Posted 7:58 AM by Blah blah

Sorry my old website is down now. It sucks and makes this page load incredibly slowly. Ok, Carlos and the rest of you Rice Bowlers, I've finally broken down and posted more on the Rice Bowl Journals Discussion Boards. Some personal stuff. Please be discreet with this info. (Yeah right.)

Living & Lifestyles / Love & Romance
Hot Crushes... That were never to be...

High school. These two beautiful girls who played piano in my orchestra (I used to play violin). I was so shy and nervous around them I almost seemed like I was ignoring them when they talked to me.

They'd say "Hi Raymond."

I'd say "Bah ba yab ba..."

Maybe they thought I was an ESL student! :p

One of them got married soon after high school This actress from China, Zhao Wei, really reminds me of her.

Living & Lifestyles / Love & Romance
The most romantic thing.....

Life is full of romantic possibilities. You guys have been talking about S.O.'s but how about romantic gestures from friends?

Here's something a Japanese friend did for me that I'll never forget. (She had a bf at the time.)

We hadn't seen each other for a long time, and she wanted to thank me for being a friend. She invited me to her beautiful place she was renting in the Oakland hills and said I could stay as long as I wanted. She made a delicious dinner for me one night and took me to Rivoli, this fantastic French-Californian place, another night. Introduced me to their portabello fritters!

When it was time to sleep, I was going for the sofa but she insisted that I sleep in her bed! She took the sofa instead. In the morning she woke up early as usual and made this special vegetable and fruit shake. In the evening we played with her cat and just had very open, honest talks.

I stayed 3 days and was just overwhelmed with how caring she was.

Living & Lifestyles / Love & Romance
Your first *kiss*

On the beach in Monterey.
She was more experienced than me and wanted to teach me.

Oh boy, did I learn FAST! I came back for extra homework.

Arts & Entertainment / Leafing Through The Pages
Leafing through the pages

Gosh, it's so hard to name just a few favorite books in my life. I guess I'd have to lay them out by the periods in my life.

As a kid some of the books I loved the most were Pinocchio and Alice in Wonderland. I musta read each of them at least 10 times. Then I discovered Mark Twain and just laughed myself silly with Huckleberry Finn. And J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. For sheer adventure and romance, I could not put down The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

Did you guys have a favorite kids' series too? I just devoured the detective series The Three Investigators. God, how I loved to play detective then and pretend I was Jupiter Jones. And remember Encyclopedia Brown? Another series I just loved and read and reread was The Great Brain books (Me and My Little Brain, etc.) I would be so immersed in all of these characters.

Other favorites were Around the World in 80 Days, Lord of the Rings (when I was 13 in bed with chickenpox), and something I love so much, Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth.

In high school, my all-time favorites were Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Orwell's 1984, and Emerson's Essays. King Lear is my favorite Shakespeare play. Oh, and I love biographies. I had a book with bios of Albert Schweitzer, P.T. Barnun, Helen Keller, and Winston Churchill that I just treasured.

In college, I liked books like Peter Ustinov's The Old Man & Mr. Smith (very funny, about God and the Devil returning to Earth).

Now as a grownup, all I have time to read are Dilbert cartoons. I think up next for me is The Cat in the Hat. :p

[I wrote about my favorite children's books last year.]

Arts & Entertainment / Leafing Through The Pages
The Story about Ping: an Allegory

Hey Sophia! HAHA... I read this book when I was a kid!!! Still remember the story. :p If you guys start a forum on favorite children's books, I'm there, man.

For some reason books are much larger-than-life and bigger to us when we are kids. At least to me, when I see old stories I loved as a kid, I feel this rush of familiarity and warmth, like I'm greeting a long-lost friend! How about you?

Arts & Entertainment / Les Cinema
Lord of the Rings

I've been a LOTR fan ever since I read the novels when I was 13 in bed with chickenpox. LOTR can whip Harry Potter in a Deathmatch any day! Salon.com has a bunch of articles comparing the two as well as LOTR with Star Wars.

If you loved the movie, you've GOTTA listen to director Peter Jackson's wonderful talk with Charlie Rose! (RealPlayer)

Believe it or not, barely any studio would fund Jackson originally and his original studio (not New Line Cinema) had wanted him to make only ONE movie for the whole series, not three.

So we're all blessed and very lucky. Jackson almost scrapped the whole thing after two years of working on it.
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Ok, YOUR turn! I'm tired of doing all the talking here...