Solitudes

First off, I apologize for the lack of entries lately. Unfortunately, my posting frequency on livejournal for the next four years will remain low, which naturally suggests that my posting wavelength will stay quite high as long as my posting velocity stays constant. In other words, my blogging energy will also be low since it varies directly with blogging frequency (assuming we can apply Planck's equation). From a practical perspective, this simply means that you will not get cancer from reading my blog.

But, all of the above simplifies to the fact that this blog has been losing momentum and will soon begin to collapse from its own inertia . . .

. . . because I just got hired as an official blogger for MIT admissions!

Ergo, r-flautist.livejournal.com is now promoted to http://mitadmissions.org/Yan.shtml.

I was ecstatic upon learning of the 2008 admissions blogger selection results a few weeks ago, especially since the application procedure involved a series of exhausting tasks including (but not limited to) submitting original LOLCATs and glorifying youtube videos to the status of high art. At last, six lucky blogophiles were chosen from the masses and given their own immortal corners of cyberspace.

A bit of history: I've been reading the blogs for over a year now and learned a lot of my tricks from the masterful likes of Sam M. (alumni), of whose myriad entries I have read every last one (this clause barely works gramatically, I know). The thought of joining this legion of Internet micro-celebrities on a site that generates over 1 million hits a year, especially when a large number of readers will be combing through my stream-of-consciousness, trying to probe my psyche for secrets on how to get into MIT (there aren't any, I checked yesterday), still intimidates me in a wonderful, exhilerating way. I've learned over the years, however, that everything turns out fine as long as I (1) write with total honesty, (2) care about the readers, (3) think of the world wide web as my therapist, and (4) remember to turn off the flash.

And, for the faithful readers of this blog, I should mention that the entire public archive of r-flautist.livejournal.com (which dates back to 2003) was available to the blogger selection committee. Unedited job complaints, longwinded rants, aloha-ha's . . . all of it became part of the evaluation. And mitadmissions still invited me over for breakfast this morning!

So, drop by anytime and let me know if it looks like I'm forgetting how to write in standard English.

Half a baker's dozen plus one half years ago, Highway 40 whizzed past my car window in a humid soup of cement and indistinct vegetation, which was steadily condensing into my first primordial impression of St. Louis. Pepper it with dismay. I wanted flowers bursting at the rims of palatial white streets. I wanted Chinese markets. I wanted desert nights lurking at the side of frenetic shopping districts, city soundscapes perfumed by Spanish accents, and painted buses that doubled as moving, hobo-transporting murals. I wanted California Pizza Kitchen, but without the pizza and the kitchen.

Pasadena was packed into two suitcases in the trunk.

Dad said, “Can you see the Arch from here?”

I looked ahead. A bridge curved over the highway, forming a mild and unspectacular arch. I turned right and saw a building with an arched roof. McDonalds: Not one, but two diabolical golden arches. Another bridge. A splattering of Spanish architecture. Thus began a confused and torturous interest in parabola-shaped structures. Inverted smiles burned into the thin, tenuous fabric of my nightmares that weekend.

Seven years later, with seven days remaining in this nomenclaturely-challenged city, my conscience is compelling me to this: dear St. Louis, although I won't deny that “the Arch” is sort of hip in a New Age, less-is-more fashion, you chose one of the worst landmark names known to touristkind. Imagine if England were famous for the Stones and the Clock, or if Greek tour guides simply encouraged visitors to view the Ruins, or if our nation's capital were distinguished by a building known only as the White House. What a travesty.

Yet, the pulsing heart of my inner hypocrite (inner? really?) is soft as a dying oyster at the sight of this city on a crisp August day, thickly buttered with perfection. Despite the muggy days and the muggers at night, I've developed a love for this city that (like all true loves) has all the characteristics typically associated with bipolar disorder. And so, given all the attention and photographic energy that I've lavished on the OC as of late, it's only fair that I spend some time and webspace rhapsodizing about the city that I've reluctantly accepted as my hometown (well, not so accepted that it's going on my Facebook).

And what better place to begin than 400-or-so words after the beginning? Here's the story of my day, finally.

Not long after 11:00 AM, I hitched up my bike (pictured below) at Saint Louis University and cruised along metropolitan Lindell into cosmopolitan Forest Park, where I became wonderfully lost in a noodle soup of winding streets.


The pre-noon air suffused with dappled sunlight and specks of shade, the way the rubbery wheels caressed the sidewalk with languorous strokes, the pedestrians screaming as they pushed each other aside when I passed . . . I felt feathery and bright, like an exotic insect with feathers. As I sailed deeper into the verdant heart of Forest Park, studded with ambiguous road signs and useless arrows, I was gripped by an inexplicable urge to become a cast member of South Pacific, the musical. So I sang, for a while, before succumbing to the photogenic beauty of these tiny roadside attractions.


Destination? I was headed to the World's Fair Pavilion for a picnic with my epicurean friends, each of whom was supposed to bring a food item that could not be found in any reasonable supermarket. Eventually, the GPS of my whim received a fortuitous signal from the satellite of my spacial reasoning and I ended up where I ended up. Hello Stairs, meet Bike.


I reached the summit, looked around, and, to my surprise, discovered none other than The Theme of Atlas Shrugged. Namely, it's lonely at the top. Especially when your friends can't find parking. Oh well, at least I was afforded the opportunity to star in a spaghetti western, complete with the necessary low-angle shot.


Four weeks later, the other picnickers arrived. All except for the fellow that was consumed for sustenance while the rest were waiting for a minivan to back out.


At long last, the feast commenced. First course: dough-covered ice cream balls (Mochi).

(For the curious gourmande: Besides mochi, pictured above are various fruity flavors of Asian frozen yogurt drinks, candied hawthorne berry kabobs, French bread and Nutella, lobster crakers and dried squid (in plastic bag), lychee, and an assorted bag of Chinese snack foods shipped from the motherland in my father's suitcase).

Next was the bombshell neo-European combination of French bread and Nutella, commonly marketed as The Original Creamy Chocolaty Hazelnut Spread that Madame Bovary Died For.


Veer east to Beijing, and you'll encounter almonds, black sesame, and mixed nuts in a chewy and mildly-sweet paste sheathed in rice paper.


Squid: Chicken of the Sea No. 2.


Lychee: Grape meets stegosaurus.


Naturally, lunch was accompanied by a steady patter of conversation, but I was alarmed to find that my powers of gesticulation were severely hampered by the stickiness of my hands. With not a napkin in sight, how could I discuss sign language or applause or other necessary topics? Emergency. I bolted down a hill and plunged my adhesive fingers into a convenient waterfall.


Scrambling across protruding blocks as I strategically surmounted torrents of water, I finally realized my secret desire to be the protagonist of an early, somewhat boring prototype of Super Mario Bros.


The left half of the following picture is what the right half of the following picture sees, and the right half of the picture is that to which the left half of the picture is giving a most terrible facial sunburn.


The combination of piquesome lunch and equally enjoyable company turned me into a great artist. While the artist admits that the following sequence, staged with much discomfort, is open to stylistic interpretation, the artist likes it because of the middle picture, in which Thoa beams brightly at the camera as she snatches a head in each hand and fishes two limp corpses out of the fetid green water.


As I step outside tomorrow morning, I will be beseiged by the Mongolian Golden Horde reincarnated in mosquito form and I will feel the clamminess of a thousand water droplets clinging to my skin like microscopic leeches and my hatred for this city will burn with the passion of a supersized glass of passion fruit juice. I can hardly wait.

Anonymous Friend writes:

"I hit a car the other day. It wasn't bad, just some paint transfer. I also almost hit another car last night. I feel like the worst driver in the world, not to mention the biggest idiot that's ever walked the planet.

". . . I'm scared about college. I hope I pick the right one and the right major and get enough money so that I won't be in debt 'till I'm 50. I'm scared that the outcome of my life depends on a few choices that I have to make while I'm only 17 or 18 years old. Can I just crawl back to my childhood and run in the sprinkler and get my feet muddy again?

"I'm generally a negative person. I determine my self-worth by my academic performance and compliments other people give me. I wish I was stronger."


Instantly, my monitor-frazzled eyeballs fired an urgent signal to my fingers, already poised on home row (read: asdfjkl;) for an Olympic round of keyboard gymnastics. Here I was, suspended inside a stagnant Friday afternoon as if time were a wobbling ring of Jello, ready to melt into a red-fluid night of liquid hours dripping by at an indefinite velocity, rolling blindly into another morning, another day slowly solidifying into another mold of Jello. Pause this. Here I am, congealing in my gelatinously ephemeral relaxation, while my friend and myriad others are stuck in insecurities thick and heavy as concrete. I respond:


"While my helpfulness in regard to most of these is severely limited (ex: My driving is comparable to a 3-year old's coloring. I can't stay inside the lines.), I do want to share some thoughts about college, which seems to be approaching like a concrete wall to a careening motor vehicle. Oops, let's not talk about my last driving lesson.

"Here's the surprise: It doesn't matter. College isn't a road. It's a field of corn. No matter which direction you start in, you can always end up somewhere completely unexpected, as long as you are willing to plow through a lot of corn.

"More than ever before in your life, you'll have the opportunity to explore. Meet strange and delightful people. Join suspicious clubs. Travel the world. Be Magellan. Die in the Philippines.

"And if you're like the average student, you'll end up changing your major 2-3 times. So you might as well pick culinary arts and feminist studies now, because we all know those are your consuming interests.

"A wise and wizened mystic once told me that grades are structured violence. Meaning, to judge the value of a student by numbers alone is a tragically limited basis for education. Toward the end of my high school career, I realized that the best way to learn was to ignore our school's system of quantifying effort and progress with percentages and rankings. Instead, I worked as hard as I thought I deserved, and I worked until I felt like I learned something worth remembering.

"My advice, in short: Determine your academic performance by your self-worth, and not vice-versa.

"Have a great year."


And the truth is, I needed to write this as much as my friend needed to read it.

Once in a while, a well-meaning friend will ask me if I've been preparing to move in to my dorm. The answer is yes, but only with certain priorities, so to speak. I'd rather not discuss it in public though.


Axiom: Roommate hates Sylvia Plath.
Assumption: Roommate is currently unaware of my sleep habits.

From this, I derived and implemented a simple test to estimate Roommate's tolerance level for General Weirdness.

Step 1: Message Roommate.
"I have a secret confession to make before we move in together."

Step 2: Introduce dilemma.
"Sometimes, late at night, I will recite passages from The Bell Jar in my sleep."

Step 3: Carefully approach upper threshold of weirdness.
"Depending on the moon phase, I may quote selections from Ariel instead, which always seems to be a hit at sleepovers."

Step 4: Conclude message with a thinly-veiled warning.
"I figured you should know, in case you ever hear me muttering something about shoes and Nazis and horseback riding into the cauldron of morning, etc."

Step 5: Wait for response.
(Step 5A: Cling to dear hope that Roommate does not read blog.)


Let me know if I should patent this method. Also, will you please buy extra bedding and laundry hampers for me while I wait for the results?

One of the funny perks of keeping a blog is the emergence of unexpected and probably hallucinatory patterns in the trail mix of assorted happenings conveniently packaged as Life. For instance, either I am woozy from heat stroke as I type this or my daily existence is in fact defined by a unifying theme that happens to be Mexico. To continue our delicious metaphor, I have spilled a package of trail mix and found that all the red m&m's, green pistachios, and white yogurt-coated raisins clustered into three vertical stripes on the floor. Evidence?

1. In my refrigerator, there are tortillas and a jar of pineapple salsa, both of which appear in Mexican cuisine more often than in my refrigerator.
2. A bag of avocados magically appeared in the kitchen, and with the aid of a fork, I concocted a substance known as guacamole without conscious effort.
3. The previous situation appears "magical" yet is simultaneously real. Mexican literature is known for magical realism.
4. It's hot outside. It's hot in Mexico.
5. Lately, I've been taking a lot of naps, which are known as siestas in Mexico. Uncanny!
6. I've been listening to The Mars Volta in the time between naps. Half of The Mars Volta's lyrics are in Spanish, and most English-speakers would agree that this half is considerably easier to comprehend than the half that is in English*. As a result, my brain is tricked into believing that it is processing Mexican lyrics with an the occasional dash of Dadaism**.
7. Mexico is often described as "South of the Border". Missouri is also South of the Border (of Iowa).

QED.

*English words that I have encountered in the bloviating course of a Mars Volta album: lancet, fontanel, catafalque.
**Time signatures that I have encountered in the same album and personally counted out: 10/8, 29/16.

I was in a listless mood earlier tonight, but the content above has rendered this statement invalid. Zing!

Just for the record, I was planning to top off the OC series with a season finale of previously-unreleased photos and anecdotes. Unfortunately, life does not follow the record.

Since my return to the dominion of the Arch, I've been experiencing a soul-crunching outbreak of cabin fever, alleviated somewhat by a spontaneous daytrip to the city via metrolink. I forgot to mention in the previous post that, upon being received at Lambert airport by mom sans dad, I learned that not only was my father in Taiwan for a business trip but that he had also (1) lost his cell phone and (2) sprained/broken/(some other unpalatable verb) his ankle in a pick up game of volleyball (of all things). Thus, devoid of automobile or anything vaguely resembling one, I've decided to invest in St. Louis's public transportation sector.

Here we come to Tuesday: I walked like 3948294 miles through hill and dale (no, seriously) to the nearest metrolink station. Wait, that sounds a bit too straightforward. Actually, I walked as far as I could and was met with a sprawling expanse of concrete perilously infested with moving motor vehicles, a modern-day Styx separating me from the semi-underground railway. Faced with this befuddling obstacle, I had to mill around and wait until some sketchy-looking gangster guy showed up and nonchalantly strolled along the edge of a highway into a Best Buy parking lot, through which he was able to access the station. I watched, then hiked up a steep hill next to an Office Max, skimmed through some random bushes, reached the highway, and followed suit.

The rest of the trip was fairly easy in comparison. I bought a ticket, waited for the correct train, boarded, successfully avoided eye contact with other boarders, and dislodged myself at the correct stop. "Central West End" turned out to be "Middle of Parking Lot in Barnes Jewish Hospital, with No Recognizable Street Signs in Sight." Fortunately, it had stopped raining and I was able to use the position of the sun to locate the general Northward direction. From there, it was a pleasant walk through coffeeshop-and-bookstore lined avenues up to Lindell and Euclid.

First stop was the library. My goal was to arrange a volunteering/tutoring gig with the local youth library program, but it turned out to be a spectacular fail. No interest at all. It's their loss, I suppose.

Second stop was the bubble tea and crepe shop down the street from the library, where My-Chau and Helena were working. I dropped in, helped Helena paint a mural, chatted briefly with a DJ, and asked the supervisor for a 3-week job. She said she'd call me back. I went home.

Insert transition here.

Yesterday, MIT released my dorm and room assignment. Random Hall, 412 is my temporary abode for pre-orientation and orientation.


Here it is in Google street view, which has slightly Orwellian undertones but is nonetheless doubleplusgood in my opinion.


It's the oldest and smallest dorm on campus, equipped with a 13 year-old bottle of milk, a roofdeck for swordfights, and laundry and bathrooms that are connected to the Internet (surprisingly convenient, by the way).

St. Louis, I have returned to the festering swampiness of your humid intestines. This I thought as I protruded my cranium sideways out of an open car window attached to a car whizzing down Lindell, which was now steeped in an atmosphere that felt like churned butter in the balmy post-sunset pre-nightfall sliver of 8:00 PM. Immediately my skull was encased in a sonic cloud of cicada buzz, which is what schizophrenia would sound like if schizophrenia decided to become a sound. This particular impression was stirred and mingled with the lively nausea in my stomach brought on by a brief-but-murderous run in Forest Park (the same distance would have been a breeze floating through palm trees had I completed the run in the crisp citrusy weather of Orange County), resulting in a sensory cocktail that would become a puddle of regret the next morning.

Hold on. It appears that someone forgot to rewind. Let's go back, then.

5:00 AM: I'm fully awake at La Cousin's hovel, having pulled an all-nighter fraught with packing and other such necessary pre-travel nonsense, scattered with bouts of inexorable sadness and futile attempts to suck in as much California air as possible so that a thin layer of pollutants would (hopefully) accumulate in the bottom of my lungs like a final souvenir. What a romantic notion, to save the atmospheric trash of a city in your living breathing body so that two entities (person and place) unite in a single, silent pain. I need some coffee.

I feel like Tragic Hero Girl's face.

2 hours and 12 minutes and one security checkpoint later, I dashingly dash from Gate 48B into the nearest dispenser of airport merchandise, grab the nearest protein bar (breakfast), fling some bills at the cashier, and hop straight onto a jet plane, feeling mindlessly jazzed. The wonderful thing about being in a rush is that velocity is to sentimentality as a garbage compactor is to Luke Skywalker. Try that, SAT minions.

“Breakfast” was duly consumed as breakfast-eater was sandwiched between an oversized human and an undersized window. The plane drifted forward right as I drifted off into a mild unconsciousness that lasted for the entire three-hour flight, which explains my inability to recall anything that happened between the twin shores (fraternal twins, I guess) of the Pacific and the Mississippi. I woke up as Mrs. Lambert Airport Landing Strip tremulously flung herself beneath the delicate metallic wing of Mr. Plane.

But, this isn't where I wanted to begin either. So far, I've been building up an airy cushion of soft, frivolous musings so that I can bubble-wrap the memories that require special handling. Thank you for your patience while I unpeel the final sheets of packaging.

On Wednesday night, one of the kindest people I have ever met took me on a spontaneous goodbye tour of Orange County. An is a teacher at SAT Center no. 2 who holds the all-too-uncommon belief that each person we meet is a transitory snowflake of experiences collected and interwoven like water molecules, a transitory snowflake drifting in and out of our lives, deserving of contemplation regardless of ephemerality. And so, knowing that I was to leave a mere three days after we met, An gave me the opportunity to not only transcribe a few last glimpses of the city but also to understand the unpredictable nature of friendship.

After an abortive foray into one of the area's numerous outdoor malls (by now, they've all blurred into a single, glitzy lump of triteness in my memory. Every Hollister conjures up a nightmarish mirrored hall of identical Hollisters, a corridor of psedo-tropical facades flanked by chiseled headless mannequins extending ad infinitum or at least ad Kansas City), the spur of the moment spun us in the beachward direction. Well, roughly beachward, I should say. We got lost on the highway at least thrice and tossed two dollars in quarters into the weirdest, most potentially-entertaining tollbooths I have ever seen.

Finally, I sensed the rime of salt and glimmer of seawater. The buildings looked older, harder and more honest. Narrow streets crowded with a tidal anticipation, hole-in-the wall restaurants rife with the promise of seafood that breathed this morning. Beyond the chipped-paint urban tableau, the ocean reposed in dissipating sunlight as An and I strolled along the Pacific coastline.


We spoke a lot about houses. Someday, I would like to live in the red one yonder.


It was 9:00 PM or so before dinner sidled into the night. We ended up at a Japanese pub with dim lighting, low wooden benches, and a staggering array of small dishes.

(Spicy cod roe)


(Sashimi from various species)


(Steak)

(Oops, forgot to take a picture of the fried salmon belly)

Not to worry; we also embraced the other side of the Asian cultural dichotomy. This relatively-traditional Japanese repast was followed by a colorful dip into one of Irvine's gimmicky new Asian dessert bars/cafes, which specialized in serving ice cream blobs covered in gelatinous sticky dough dusted with flour. I have a charming way of making new-age cuisine sound much less palatable than it actually is, but I stuck with a semi-straightforward green tea frappe anyway.

All in all, this was one of the nights that I will definitely remember when I am cloistered in a library at 3 AM in Cambridge prepping for a final in a subject that sounds straight out of The Trekkie's Guide to Sci-Fi Jargon.

Skip ahead to Friday.

My boss is a wonderful, generous lady. Not only did she throw me a surprise going-away party after my last day of work, but she also introduced me to the saving grace of pizzahood. You see, I had practically given up faith in insipid slices of puerile dough smothered with apathetic marinaras, limp cheeses, and dead cow parts. And then I encountered this deep-dish, barbeque-sauce-and-chicken wonder, the inch-and-a-half-thick isoceles miracle of incomparable gustatory pleasure. For the record: the food was from BJ's, which seems to be sadly absent from the Midwest.


One minor detail: I had actually known about the “surprise” since Wednesday and was consequently able to buy Boss Lady a small token of appreciation in advance. By “advance”, I mean that I cajoled Copier Guy into driving me to the local Asian product-infested marketplace during lunch break on Friday. With his help, I located and purchased a small towel that was rolled and packaged to look exactly like a strawberry cake, complete with garnish and a faux-bakery cake box. Appropriately, I hid the gift in the refrigerator for the rest of the day. Boss Lady was adequately surprised.

Everyone was exceedingly nice to me, including Helen (!) and La Cousin, who randomly showed up late. Here's the gang of partygoers/employees in our natural habitat, minus La Cousin and her boyfriend (who took the picture, I think). Boss Lady is standing next to me in a navy blue suit.


During a lull in the festivities, I whipped out my TI-83 and decided to stand by the mail boxes to finish my time card for the month. Unknownst to me, the other guests all thought I had disappeared and were searching the room in a growing state of confusion. It appears that my choice of sweater design was rather unfortunate, given that mailboxes also look like gray-and-white stripes.


Boss Lady was highly amused by my chameleonic properties, and I was quickly relegated from Celebrated Honoree to the workplace equivalent of Wally from the Where's Wally books. So it goes.

Following a sentimental montage of hugs and goodbyes, An and I headed off to enjoy the cruel, pencil-bashing genius of Christopher Nolan's Batman. Try that for incongruous. Regrettably, I was asleep for part of the movie and didn't realize this until I checked IMDB's plot summary later that night. It seems that another viewing will have to be arranged.

Later that night, I corrected my fallacious assumption that Dave and Buster's was basically a glamorous pastiche of Chuck E. Cheese. Nope; it's a glamorous pastiche of Chuck E. Cheese plus alcohol and some guy who cards everyone at the door to check if they're on the far side of 25. I also learned that I am far below the national average in terms of aptitude in zombie-killing.

It was close to midnight when I returned to La Cousin's apartment in a thickening simmer of nostalgia that boiled over into a full-blown effusion of regret (whyamIleaving) as dawn approached like an unwelcome silver Toyota Matrix. Which, to bring everything full-circle, describes my whereabouts at 6:00 AM on Saturday morning: in a car headed toward LAX, in a state of wistful sadness, and soon to be in a state of uncalifornia.

I took a picture of my eerily-empty room and added a soft light filter in GIMP to splice in some of that artificial home-sweet-home aura. It made me feel marginally better about sleeping in my own bed again.


But then my mind ambled back to the fragmented mementos of the past five weeks.

(Clockwise from top: map of nearest Borders to Cousin's home, fake detention slip, another fake detention slip, awesome non-fake card from Eric, boarding pass for return trip, card for Dave and Buster's with an amazingly useless amount of credit remaining, my nametag from work, free bag from one of La Cousin's shopping sprees).

This is one of my favorites. On Thursday the SAT class and I gathered our grievances and churned out a detention form for Eric, complete with authentic signatures from every class member.


Later that day, I spontaneously decided to invite the entire class to Borders for coffee and goodbyes. To secure Boss Lady's approval, I officially designated the event as an “informative discussion” for students and parents about college and whatnot.


Surprisingly, about half the class and two parents showed up to hear me ramble for two hours about my views on education and the role of the college process. I was deeply flattered when the parents insisted on taking notes and absolutely floored when Steven's father bought beverages for the entire table in appreciation. Trust me when I assert that everything I taught and learned that night could easily fill up an entire separate blog entry; let it just suffice to say that my heart felt close to bursting with love for humanity by the time I left.

Speaking of bursting hearts and other cardiovascular complications . . .


I could barely believe my bacon-and-chocolate-stunned eyes as they gazed upon a monstrous chimera of ambiguous deliciousness, unexpectedly encountered at Tustin's Whole Foods Market (of all the places! of all the ironies!). I was almost prepared to throw my hands up to the unabashed absurdity and surrender $2.59 for the atomic bomb of mankind's confectionary progress over the last century. Mo, you are the Dr. Oppenheimer of our generation.

To be continued.

Tonight, I saw a cup of chicken noodle soup wildly spilled across a deserted parkway that was 90% street-lit and 10% moon-lit. Picture: doughy limbs of noodles sprawled, supine in watery light. Avant-garde strokes of carrots and celery exploding silently, frozen against luminous asphalt. Splattered supernova, poultry (poetry?) in stopped motion.

The last 36 hours have shattered my conception of humanity, and all I can write about is someone else's soup, undrunk.

No cliches tonight. My heart is the bursting chicken, robbed of claw and bone, diced geometrically, brined callously, souped into a warm bath of tenderness, then flung abruptly into an asphalt sea. I can't function right now, much less blog. Too much emotional broth.

In another 36 hours, this story will be over.

Last weekend, I was ordering dinner in a Vegan/Vegetarian restaurant of undecided cultural identity and found myself unable to resist a vague beverage labeled only as Notmilk. Like a singsong taunt from a contrary third-grader, Notmilk was provocative, mischievous, tugging for attention. What was it? Not milk. What does it taste like? Not milk. What is it not? Milk. And so forth, in an endless circle of peevish puerility.

It was delicious, by the way. Definitely not milk. Fully lived up to its title, I suppose.

I mention this plotless anecdote only so that I can justify my answer when someone asks me about life outside of these neatly-packaged text boxes, beyond the fresh white milk of my internal-turned-external monologue, or perhaps blogologue (it gargles on the tongue like an ungulped gulp of cafeteria cow-fluids). "What happens?" perhaps you implore, if you have nothing better to ponder on Sunday night. Answer: Notmilk.

And Notmilk is not necessarily bland, though its flavor bears no more than a mere shadow of verisimilitude to the nuanced gestures of its lactic sibling. In fact, several of my technologically-disinclined friends pretend to be lactose intolerant and refuse to drink milk, even when I offer a fresh, unsipped, and totally appetizing hyperlink via Facebook chat or AIM (hint: Lucy. Although the very fact that she's used as the example here means she won't read this. How futile of me). Fortunately, Lucy phones me every weekend so we can catch up and share a nice swill of Notmilk.

So why do I write this now? Well, my date of departure has finally settled like fine-grain sand washed up by the tide onto the impending beach of July 19th. This coming Saturday, that is.

Listen: Blogging, although glamorous in its charming fashion of sublimating banality with wit and Pokemon and coffeeshop musings and Aloha-ha-ha's, is nothing more than the most flimsy doppleganger for actual, corporeal living. Notmilk, and I mean this both literally and figuratively, is far more nourishing than milk. For me, this blog is a resilient vehicle for petty analyses, random intellectualizing, and occasional self-therapy, but it is never an adequate substitute for human experience.

On that note, I hope to see every single one of you in person very, very soon. Leave a comment, send an email, or even shoot over a phone call. When/where do you work? What have you always wanted to do in St. Louis? Could you get me a discount if you do the former and I do the latter? Please refrain from texting, however, as this will cost me an entire nickel.

Here begins the actual entry for the day.

Recent developments:

1. In the unflinching absence of an actual library, I filched a tome of Margaret Atwood novels from the modest bookshelf at the SAT prep center (which happens to have the most eclectic mix of crappy Look-Ma-I-Can-Read-A-Chapter-Book books and serious literature that is not always rated PG, to say the least. I was much fascinated by the juxtaposition of Henry David Hwang's brilliantly-subversive M. Butterfly and the neon green cover of a Goosebumps volume (subversive in the hovering eyes of ultra-protective, no-scary-reading-before-bed type parents, I suppose). Sadly, it's almost certain that none of the actual Asian people around here has read the former).

2. I've been plowing through The Handmaiden's Tale whenever possible and will (hopefully) return it before I leave the premises for good on Friday.

3. Yesterday, I went to the Orange County Fair, which mostly consisted of urbanite SoCal'ers pretending to rusticate by grilling up a holocaust of pigs, cows, and corn-on-the-cob and selling overpriced farmer's market produce. Hilariously, there were also tents that sold designers shoes and upscale kitchen equipment on a hay-lined dirt floor that hinted faintly of manure. I'll try to get the pictures up soon.

4. There was a ton of cheap, low-quality goods for sale at the fair. I spent a total of $2.13 on a wallet that is 4mm too small to hold any reasonable credit/gift/ID card and a Transformers-themed Rubik's cube that is turning out to be absolutely diabolical. After 3 hours of eye-dizzying cubing (which included researching instructional videos on YouTube), I'm finally left with only two cubes that need to be switched.

5. I flipped over the packaging for the Rubik's cube and was greeted with the densest, most hilarious sea of blatant typos ever distributed in public. Quote:
"The wayg of combinatoin on gccond layer ia ghowed an below"
"5when the pyramid colors of therd layer as4, tum the side to upper"
"the conbinetion of gix gidea"

I swear, it's as if the guy who writes those incomprehensible spam emails in your bulk folder started working for a toy company run by Jamaicans.

6. Told my cousin that I needed to make a quick run to Borders today. Ran quickly to Borders, as promised. Stayed for three hours.

I had some extra time after I paid for my books, so I walked around the outdoor mall and let papery fragments of Neil Postman's writings ferment in my brain while little kids played in water sprinklers and throngs of denimed twentysomethings passed by, clutching coffee cups and faint airs of self-consciousness. Beautifully and beatifically, darts of perception began to leap between my inner and outer worlds, mingling bookish musings with mall-ish frivolity . . .

To be continued in a separate entry.

I'll be blunt; tonight, my cousin and I had a soul-baring fight. Current weather condition is 68 degrees Fahrenheit and cloudy, current emotional state is disemboweled.

At roughly 8:30 PM, she managed to snag the one insult that I absolutely cannot swallow with a warm-hearted glass of milky forgiveness and a plate of good-humor cookies.

Imagine: the part of my linguistic facility in command of blogging, wordplay, general wittiness, and other such cerebral amusements shudders once and drops dead like a deer hit by a perfectly-timed golf ball. Hole in one, so it goes.

I try to be reasonable: "I wish you had told me that earlier. Could you have spoken to me personally?" Weak, I know.

Cousin: "Shut up. Who do you think you are?!" To be read with inflection soured by absolute disgust.

Long story short, I walked into the hall later, accidentally spilled a metric ton of insecurities on the carpet, and tried to clean up the mess by gushingly admitting my communication problems (ironically, I was highly inept in communicating this last point, but this is only apparent in retrospect). My traitorous voice, the Benedict Arnold of this personal war, inexplicably cracked like an unwelcome dawn. Behold: a vocal fracture, frail and fragile as a newborn duckling, melted hostility into a thin, tenuous stream of shared tears as we were suddenly encircled by the vibrating wings of a moment too young and tender to be understood.

9:00 PM, and we had driven miles away, encircling a sedated lake in the tense darkness. We walked and cried silently.

She asked me if I was afraid of her father. I said no; it had been years since I saw him. She explained that although she feared and sometimes hated him, she felt deeply indebted regardless. Never before had I understood the meaning of filial piety, or (to be less pretentious) of family.

"You're lucky your parents never hit you," she says. (She is mistaken.) "I remember once when I got hit hard with a ruler. You know, the wooden kind. It hurt so much."

Quietly, I remember being kicked by my screaming mother. This was a long time ago.

"And you're lucky you didn't go to school in China."

Another memory: a shrill-voiced preschool teacher grabs some distracting trinket of mine, slaps a few curses in my face for good measure, hurls the aforementioned item down a flight of stairs. and screams at me to go pick it up. Whatever it was, it snapped in two.

"Your mother was scary. She had a terrible temper. She tutored me in math and would go crazy when she lost patience." My cousin stares into a vacant distance. Recalling that my mother also taught me algebra at age 6, I try to conjure an echo of her wrath in the hollows of childhood memory. No luck; I was always quick at algebra.

"I don't know how she became so mellow." Another memory, far worse, surfaces. As soon as my aging mother began to show signs of blunting her razored cruelty, I began to treat her monstrously. Somehow, I consciously tried to exact revenge at age 9 or so; dearly do I remember yearning to reverse our respective roles. She's a nurse now, with a nurse's soft supple personality. I don't respond when she speaks to me on the phone.

With heartbreaking gentleness, repressed emotions welled up like rainwater in an abandoned gutter. I stood with intestines bared, viscerally vulnerable, trembling with relief.

Hours later, I still can't sleep.

Visually speaking, this will be the most ambitious blog entry I have ever attempted. Hang on.

Right, so a brief description of last night would involve the keywords "Beach," "Party," and "Discussion of the merits of various high-powered telescopes and the best stargazing locations in Southern California."

Have you guessed it? Here's a hint.


Yep, you guessed it, Sherlock! MIT meet-up, complete with a full arsenal of combustible materials.

I heard about the event through the Facebookvine about a week ago, realized that Dockweiler beach was a mere 45 minutes away from my hovel in the OC, and somehow wheedled my cousin into driving me up to the LAX region. I got dropped off by the side of the road because nobody wanted to shell out 7 dollars for parking. Miraculously, it took a mere 4 minutes to locate the MIT group, which consisted of total strangers who were once no more than collections of pixels on my laptop screen. Literally, I knew not a single person.

But, what could be a better "icebreaker" than a bonfire?



Personally, I prefer my marshmallows cooked medium-rare, but the theme of the night was turning various substances into indistinguishable forms of carbon, so I went along with it.

Here's the group that showed up semi-early. The girl on the far right is the master mind who created said Facebook event.


Notice the conspicuous lack of alcohol. Never drink and derive, kids.


The beach was frigid. I tried to be "cool" (pun! zing!) by standing around and mingling for a while, but the fire slowly grew in attractiveness (much like Uma Thurman upon repeated viewings of her movies, oddly).


The sea also looked tempting. For a few torturous moments, I was torn between the urge to dive into the freezing frothing depths and the urge to be roasted alive by blazing flames. It was like choosing between chocolate and vanilla, I swear.


I ended up by the bonfire, where I promptly ignited conversation with a girl from San Diego named Tracy. Click.


For some incomprehensible reason, Tracy and I ended up running up and down the beach while I slowly discovered that my camera could take videos and then realized that, by rotating the camera as I stumbled haphazardly down the beach, I could get footage that looked surprisingly similar to the famous air strike scenes from Apocalypse Now (or any 20th century war movie, for that matter). The result was the following masterpiece of spontaneous cinematography, filmed 10 minutes after we met for the first time.


(Pardon my frowsy editing, as this and the video at the beginning of this entry are literally the first two things I have ever filmed in my short life. I was going to ask you to cut me some slack, but that sounded as if I were requesting that you tailor a pair of dress pants. The context of this blog ruins everything.)

Bonus points to anyone who caught the musical reference to Apocalypse Now. Also, if you listen closely during the section right after Wagner begins, you might catch the guy in swimming trunks yelling something along the lines of, "Hey baby, I'm right here! Come back! Take a picture!" It was most unfortunate.

Anyway, no animals were harmed in the making of the above video, but shoes certainly were. I'm thinking about just chucking this pair rather than deal with the desandification process.


Upon my return to the bonfire, I happened to suggest in passing that we arrange "MIT" out of flaming pieces of wood. Instantly, four people grabbed marshmallow skewers and jumped on the idea. I think I chose the right college.




I fed the fire.


And took pictures with a girl named Robin who is one fourth of a quadruplet. [EDIT: I just confirmed with Robin that all four of her quadruplet group are going to MIT next year. Wow.] Robin called me right after I arrived on the beach and said something like, "Sorry, I don't know you, except that your number is on Facebook, but can you tell me where you are on the beach?" and I said something like, "Sorry, a plane just flew by overhead, can you repeat that?" and this went on until I just decided to wave maniacally for as long as necessary. And lo and behold, Robin and her entourage showed up right behind me 30 seconds later.


The night was still young, so Tracy and her group from San Diego invited me to go food-foraging in the nearby city. We ended up, in true collegiate fashion, at a Subway and a pizza parlor. I asked the pizza guy to snap a picture of us with our victuals and a blatant box of Bellissimo Foil.

(Left to right: Tracy, some unknown person, Tyrone, Jeff)

The sun had set by the time we returned to our beached friends as triumphant bearers of Crust, Marinara, Cheese, and Pepperoni. Somehow, it appeared that our shindig had turned into a quilting party in the meantime.


I didn't really mind, as long as the fire was robust as a young whale. Bet you didn't see that comparison on the horizon.


Also, I still don't know the names of 2/3rds of the people in this photo.


Or this one. The briny-balmy air wasn't friendly to my camera lens, as you can see (or not see, depending on how you think about it).


In brief: I dedicate this entry to the next four years.

For all blog-related purposes, Day 17 started at 12:08 PM when I suddenly segued into a blurry state of wakefulness, prompted by the sounds of La Cousin inviting me to lunch on the fine, authentic ethnic cuisine served at Taco Bell. In hindsight, it appears that my initial response was to stare at a conveniently-located wall until, presumably, the nightmare ended and I could drift back into bright-colored dreams about balloons and dress pants. After a few minutes of stagnant awkwardness while La Cousin pontificated about fast food and I ignored her in favor of trying to feel my own eyes glaze over, I could no longer avoid the fact that, today, I was the one for whom the Taco Bell tolls. Thankfully, my cousin eventually grew tired of my stoic expression, which I had painstakingly composed into a convincing pastiche of severe coma impairment, and exited the room.

(Side note: I didn't actually sleep until noon. I woke up at 7:30, savored a few precious hours of gauzy morning solitude, and eventually passed out because I had retired no earlier than 2:30 AM the previous night).

An hour later, she returned home with a chicken sandwich from Subway, which I consumed for breakfast this morning. Let it suffice to say that this was one gustatory experiment that should not merit further study. Dear America, please stick to eating chicken embryos and drinking the bodily fluids of cows for your ante meridiem repast.

There was also a heartstopping moment somewhere in the vast immensity of honey-hued hours that was the afternoon of Day 17. Narrowly did I avoid a long night at a Chinese Karaoke bar in Alhambra, but my cousin was convinced at the last precarious minute to change her (really, really terrible) evening plans. The much-preferred alternative was spent with her boyfriend, my boss, and my boss's unsedated five year-old daughter.

Slicing down the highway at 75 miles per hour in my boss's car, I transcribed the light of a sweetly incandescent sunset.



(If you look closely at the picture above, you may detect the glassy mirage of my cousin's dismembered shoulder blending ectoplasmically into the palm silhouettes)

We spent the eve of our national birthday on a grassy ledge overlooking the Pacific as dusk melted like warm butter into a balmy soup of oceanic darkness.





To be more specific, I spent a generous portion of the night chasing my boss's five-year old up and down the SoCal coastline as she serenaded unsuspecting beachgoers with runaway hits from High School Musical.

With silent grace, the heaving sky exploded at 9:30 PM, followed a split-second later by a belated burst of sonic energy billowing beachward through an ether of air molecules. And there was a shattering of nervous light, shaped into galaxies of trembling blossoms blooming, bleeding bright sparks, shivering and dissolving into soft tongues of residue, soft whispers of gunpowder.




























My boss's five year-old, on the ride home: "Is today Christmas?"

At roughly 2:30 PM today, the copier guy was roughly absent from the copy room, and, consequently, I was roughly stuck at Test Prep Center #2 until Sir Designated Driver could be roughly located and roughly compelled to drive me back. Catching a vague fragment of office conversation about a certain Room 109, I promptly pinpointed the desired integer and was greeted by this:



Children, not only loony but also balloony on this particular afternoon that will forevermore be associated in the synaesthetic soundscape of my memory with bright, rubbery squawks in primary colors.



I had entered unfortuitously during the fever pitch of Ballunatic Festival No. 1, and the latex-related mayhem was just this side of freakish. This little girl, a veritable Dr. Frankenstein of balloonology, appears nonchalant at having recreated the infamous Gordian Knot out of air-filled rubber.


Pictured below is an authentic balloonman. I'll be honest; my knowledge of balloonmen ranges no further than the jumbled syntactical playground of the famous e.e. cummings poem about the balloon guy whistling far and wee. I've googled this poem, and this definitive balloonman of all balloonmen is described variously as "little," "lame," "queer," "old," and "goat-footed." As for the guy below, I have to admit that I didn't catch a good glimpse of his feet-or-possibly-hooves but (otherwise) I'm sure that he is none of the above except old, sort of. Once again, life imitates art but never e.e. cummings.


Mr. Balloon Guy did not whistle far and wee, but I was amused to hear him yell "ALOHA!" at the very end of the presentation. And then, the shocker: he did not halt after a single belted "ALOHA!" but continued until the kids joined him in a litany of Hawaiian salutation. "ALOHA-HA!" sung he, and he was instantly echoed by a discordant chorus of aloha-ha's. And then: "ALOHA-HA-HA!" and (surprise) "ALOHA-HA-HA-HA!" It was absurd.

Somehow, I was convinced to stay and help overactive kids build rubber balloon monkeys with a man who had the rare ability of screaming tourist greetings with the bloody overtones of a Sioux war cry. The fruit of their labor was supposed to look like this:


Somewhere between the making of the monkey's first ear and the completion of its bubbly head, there was an intermediate stage in which the balloons had uncanny Freudian resemblances. I'll leave it at that. No pictures.

Eventually, copier guy gave drove me back to SAT Center #1. I walked into the office like this:


. . . it was not entirely fortunate that my boss was meeting with a few concerned parents right in the middle of the entrance way. At 4:33 PM today, I bid farewell to my formerly opaque veneer of normalcy at work.

Just for kicks, I will try to wear the monkey hat as often as possible, starting tomorrow. We'll see how it goes.

On a completely unrelated note, my search for dress pants has at last borne fruit of a well-pressed, nicely-cut, and high-thread-count nature.


Major conflict resolved. Season 1 of the OC has now concluded.

Bought at Trader Joe's:
1. Tomato Basil Hummus (combines the feisty tartness of tomato sauce with the rich nuttiness of tahini- it's the gustatory equivalent of The Godfather set in Israel.)
2. Herb Salad mix (a week's worth of vitamins and chlorophyll for two bucks. UPDATE: Just tried it. I never imagined uncooked vegetables could naturally taste like cooked rubber.)
Multigrain bread (the kind with oatmeal flakes on the crust for the rustic, homemade look. Because nothing says wholesome like uncooked oatmeal)
3. Microwaveable Indian vegetable curry-like mix (I have no idea what's in the box, but I will be eating it for lunch one of these days.)
4. Microwaveable miso noodle soup (the brand is called something like Auntie Anne's, which makes me uneasy. It's like ordering foie gras at a Vietnamese restaurant.)
5. Corn tortillas (Ridiculously cheap. It's plausible that if farmers weren't using most of their corn to grow meat, thus raising food prices, Trader Joe's would actually be paying me to take their corn tortillas.)

Here I shall mention that everything above was typed in the middle of the afternoon in an Asian-owned hair salon festooned in red pleather and furnished with plushy cream-colored swivel seats, three of which were then occupied by La Cousin, her boyfriend, and her garrulous former classmate who has a rather uproarious penchant for lewdness*. Having decided to keep my head unshorn for now, I flipped through one of the (Japanese? Korean?) hairstyle magazines a few minutes ago and was alarmed to discover that Asian people now look more Caucasian than ever. But my fears were allayed when I opened a copy of Entertainment Weekly and found that Caucasian people now look more African American and Latino than ever before. Society has a way of maintaining homeostasis.

*She will hereby be referred to as Michelle, mostly because that is her real name.

I am grateful to Michelle for adding to my mental wine rack of ironies-that-only-get-better-with-age, the rare variety of situational humor meant to be savored and downed as inspiration for a screenplay ten years later. Michelle, who is either a cosmopolitan daredevil or a houseless and wifeless housewife** in need of escape from nothing in particular, has been trying to cajole XX-chromosomed friends into attending pole dancing classes with her. However, it appears that Irvine's newly established institute of pole-vaulting-minus-vaulting-plus-dancing (I couldn't find a synonym in Webster's Thesaurus) is not yet prepared to accept pupils. Punchline: the instructors haven't yet figured out how to set up the pole.

**A rogue idea flickered through my blog-processing mind while I was writing this, and I realized one sentence later that it was brilliant, relatively. Imagine turning on your TV and tuning in to the season premiere of Desperate HouseWifi's, a dramatic chronicle of one man's unrequited attempts to establish a stable relationship with his home internet connection. After trying to remain faithful for months, he finally begins to hook up with Panera Bread's wireless network on a regular basis . . . voiceover: “Even without wires, this is about to become a tangled affair.”

(On a more analytical note, pole dancing and other similar aerobic activities have been popular as a form of exercise in Beijing for a while now. It's a near-perfect example of the Chinese cultural dichotomy- while twentysomethings are practicing strip aerobics in newly-built gyms, elderly folks at the park down the street are mastering thousand year-old Tai Chi routines. As a rule, the new trends in China hit LA first and quickly migrate south to the OC area. Rarely is there a trend potent and resilient enough to spread as far inland as St. Louis without being exterminated by the antibiotics of Western taste, but Bubble Tea is one example of a particularly resistant strain that has adapted well to the New World.)

After the three heads had been adequately and professionally scissored, the three head-owners and I headed to an outdoors mall for dinner and marathon mallbrowsing. The relationship between dinner and malling (pronounced like “mauling” for good reason) is like the relationship between Mark Hamill and a hefty percentage of that which came out of Luke Skywalker's cliche-ridden mouth: the former made the latter tolerable. Behold (let's start in medias res for dramatic effect):



The meal was at a Sushi/Shabu-shabu restaurant of vast acreage and dubitable heritage. We started with edamame and (for me) macro shots of prickly green skin itching with grains of salt.


Michelle's tuna sashimi arrived first.


. . . followed by my order of spicy tuna rolls, fairly overbubbling with soft bright-coral flesh.


Unsheathed of nori and torn from its cushion of pearl-grain rice, the tuna was a nude, unearthly mess of savory carnage.


This appeared to be crisp-fried shrimp (a la Louisiana) disguised by the trappings of traditional sushi further disguised by a velvety coat of what tasted like cheese sauce plus inexplicable scallops. Cuisine with severe identity confusion disorder, if you will. A full-blown hermaphrodite of discrepant cultures, dressed in multiple layers of drag. Chimerical, but tasty.


As for the shabu-shabu, I had quite a thrill. For the uninitiated, shabu-shabu happens when the waiter brings out huge plates of vegetables, vermicelli, tofu, and thin-sliced meat after lighting the metal firepits built into your chrome-lined table. You dip slices of meat into vats of boiling water to cook, finishing the job with thin flavorful coats of a sweet vinegary sauce and a creamy sesame paste. The tofu, vermicelli, and vegetables get a less ceremonious treatment, as they are usually dumped into the pots and left to bathe themselves until tender, at which point they too will be dressed glisteningly in veneers of seasoning.


Steam is involved.


And that was all on Sunday, the meat and mustard between two wholesome slices of Saturday and Monday.

Three quick perks of a full-time job:
1.According to a certain email list, there is a teacher/staff member at one of the two SAT prep. locations who has the exact same name as me, first and last. I am now free to hypothesize that I was never actually hired and that my existence here in Irvine is simply due to a not-entirely-unfortunate data processing mix-up.
2.After a particularly rousing session of quiz-grading, Daniel began to relate his experiences as a lab assistant in one of the hottest regions in California last July. He had to hug trees to get across campus in the middle of the day because trees apparently had a slight cooling effect. At one point on his way to work, he nearly gave up completely. So he sat down in some shade and hugged a tree for a while.
3.Paycheck.

The great thing about lists is that transitions are entirely optional.

EDIT: This entry will appear as a repost if you're subscribed to this blog, but have no fear, fellow readers, I have not defaulted to rerun episodes of the O.C. (at least not yet).

(Day 10: In which I attempt to inject drama into the O.C. so that it will stick around for another season)

Let's start by extricating/explicating a few of the agonizing needles that have been lodged in the pincushion of my mind as of late. Assumption: this paragraph, which will take you less than two minute to read, took twelve times as long for me to write. Not to generalize in the annoying fashion of melodramatic journal-writers ("Life sucks," "Every day is a new beginning," and all the other peccadillos against originality, etc.), but, my social life right now is a giant gnarly bramble of many vines and precious few berries. With regard to my family relations, let it suffice to say that tender tendrils of love once stretched around a (fairly lovable) 5 year-old have now evolved into a monstrous labyrinth of ropes and thorns, clearly unsated after twelve years of drought. I absolutely loathe being touched or prodded and have spent long hours cultivating an trim-but-imaginary lawn of personal space around myself, but it appears that the "Keep off the grass signs" have yet to be translated into relativespeak.

Anonymous lurkers in the cyberspatial darkness, I give you my full permission to laugh at me while I (metaphorically) claw at these (non-metaphoric) walls and hedges. Especially when I reveal that, in occasional moments of not-quite-bridled effusion dearly beloved to my repressed inner egomaniac, I will say/throw something that I will later consciously regret. But, somewhere deeper within the now-stagnant pools of comical anguish, I do savor my relatives' hot-tempered reactions, those watery images of my own frustration projected into a distorted mirror.

Here's me: I'm sleeping alone in the master bedroom of my relatives' apartment tormented every night by the fact that I should be sleeping on the couch, I can't buy my own food, I'm not allowed to pay for my own movie ticket, my food intake is constantly monitored, I'm told at every meal to consume more when I have absolutely no desire to do so, I'm incessantly warned that I will be tired after walking/running/working/using the Internet, and to top it all, I can't stand to speak more than 5 sentences a day at home, mostly in garbled half-grunts of barely-intellegible Mandarin that is in fact mostly English. Some lonely people will tell you on their blog that nobody understands them, but I'm one of the few who will mean it literally.

On the flip side, work is great.

The copier guy picked me up from SAT center no. 2 today, and we had a thoroughly enjoyable chat on the drive over. He's roughly half the age and twice the conversationalist that I estimated him to be. I snapped a shot of his schedule while heads were turned away:


I kid you not, the above picture is completely undoctored and unstaged. I was correct in assuming that he only comes two days a week, but nothing in my limited realm of experience could have prepared me for the delightful shock of seeing "Wednesday" so misphonetically misspelled.

And what, one might ask, is that solitary blue scrawl under "Thursday"?


(Although, the fact that the time says 11:50 is quite surprising because it implies that he was making copies for three hours straight. Some people run a marathon in three hours; others run a Xerox.)

See you on the flip side of the weekend.

(In which I at first strive to maintain some degree of continuity with the previous post)

Happily, the aforementioned (specifically, Tuesdaymentioned) communication complications appear to have resolved themselves. Having excused myself to the business of serious TA-ing at another SAT prep center, I no longer have to worry any more about becoming the hyper-ironic parking lot traffic director with a total of 1.4 hours of driving experience (although nearly all 1.4 hours were in a parking lot, but I think it's best not to elaborate on the operative word "nearly" until I get my license). Also, I discovered that putting papers in the "To be filed" bin implies that they are to be filed . . . by somebody else (second problem: solved). Thirdly, Helen has left for a cruise (European, not Tom), and so I am free to crack Wellesley jokes like eggs into a frying pan.

Which begs the question, if somebody makes a Wellesley joke and no Wellesley-goer is around to be insulted, is it still a joke?

And while the intellects of my readers are still piqued by the moral and philosophical implications of this eternally-relevant question (I know, right?), I'll excuse myself for a ramble outside the realm of my usual blogosphere:

Sometimes, when I take my winding walks and strenuous strolls (not really) down these sidewalks as white and warm as the insides of a baked fishstick, I like to imagine that I'm on an alien planet on which it is forever dusk streaked with sunset and I am forever just-finished-with-dinner-after-nine-hours-of-work. Lawns grow in trim green grids split neatly by flatlands of concrete, sun-warmed walls sprout out of fertile asphalt, and indigenous college students may be observed in the psuedo-tropical habitats surrounding swimming pools. At a strikingly regular time every night, sprinkler heads rise from their daytime dormancy to revel in their liquid-dispensing prowess and bask all of Suburbialand under the height of three feet in a fine, shimmery haze of recycled water. Hispanic children burst bizarrely out of the hedges near my abode, jabbering in an alien tongue that sounds suspiciously like Spanish.

As I rounded the corner near the laundromat on my way home today, a dry sweetish smell slid into my general vicinity. Suddenly, I felt very, very happy and got this ultra-vivid image of myself at the local Mexican grocery market as a 6-year old, sifting through brown rice and fresh cactus leaves as my mom analyzed, measured, dissected, and finally selected vegetables for purchase (they were cheaper at the Mexican stores). It was as if I could live here forever by reliving the warm, sunny half-memories from over a decade ago. I'm still trying to decide if this flash of euphoria was evoked by drugs or just some really great-smelling laundry detergent.

But, anyway.

Last night, I somehow ended up going to Souplantation (known as Sweet Tomatoes in St. Louis) with my boss, her family, La Cousin, and La Cousin's boyfriend. I've decided that Boss Lady is a stupendously nice person, so it is doubly unfortunate that she works in a viciously misguided business. In a perfect world, she would be managing a successful, popular, and deliciously well-run restaurant with competence, verve, and alacrity. A restaurant like Subway*.

*I'm not kidding here. The Subways in this area are apparently unbelievably crowded and probably require highly efficient management. If Dagny Taggart lived in Irvine, she would meet her match somewhere in the sandwich-heaped melee of the Subway franchise.

So about the tutoring gig? The kid is straight off the plane from Taiwan. Communication is a problem, but I will get a ladder and try to surmount the language barrier. The first session was alright, but I still felt like Kevin Costner in that one movie with the wolves and the dancing.

But, yesterday is yesterday. Here's the highlights of today:

-At SAT Center no. 2, I have my own desk, crafted from solid wood and topped with a computer to which I do not have the password. This morning, my desk was also graced with a carton of Chinese pastries and candies left behind by some anonymous snacker, who probably also doesn't have the password to my computer. I spent a good deal of time today watching staff members walk by, turn around, grab pastries/candies, and walk away without telling me my password. It was greatly relaxing for some reason, and I got to shrug a lot.

-I'm a TA officially, now that I have met He Who is Being TAed (actually, I'm a TA for three teachers total, but I've already insulted both of the other two without really trying. I accidentally called Teacher 1 by the name of Teacher 2, but I apologized by admitting that this was a careless mistake on my part because Teacher 2 has a conspicuous beard whereas Teacher 1 does not. However, I think I later told Teacher 2 that he should shave.)

-I walked into the SAT classroom this morning, found the English teacher (whom I'm TA-ing) producing odd non-lingual noises at the thermostat, and decided immediately that I liked him.

-After lunch, Jennifer carted me over to SAT Center no. 1 (in her car, not in a literal cart, fortunately. At least not until the gas prices rise another 10 cents). There's this guy there who makes me extremely happy because 1) he only comes, like, two days a week, 2) all he does is stand by the copier and even make copies on occasion, and 3) he has a great sense of humor, seemingly. This seems like the best type of co-worker: comes infrequently enough that you can store your own papers in his box, makes copies so that you don't burn your eyes out looking at the green xerox light, and is amiable enough that nobody cares that there's a guy who's always standing by the copier and whose box just happens to be holding your papers.

-I got paid to sit around and type in Wingdings. Let me repeat: Wingdings. The font that 7 year olds find hilarious.

Looks like I'm almost purged of cerebral spew for now. Time to digest some more of my existence.

Must find library. Otherwise will talk only in sentence fragments. Annoying. Much like lack of library.

Thankfully, I have now exhausted my own tolerance for grammatical peevishness and will now compose sentences that are as whole as whole milk made over whole-grain cereal sold at Whole Foods.

Work today was full of potentially-unfortunate communication accidents:
1. I think I agreed to become a traffic director. This entails standing with signs in the parking lot at least four times a day to ensure that parents do not get us sued by owners of adjacent property.
2. Somebody asked me to file a stack of papers. In a moment of absurdity, I yelled out, "I LOVE FILING PAPERS!" Tragically, it appears that my tone of voice was just a shade too enthusiastic to seem credibly sarcastic. I now have to file a lot of papers.
3. I inadvertently blurted out a lot of Wellesley jokes while Helen (the pre-Wellesley TA) was around. "Inadvertently" sounds a little too convenient, I know, but making Wellesley jokes requires absolutely no effort and often requires nothing more than one strategically-dropped word.

-Helen: Daniel, you laugh like a girl.
-Daniel: What kind of girls do you know?
-Yan: WELLESLEY.

-Kelly: So I noticed all of the girls in the SAT class sat at one table and the boys at another table.
-Helen: I would never do that in college.
-Yan: WELLESLEY.

You get the idea.

One of the rare perks of working in a nearly all-Asian business is the deluge of excruciatingly funny child names. Like Eureka. There is a child named Eureka. Her last name is Ma. "Eureka, Ma!" There's also another kid named Drewlan, which sounds like straight out of Tolkien until you realize that it's just an Anglicized rendering of some phonetic Asian mess.

After work, the relatives were out later than usual and brought home restaurant victuals from one of the dozens of Asian joints in the area. Said dinner turned out to Korean. Behold, the saucy, spicy sustenance of the sort peddled by street vendors in Seoul:

Hodgepodge of warm cabbage, thick glutinous noodle, ramen-like noodle, fish-flavored tofu, and a hard boiled egg halved on top. Packaged street food style.


Salad! What really made this memorable was the chunks of fresh sashimi nested in the lettuce and sprouts, doused and dressed in chili sauce. Far superior to anchovies any day.


I'm not allowed to call this sushi, because it's a Korean variant. This presents a communication dilemma, so I will refrain from commenting on this not-Sushi-dish, other than to say that it was quite tasty.


Somebody also had the loving foresight to bring home a tiny carton of bright yellow pickles. I forgot to whip out the camera, so here's an equally-bright sample of vermillion Japanese pickles at a curry restaurant that was decorated like Steak and Shake and served food in the same presentation style as Denny's (from Saturday night).


Tomorrow, I'm heading over to a new test prep location to tutor Algebra II, the summer sequel to the box office hit, Algebra I.

Did I forget to post for two days? Or was I just giving everyone time to "digest" the last entry?

(Sorry, not every blog intro can be both as transcendently profound and heartbreakingly witty as the last one with the Pokemon. If only.)

It's miraculous, really, that TV writers were able to develop a show about the OC (it's called the OC, actually. Just so you know.), because there's really nothing to do in the OC except watch a show where stuff happens in the OC that doesn't actually happen in the OC.

I feel like the last sentence just consisted of different permutations of the same 4 words, but whatever. Reading that sentence will give you a good idea of how life in the OC feels.

But, my mom left on Saturday and it just so happens that everything got better. That notwithstanding, I had the argument of the century with my aunt yesterday because I wanted to sleep on the couch, and she wouldn't let me sleep on the couch, and so I called my mom for help, and my mom said "Don't sleep on the couch," so I ended up not sleeping on the couch. I slept on a huge, abundantly-pillowed queen-sized bed by myself, and it was the most uncomfortable experience ever. I still want to sleep on the couch.

Before that (look at me, I'm Citizen Kane!), my relatives and I took a nice, flower-scented walk by a man-made lake. Dear Missouri, man-made lakes are cleaner, healthier, more physically attractive, and nicer to children than nature-made lakes. Please domesticate your lakes as soon as possible.

There's a theatre across from the lake that has $1.50 matinees!! $2:00 evening shows! Preposterous! The price of gas to get there costs more than the show!

According to wikipedia, the OC has one of the highest Boba Tea shop concentrations in the US, thanks to the huge Asian population. I realized that this was a plus after my cousin got me a green milk tea boba on the way home from the lake, specifically after I realized that some brilliant tea-mixer had concocted the perfect balance between tea-ness and un-tea-ness. Let me elaborate: bubble tea in St. Louis tastes like sugar and other stuff that is most definitely not tea. Bubble tea in the OC tastes like tea (bitter, fragrant, multi-dimensional but not too erudite) with just the faintest blossom of milky sweetness.

Anyway, even before all that, La Cousin and her boyfriend took me to the OC mall center for a movie. I realized that her boyfriend was the same guy who works at the SAT office and once gave me the keys to my own apartment (or rather, my relatives' apartment), which explains why he had the keys better than whatever reason I had hypothesized (perhaps that he was a really great locksmith).

Speaking of work, I showed up today and proctored TWO SAT TESTS. They were the same length as the real SAT tests sans the math sections (because I was in charge of "Junior" SAT for people who hadn't gotten past Geometry). It was a real exciting job. I couldn't wait to call "Pencils down" once every half hour. Boy, what an adrenaline rush.

On the bright side, somebody accidentally ordered lunch for me. I brought lunch, so I gave it to Helen, who ate it. I plan to do the same thing tomorrow, since I think I'm still accidentally on the Order-Me-Lunch list. Just for the sake of establishing a routine, you know.

Also, the boss is letting me tutor two students at another SAT center. Algebra II. This is heartening indeed.

I had some down time later, so I went outside and tried to talk to a rising 8th grader named Sabrina, who was most definitely not a teenage witch (I checked). She was shy and probably thought I was trying to report her to the Red Police or something. Anyway, she didn't talk much and ran off to meet her parents in the middle of a sentence. I think her last words were "Ninety-two".

Also, she has the face of a tragic hero. If I took a picture and you saw it, you would say the same thing, I swear.

I have this desperate psychological need to hang out, by the way. In fact, I have spent the past three days in rampant pursuit of hanging-outage, to little avail. I have hung out with my cousin, but I consider this hanging-out to be of inferior quality to the hanging-out to which I am accustomed, including the hanging-out that customarily occurs in St. Louis hang-outs. Oh, but my efforts nearly bore fruit today, fruit that hung out on a tree of opportunity. Observe the following account:

Me: You're right, very little hanging out takes place in the OC
Helen: Do you even have anyone to hang out with?
Me: Um, no.
Helen: I would ask you to hang out with me . . . but I don't really hang out.

So close! Yet so far! I feel hanged somewhat, but not out.

However, I did manage to find a pair of dress pants, which are now hanging (out) in my closet. They don't really conjure up the description of "pants" in my mind, so let's just say I bought a pair of dress.

I'm going to wear a pair of dress to work tomorrow. Yeah, that sounds about right.

Today, I was broiled alive by the heat of a thousand suns, each possessing 1/1000th of the intensity of a single Southern Californian sun, which is still as powerful as, say, a hundred Charizard pokemon cards.

California, the land of happy cows and man-killing sunlight.

But, no worries: I can tell you that the sun went down eventually, having seen it with my own heat-zapped eyes while driving down the highway. Luckily, I'm also pretty sure scientists will have found a treatment for skin cancer by the time the symptoms really start to appear.

I also ate a lot of spicy food today, but that will come in later.

The secretary never called me, so I showed up to work at 1PM because I started eating grapes at 12:15 and I had to finish them before I left the house (at 12:30, giving me 30 full minutes of cooking time in the California sun-oven while walking to work). I spent the rest of the afternoon typing up choppy sentences and making comma splices, because society will clearly fall apart if nobody knows how to unsplice a comma splice.

I have to say, out of the copious multitude of grammatical errors available from your local SAT catalog, sentence fragments are my personal favorite. They've really grown on me since Thursday.
Punctuation error questions are annoyingly reminiscent of those Find 6 Differences Between These Two Pictures (That Only Have 5 Differences, Actually) things in that I have to pay too much attention to tiny details, while run-on sentence questions simply grate against my sense of ethics. Sentence fragments, however, have this endearing way of looking like masterpieces of minimalist literary style after a few hours on the job. Take the following example:

Platypus venom. Is able to cause much pain. But it cannot kill. At least not humans.

It's absolutely zen-like.

Ok, enough about the charming glamor of grammatical crimes. After I got home from work, my relatives and I went to the Asian District (oh wait, that's the entire city, isn't it?) for dinner. First stop: Korean tofu restaurant.

These cold appetizers were not only free, but the waitress would give a free refill whenever we finished a saucer! Let me tell you, this is the closest that anyone will ever get to those Magical Self-Replenishing Sandwich Platters that Harry Potter gets at Hogwarts. Clockwise from top, we have: sprout salad, seaweed squares with tomato-like sauce, spicy tofu, and gelatinous rice noodle things in soy sauce and spices.


Plus a salad with fish sauce (tasty), pickled radishes (too bitter), and cucumber disks in amazing sauce (amazing and saucy). Probably half of the cucumber sauce on that plate was steadily transferred onto my plaid pants as dinner continued and I continued to use chopsticks. (also, we ended up getting at least two more refills of the cucumbers).


Here's the whole table (before any main dishes were served!) plus La Cousin and her imperialistic hollister shirt. I'll refuse to inherit that one if she ever gets tired of wearing it.


Here's a closer shot of one of the peripheral items in the last picture: whole fried fish! Uncensored! (Possibly NSFW, at least if you work for a bunch of vegans, and I don't know why you would, so you should probably quit and take my job instead)


This is beef, which I was reluctant to eat after reading Omnivore's Dilemma. Beef is raising food prices because corn that would be used to feed people is being used to feed cows. And cows have bones and other parts that can't be eaten, so overall, less food is available because corn is essentially wasted on certain parts of cows. Some would argue that beef tastes a lot better than corn, but they've probably just never had really delicious corn.


Main dish #2: Beef kimchi tofu. Here, my cousin is taking one of the raw eggs pictured earlier and breaking it into the boiling-hot pot of tofu sauce. The next step is to kneel down and fervently pray that the sauce is hot enough to kill all the salmonella in the eggs. Bon appetit!


Main dish #2: Seafood tofu, extra spicy with oysters, clams, and shrimp. Same steps as above. I'm proud to say that I downed almost the entire half-liquid egg yolk.


My (steel?) bowl of rice, topped with seafood tofu. Here's some "food" for thought: why is that "seafood" must explicitly have "food" in the name? It's not like cows are called landfood, or birds airfood. (Airfood is what they serve on flights that take over 3 hours, and that, I must admit, actually needs the label "food" in order to be recognized.)


Dinner was delicious, by the way. I was overcome with gratefulness to Korea, both North and South but mostly South.

We headed over to the Chinese supermarket that had a brief cameo in episode 1 of my OC trip. This time, pictures were involved:

This speaks for itself, although you may wish it hadn't.


Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned a nation of rustic agriculturalists, would have been heartened by this. Who knew that you could sell desserts to kids with a gimmicky pseudo-pastoral theme?


Coming to your local Whole Food Market soon. Because it's (1) black and (2) glutinous.


The guy who has a system of notation named after him in my Calculus textbook also has butter cookies named after him. Truly, he is a renaissance man.


Ok, I'm out for the night. See you later, same time, same channel.

According to your junior high social studies teacher, the Spanish came to California for the sake of gold, glory, and God. It seems that they succeeded pretty well on all three accounts.

And yet I can't find dress pants.

Anyway, on to more "pressing" matters. Ha ha, I just barely made a pun. Or should I say, I made a "threadbare" pun. I think I just lost three readers, which means I have . . . negative 0.5 readers left.

I spent the day at work channeling Edward Norton, circa Fight Club before Brad Pitt gets any screentime. Jobs consisted of rewriting more SAT questions (read, bowdlerizing comparatively well-written SAT prep books of any humor and personality), making up passages about Platypus venom with deliberate grammatical errors, pretending to work for an hour or so, and listening to Boss Lady schmooze overachieving parents into selling the minds of their children to Test Prep Gulag.

One particular anecdote worth reprinting: A daughter once asked her mother what the best college was. Without hesitating, the mother answered, "Harvard." The daughter said, "Then I want to go there." The mother felt extremely proud and later told this story to her potential customers when she became Boss Lady.

All this time, she was talking to a father who brought his daughter (no older than 14, I'd say) in to analyze her test-taking abilities. The boss asked the girl if she was good at English. The girl quietly shakes her head, no. She then takes a practice test and gets half of the vocab questions wrong. The boss bluntly tells this to the father, explaining how this was an obvious weakness, etc., that the girl needs to read more. The father and daughter stay for another hour or so arranging lessons.

I didn't mention this in the last post, but SAT students are divided into two groups based on their scores on the practice tests: the UC program kids and the Ivy program kids. The UC kids are only expected to get scores good enough to go to one of the University of California schools, whereas the Ivy kids should . . . well, you know, get scores in the Ivy caliber. There's something vulgar in the way these students are labeled. You're UC quality, you're Ivy quality. Adjust life expectations accordingly.

Add up the last three paragraphs, multiply by the number of hours these teens are supposed to invest in the college admissions process, not to mention the amount of cash their parents are willing to shell out, and here's the bottom statement: I'm not comfortable working in a profession that profits by telling people that they're not good enough.

And so, the inevitable conclusion. Unless I can go to bed knowing that I'll have an opportunity to help someone understand their full potential, I have to quit.

I'm going to show up to work tomorrow. I'm going to put up with another day of secretarial work and hope for a future in counseling. For now, let's say that I have two other options. I can go back to St. Louis. Or, if life is indeed a beautiful path lined with fruit trees that drop good fortune into the laps of proverbial characters as well as Isaac Newton (note to self: never try to invent a metaphor that ends up sounding like a SAT sentence correction question), there's this:



City of my youth, always waiting, spread under the quasi-Mexican sun in a bath of wonderfully polluted air. Plan B is to call up contacts at CalTech and try to score an internship, then talk some of my parents' old friends into letting me live in their home.

The plan outlined above occurred to me as I was walking home from work (which is when I took the picture above, incidentally). I signed out at 5:30 PM for mental health reasons and asked the secretary to call me when she needed me tomorrow (if she's honest, she won't call me at all). I walked down 30-minutes worth of sun-drenched roads that unraveled like thick flat ribbons pinned down by palm trees. I love this state.

Turning the corner toward La Cousin's apartment, I managed to snap a shot of her residential street. Suburbia paradise, behold.





I got home, ate dinner, called my Dad and told him I needed to get to CalTech. He understood. Time to wait and see.

Then my dad immediately called my mom, who then tried to convince me to stay and suffer a bit longer. My cousin came in and was polite enough to help her. It seems that their main premise is that every job is boring and that adults need to be able to deal with jobs they hate (they used themselves as examples). I didn't argue, partly because my cousin's family has always been quite condescending toward me and partly because I was busy reading blogs on my laptop.

And then I realized that somehow, in this chaotic mess of traveling, buying dress pants, dealing with SAT Gulag, and inheriting 3939482943 pairs of shirts in one night, my stress level had shot up like gas prices. I excused myself and went for a run.

When I got home, my relatives suddenly thought I was healthy. Let me mention that prior to tonight, La Cousin had inexplicably accused me of having an unaligned backbone and insisted that I had a nutrient digestive disorder. Her mother had told me at least once during every meal that I wasn't eating enough. No kidding, when I got home, my aunt looked at me and said, "Did you really run? Are you sure you didn't walk?" Eventually, she had to believe that I was actually capable of running without shattering every ankle in my body (that is, two. In case you were wondering.). I am now the Lance Armstrong of this house.

Things began looking up. Ok, time for some extraneous photos before I sign out.

Guess which facial soap my cousin uses?

That's right. It gives new meaning to the phrase, "You have naivete written all over your face."

A humble photo of the humble abode in which I reside, humbly.


The plot has been adequately thickened. Time to bake.