12.22.2011

i think my favorite thing about the relaxed atmosphere of winter break is that i can read all these news articles online. no more backlogs. wholesome satisfaction of curiosity.
#firstworldproblems
"mourning"

i'll never forget mom's stories about when mao died.

12.17.2011

finally dawning on me that the season has closed. i'm so grateful and proud to have this in my life. i've never learned so much. i think the most important thing i learned is that learning will never stop - it's beautiful. 

four months never have gone by so fast.

m. galasso photography

12.15.2011


that fractional representation of each year of our lives is so..wow

12.14.2011

went to help at revere's concert. love to be back where it all started. but boy, to go back there..

the hardest moment was walking down the outside gate where i spent so many memorable afterschools with g.k. while we waited for our ride. i can't believe i almost forgot about that. i'm so glad i didn't.

12.13.2011

i saw the second shooting star of my life today above the center of the quad after the concert. it was beautiful. streaking away from me towards a huge, glowing waning gibbous.

it's a wonder that anyone could make a wish on them - they go by in such an awful rush.
lang+apush exams, winter concert, a hell of a day and night. memorable in every way..

12.09.2011


we used to play outside when we were young/and full of life and full of love
last block of the season was today - boy, time flies.

lausd championships tomorrow.

last time we bring macabre merrymaking onto a field.

12.06.2011


i heart my spam musubi.

and i want to be like these guys, they always have me choking in laughter.

mom always knows best. i always get this weird feeling in my chest.

i just want to use your love, tonight
i don't want to lose your love, tonight

12.05.2011

ice cream is the best motivator to keep me grinding away at this calc crambook project.

ben and jerry's here i come.
asian-american

i have no choice but to check it, it'd be pointless if i were to leave it blank with an obviously Chinese last name. but i think i'm alright with that.

12.01.2011

"must've ruined her day, huh?"
"maybe, definitely ruined mine."
"ruined mine yesterday."
"yeah, it happens."

11.30.2011

‎"One protester told an LAPD officer: "If you give me a hug, I will leave right now."

"Are you serious?" the officer asked with a smile. He appeared for a moment ready to comply, but then moved away."
picking leaves out of my hair

11.29.2011


wish i was there at the troubadour. i'll see you sometime in my life.

#sharkfacegang

11.26.2011

i had a dream and we talked. it was trivial small talk but we talked. there wasn't a hi or a bye but we talked. we don't talk anymore but we talked.

spindle neuron

11.25.2011

fat jerry, two lemonades, onion rings, diddy riese sundae, apple pie with akboche. good times.
once i'm well-rested and well-fed and mostly de-stressed, my idle mind changes.

left tilt

scenes from the suburbs

11.24.2011


trauma
hardboiled eggs and pancakes, hole in the wall burger with fries, chipotle, tater tots and caramel cheesecake at hooter's. solid pre-thanksgiving warmup.


and a day with some of my favorite people in the world at one of my favorite places in the world. the air felt so fresh tonight.

11.21.2011

the nicest place on the internet

this just made my afternoon/evening/latenight of work seem a little more bearable. almost done with this assignment - sure am going to earn my thanksgiving break.
"How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever."
pepper spray
"In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

She learned these things, but I couldn’t teach her about Chinese character. How to obey your parents and listen to your mother’s mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. Why easy things are not worth pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best."

11.15.2011


"for those still doubting the artistic integrity of lady gaga..."
"mendacity is a system that we live in. liquor is one way out an' death's the other...."
norm

11.13.2011


why are these so amusing
with sunset before 5 pm, everything feels inefficient and overwhelming. 

that pressure in my chest is back, i think. might just be my imagination?

sometimes you just need a step back for a perspective check.
i think it's magic, sometimes

11.06.2011

this sounds like a question on a college app - but i do wonder
"oh, no, he'll come back...these private little revolutions always die. the compromise is always made. in a peculiar way."
twelve hours of sleep in eleven hours time (i<3dst), steaming spiced trader joe's apple cider, pumpkin pie, fresh post-shower air

strangers, again.

universal

it's beautiful

11.05.2011

5:30 am call
40s fahrenheit chino
angry bull fog puffing out every breath, lambeau field status
huge orange egg yolk sunrise
snow-capped san gabriels

10.30.2011

everyword
there's always this young father with a british accent and thick-rimmed glasses that plays soccer with his two sons outside my balcony. yelling "goooooooaaal" just like on tv when they score as he tries to teach them the game and it's just so simple. one of the sons always ends up in tears. they always come back. but the times are simple. you can hear the smiles.

each mornin' i get up i die a little
tebow
i missed competition days.

10.25.2011



yep.

this reminds me of those endless lazy afternoons in the neighborhood at the swings. life changes a lot. miss my boys.

10.24.2011


after five hours of calc and bio studying and this cold making me a little loopy, this is absolutely hysterical. i can't breathe. this will never get old.
yep, i really have no interest about cells. none. where's the math?!

10.22.2011

burritos

i love ridiculous food articles.
"then the orchestra played a waltz or a tango, something that had a slow and sensuous rhythm. couples would come outside, to the relative privacy of the alley. you could see them kissing behind ash pits and telephone poles. this was the compensation for lives that passed like mine, without any change or adventure. adventure and change were imminent in this year. they were waiting around the corner for all these kids...here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows...all the world was waiting for bombardments!"
hierarchy of digital distraction
switching homes instead of homecoming dance
math jokes, heh.

nutrition performance, pep rally call time conflicting with calc test (that i'll get most of my points on during tuesday's free response..), watching the teachers dance during the pep rally, chillin' in sci bowl and bio, lil' horn with bret, rewind and vibin' with music in the back room with k.m. knocked out next to me and b.f. blowin' away, food trucks (chicken tikka masala, mango lassi, bomb samosas, most garlicky and amazing herb fries), and a wild homecoming game. wild. michael strahan! halftime performance (with end of the half streakers..ucla v. arizona anyone?), audio push having a hell of a performance on the track (and on my podium, hah), jroy dancing makin' me smile, down 16 in the fourth, fourth down stop, t.d. + 2 point conversion, punt block returned to the house and another 2 point conversion, stop 'em on fourth down, force OT. get that hard stop, score on an off-tackle off our first play. field rushed. that crowd was the loudest and the energy was blowin' stadium by the sea up. band playin' away (with that one fan dancing..and that other fan that..yeah, haha). was awesome to have alumni back. seeing chaunce conduct w^ made me happy. i miss everyone. got my serg bear hug. fight song/w^/fight song after the game winnin' score was electric. 3x3 animal style from westwood drive thru afterward. then sleep. such good sleep.

10.18.2011

10.17.2011


this is going to be a horn choir evenings kind of week. 3 exams, 50th anniversary homecoming game, here we go.

also this chamber group is just unbelievable. i can't believe it.

10.16.2011


"The left clip is a segment of a Hollywood movie trailer that the subject viewed while in the magnet. The right clip shows the reconstruction of this segment from brain activity measured using fMRI. The procedure is as follows:
[1] Record brain activity while the subject watches several hours of movie trailers.
[2] Build dictionaries (i.e., regression models) that translate between the shapes, edges and motion in the movies and measured brain activity. A separate dictionary is constructed for each of several thousand points at which brain activity was measured.
(For experts: The real advance of this study was the construction of a movie-to-brain activity encoding model that accurately predicts brain activity evoked by arbitrary novel movies.)
[3] Record brain activity to a new set of movie trailers that will be used to test the quality of the dictionaries and reconstructions.
[4] Build a random library of ~18,000,000 seconds (5000 hours) of video downloaded at random from YouTube. (Note these videos have no overlap with the movies that subjects saw in the magnet). Put each of these clips through the dictionaries to generate predictions of brain activity. Select the 100 clips whose predicted activity is most similar to the observed brain activity. Average these clips together. This is the reconstruction."



heh, brains.

10.14.2011

that cozy isolated feeling on the field as it's enveloped by blankets of pacific fog

10.13.2011

a more relaxed weekday. i'd say 15% relaxed. a nice rewind from a few weeks of craziness.

i walked on third street for a little bit to catch dinner. i saw a pair of college students on a date. several groups of asian tourists. a disheveled looking man tuning a guitar with his voice.

mom and i talked the other day about how third st. is a tourist spot. sometimes i can step back visually and see a place, any place that i'm familiar with, through the eyes of a visitor. like how i first stood paralyzed under the shooting cn tower or wandered mindlessly through chinatowns of various cities. (san francisco, seattle, vancouver, toronto, d.c., chicago) (i like chinatowns.) third street looked like that to me today and it's interesting. i transfer buses one street up from it and if i stay there, i'm still in the drowsy school mode. it slowly passes as i wade into the crowds of the promenade. i remember times where i had enough flexible time to catch more than a snack at famima and go down to ocean avenue and just soak up the pacific on that salty white railing as if i were seeing the ocean for the first time.
"...and he remembered that the night before, when he had put his arm about Mattie, she had not resisted. But that had been out-of-doors, under the open irresponsible night. Now, in the warm lamplit room, with all its ancient implications of conformity and order, she seemed infinitely farther away from him and more unapproachable."
mmm, cereal killer.
aurora borealis

10.10.2011

reading about the hike up for the first time and i've never been camping or done intense hiking and i'm probably crazy but i want to get up there. i just want to. one day, before i grow old and my joints creak.
huaxi

10.09.2011

"so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past"

10.08.2011

"She drew closer under the bearskin, so that, looking sideways around his coat-sleeve, he could just catch the tip of her nose and a blown brown wave of hair."


"...That was all; but all their intercourse had been made up of just such inarticulate flashes, when they seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they surprised a butterfly in the winter woods..."


"...it was the most confusing hour of the evening, the hour when the last clearness from the upper sky is merged with the rising night in a blur that disguises landmarks and falsifies distances."


-edith wharton, ethan frome

post-mortem

occupation's micro-community
tribute
pool circle

how things change

"you have an older brother?"
"shaquille o'neal"

10.04.2011

hrm
pick-ups to fourteen salvaged my day. but for the rest of it..

on to the next, on on to the next one..

sky is still up there. even though it is getting ominously dark and cloudy and the air is just that much crisper.

10.03.2011

this water tastes like blood
but the mug looks so blue, it's so deep and it's like those eyes but those eyes
weren't blue. were they even the same color?

but this water tastes like blood.

god,

ahahahah
as annoying as the internet can be when facebook ties me up when i need to study or i can't stop reading newsblogs, all that means nothing when it shortens the distance. whether it's across the pacific or down to central america. and i'm so grateful. so, so grateful.

10.02.2011

this was the first weekend in months where i didn't write a to-do list and i almost feel free, but i'm still missing something to cross out.
i miss oil painting. add that to my list of things i want to do on a perfectly unscheduled and open week. (as much as i like to keep busy)
just had unheard-of amounts of spit come out of my conn 8d bell onto my shorts (after five minutes of trying to find where it was). sunday nights, yeah!
i only hit your voicemail.

devious
my favorite is when i can write outlines as messily and without care as i want, knowing nobody but myself will read them.
my calves do not feel right with these mosquito bites. they're swollen like disneyland turkey legs.

man, i'd kill for some disney churros right now. and breadbowl chowder. or gumbo..

10.01.2011

this is like forgetting hot soup on the table and coming back five hours later.
switching homes today for the first time in over a month. there's not much to say past that.

besides that my calves have swollen to twice their size. damn mosquitos.

absolute. audial shoulder massage.
staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer

9.29.2011


just like freddy.
pure

almost a little creepy. place has barely changed in almost forty years.
real men
growing stack of books on my desk, leftover from a summer where i didn't read enough:

a farewell to arms - hemingway
looking for alaska - green
paper towns - green
catch-22 - heller
magma - gatto
trimalchio - fitzgerald
diary of anne frank - frank
when you are engulfed in flames - sedaris

sometimes i wish i could just spend one entire day a week just with some soft bon iver, a mug of that pungent green tea, and a novel. that crisp, slightly musty, earthy smell of those pages.

my favorite scene

9.04.2011

i've gotten so used too (good at?) vacuuming all my thoughts and feelings and rapture and poignancy inside me to produce some sort of attempt at a professional, level-headed byproduct that i've lost some (most?) of my ability to display it. through word and others. i'm displaying this frustration in word but communication frustrates me sometimes.

to be happily alone is a compromise with loneliness.
this smooth shell has hardened. the cracks in it have too.

8.27.2011

audrey hepburn is gorgeous.
do you know any jokes about sodium hypobromite?
numerology and ron artest
75
i haven't written anything in a month or so and it feels like i won't for many more months to come. it's that forlorn wordless feeling. i don't know if that's a good thing.

fugue
e.c.'s surprise dinner and fun and yay. laughter and yay. first week of band camp done (and productive) too. yay! all is well and i'm gonna sleep well.