Posted 10:37 AM by Blah blah

Birthday in Las Vegas

Hey! My friend D sent me her pix from her birthday in Vegas with some friends. She's the girl on the right in most of the pix. Whew! She looks stylin'. As you can see, she's only TWO YEARS OLD!

Posted 7:43 AM by Blah blah

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Posted 9:21 PM by Anonymous

[ From an entry I just wrote for my journal. ]

"Most boys I have gotten romantically entangled with had either been diagnosed with a mental disorder or should have been. I've loved manic-depressive people before. When Jeremy told me that he could not play the part I needed him to, it made me angry because I didn't think I'd asked him to play any part. I just wanted to love him. It took a long time before it dawned on me that he was right. I sometimes wonder if things would have been different had I packed my bags and moved halfway across the world to be with him when we wanted to be together. I think we may have been happy for a little while before I realized that I couldn't make him happy, no matter how much I loved him, and his depression would have hurt me too. I wouldn't have had the strength to leave him because I loved him so much. Where would that have gotten either one of us, with so much love and so much more unhappiness? I could not make him happy and I would not have forgiven myself for it even though it was not my responsibility. He knew he couldn't be what I wanted him to be. It still hurts to realize that he loved me better than loved him.

You want to love someone that is out to destroy themselves? Go ahead. Love them. But don't end up with them. Don't spend your life with them. You can love someone with ever fiber of your being and still be unable to make them smile. It isn't for you to fix a broken person. They have to do it on their own. Maybe your love will help them with it, but you cannot put the pieces back together without screwing that relationship up permanently in some way. Two broken people coming together will simply make a broken relationship. Don't look for parts of yourself in another person. Look for someone that will make you better, whose personality compliments yours and helps you become everything you can be. If you're not complete on your own, the completeness you feel when you're with someone will only be an illusion. It will go away. Then you'll still be missing pieces and be angry that this person you loved and depended on for happiness betrayed you by not fulfilling his role in your life. But it isn't his role. It's yours.

Happiness in relationships is not a privilege. You shouldn't have to work to be happy in a relationship. You shouldn't have to feel guilty when you're not. You should never feel like it's okay to be miserable because you love someone. Life is much too short to be wasted on bad relationships, and if you cry yourself to sleep every night because the person lying next to you feels a million miles away, you're not in a good place. The key to really loving someone is letting them go, and where they choose to go will determine the relationship you have with them. "Go. If you want to go, if you know happiness is somewhere else, if there is somewhere else you need to be and someone else you need to be with to find joy, then go. I love you enough to want you to be happy, even if that happiness cannot be found in me." Imagine the strength in a relationship between two people who have already found themselves. The journey will be magic."

Posted 9:43 AM by Blah blah

Ze's Page is still THE funniest page I've ever seen on the Internet. You need Flash to watch him.
Just saw his advice page. "You just take dee bull by zee ears, baby!" His weblog.

I started a new topic on RBJ: Dates from Hell.

What have been YOUR worst dates?

Posted 7:01 AM by Blah blah

Roy's beautiful photogallery of his summer trip to Vietnam and Korea. Sorry to steal your jaw-dropping photo, Roy. :) Check out his main page (Sept. 10 and earlier) for more gorgeous photos like this:

Posted 10:59 PM by Blah blah

From Christina:

Posted 4:33 PM by Anonymous

Maybe look more like Yoda you do, hmm?

Posted 9:18 AM by Blah blah

Going Bald

On RBJ, Gnute said she plans to shave her head bald soon.

I said: "How about changing your photo in Photoshop first, then showing it to your friends for opinions? Like Zoltan did here."

Danny said:

or like how Raymond did here:



now raymond... you are one sexay man there... maybe a little shine would do wonders....



ahhh... much better.... no lets see what we can do about them ears....



oh raymond... you are the king... hands down... Maybe a little bit of makeup to bring out your facial features a little more though....



You are so pretty. :blink:
_________________________
HAHAHAHA! I look like a cat! I've been Aunty Dumpified.

Posted 5:56 PM by Blah blah

Haha! Look at Ernie's stories of his recent appearance on that TV show, The Weakest Link! Min Jung, invite me to Ernie's next bday party!

As someone wrote in his comments, Ernie should have said on TV: "I write a near-daily humorous account of events in my life on the Internet, which has brought me fame, notoriety, and the adulation of teeming masses of geeky tech-heads and homosexuals the world over."

Ernie said: "I would love to tell you how I did on the The Weakest Link (yes, I made it onto the show! whoo!) but there is a $350,000 lawsuit saying that I'm not allowed to publically disclose whether I won or lost until the show is on the air. That can be anytime from mid-November to some time in February. Until then, I'm left to write about other amusing things about syndicated television. Just not now, at 6:30 in the morning.

Okay, okay. One small hint: I'm on for the entire episode — all 30 minutes. I'm not disclosing anymore."
_______________________
From RBJ: What's Your School Food Like? (i.e. Do You Like Green Hotdogs?)

I said:

Oh man, one of the foods I hated the most from high school was:

QUESADILLAS!

It was a flour tortilla filled with melted cheese. And maybe ONE pea. Anyone else had to suffer through this?

That's the difference between Chinese food and cafeteria food. Chinese food names are to the point, like:

- Pigs' Ears with Weird Sauce
- Duck's Tongue with Weirder Sauce
- Chicken Feet with No Shoes

School cafeterias are great at coming up with glitzy names for stuff. Those ladies who write the cafeteria menus must have PhDs in creative writing:

- Corndog Delight with Thousand-Day-Old Ketchup
- Burned Meatloaf Casserole Surprise
- Salt-free Soggy Zucchini in White Butter Sauce
- Dancing Drumsticks Marinated in Mustard

Posted 12:19 PM by Blah blah

I Just Got Dumped--Pass the Ice Cream, Please (Reuters):

"A new study validates why ice cream tastes so good after a breakup, and why that nice jacket in the store window--that you really can't afford--seems like a good buy once you've been dumped.

Dr. Jean M. Twenge of San Diego State University and her colleagues found that people who feel as if they have been rejected by others tend to adopt unhealthy, self-defeating behaviors, such as eating poorly, taking risks and blowing off work to have fun."

At 81, Peter Ustinov Happy to Work Until He Drops (Reuters):

His zest for living is as great as it was when he was 21. "I have more now because there is less of it. It is a rarer commodity," said the dual Hollywood Oscar winner as he reflected on his life as a playwright, novelist, actor, film director and much traveled Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N. Children's Fund....

"But in this country there are no real disadvantages to age because in my business the British public has always confused longevity with merit."

But what does he miss about his youth?

"I've forgotten," he confessed.

Posted 8:31 AM by Blah blah

September 11th

Despite death and destruction, New York survives - remarkably, heroically resilient. (Newsday):

"[F]or years worriers have suggested that a population as diverse as ours could ultimately erode America's classic ideals. They have warned that America's class and ethnic splits could splinter the nation into myriad mutually hostile, clamoring factions.

Sept. 11 proved the worriers wrong.

From the noisy streets of African-American Harlem to the crowded walk-ups of Hispanic Washington Heights to bohemian Greenwich Village to the tree-lined lanes of Long Island and New Jersey, the stars and stripes waved everywhere during the grim autumn of 2001.

A famously fractious region suddenly spoke with one magnificent and powerful voice.

Consider what happened downtown. By the end of that terrible day one year ago, lower Manhattan had lost a third of its commercial real estate. Where the Twin Towers had stood, the city was left with 1.6 million tons of twisted steel and shredded aluminum.

And yet, a region known for its inability to do public-works projects well cleared Ground Zero ahead of schedule and under budget. A federal government that in recent years has never shown much interest in the fate of its largest city came up with $21 billion in aid.

And perhaps most incredibly, a hopeless amalgam of governmental entities charged with the task of rebuilding lower Manhattan - led by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. - in fact is listening closely to the public as it forges ahead with plans to honor the dead and rebuild downtown's commercial vitality.

We have learned something profound about ourselves in the last year. We have learned that we are one people after all - more than we ever knew. And we have learned that, when we work together, we can do anything."

Widow tells of poignant last calls (Sacramento Bee):

"Honoring Tom Burnett's memory on the one-year anniversary of the attacks, his widow has provided the fullest account yet of the traumatic events that day -- of hopes that rose and fell by the minute, of lives left in sorrow by a paroxysm of terror.

Deena Burnett, who frantically took notes as she talked with her husband, has shared her reconstruction of their last, desperate conversations."
________________________
Here's my entry from Sept. 11, 2001. I included pix from my dinner at Wild Blue, on top of the World Trade Center.

Pix of Ground Zero today by Laura who writes her funny dating stories.

Me at the Windows on the World bar at the WTC:


This is me on Sept. 12th:

The saddest thing I saw today was a reporter trudging down a lifeless, dusty, eerily quiet street. He was trying to control his emotions as he said that officials thought that most people buried under the 110 story rubble had fallen into the WTC's deep basement. That was why there was virtually no sign of life out there in the post-apocalyptic hill of stones. He said the worst thing was he had gone to a makeshift triage center people had set up to care for survivors, and it was completely EMPTY. He and other reporters today spoke in glassy-eyed shock, saying the devastation was much worse than they had ever expected. The collapse damaged over a hundred nearby businesses and spread out in an impact over a ten mile radius, like an atomic bomb.

What really hits home for me is the list of names. The airlines and press have begun to release a list of the almost 400 people who died aboard those four hijacked flights. In our company intranet, our CEO tried to give us words of reassurance. IBM has listed our first death: one of our brand managers, a woman working on an account in NY.

Here's a sample of people from the partial list of victims:

- John Ogonowski, 52, Dracut, Mass., captain
- Thomas McGuinness, 42, Portsmouth, N.H., first officer
- Jeffrey Collman, flight attendant
- Sara Low, 28, Batesville, Ark., flight attendant
- Betty Ong, flight attendant
- David Angell, 54, Pasadena, Calif., executive producer, NBC's Frasier
- Berry Berenson, 53, Los Angeles, actress and photographer
- Edmund Glazer, 41, Chatsworth, Calif., chief financial officer, MRV Communications Inc.
- Daniel C. Lewin, 31, co-founder of Akamai Technologies
- Sonia Morales Puopolo, 58, of Massachusetts, former ballet dancer
- Jessica Sachs, 22, Billerica, accountant with PricewaterhouseCoopers
- Garnet "Ace'' Bailey, 53, Lynnfield, Mass., director of pro scouting, Los Angeles Kings
- Klaus Bothe, 31, chief of development, BCT Technology AG, Germany
- Christoffer Carstanjen, 33, Turner Falls, Mass., computer research specialist at University of Massachusetts
- Heinrich Kimmig, 43, chairman of BCT Technology AG, Germany
- Robert LeBlanc, 70, Lee, N.H., professor emeritus of geography, University of New Hampshire
- Sarah Clark, sixth-grade teacher from Backus Elementary School in Washington, D.C.
- Asia Cottom, 11, student at Backus Elementary School in Wasington, D.C.
- James Debeuneure, 58, Upper Marlboro, Md., fifth-grade teacher at Ketcham Elementary School in Washington, D.C.
- Rodney Dickens, 11, student at Leckie Elementary School in Washington, D.C.
- Bud Flagg, Corona, Calif., retired Navy admiral and pilot for American Airlines
- Steven D. "Jake'' Jacoby, 43, Alexandria, Va., chief operating officer, Metrocall Inc.
- Ann Judge, Virginia, National Geographic Society
- Barbara Olson, 45, TV commentator and lawyer
- William Feehan, First Deputy Commissioner of Fire Department
- Peter Ganci, Fire Department chief
- The Rev. Mychal Judge, New York Fire Department chaplain
- Yamel Merino, 24, Yonkers, N.Y., emergency medical technician for Metro Care Ambulance Co.

The NY Fire Department chaplain! Times like this are what make me lose any remaining faith I might have in God. [A Year of Questioning God (Wall St. Journal)] So much promise, so much happiness, so many dreams...dashed in one meaningless event. We like to hope everything, including every death, has a purpose ultimately. I know my family and I agonized this summer about it with my uncle's death. We like to hope that when we die, we are ready to go---we've worked the jobs we've wanted, visited the cities we've dreamed of, loved those we've longed for, been as naughty as we wished, and been as angelic as grandpa wished. But death sometimes is so ordinary, so clumsy, when we are still incomplete, half-asleep, in the middle of a dream.

I am speechless. Wishing you all a stronger, happier day tomorrow.
______________
Rest in peace. How about you? Please leave a link to your Sept. 11th entry in the comments (or post an entry if you are a cowriter). Many people on RBJ posted their entries.

Rest in peace, dear Uncle. I still have to write a final remembrance of you.

Posted 4:28 PM by Anonymous

Too bad you didn't like the Yoko Ono exhibit, Raymond. I've never experienced any of her work myself, but one of my favorite folksingers is a huge fan and has lots of stage banter about her so I've heard about her work. Now I'm not an art history buff, but I don't think it's really accurate to broadly describe Ono's work as "modern art", which I would think is more of a timeframe than a real genre. I think Ono's work is better described as conceptual art, which is defined by Merriam-Webster as "an art form in which the artist's intent is to convey a concept rather than to create an art object". In other words, it's idea over form. That said, I can't say that Ono's work really sounds like my cup of tea. Sol Lewitt, a major minimalist conceptual artist, is my least favorite artist ever. He's the one who made the infamous incomplete open cubes. Or perhaps you've seen one of the wall drawings he commissioned other people to make in his name. Right.

That said, I thought it was interesting how people are so much less accepting of conceptual art than they are of say, conceptual movies or literature. Everyone loves books and films that are different and make you think, but when it comes to art, we demand something pretty, or at least clever. I think it's because of our society's early addiction to blurry water lilies and starry nights.

Anyways, this weekend I also went to an art museum. I was down in New York City visiting some friends from school and we checked out the Whitney Museum of American Art. It's a really great, if smallish, museum with an excellent permanent collection and fantastic temporary exhibits as well. I really loved the Joan Mitchell exhibit, and they also have that famous Vera Lutter camera obscura print of the Pepsi-Cola sign. I think it's famous; I've seen it before at a photography exhibit at the Wadsworth here in Hartford. It's a really cool print; it's about 7 feet by 14 feet and was made (as far as I understand it) using the basic procedure of a pinhole camera, except the "pinhole" in this case was the window of the room. I was pretty impressed.

Okay, that's enough uneducated rambling about art from little old me.

Posted 9:50 AM by Blah blah

French Films

I am really into French movies recently.

Just saw The Girl on the Bridge (La Fille sur le pont), 1999, with Daniel Auteuil and Vanessa Paradis.

Shot in black and white, this movie is stunningly beautiful. It's subtly erotic. A young woman who's about to kill herself is convinced by a man to join him as his assistant. He works as a knife thrower.

Poetic, complex, highly moving. This is one of the most perfect movies I have seen.

Daniel Auteuil is one of the most popular actors in France. I saw him in the comedy Le Placard (The Closet) and he was hilarious. Vanessa Paradis first became a pop singer at age 14, before branching into acting. She is like a sexier Audrey Hepburn. She's also the woman in Johnny Depp's life.

I like that the French movies I've seen (like the excellent Cyrano de Bergerac 1990) are more subtle, more intelligent than typical American ones. I like that they are more articulate, with lots of talking and longer takes than typical American fare, which assumes an MTV attention span. I like how they are more subtle sexually, which makes them more erotic and romantic.

Posted 11:13 PM by Blah blah

Blog for Money

Hey, this sounds like a great idea. Maybe I'll join this: Blogging Network. I don't get paid for my time here, but dammit, given all my effort, why shouldn't I?

Blogging for Dollars: Giving Rise to the Professional Blogger, by Meg:

"There's a vast group of people out there now who are experts in finding the news and links, capturing its essence in short snippets, and churning it out hour after hour, day after day. We know their content is compelling, and that drives traffic and repeat visitors to their sites. It's time to take blogging to the next level and that starts with paying people to produce high-quality, focused blogs for commercial Web sites. Until that happens, people will continue to view Weblogs as little more than personal diaries, or just another form of Usenet. Until we create a financial structure to enable the creation and maintenance of professional blogs, we won't see the best, next generation of Weblogs."

Weblogs4Hire.com

Posted 9:48 AM by Blah blah

SF MOMA. True Body Wraps with Sara. Dinner with Chris. Shakespeare with Cheshire Dave.

Had a great time Sunday. Sara, one of Christine's friends, recently opened her body wrap/spa/massage place in San Francisco, called True Body Wraps. She and David also just had a baby girl Andrea a few months ago! She invited me and her friends to a little open house party for the spa and to meet her baby.

That morning, I went with a friend, Cindy, to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The museum was showing the last day of a huge exhibition by Yoko Ono (wife of John Lennon). Call me a barbarian, but Yoko is way too pretentious for me.*Gag* I've tried to appreciate modern art. For instance, I like Salvador Dali and this guy whose funny paintings hang in the LA County Museum of Art. I prefer modern artists who show traditional artistic (i.e. drawing, sculpture, etc.) skills but may twist things around to make an effect. An example of lousy art: one of Yoko's short films, "The Fly," shows a fly buzzing and walking over the body of a naked woman. The fly was "directed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono." The woman never moved or spoke. They put in these buzzing, squealing sound effects to mimic the insect.

Modern "artistes" are the only people smart enough to do the impossible. They know how to make a naked woman look boring. While the fly went bzzzz, I went zzzzzz.

Here are some examples of Yoko's art. They show her role in "transforming works that were originally light and transparent into bronze, symbolizing a shift from what she calls 'the sixties sky' to the new 'age of commodity and solidity.' "

1. A transparent little maze (made from Plexiglass?) stands in the room. You must take off your shoes and walk through it, one person at a time. In the middle you find...a toilet. (But no toilet paper!)

2. Yak with Yoko: a normal phone sits on a ledge. Yoko calls that phone occasionally and talks to whomever picks it up. If I answered, I'd just say "Raymond's Pizza! Would YOU like to get our two-for-one special, topped with oatmeal, wheat germ, and freshly cut grass from my backyard?"

3. You hear a recording of traffic noise. This is part of a series of recordings (released on CD) called something like "Normal Sounds." Yoko coughs over the noise. She does it on purpose. Get it? Get it???

4. A pile of round stones lies on the floor, surrounded by a marked square. You kneel, pick up a stone, and put it on top of the pile, which falls down again.

5. A piece of wood hangs on the wall. A hammer lies next to it, with some nails. You are supposed to hammer a nail into the wood. (And while you're at it, would you fix my sink?) Through THIS exhibit, Yoko met John Lennon. He hammered her thumb by accident, and the rest is Beatle history! (I'm kidding.)

6. A green apple sits on a pedestal. Someone has taken two bites of out it. They change the apple daily after it has rotted a little. While you contemplate this, you think of the decay of civilization and the end of free love and those Jesus-like sixties hairstyles. You think of Austin Powers and what a set of bad teeth would have done for you then. You meld with the overarching karma of the intensity of this experience. Someone behind you says "Hurry up," knocking you out of your introspection. You realize you've missed lunch with your friends. Secretly, you swipe the apple. You eat it.

Next I met Sara, her husband David, and the gurgling baby Andrea. One of Sara's friends, this girl who acted as a "subsitute eyebrow plucker" at her spa, tried to explain what "body wrapping" is to me. She couldn't do it. I will take body wraps on faith from now on and leave them to women.

Then I met this girl J, who has known Sara since they were roommates back in Taiwan in their "Love Boat" study tour. Damn, I wish I had applied for the Love Boat (Chientan)! She brought her younger sister along, and our talk went a lot like this:

Me: So what kind of sports do you do?
J: Well someone gave me a tennis racket once, but I haven't really played it. I am trying to learn some golf, but...
Younger sister: She sucks.
Me: Ohh....so how long have you lived in the South Bay?
J: About two and a half years. (Smiling) I still don't know that many people. I knew this guy _______ once, and he told me...
Younger sister: She was actually dating him.
...
Me: So you work for Apple? Huh! How has the morale been for you guys since Apple had those economic problems?
J: Well we've felt much better since we released the iMac and came out with all of our "flavors!"
Me: Oh yeah, flavors! Like peach...
J: We don't have peach!
Me: I meant ah...durian?

Next, we had dinner with Chris! He's from Malaysia and gay and SUCH a cool, kind, entertaining guy! He had many stories to tell and is getting involved in a lot of interesting projects, like this Asian-geared magazine he wants to start with this girl Mochi_bun. He's also active in helping the Chinatown community. He has a ton of girl friends and, as you can understand, many want to "convert" him into a straight man. I was inspired by how positive and energetic he was about life! I'll see him again soon.

I'd met him at Amabelle's beach BBQ a few weeks ago. Amabelle, who just started working as an elementary school teacher, just invited us to yet another group BBQ in SF.

Yay Chris! Love your new dyed purple-brown spiky hair! Note my recent bad haircut.



Finally we went to Berkeley to see Shakespeare's Henry IV, done by the Impact Theatre. They played extra-low budget, wearing normal street clothes. The guy who played Falstaff was especially funny, and he looked like one of those WWF wrestlers. Met Cheshire Dave and his girlfriend Sarah, who recently finished law school. They did the swordfights in Henry IV very slowly, like a John Woo movie. And the one Asian girl in the cast did most of the killing. Whoo! The theatre group hired a fight choreographer for this play, and his business card reads: "Official badass."