in Vancouver (okay, actually Coquitlam, or what I call Shitquitlam, this shitty suburb of Vancouver where I grew up and my parents still live). I spent the first week totally snowed in. I'm talking over a foot of snow that I'd shovel only to have it come back the next day when my back was still sore from shoveling. So I gave up, hunkered down, and caught up on some reading for school. Apparently the BC south coast hasn't seen this much snow since 1971 which means it's the most snow my area has seen in my lifetime. It was pretty and all that but the novelty wore off quickly. Once the snow let up a little it was time to see friends for our favourite activity, eating. Just wanted to sum up for people in/visiting Vancouver the places we went to and the highlights (and a few lowlights):

Deer Garden. This place has the best curry brisket in the world, better than the famous Mui Garden curry. My parents get take out from here every time I visit.

Hon's Wonton House. We stopped at the New Westminster branch for some lunch and I got duck noodle soup (my favourite noodle order) for $4.35 with big huge pieces of duck. Delicous.

Rich Ocean. This place on West Broadway has awesome and cheap (before noon) dim sum. We ate until we were stuffed and even got dessert and it came out to barely over $25 for 4 people. Really awesome food. Can't wait to go back.

North Garden. This is where the old Lone Star Cafe and before that Fuddruckers were located. The beef and gai lan was a bit tasteless, but you have to go there for the peking duck. It is amazing. I haven't had Peking duck that good in a long time. $28 for two dishes -- the duck skin with wrap and duck meat with lettuce wrap. The hot and sour soup is particularly spicey but K liked it a lot. If you like your soup spicey, definitely try it.

Kingyo Izakaya. K and I walked down to Denmen from Robson to check this place out. Guu is still our favourite, but this place was excellent. Get the sashimi salad and tuna tataki. Oh and the black cod and also the crab croquette.

Rodney's Oyster House. Went here with some friends. Usually we try for the happy hour when oysters are a buck each but we came for dinner instead. It was delicious but pricey ($3.50 an oyster) so I'd stick to happy hour.

New York Fries. Kind of odd to go to a Canadian fast food place called NY Fries to get poutine but they make it well there and K was craving some so we did. Yum.

Blenz. This is kinda the Canadian Starbucks. Ubiquitous chain coffee shop, but the coffee is better than Starbucks. Definitely try the Belgian dark chocolate mocha. It was fantastic.

Ki Hon Sushi. We got a nice take out sushi party platter for 5-6 people for only $36 here. And that includes 15 pieces of nigiri and a whole bunch of rolls. Will definitely be back for my next take out order. Tekka rolls are only $2 and the other stuff is just as cheap and it's pretty good for a little tiny take out place. Definitely the cheapest party platters around.

Miki Sushi. I was just looking for a mutual location to meet up with friends the first night I got in before the forecasted snow storm. This place sucked hard. It had the decor of a 1960s mental institution including the pukey green wall color and shit generally falling apart. The fish roe sushi looked like food poisoning wrapped in seaweed so we didn't eat it (and they didn't take it off the bill). It was generally bad, dark, drafty, cold, and bad bad bad.

Finally, Taiwan Beef Noodle House. I didn't eat there because I was way too hungover from new years, but my friends had lunch there new years day and got food poisoning so I'm okay with never going there.

So I think I met my Chinese and Japanese food quota (as much as possible) while in Vancouver despite the snowy roads. Now I'm back in Seattle where happy hour rules but Asian food...not so much.

love

2008-12-27T00:43:00.000-08:00

As an unmarried 32-year-old I obviously am no expert but I find strategizing in relationships a la Rules of the Game is manipulative, overly defensive, and self-serving. I can understand how it can be important not to just jump right in the deep end with unrestrained optimism and I can understand why wearing your heart on your sleeve all the time could invite heartbreak, but I don't like the idea of hard and fast rules aimed at self-protection like Women should'nt say 'I love you' first. I think, in my mind, I file this sorta thing under "thinking too hard" and "using your head when you should be using your heart" and "silly social rules that perpetuate a static and essentialized notion of gender and that reinforce traditional gender roles in heterosexual courtship." Okay why does feminist theory get into my musings about everything. Anyways, it is an interesting topic. What's been your experience?

holidays

2008-12-22T21:16:00.000-08:00

So I made it through grading hell and survived the drive from Seattle to Vancouver. The drive was actually pretty easy as I took off 3 hours before the huge snow storm that blanketed the pacific northwest. I5 got a tad bit sketchy with compact snow up around Arlington, WA but with some slow and steady maneuvering it was fine. Even had time to stop off at the duty free store for some 75% off Lancome and liquor for some friends. Those of you who take the truck crossing northbound into Surrey, show your AAA/BCAA card for a discount, even on fancy cosmetics (but not liquor). This is at the first duty free store, not the second one.

First night I got to see a couple of friends and their awesome 6 month old who is rarely without a big toothless smile on his face. I can only hope for a kid as awesome as him. He even sleeps through the night.

After that it snowed and snowed and snowed some more. I've been stuck at home since Saturday as a result. It's not really a bad thing since I have a lot of work to do over the holidays. So far I've finished No-No Boy, a novel that I have to teach this quarter for an American Ethnic Lit class. Now it's time for exam reading which includes The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity, which I've been dying to read.

I've also been appointed to cook/prep for the potluck Christmas dinner which means no fucking way I'm making turkey. Too much pain, too much time, and no one but my younger cousin even likes turkey. My older cousin whose family used to host each year particularly hates it. So we're doing Chinese food and whatever. I guess you could call that fusion even though I don't really fancy fusion restaurants.

Here's what I got planned:

Other people’s contributions so far:

Chinese mushrooms
Chinese cake (probably with that gross chestnut cream shit, ugh)
Others TBD

Mom buy/make:

Curry beef brisket
Roast duck
Gai lan with garlic, and oyster sauce

Me to make:

Salad with grated cheese, dried cranberries, sliced almonds, crumbled hard boiled egg, sliced ham
Honey garlic chicken wings
Tomato basil bruschetta
Goat cheese red pepper phyllo pastries
Mixed berry trifle

seclusion

2008-12-17T11:58:00.000-08:00

I read this article about public schools locking up mentally disabled, autistic, and special ed kids in seclusion rooms where some have been left for hours. One even hung himself. Yes here in the great United States of America. How fucked up is that? If teachers aren't trained to deal with special kids then get some who are. Oh I forgot, not enough funding for such things. Let me just say that we had a lot of kids with mental disabilities in my elementary and jr. high school and they had a very small class and many assistants trained especially to work with special ed kids. A couple of my childhood friends are special ed assistants now. Do such positions even exist in public schools here? Maybe there is one for the whole school rather than several for one small class. Money needs to be allocated for things like this. But here money goes to senseless wars and things like building stupid fences at the Mexico border. Public education and health care are so pitiful here. I hope Obama is able to undo some of this mess.

ex-pat

2008-12-17T01:18:00.001-08:00

So I read this headline, "Canadian Living in SF gets 6 1/2 years for soliciting 'girl' for sex," and thought for a split second, this better not be someone I know. Canada really is not all that big. Thank the gods, it's some old white dude. Freakshow.

shooting

2008-12-17T00:49:00.000-08:00

Another shooting about 10 blocks from my place. This one is pretty ballsy. Someone shot someone in the head outside of a youth event protesting violence.

In less violent news, I've been doing fairly well with my post-exam-grading, pre-going-back-to-Vancouver to-do list. I took most of the weekend to unwind but did manage to start on the list. Done to date: dropped off gifts to committee members and other helpful faculty, revised exam reading lists, returned library books, registered for some of next quarter's credits, paid bills, opened my stack of snail mail, filed my huge pile of miscellaneous unfiled shit, vacuumed, organized my closet, sent post dated cheques for January's rent and Internet, uploaded a few batches of old photos, and got some snow boots (just in time) and a new messenger bag cuz I just am not a carry a handbag everyday kinda girl and my two other bags have broken zippers from overuse. So. Hopefully I will be all ready to go by this Saturday and the weather will cooperate so I can get home safely.

But before that can happen I need to chip away at my to-do list a bit more yet. I still need to: fix my printer, shred my pile of shit to shred, change Oscar's cage, upload my friends' wedding photos, and finish up some sewing and hemming. The snow should keep me home most of tomorrow to work on all that I think.

sucks

2008-12-01T19:26:00.001-08:00

Just spent a bit of time chatting with a good friend who recently had her second child. I went on her facebook to remind her to add some other friends so she could check out their baby pics. That led to a series of random clicks to the pages of our mutual friends, most of whom are in Vancouver. That was such a bad fucking idea.

Surfing FB and seeing all those baby, wedding, vacation, [insert other indicator of personal achievement/luck/success/stability here] photos reminds me of just how stagnant my life is. I haven't traveled overseas in 17 years and don't really have the time, money or travel companions (with compatible schedules or interest) to do it with anyways. We were thinking of going to Thailand, the one place I can maybe afford but now that chaos has erupted there, it's a no go. I did surf onto an old friend's fb page and it looks like she is doing a 180-day round the world honeymoon. How pleasant for her. I live alone in a dark rainy cold city (did I mention I have seasonal affective disorder?) below a couple of noisy racist assholes and the only thing certain about my future is uncertainty. I can barely afford my rent and bills, my department constantly fucks with me by forcing me to swap advisers, and even if I did have a lot of friends in this city, I wouldn't have the time or money to hang out with them. Pretty soon I get to go home for the holidays where my parents will test my patience by nagging at me for trivial things and I will sit in traffic alone trying to visit my happily married friends way on the other side of town. Being the fifth wheel rocks. Oh and if we go out and hang out with other folks, I will inevitably be asked the most annoying question ever. What are you going to do after you graduate?

Well. Let's see. I am on a student visa so I live in a country where I have no rights. At all. Most of the programs that are hiring are in the midwest (or some ridiculously small town) where I refuse to live. But that's okay because I have not published jack shit which will make it really hard to get a job anyways, as does the fact that the university would have to fork out some cash to deal with my visa issues and I doubt we'll be out of this recession by 2010. So what am I going to do after I graduate? To be honest, I don't fucking know and sometimes wonder if I even care anymore.

The other annoying question is where are you going to live after you graduate? Well. Let's see. I have to live where 1. I can find a job 2. I am legally allowed to work 3. I will not have to re-live the racial ignorance that plagued my childhood 4. I will not die of loneliness. I'm not sure that there is such a place.

I have a long day tomorrow and I really don't feel like facing it.

BlogHer

2008-12-01T16:42:00.000-08:00

In my pursuit for distractions from exam reading I checked out the web site for BlogHer which holds annual conferences for women bloggers. There are various categories to which you can submit a link to/feed from your blog. Naturally I clicked on Race and Ethnicity. Browsed about 8 pages and nope. Not one Asian blogger. I think I'll stick to my other blog community - Rice Bowl Journals (btw, they moved so update your bookmarks).

late

2008-12-01T02:47:00.000-08:00

I'm usually pretty good at getting to bed by midnight, earlier on school nights. But when I don't have an appointment or class in the morning it's hard to find a reason to get up and so I let myself go to bed way too late the night before. I just can't help it though sometimes. I get work done too so if I'm up doing work I let myself stay up even later. Obscenely late. Like now. This is going to foul up my sleep schedule tomorrow. I know it. Consistency with anything is so damn hard for me for a lot of things. It's almost as though I get bored or wound up when things run too much on a schedule and things don't change.

violence

2008-11-26T11:20:00.000-08:00

So this rise in youth gang violence, and it is a real rise not just a perceived one, sucks the big one. This all happens just south of where I live, not too far south. Meanwhile up in the neighborhood around my university there has been a bunch of strong arm and gunpoint robberies, one just last week in broad day light a block off the main street we call the Ave. I'm not sure what's scarier, the combination of these two problems or the more organized crime shootings in Vancouver that are on the rise as well. Vancouver being a port city means various ethnic gangs and one that calls themselves the UN (members of a variety of ethnicities) are battling to head up the rampant drug trade up there and they seem a lot more organized than the street gangs of 16 and 17 year olds down here. But when you're carrying a gun and shooting people and catching folks in the crossfire, it doesn't matter your age or affiliation. I hate guns.

San Diego

2008-11-25T23:38:00.000-08:00

Got back in Sunday night after a 4 day trip to San Diego for a conference. Took K with me since it was a great opportunity to catch some sun, relax a bit and see his brother's family. Thursday night we hit up a nice brew pub restaurant called Karl Strauss where my friend and fellow panelist joined us later for some beers. We headed to another bar after that one closed and it looked very promising with its great number of beers on tap. Unfortunately those taps mostly poured shitty beer like Coors and Bud. Friday noon was my panel which went well but was poorly attended because it was in the alternative hotel where all the presenters boycotting the Hyatt (owner supports Prop 8) moved their panels, and because it's a huge ass conference where folks are spread out because of the sheer number of panels running concurrently. Oh yeah, and no one gives a flying shit about Asian American issues.

After the panel we went out for a nice lunch where K got to meet my conference buddies. We had Mexican food since most of us (from Washington and Illinois) are deprived of good Mexican grub. That night we went to our awkward department party where food was free but drinks were a huge rip off. It wasn't too long before I wanted to scream. Being confined to a room with a number of people whom I dislike for one reason or another (generally I can sum up as ego, power, race, gender type issues) makes me want to drink heavily, and my Ketel and tonic was $10 so that wasn't practical. Finally we got out of there and reconvened with the other graduate students across the street where an old prof of my joined us. Eventually we called it a night.

Saturday was San Diego Zoo day. The niece and nephew were a lot of fun and almost on their best behavior. K's brother is very...different, even more different than I had imagined and in almost every possible way. Overall it was a really fun day and we got to see koalas, pandas, giraffes, elephants, and a bunch of animals from Asia and Africa that I really couldn't identify or remember the names of. I just remember thinking there is a load of venomous snakes and spiders all over Asia, Africa, and South America and it scared the shit out of me to think about it. Unexpected highlight of the day was the the Asian male tour guide for the tour bus who had this extremely cheery, forcefully gay, lispy style of speech even when he announced really morbid animal facts, e.g. "...and the mother lion lays out in front of the den to prevent predators from completely destroying her helpless young!!!" It was like musical theater meets Lorne Green's New Wilderness (that 80s TV show where you got to see animals up close hunting and ripping the guts out of their prey) and it was delightful. That night was spent hot tubbing and then dining in Little Italy before I met up with some old profs from San Fran for drinks.

Sunday was our last day which we spent touring Old Town. Nice to stroll around in the sun and check out some of the old buildings. Not the most exciting place I've ever been to but perfect place to spend a few hours outdoors before heading to the airport to go home. I miss the sun and warmth already. Pacific Northwest bleh.

remembering

2008-11-11T16:33:00.000-08:00

In elementary school we had to memorize this poem and recite it in assembly. Did other Canadians out there have to do this too? I know nothing about poetry but I like this one. It's called In Flanders Fields:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields… — John McCrae

transit

2008-11-10T20:15:00.000-08:00

I arrived in plenty of time for the 12:27pm bus today. Someone was already there waiting. It didn't show. So I thought the 12:44 is cutting it close for my 1pm doctors appointment but it might do. 12:44 came and went and still no bus.

1pm, nearly 40 minutes after I arrived for a bus that is supposed to come every 15 minutes, a bus passes my stop, lets someone off and takes off. Apparently another bus was right behind it, which means they're both so fucking late that they are one behind the other, with probably a third one not too far behind that one. So I had to run like hell to arrive at 1:16pm for my appointment.

Luckily the doctor saw me but if she decided not to I would have been charged for missing an appointment. I am all for taking transit to reduce carbon emissions but it is a gigantic fucking pain in the ass when they are unreliable, especially when (1) it's raining (luckily it wasn't today) (2) when I have an appointment that was difficult to schedule (3) when missing that appointment costs me money that I don't have.

Seattle, you need to get your transit system shit together. Seriously. And about that Prop 1 for the building of a light rail... That should've been approved about 20 years ago.

Obama

2008-11-05T00:23:00.000-08:00

Well that happened faster than expected. We hadn't even gotten our check at Smith when it was announced that Obama took Ohio, Pennsylvania and even Florida. Obama was the new president of the United States of America. 44th President of the United States. America, I am so proud of you. The last eight years have been painful and I came to realizee just how conservative and stagnant the U.S. can be, but tonight I realize that you are ready for a change. And it wasn't barely a win for Obama, it was a landslide. As a Canadian, and a left leaning one at that, I never thought your people would get their shit together to really welcome such a progressive (and black) president but tonight you proved me wrong and I could not be happier. So congratulations the rest of the world is very very proud of you. But let's just take a moment to thank Obama, the American people, and the rest of the world for silently cheering him on. Bravo. Here's to hope... You go Obama!

deaths

2008-11-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

I'll get to the election in a moment but first gotta cover some other shit going on in my neighborhood lately. It's sad and frustrating at the same time. Last Thursday, a 61-year-old former custodian (in the building where my office is now) at UW commit suicide publicly in the middle of Red Square by dousing himself with gasoline and then setting himself on fire. He obviously had a statement to make and I wish people would tell his story. All I know from a colleague is that he had worked at Uwajimaya, a large Japanese store, previously and had some sort of grievance there that had gone unsettled. He had been let go at UW as well but the circumstances are not entirely clear. I think his side of the story deserves to be told.

Then on Friday night there was a gang related shooting leading to the death of a teenager a few blocks from where I catch my bus. Not much talk of youth gang activity around here. Sounds like they need to spend some dollars there to get that issue looked at. I'm not terribly interested in living near an area where I could get caught in the crossfire.

Then yesterday K saw a guy in his mid-30s up on the Aurora Bridge which is across from his office. One moment he was there, the next he was in the Adobe parking lot.

So obviously things are going all to hell, at least in my corner of the world here. I'm going to go out to watch the election with friends up on Capitol Hill and hopefully the evening will end with me running through the streets shouting OBAMA! I'm nervous and excited and hope he can help turn things around in this country.

repost

2008-10-29T21:43:00.000-07:00

Obama was on primetime tonight and whoever worked on that project needs to win a fucking Emmy or something. It was an amazing, thoughtful, touching, but never negative, finger-pointing or angry. Seriously. Haven't seen anything like it in my life and that's probably because there hasn't been a leader like him in my lifetime. The writers and producers and directors must be talented but we're talkin' Obama here. The man is amazing all on his own. This video just helped to convey that.

One thing I found almost as amazing though is the comments left by the public in response to the video. Here are some of my favorites:

PantherCityIndie See Profile

I grew up the son of a political cartoonist. I have every reason to be cynical about politics and politicians. I was only ten when Watergate dominated the headlines, but I remember it well. How can you not when your father constantly talks about it and provides a daily editorial?

I watched the video on HuffPo's YouTube link, since I was in school while Obama's ad ran on TV. I had my headphones on while sitting at my PC. It was next to impossible to resist being moved (not that I went in with that purpose in mind) by what I saw, and how the ad was done. If you saw me in person, you'd see a six foot four inch guy that might appear like he'd go for McCain, being in Texas, being white, being a Navy vet, living in a conservative city in a deeply red state. You would be wrong. I voted yesterday...it likely won't win Obama the Texas electoral vote count, but I wanted my little bit to contribute to his popular vote column.

I became eligible to vote in 1980. I've voted in almost every presidential election. This is the first one where I did not hold my nose while in the voting booth. Once, perhaps ONCE, in my 28 years of voting life, I'll have cast a vote for someone who is much closer to how I understand the world and my country than what I've seen in my lifetime.
---
Evelyn See Profile

When I see America through Obama's eyes, I get that feeling in my chest, that catch in my throat. I see a beautiful America. When I see it through McCain-Palin eyes, it looks like a bitter, angry, scared, hateful America. I like Hope better than Fear.
---
4everdem See Profile

Barack Obama makes me want to be a better person.

I love my country. I am so lucky to be an American.

I have hope for the next 4 years.

Please Vote.
---
bf2renegade See Profile

For the first time in my 25 years living, I felt empowered and dignified by casting my vote to a TRUE president; an inspirer, a captivator, a motivator, a fellow man. Following the entire election activities from both campaign with an objective attitude, I am compelled to put my vote on Obama. I felt tears running down my eyes when I saw this "infomercial." This is truly a historic moment, not just because a person of different race is running for Presidency, but because that someone IS paying attention to the American People and their needs. I have so much anger towards the McCain/Palin campaign and their supporters that I've been wanting to spew out, but after watching Obama hold his composure and maintain the course, that is when I learned the lesson that he preaches out; that no matter how much anger you have, retaliation should always be the last resort.
---

cable

2008-10-22T20:29:00.000-07:00

Or lack thereof. For a while there I had hundreds of channels because the last tenant forgot to cancel their cable. I think they also forgot to submit a change of address to USPS because I get more of their mail than my own. I even have their voter package thingy. It's been 6 months, would you please update your fucking address!!!???

Anyways, cable. After I lost those channels I had your basic over the air stuff. It was kinda blurry but if I wiggled the cable just so, or if I held the cable in that sweet spot and watched TV with cable still in hand, I got some network channels with only a few lines running across it. After I moved some shit around though I lost that sweet spot despite numerous ghetto configurations e.g. cable propped up on a large candle. Now I don't get shit. What I get reminds me of the movie Poltergeist and that scares me. Instead of looking for a solution I just gave up. Honestly I don't have time to watch TV and a lot of what is on those channels is complete crap, like Two and A Half Men. Who the hell watches that? It's not even funny. If I'm going to stare at the TV it's going to be with K watching a movie or good TV series on DVD. Right now we're into True Blood, Dexter and Weeds.

I was never one to use the TV as background noise because I find it frazzles me and distracts me from those few coherent thoughts that enter my mind once in a while. But when you're eating breakfast, or doing some housework, it's nice to have something on. So I find my media consumption habits have changed. I'm listening to a lot more Internet radio (the new age stations on Shoutcast. Yes new age, you jerk. I can hear you all laughing from here). I've also been listening to a LOT more NPR which I've learned often reports in depth Canadian news which is awesome. So that's what's been on lately and I think it's been a fantastic change. I can sort of absorb news and political discussions while doing other things. I spend less time consuming crap. The only drawback has been getting hooked on some of the interviews and stories which means I stick around to listen to the end, which means I ended up being tardier than I already am.

morons

2008-10-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

What is that list that folks post about stupid criminals? I think it's even sweeter when the person caught doing bad things is a beauty queen. It just is. Don't you agree?

For example, if you are planning to do a little dine and dash, getting away with it is a lot easier if you don't leave behind a wallet containing your ID and stash of pot.

eviction?

2008-10-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

I go so long between posts that blogger changes its UI everytime I login. Jeesh. It's not that I have any lack of things to say, it's just that I've got so many activities (film fest planning, yoga, lindy hop) going on outside of school plus "micro-blogging" on twitter keeping me occupied. But I won't abandon this blog. Twitter restricts the number of characters per post and I'm far too long winded to be constrained by that.

So neighbour update. I always have assholes for neighbours no matter where I move, even state to state. The two douchebags upstairs invited friends over in the middle of the week two nights in a row a few weeks back. Noisy, messy, drunk friends who were stomping up and down the stairs and dropping fucking popcorn all outside my door. Someone has also left gum on the carpet outside my door on two occasions. It's not like gum just falls out of your mouth unless you're four fucking years old. I'm pretty sure it was deliberately left outside my door. The morning after one of their little get togethers their window screen ended up in the parking lot below all mangled and shit. So I called the landlord to tell them about the noisy guests, window, and popcorn. She came that afternoon to clean up and I heard her talking to the douchbags, asking them when they are graduating etc. I have a feeling they won't be invited to renew their lease. Maybe they'll even get evicted.

Good because not only are they douchebags, they are racist douchebags. I can hear every word they say through these flimsy ass walls of my shitty ass 10-unit apartment complex, especially when they are YELLING at the TV at the top of their fucking lungs while playing their stupid first person shooter games. The other day one of the shitheads repeatedly yelled "fuck you n*****!" Yeah. The n-bomb. Did I mention they're white soccer-playing jocks from Seattle University. Yeah I googled them. I wanted to know what these losers are about.

Even in the privacy of your own home, what kind of person uses that kind of language? Seriously. The n-word does not just roll off the tongue of anyone I know.

On a separate occasion one of their friends popped out the door and saw me coming out of my apartment. He put his head back inside and whispered something to one of the guys that I couldn't hear. Douchebag then yelled back to his friend, "is it Asian?" That was followed by audible giggles and "shhhhhh" from his other guests. I take it the neighbor was asking about me. They could at least have used a pronoun that refers to a person and not an object.

Anyways, upon further stalking I discovered that douchebag #1 is a 22-year-old from a town in Arizona with a population of 200K, 86% white, with a significant Mormon population. Douchebag #2 is a 23-year-old political science (???) major from an even smaller town in Washington's "tri-cities" with population of 55K people, 83% white. Both towns are very conservative and overwhelmingly Republican. Gee, I wonder if it's a coincidence that these two rejects were bred in small white conservative Republican towns. I think not.

Seattle, especially our predominantly gay and racially diverse neighbourhood of Capitol Hill, is way too big of a city for their narrow little minds. Maybe they should just go home! Fuckers.

shirts

2008-10-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

Couple more sales before Cafepress cuts me my first cheque (that's check in American). Check out my store! http://www.cafepress.com/cdn_heart_obama

This shirt designing stuff is fun. I wish I had the artistic ability to do this kind of stuff for a living. For now creative pursuits will have to sit on the back burner as I finally have a tentative date for my doctoral exams -- early March. Counting backwards, I'll have to read about a bazillion books and articles each day. Awesome.

Teaching is going okay. My first discussion section for the Intro to Asian Am studies course I'm TAing is full of bright talkative students, mostly seniors. My second section, not so much. Lots of staring down at their notes, fidgeting, generally avoiding eye contact with me even with softball questions like, "could someone briefly summarize the anti-Chinese violence that took place in Rock Springs, Wyoming?" It was a 4 page article, people. Step up already. Jeez.

weekend

2008-09-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

So I did a last minute trip to Vancouver this weekend. I spent last week getting nothing done and hating my life as usual so when I decided to head up Thursday I had a whole day full of errands to run first. Things that had to be done like getting my glasses fixed, laundry, getting a new silent hamster wheel (did I mention I adopted a little hamster named Oscar?). Weekend was good even though it rained on Saturday. I took my friends out to a very condensed lindy hop drop in lesson where they pretty much covered 3/4 of what I have learned in 12 weeks into 50 minutes. I finally lost my social-dancing-with-strangers virginity at the Stomp it Off dance that came after the lesson. The live band was pretty fun.

I brought up some DVDS to watch on my parents big new TV. One of them was Wedding Crashers which I heard was funny. I got through maybe the first 10 minutes and I had to shut it off. It was stupid and not funny and Owen Wilson is really annoying and plays the same idiot character in every movie. Also saw the Accidental Tourist which was pretty good but a little slow and depressing. The movie I saw that I liked best this weekend though was Stranger than Fiction. I heard that Ebert and Roeper liked it but I am just not into the moronic Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Owen Wilson etc type Hollywood movie so I never saw it before but it was surprisingly awesome. I don't even want to explain the plot because I don't know how to do it without giving it away but just trust me. It's good. I have a new respect for Will Ferrell and wish he would do some more non-moronic movies now.

ugh

2008-09-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

It shouldn't take weeks to put away an airbed and sleeping bags I brought out for visitors Labor Day weekend (I'm a neat freak so this is by no means normal). The handrail I took down to paint a month ago (and left on the stairs) should've gone back up before K came over out of pity to put it back up yesterday. I shouldn't be sleeping 15+ hours on a sunny day on the weekend. And it shouldn't take me a whole summer to write a response paper for 2 credits. Sitting motionless for hours while the rest of the city is out enjoying what's left of summer, probably also a bad sign. The fact that I have no idea when classes start (including the one I teach) and feel nauseated thinking about it is also not so good. I had a long to-do list for the summer -- finishing a paper I already presented at a conference, updating Endnote, reading about 10 books for exams, putting in a paper for publication, figuring out more details on what I'm doing for my diss. Big fat zero on that list. I read one book. ONE. Christ. I have a TA meeting today and getting myself dressed and on a bus to campus is going to be like moving a mountain. I would like to return the brain that mother nature gave me for one that isn't defective.

LDS

2008-09-10T19:52:00.000-07:00

Look what happens when I'm at my computer all day. I blog a lot and I catch up on blogs. Man oh man was it worthwhile to read Pants's blog again. Her brother had a Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints themed costume party. OH my fucking god. The photos are hilarious. I must share.

Palin

2008-09-10T16:23:00.001-07:00

Just a collection of some of my favorite reader comments to news articles about Palin.

- If she won't answer questions, the media should work around that and instead yell "Look! Gays!" or "Condoms!" near Palin and just watch her dive under the podium in fear.
- For trying to appeal to Hillary-style feminists, it sure seems funny that the men around her are telling her when she can speak and when she can't.
- Of course she's not scared to answer any questions; she's incapable of answering them. John McCain and Britney Paris Palin '08.
- The last thing Crazy McCain wants for Scary Sarah is for her to be unscripted...she might put her proverbial foot in it (she is going to do it anyway) and scare those that thought she was a Goddess! Run Sarah Run...we are coming after you with our San Francisco Values and you might get cooties!
- During the debates there will be no scripts allowed. So if I were her, I would carry a bible. she is going to need it
- the Hillary comparisons have got to stop. Hillary never would have hid behind a man like Palin hides behind McBush

And this was a more general comment I found. A bit tragic:
-Democrats have science, reason, and humanity on their sides. Republicans have . . . . a love of Jesus and lots of flags. And yet the Republicans will probably win again.

Seattlites

2008-09-10T14:44:00.001-07:00

Another reason why I like living among Seattlites. I don't think you'd read these kinds of comments from readers in many other cities.

ABC

2008-09-10T12:29:00.000-07:00

The US presidential election coming up is going to be historic and frankly it's making me very nervous. I thought Americans, even conservative ones, would have the brains to see through McCain's bullshit and the absurdity of his pick of running mate. Then again Americans also gave W 4 more years so I should learn to be less surprised.

In any case there is an election going on in my neck of the woods soon too. Our PM, Conservative Stephen Harper is trying to hold the federal election early knowing full well that an Obama win could sway Canadian voters to vote further to the political left.

The new saying in Canada is ABC -- Anything But Conservative. Wanna know why?

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams (also a conservative) says of PM Harper,

"Even without a majority, he has cut funding for minorities, cut funding for literacy, cut funding to students, volunteers, museums and arts and culture groups right across the country [and] his government cut funding to women's groups and … actually went so far as to remove the federal mandate to advance equality for women."

More here.

I should get one of those shirts that say "Don't blame me, I voted Liberal." Canadians (including ex-pats), please vote Harper the fuck out of there. He is messing up our country.

NCA

2008-09-08T23:49:00.000-07:00

The National Communication Association is an academic association that I'm a member of but one that tends to anger me to no end. And I'm not the only one. Their daily digest of distribution list postings are full of angry members' rants. There has not been one response to the flurry of angry emails from the execs. Here are a few of the complaints:

- They are holding this year's annual conference at the Manchester Hyatt in San Diego which is being boycotted by most other academic and professional organizations and citizens' groups because the hotel's owner contributed thousands of dollars in support of a proposition to ban gay marriage. They are also in the middle of a labor union dispute (their room cleaners have to clean more rooms for the same pay and have no job security)
- They wanted us to register for the conference so far ahead that most people get stuck with a gap between paying the money and getting the money reimbursed by our departments. This is a gap that hurts graduate students and people in teaching positions who still have tight budgets
- The convention program is looking more and more like a phone book and NCA does not allow us the option to just view it online to save a few trees
- The hotels with discounted rooms for the conference are full except for one, and the conference is still 4 months away
- They charge a big wad of money for the preconference courses/seminars but the instructors they recruit to teach/lead them don't see most of that money
- Younger scholars and people of color have complained of just not feeling very welcome at the conference (I'd agree)

And my complaints:
- They send us the badges in the mail and if you forget to bring yours to the conference you have to pay for a replacement badge -- why not just save the postage and envelopes, have the badges at the conference and have a badge pick up station at the check in? (they could learn a thing or two from organizers of tech conferences I tell you)
- The web site is horrendous which is particularly embarrassing (as in I'm embarrassed for them) because they are a communication association. It is impossible to find anything on that site and their new flashy "RFP tracker" is not even a web application, it is a link to a 53-page PDF file (OMG, are you kidding me?). Oh and they can't even keep the font sizes and styles consistent from page to page (ever heard of CSS?). Ugh, I could go on and on. The web site is just pathetic. Pair a design student with an information architecture/comp sci student together on an internship and let them have at it. It couldn't get any worse.
- Almost all the faces I see in the newsletter are of old white folks, usually men. You'd think it was a newsletter for AARP or something (oh wait, AARP would have more people of color in their publication). One of the articles in the last issue of Spectra (their newsletter) was a rant from a grumpy old professor who was annoyed with laptops in the classroom and with students bringing Blackberries and Palm Pilots (he admitted he didn't know the difference and, yes, he said Palm Pilots). Laptops are how we electronically take notes these days, those mysterious things that replaced typewriters which replaced stone tablets. See where I'm going with this? Technology serves a purpose and it's related to communication and an important topic of study in our field for people very unlike him (thank the gods). His claims about technology getting in the way of learning were hyperbolic and serve only as an indication of how out of touch he is with the way business (and academics) is done these days.

I guess I could sum them up as old fashioned, inefficient, disorganized, bloated, out-of-touch, and inflexible.

pingpong

2008-09-05T17:34:00.000-07:00

Really looking forward to seeing this Jessica Yu film
http://www.pingpongplaya.com/us/index.html

Here is the facebook group with listings of when and where to catch it
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16504443114

redneck

2008-09-05T14:52:00.001-07:00

The words of Bristol Palin's baby daddy from his MySpace page:

On his MySpace page, Johnston boasts, "I'm a f - - -in' redneck" who likes to snowboard and ride dirt bikes.

"But I live to play hockey. I like to go camping and hang out with the boys, do some fishing, shoot some s- - - and just f - - -in' chillin' I guess."

"Ya f - - - with me I'll kick [your] ass," he added.

He also claims to be "in a relationship," but states, "I don't want kids."

from the NY Post. Nice.

random

2008-09-05T14:07:00.000-07:00

Here is a random collection of thoughts and updates since I'm not having coherent thoughts lately.

- Good article on why we like Facebook and Twitter
- I bought a shirt from Threadless of unicorns humping under a rainbow and it rocks
- Watching the RNC is far too grating so I follow FakeSarahPalin on Twitter instead
- Went to the famous Red Mill burgers for first time this weekend and it was tasty, but I was disappointed that there was no option to have a fried egg on top
- Got the $39 introductory massage special at the franchise Massage Envy and it was surprisingly good
- I went social dancing (lindy hop) for the first time at the Century Ballroom and had a great time (especially after I made K dance with me NOT in the cool (i.e. highly experienced) kids part of the dance floor where people know what they're doing and most teach classes. Instead I looked for the part of the dancefloor where people looked like they had just learned a basic east coast swing at the free half hour pre-dance lesson. I fit in better there.
- I start another series of intermediate level lessons next week and can't wait since this partner dancing stuff is the hardest, most intimidating thing I've attempted since learning to snowboard 10 years ago. Actually, this is harder and scary in a different way (scary in terms of kicking strangers in the shins and looking perpetually confused, out of step, and stupid vs. scary as in I could fall off a snowy cliff and die right here scary).
- I'm putting in an effort to reduce my consumption of red meat (except for the trip to Red Mill Burgers) for the sake of sustainability (House of Prime Rib would be another exception if I ever head there again in the near future)
- I decided not to submit a paper to a conference for 2 reasons - 1. it'll be on my birthday 2. there is no division for race and ethnicity and I think that's lame 3. (ok 3 reasons) it's in Arizona and I'm saving up my good shit for a conference in Honolulu (after you go to a few academic conferences and realize how draining and expensive it is, you tend to get a bit pickier)

over

2008-08-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

Summer that is. There was supposedly a heat wave here while I was in LA but, as usual, by the time I got home it was back to thunder showers and downpours. We got some great weather during July but I spent that month trying to manage a difficult teaching schedule. I got to travel a bit for August but travel for weddings is not the same as travel for relaxation because, well, it's hectic and not super relaxing. I spent the last week or so finishing the unpacking I didn't get around to back in April when I actually moved. Also did a lot of painting in my apartment so it looks inviting and maybe even pretty rather than slummy. I have one accent wall painted "sliced avocado" colour now and it looks pretty damn good.

Got less than a month left of summer, in which time I still need to write a short paper, reformat my computer (and/or get a new one before this one blows up), and respond to a call for papers for a conference in Phoenix. My "free" wifi stolen from a neighbour disappeared after I got back from LA which sucked the big one. Luckily it magically came back today so I've been glued to my computer the whole day. Oh and of course, with the reappearance of my free wifi comes a problem with my cell phone. It's not dialing out. Great.

I don't think part of September is enough for me to recharge my batteries and mentally be ready for another grueling school year. But I don't have much choice.

I need more sun and more time to be ready for school.

August

2008-08-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

I'm finally back in Seattle after spending most of the last three weeks out of town. It's been an awesome, though not terribly restful, three weeks. The first week I headed up to Vancouver by myself while K headed to Sac to see his mom as well as his niece and nephew who came up from San Diego to see him and their grandma. I had no idea that it was BC day long weekend so there was a lot of eating and more time to hang out with my friends than usual. One of my best friend's also had a nice banquet to celebrate his baby's one month birthday (moon yuet) which is a Chinese thing to mark a newborn making it to one month and effectively out of the woods so to speak since those early days are still sort of touch and go. My friend's brother was also in town from Fresno so it was cool for us to all hang out. I can never get enough of my Vancouver friends.

I headed back to Seattle the day before K and I took the train down to Eugene, OR for a wedding. The train ride was pretty relaxing. It was my first time meeting that group of friends and they were awesome and fun and smart and incredibly good lindy hoppers. It was exciting because it was also my first time taking what I've learned at lindy lessons to the dance floor and my first time watching K dance lindy. I've wanted to do this for a long time and I have finally found folks (and a bf) to dance with. Kinda sucks that they've got about 10 years of lindy experience on me since I just never had a circle of friends that was interested in all that. Part of the problem being I was a permanent fixture in the rave scene ten years ago. Oh well, better late than never, and this is something I can do even when I'm old like one couple that was ripping it up on the dance floor.

I just got back from 4 days in SoCal for a friend's wedding where I got to see many of my Bay Area friends including a couple who are moving to NYC. It was awesome to hang out like old times, including having a few too many drinks and going out late to eat. One lowlight of the trip was some raging drunk white dude who ran past us yelling "fucking gooks." I wish one of my friends wasn't so tired because he said he would have otherwise kicked his ass, and there were certainly more of us than there were of, well, him. Oh well. The rest of the weekend was a lot of fun and the wedding was a combination of good friends and open bar, which made it pretty entertaining.

Now that I'm back it's time to tackle my two summer credits, get some paint on my apartment's walls, and try to get some down time before madness starts again.

immigration

2008-08-12T21:31:00.000-07:00

This would never happen in the United States.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/08/12/immigration-experience.html

If it did I'd have a green card by now.

Greyhound

2008-08-05T16:17:00.001-07:00

I've taken charter buses a few times that I can remember. Once from UBC to Big White for the annual CVC ski trip and another time from Chicago to Urbana. On that trip to Big White I remember one of the buses full of university students like me at the time slipped on that dangerous Coquihalla Highway and landed on its side. No one was hurt but that was freaky. My trip to Urbana was not eventful but I would say that it wasn't the most comfortable way to travel and the bus station in Chicago is less than pleasant. Everyone there looked down on their luck and generally miserable. Anyways, I think the most dramatic thing to happen on a chartered bus took place a little while ago in Manitoba:

Without any apparent provocation, Li allegedly began stabbing McLean, who had reportedly been dozing. Terrified passengers poured off the bus.
The accused then allegedly decapitated McLean and paraded around the bus with his head. Li is also accused of consuming parts of McLean's body during his subsequent four-hour standoff with police. More...

ice cream

2008-07-29T14:10:00.000-07:00

Last Friday K had to pick up his credit card he left at Flowers on the Ave and I had to pick up a prescription at school so we worked in the morning from a coffee shop and then had lunch up in the U-District before working the rest of the afternoon from the graduate library cafe. It's kinda nice to have someone to work with so I don't find a quiet spot to take a nap (which happens a lot).

When it was quittin' time we decided to take a walk out to Wallingford for a treat, homemade ice cream at a local shop called Molly Moon's that makes awesome organic ice cream from scratch, including the sugar cones. He had honey lavender and I had thai iced tea. Other flavors included Vivace coffee, bubblegum, balsamic strawberry and other on their web site. So yummy. Baskin Robbins and crap like that just doesn't compare. Although I have to say I really like the Starbucks coffee ice cream.

Trying to finish my last week of working with these teens. There are a few of them I can't wait to never see again, but a few of them have grown on me, but those were never the ones who had discipline issues. 2 days of grading what feels like a billion speeches, report card comments and then I head to Vancouver to spend a week reading and relaxing.

burbs

2008-07-22T19:21:00.000-07:00

Headed up to Vancouver this weekend to see my friends' new baby boy. He has too much clothes but we couldn't resist bringing him a onesey that says "iPood" and another set of oneseys with little sayings on them. My favorite one says "what, I don't smell anything." Spent Friday evening at their place having drinks and holding the baby (an unusual combo but we didn't drink that much I swear). Saturday, K and I had brunch with my parents at Earls Restaurant. I went to their web site to find the location and it had a quote there that says "I don't flirt, I selectively engage" which I find rather offensive. Is this a fucking restaurant or white version of a Asian-style PR club for Christ's sake? They're known for hiring pretty, skinny, white waitresses. I don't think I've ever seen a male server, or one that is fat or non-white. Only reason we went there was to use a giftcard we got from a vendor of my dad's. Not planning to go back.

For the first time we spent the whole day in the burbs. I took K to a Korean spa called JJ Family Spa Plus, the only one in the Lower Mainland. I was hoping for something like Lynnwood's Olympus Spa but unfortunately it sort of sucked. The woman barely greeted us when we came in, the jacuzzi was dirty, men's steam room not working, two of the soaking tubs were empty (leaving just the dirty jacuzzi), there was a freakin' TV in the charcoal room (how are you supposed to relax?), they wanted to charge money for use of the massage chairs (like the ones at Sharper Image), the shampoo and conditioner dispensers were empty, and when I returned my key the woman didn't even look up from her computer screen. Bitch. They are planning to renovate but it looks like they already started but continued to take customers at full price. So unimpressed. Still, like K said, it wasn't a bad way to spend a couple hours -- laying around in a heated room on a bed of salt, charcoal or "yellow earth."

Oh well. We did have a nice afternoon visiting Belcarra Park where a couple caught a really big crab and kids were catching little fish with fishing line tied to a tree branch. Lots of them were doing that and having great success at it since the water is clear enough for you to see the fish biting less than a foot below the water's surface. That's what kids should be doing, not playing video games on a sunny day. They looked to be having an awesome time.

Stopped at White Pine beach on Sasamat Lake on the way back where we sat on a park bench and looked out at the water. My friends were either at a stag or taking care of baby for the evening so we walked down to the local theatre to watch the Dark Knight. I'd never spent so much time at a theatre -- 1 hour wait, 1/2 hour previews, 2.5 hour movie for a total of 4 hours. It was awesome to walk there and back in the middle of the night when it's nice and warm out.

The goal for Sunday was to eat fish and chips at the famous Pajos. Even the newborn came out and we all walked around Steveston, got some sun, and had some gelato for dessert. A perfect Sunday afternoon, at least until we went to the Duty Free on the way home. This snooty middle aged white woman in the cosmetics section would not stop following me. I clearly did not look like one of the foreign Asian visitors who drop loads of cash on cosmetics so I'm pretty sure she was thinking I was going to steal something. I wanted to turn and ask her if she ever followed white women that closely. Instead, I kept looking at different things in her section to watch her follow me. It was almost funny because she was so obvious. I did a couple extra laps through the aisles to give her some much needed exercise. I need to think of more strategies for dealing with white salespeople who follow me in stores. K dealt with it by leaving the area for the wine section. I prefer a more confrontational, or at least entertaining approach.

bus

2008-07-15T22:27:00.000-07:00

Every bus ride is such an adventure. Today a woman made a loud phone call to the bus authorities to complain that her busdriver drove by her with a half empty bus after making eye contact with her. She had to wait a half hour in the hot sun until the next bus, the one I was on, arrived. With the gas prices going up, there seem to be more people on the bus. What's really annoying though is that public school kids take public transport rather than getting a yellow school bus for their field trips. What that means is they fill up the bus and the bus has to skip the regular commuters who are left waiting for the next bus. I realized recently that some buses are air conditioned while others aren't.

teens2

2008-07-09T17:10:00.001-07:00

And an update on that summer program I'm working for. Well the last two days have started with stern lectures from the program directors about unacceptable behavior. The latest incident involved three of the boys wrestling in one of the classrooms and damaging some computer equipment, which they'll have to pay for. I'm thinking they need to do a tougher screening process. Teens who think that wrestling and breaking shit, shouting to one another outside administration offices, and taking naps during class right in front of my face are not college ready.

fall

2008-07-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

It drives me crazy how people in this country love to file lawsuits. If you get wasted and fall out of a window to your death, it is your dumbass fault. Your parents should be embarrassed, not angry about "free swinging windows" and other "hazards" in your son's fraternity house. Blaming others for your kid's stupidity is pathetic. [broken link has been fixed]

treehouse

2008-07-05T14:26:00.001-07:00

On weekend mornings, it's become a bit of a custom for K and I to have breakfast at his place while listening to NPR for an hour or two, sometimes even longer. There were so many great stories this morning. My favorite for today though was a follow up to this story about Dave who lived in a treehouse in Seattle. What you don't get to read in the news are the details and what happens after the story is considered old news.

Dave grew up being bounced from foster home to foster home. He's been physically, emotionally, and sexually abused. Years back he sent through a bad divorce, lost his job, lost his home and became homeless. He's in his early fifties and he made the news when the city decided that the treehouse he had built on city land and lived in for two years was going to have to be torn down. He's known as the squirrelman because he loves animals and shared his treehouse with little critters including a squirrel he had tamed, a rat and a ferret. Well after he got evicted he became a bit of a local celebrity because people in the area knew him and loved him and so some folks got together to buy him an RV to live in, and he cried. What the news didn't report is that there is a really happy ending. A woman who lives outside of Seattle who also has a special bond with animals, lives off the grid, at one time with several wolves, yes wolves, and other animals. Dave now parks his RV on her land and lives with her and together they take care of animals. She doesn't charge him for rent but he works for her and it sounds like he has a permanent home and a life again. I wish I could find the story on the NPR or KUOW site but I can't remember what time it was or what show I heard it on. But it was a really touching story so I thought I'd share. I like happy endings especially for people who haven't been so lucky in life but haven't lost their passion for life. I hope things get better for him.

teens

2008-07-02T17:45:00.000-07:00

It's been yet another unplanned hiatus. Teaching a college prep program for underprivileged teens from 8:30- 10:30am and then teaching my own undergrad class for 2 hours in the afternoon is kicking my ass. I pretty much come home and prepare lectures, videos, and review the readings until it's time to go to bed. It's been really hard to train my body to sleep at a decent hour like most people. Everything else has fallen by the wayside -- laundry, dishes, groceries, time with K, time to relax and watch TV. I think I would have more energy if my teen class didn't eat away at my fucking soul. Let me tell you about my students' behavior today. One of them pulled his hood over his hat and face and put his head on the table and closed his eyes. This on a day when his classmates are delivering speeches. I called him out on it. What does he do next? Puts on shades, puts his head on the table and starts drawing on the desk with a pencil. I got him put on probation. And these speeches. Holy shit. Some lasted barely more than a minute (on a 3-4 min speech), many had no arguments, and most of them treat the assignment like it's some joke. Most of them are so bad that I'd be tempted to score someone higher for going to the front of the class, lifting an ass cheek and letting one rip. I cannot deal with snarkiness and stink eye. Someone remind me to never take these "working with teens" type jobs again. They're not for me.

activities

2008-06-19T22:22:00.001-07:00

So I'm on a supposed break between spring and summer quarter but I've been spending it developing a course that I'll be teaching for 5 weeks. It'll be the first undergrad class that I teach standalone and it's on a topic that is right down my alley so I'm pretty excited but doing all the readings, developing reading questions, coming up with assignments and previewing all the videos I plan to show (plus making up questions to answer after the video) has been a lot of work. Fun but still time consuming nonetheless. To keep things interesting and to force myself to get out and get some exercise I've been going to ashtanga yoga once a week and will be registering for 12-week series with K starting July. I also started lindy hop lessons which are also once a week and, man, does that ever involve a lot of sweating. What I learned on day one was that the other swing classes I've taken in the Bay Area were definitely West Coast swing and not lindy. But I'm actually enjoying this a lot more. I never really got into the West Coast swing classes, it didn't help that I didn't have a willing partner at the time either. K is about 10 years ahead of me at lindy hop so I go on my own which is fine by me since he's out on his bike those days anyways. Maybe one day I can dance with him and not just in the living room. So there you have it. I'll be forced to get out and move my ass at least twice a week. I've already lost almost 4 pounds just doing all the walking around in my neighborhood, to the bus stop, to K's and to my activities.

parents

2008-06-16T21:48:00.000-07:00

My parents came to visit this weekend. They had to head south to fetch something they bought online from their PO box in Blaine so they continued down the I5 for a visit. Most people have normal conversations with their parents by the time they hit their 30s. Unfortunately, my parents' idea of communication is driving from the back seat (both of them, simultaneously) and offering unsolicited advice and annoying commentary on every. single. fucking. thing. I. do.

Here is an abbreviated list of things on which they commented/questioned:
- my place is too old and the landscaping unkempt
- front door is too squeaky
- why is there no in-suite washer dryer
- everyone has a covered parking spot except me and another tenant
- why do they have to swear in this movie
- organic peanut butter is too oily (it's separated and you need to mix it up, it's just like that)
- stairs to bedroom are too steep
- fridge is too big
- microwave should be tilted at a different angle
- curtain, which is temporarily covering my my storage nook, is too sheer
- not enough meat in the fridge
- bathroom tap is too hard to turn on
- there should be a strainer in the tub to catch hair
- where is the sugar, why do you put honey in tea
- why buy a knife set when I could take their old knives and sharpen them
- why so many cables near the baseboard heating
- knobs in the bathroom are loose
- why are there not more towel racks for guests
- I should mask when I paint walls (I DID MASK)
- I should have cable, it couldn't cost that much
- why are there no facecloths
- bus stop is so far away
- non-slip mat in the tub should be hung up daily to dry
- electrical bill too high for one person
- too many keys on my key chain makes it too heavy and will break my car's ignition

They were relentless and K had to listen to some of that, and also had to deal with me losing my patience and thus he deserves a large trophy.

The only peace I got was when I put on a movie Friday and Saturday nights. That bought me a total of 4.5 hours of them not criticizing me and how I live my life. After they left on Sunday afternoon, I collapsed on the couch and fell asleep for two solid hours.

race

2008-06-08T21:10:00.001-07:00

So I went to K's bike race in Ballard this weekend. It was pretty fun. I can't believe I stuck around all day. It was a crit which means they ride a 1km course on closed off city streets. The more advanced levels (category 1, 2, and pro) go around for 70 min, cat 3s do I think 50 minutes and his level, cat 4s and 5s do 35 minutes of continuous riding around the course. K got off to a bad start thinking his foot was clipped into his pedal. It wasn't, which caused him to slip forward and crotch his top tube. He didn't ever manage to get back on track, but at least he didn't crash like a couple of other riders in his category, one who broke his pinky finger and another who fractured his elbow and lost a bunch of flesh. Yeah, this confirmed that I will never ever take up a sport that involves trying to be faster than someone else.

I haven't watched a race since I went with my parents to watch the Tour de White Rock in BC when I was a kid. It was kind of like watching Indy (I went to Infineon a couple years ago to see Danica Patrick), all the excitement but without the noise and stink. Plus you get to stand right up close and watch them go by. Part of the fun for me was also seeing all the awesome dogs that people brought out with them. Seattlites love their dogs. One big black dog I saw was a 2 year old that was 120 lbs (ie bigger than me) and still growing. He made the retriever he was playing with look like a chihuahua. So cute.

Anyways, yeah, it didn't do much more than sprinkle a bit all day that day but I was wearing 3 layers under a down jacket to stay warm. The sun made an appearance today but the forecast calls for more rain this week. Yuck.

seriously

2008-06-07T14:53:00.000-07:00

This weather has got to fucking stop. It's June. This morning I had to turn on the heat. I could no longer stand wearing a fleece jacket or down vest INDOORS. My 5000 lux seasonal affective disorder lamp plus turning on the heat is not meant to simulate spring/summer for the whole year. By now we're supposed to have real, not simulated, summer. I'm starting to wonder if this is a climate that I can tolerate long term, especially when I'm so sensitive to lack of sunlight. Dammit California spoiled me. Then again, when I think about it, I was pretty miserable in Vancouver during shitty weather months too.

I got up at 10am or so today, had something to eat, and could not keep my eyes open. Crashed on the couch for 2 more hours for a grand total of 11 hours of sleep and I still feel like shit. I'm on my third cup of Red Rose tea which I made extra strong so I can put in a couple solid hours of reading for my exams.

Good thing I have to do something that involves leaving the house. Gonna watch K's race in Ballard this afternoon. In fact I should be getting out of my pajamas right now but it's just so fucking hard to get motivated to do anything. Winter, you need to go away really soon. My mental health and productivity are at risk here. I've already had to take most Cure songs out of my playlist for fear it will only sink me deeper into this weather-induced melancholia.