woo!
6.28.2011
6.27.2011
6.26.2011
"I think an idea... we can all sit around and say, "Wouldn't it be cool to get two rhinoceroses to stand upside down and then paint them red and then everyone would look at it because it would mean this or that" or some kind of artistic for art's sake, or art for art's sake, or improvisation for improvisation's sake. I think that's cool, and there's been plenty of people that have furthered the envelope in art and music because of their experimentation. But I think for me, the music that has always resounded with me — and art as well — is when it feels a little bit like it's coming from a person. And it's coming from a visceral place. A place that is maybe trying to explain something that isn't explained yet. And I guess that's what I was trying to do, and by trying to write songs in a subconscious way, I've ended up with something I'm pretty proud of that I didn't know I was capable of doing."-justin vernon
6.25.2011
youthful homeless man on the corner of wilshire and sixth,
there was something about you that made me want to say hi. and to ask how you were. and this is me, the boy who was too scared to buy something from a cashier alone until he was eleven.
but there was something about you that stirred the inner steve lopez. i think it was your eyes. i could barely see them in the dimly terracotta lit street with curly and unkempt blond hair wildly spaghetting off your scalp, but there was something in those globes of mediterranean blue. a glint of saturday morning looney toons and ballpark afternoons. a glint of kid.
you laid your linearly framed bike against a shooting palm tree. plastic garbage bags, black and worn, lightly crinkled against each other. you had a box of pizza, dinner i guess, from little caesars. three pieces inside. and i could feel myself getting full after watching you eat those three hawaiian slices.
the way you walked was different. there was no droop in your tread, as if every step asserted that this would not be the life you will perpetually live. your shoulders were pulled back and expanded your ribcage to the polluted heavens.
you left quickly, after you finished eating. i didn't stare for too long as you folded the now-empty little caesar's box in half to fit in the granite trashcan and straddled onto your bike, but i caught one last glimpse of you as you passed by me. the early summer night lost in sapphires.
6.24.2011
define american
"But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.
- - -
It was an odd sort of dance: I was trying to stand out in a highly competitive newsroom, yet I was terrified that if I stood out too much, I’d invite unwanted scrutiny. I tried to compartmentalize my fears, distract myself by reporting on the lives of other people, but there was no escaping the central conflict in my life. Maintaining a deception for so long distorts your sense of self. You start wondering who you’ve become, and why.
In April 2008, I was part of a Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings a year earlier. Lolo died a year earlier, so it was Lola who called me the day of the announcement. The first thing she said was, “Anong mangyayari kung malaman ng mga tao?”
What will happen if people find out?
I couldn’t say anything. After we got off the phone, I rushed to the bathroom on the fourth floor of the newsroom, sat down on the toilet and cried.
- - -
I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore.
So I’ve decided to come forward, own up to what I’ve done, and tell my story to the best of my recollection. I’ve reached out to former bosses and employers and apologized for misleading them — a mix of humiliation and liberation coming with each disclosure. All the people mentioned in this article gave me permission to use their names. I’ve also talked to family and friends about my situation and am working with legal counsel to review my options. I don’t know what the consequences will be of telling my story.
- - -
Not long ago, I called my mother. I wanted to fill the gaps in my memory about that August morning so many years ago. We had never discussed it. Part of me wanted to shove the memory aside, but to write this article and face the facts of my life, I needed more details. Did I cry? Did she? Did we kiss goodbye?
My mother told me I was excited about meeting a stewardess, about getting on a plane. She also reminded me of the one piece of advice she gave me for blending in: If anyone asked why I was coming to America, I should say I was going to Disneyland."
6.22.2011
6.21.2011
6.20.2011
6.19.2011
6.18.2011
6.17.2011
there's a piece of me going away with each and every one of you seniors in the band. thank you for all the great times and everything. gonna miss you guys so much.
6.16.2011
6.15.2011
6.14.2011
"How far can one travel from the Earth?
Since one can not travel faster than light, one might conclude that a human can never travel further from Earth than 40 light years, if the traveler is active between the age of 20 and 60. One would easily think that a traveller would never be able to reach more than the very few solar systems which exist within the limit of 20-40 light years from the earth. But that would be a mistaken conclusion. Because of time dilation, he can travel thousands of light years during his 40 active years. If the spaceship accelerates at a constant 1G, he will after a little less than a year (mathematically) reach almost the speed of light, but time dilation will increase his life span to thousands of years, seen from the reference system of the Solar System, but his subjective lifespan will not thereby change. If he returns to Earth he will land thousands of years into its future. Even if he should accelerate for a longer period, his speed will not be seen as higher than the speed of light by observers on Earth, and he will not measure his speed as being higher than the speed of light. This is because he will see a length contraction of the universe in his direction of travel. And during the journey, people on Earth will experience much more time than he does."
i love you, wikipedia.
6.13.2011
those eyes. those eyes after the daehn. those eyes summed up everything.
all the 7ams and endless nights and two past midnight arrivals at pali. all the frustration and raised tempers and flaring voices and all the smiles and belly laughs and witty jokes. all the teary-eyed debriefs and rapture and love. the kind of love that's crazy, in the best way. the kind of crazy that nobody gets until they experience it, the first time you put passion above sleep and everything else in life freezes.
innamorarsi
that's when words fail - when sound and vision aren't even enough, because whatever was in the air is now lost in the atmosphere after the moment dissipates.
and that's the magic of live performance.
and that's how my memories are built.
and i'd have it no other way.
6.12.2011
"This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self."
6.11.2011
6.09.2011
today was one of those tired kind of days. the kind of day where the pacific waves of concert band passionately crashing and retreating on the beach couldn't even stimulate me, and i was forgetting what i had done three minutes beforehand every four minutes. even in a six bar rest, everything got hazy and disconnected.
after musical rehearsal, i went out to dinner with my mom. we went to cpk, in westwood. we sat at the bar to beat the crowd of people waiting for a table (what's so terribly wrong with sitting on a highstool at a barely community table, when you also get a perfect view of the hdtv?). we began to talk to this lady and her husband, both middle aged, after she asked if my cherry limeade was good and was surprised at how young i was (she thought i was my mom's younger brother. or at least a ucla grad student). she told us about how her kids were at stanford grad school, paving their lives out in law/technology and biomedical engineering, respectively. she told my mom about how to savor her time with me while i'm young, as her son just told her he got a summer internship and won't be coming home for a while - it was bittersweet.
the finals game 5 was on, heat v. mavs. great game. what was even better though, was to be in the middle of a huge crowd of people of varying faces, sexes, ages, and personalities. now i understand why people go to sports bars to watch the big game with complete strangers. there's this unspoken camaraderie that is so much more powerful than anything you can get with your big fan of a best friend. we laughed and groaned together, cheered and fist pumped (except for the one poor, awkward heat fan that..got the heat from us [i'm terrible]). when terry put up the dagger 3 and the screen froze for a second, we weren't individuals watching a tv anymore, we were one conglomerate entity, despite not even knowing anyone else in the group by name, and we swore and yelled in disbelief until we saw the score change as the screen returned back to normal. we exploded in smiles and cheers and high fives and it was incredible.
6.07.2011
6.06.2011
those days,
i grew up enthralled by the rhymed chimes of
barney and the like,
falling asleep to tom and jerry under the
enveloping folds of that worn, sunshine-yellow quilt
but those nights
i nestled my head between the firm, rough green cloth of
that discounted throw pillow and the corner of the loveseat because
my parents were watching that chinese drama program
just to drown out and prevent me from separating what were the
fortissimo yells of my only family and the
material, cash-driven acting on the tv
i used to be so into graphic design and computer sciences but then it just..went away. i don't know how or why, but i really hope i don't follow that trend with music. mom says i will but i hope i won't. i can't see myself loving anything else as much. i hope i haven't fallen into the volatile youth.
6.05.2011
'beginners'
"I feel like kids are the perfect psychic investigators of their parents, and kids understand their parents' unconscious better than the parents ever do. On the surface, it all looked good, and underneath, there was this impossible-to-describe loneliness."
6.04.2011
the weather today was beautiful with those tiered clouds and i've transcended fatigue and i felt like caesar walking through the empty halls after three sat ii's and relaxing up at gelson's, treating myself to a formidable lunch while people-watching homogenized palisadians and i felt pretty alright being alone, even though my brain is split and my heart doesn't care anymore but all that matters is that the evening was the perfect combination of spring chill and summer night warmth and i'm laughing freely again.
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