"a band of travelling puppeteers just crashed my party!"

so i have had a day and a half to recover from one of my better birthday parties of life. It does not compete with the 22 year "oc birthday party" that had 500 people and was broken up by the cops but it was close!

The night began with some awesome chicken wings that i made. i can in fact cook, i just choose not to. Well as typical of the school of public policy kids they got word of the party, emailed it out to their lists, and showed up in a horde of 50. PP kids can't ever just travel alone, they travel in giant packs and overtake a party. Part way through i looked to wendy and said "do you know anyone here? me niether!!" This is separate from the many occasions that i drunkenly blurted to strangers "you do'nt know me!! this is my fucking party! you don't know me!" so we danced to some really good music wiht a mix of new wave and 80's hip hop and pop. At one point i started up a conversation with some very strange looking eastern european people. I wasn't really sure if they were wearing costumes or if that was just their normal clothes because one guy was wearing these crazy willy wonka type glasses, crazy clothes and suspenders. I mean it's all hazy but i believe i asked him if he was from the school of public policy. turns out no, in fact he and his giant (they were all like 6 ft or taller) friends were a group of travelling puppeteers. they were in Ann Arbor doing some puppet shows and they got word of our party, parked their giant blue bus across the street and decided to party with us. i know!! so random!! I kept wondering if they were the kind of puppeers like john cusack's character in "being john malcovich" who do serious puppeteering that would make you want to cry and feel like of emotions to. I'm not sure because they told me about their next show but i was too drunk to remember what they said. I went searching through my pics to see if i could find any pictures of them in the backgroudn but i found nothing. I still wonder if the travelling band of puppeteers was just in my imagination or if they really existed. I guess we'll never know.

photo time!

before the party actually started kebbyn and i decided to take some full body shots of ourselves.
"hey it's the black guy from miami vice!"

this picture was not posed at all. i really was having that much fun dancing with myself.

joteria, cuban style
for some reason there are an excessive amount of pictures of me and fernando at various parts of the night probably because we were always dancing to 80's music together.

scott being mod and fern being an 80's prep a la james spader's character from pretty in pink
more miami vice, only wiht the white guy
me and the singaporean. LOVE!
Later in the night, i was surprisingly coherent even i have to admit
this is my favorite married couple of all time. I often tell them in my drunken hazes "i wanna be like you guys when i grow up someday." Like i said they are married but they still manage to come out and party hard without that whole lame married people attitude. They are truly good times and at the end of the night they drunkely ride their bikes home together, which i find very romantic in a totally fucked up way.

fern and i shimmying to the song from silence of the lambs. remember the song when buffalo bill tucks his penis under his legs and starts to dance! that was this song!! the dancefloor cleared but we didnt' care. we danced.
why i do believe that is whitney!
everyone got very excited when we played "i wanna dance with somebody," especially me
note that my shirt says "reebok, girls jam!"
fern and erica, a public policy person
"2 kewl 4 grad skewl"
too bad by the end of the night nish was such a hot mess. i was mildly scandalized by this picture
in the morning i came to find nish passed out still in her full 80's attire. and my morning i mena 2pm

so onto those damn ellusive puppeteers. i have been searching through facebook finding various people with photo albums from my party (people i don't know fyi) and this is the only picture i could find wiht one of the puppeteers. she is the giant woman to the right in blue. GIANT.
the next day we went to have denny's, nish threw up ALOT, and then a few of us went shopping because there is really nothing else you can do when you are incapacitated by the hang over from hell.

80's parties, vacates, and drink recipes.

yes it has been forever!! or maybe it hasn't...i really don't know. i've been in intense group project/final papers mode. WE are at the time in teh quarter when i'm checking off to do boxes and new things aren't being added which is very cool.

so let's see, big news, big news....

tomorrow night is my 3 way march babies 80's birthday party with my 2 friends. here is the picture from the evite.
awesome, i know. I took my face from this pic of us pretending to surprise my friend before he actually got there. I figured we wouldn't be able to take a picture during the actual surprise part so we should take it before to memorex the moment. This whole thing is having a slight damper put on it by the fact that i suddenly got a wicked head cold today. I have been waiting to drink without judgement for a long time so hopefully it will all get better in the next few hours. I'm gonna do some 80's work out wear wiht a leotard and tights and a short baby tee and leg warmers and pig tails and a bright pink headband.

but onto bigger news!!!

we are going to puerto rico!! me, cathy, ivan, bob, and dan are going to glorious puerrrrrrrto rico. generally we tend to hate the kind of east coasters who fly to the bahamas for a 3 day weekend because it's cheap and close and stay in the resorts and carry around giant camera bags and are pasty and white and dont' look good in bathing suits. BUT this is so very not us. we are from california and the carrbbean is kind of far and exotic and although we are staying in resorts (on corporate america's tab!! thank you rich people!) and we are ethnic and turn a nice shade of caramelo when the sun kisses us. so the goals are as follows in this particular order

1. drinking
2. fagulousness
3. beaching
4. the yunque national forest
5. casinos

eeeeeeemagine!!! i am in the process of getting totes svelt for the occasion. Maybe i'll start doing my pilates tape again. The one good thing is that i have not gained weight, i have lost weight since being in grad school, now i just have to get toned. also i am now a size XS which really makes no sense to me because i have never been an XS so the clothing industry must be playing some mean joke and lyign to women making them think they are smaller than they actually are.

oh yeah and another sidenote, my friends and i invented the greatest drink this weekend. We were having a girls dinner in and singaporean jen cooking us a delicious meal while we listened to her jazz and bossa nova records. So at one point she said "i have lychee pronounced L-I-Chee!! we should make lychee martinis."

lychees? check
martini glasses? check
vodka? shit we had none
but wait, we had champagne!! check
ice? again double shits we had none.

so here is whta we ended up doing. we couldn't wait for things to freeze because we needed the liquor like right then and there so Jen found some ice packs (the blue kind) in her freezer. We cut them up to make smaller mini ice packs that would fit in the shaker. We took those, put them in a shaker, poured lychee juice in it, then poured a glass of champagnem a lychee, and some of the chilled lychee juice. It was super ghetto what with the whole blue ice fiasco and at one point jen had to say "if you see anything blue DON'T DRINK IT." but it was also very chic what with the whole champagne thing. Anyways you all should try it. it was like champagne on crack.

drunk...on life?

fuck i'm drunk....
but clearly not so drunk that i cannot write coherent sentences.....
so maybe i'm not that drunk??

this is my general feelings on life. Ramit came into town and i took him on a "pub crawl" which basically turned into lots of drinking at 2 bars. He was on the verge of passing out which he claims was due to the "excessive" amount of drinking he was doing but really he had liek one more drink than me so really the question becomes

1. was his drinking really excessive
2. or is my tolerance really high?

i have no answer for that so i will let you all ponder. So i wanted to take him on a tour of the midwest and he asked if we would eat lots of hot dogs. My response, "you dumbass." But really having a non michiganders here has really made me see how wierd it is here and how much i've changed. Like for instance i saw this really unnatractive couple dancing and grabbing each other, essentially having sex on the dance floor. had they been hot or in another city i don't know what my response would have been, but here i thought "wow that is kind of special that they are so into each other that they are willing to fuck on the dancefloor." I'VE CHANGED! People really are less attractive and much more white here. not that those two things are correlated but there is something beautiful about olive skin and dark hair and varying body types. Perhaps it's the variety that makes california beautiful. i mean, i'm just saying. Also what we consider fun here is like really not. Basically in grad school i feel like we settle alot. "oh this is fun compared to my real life so i will enjoy." call it lying to yourself or whatever but you gotta do what you gotta do to survive. Secondly people here can't dance. This is kind of a fact. and i will broaden that to say "white middle americans can't dance." argue as you may but it's true.

ok but on a high note it was decided that i would finally make my trip to "the cape" this summer as ozan is taking me on a fishing trip with his dad, a professional fisherman

I KNOW!!!!

EEEEMAGINE!!

i was like "do i have to buy an angler's license?" "am i gonna wear a fishing strap around my waste for if i catch a big one?????" he laughed, but i am very serious. i'm super excited about this. thank you cathy!!

oh paula deen, you do NOT slay me

so i'm sick in bed going in and out of sleep while i have teh food network on in the background. I have food poisoning so i'm not so sure that watching food being cooked is such a great idea since i kind of feel liek vomitting every 10 minutes. But anywyas i was just watching Sandra Lee who is CRAZY but i still kind of love her because she is just a little too cooky to not be appreciated. yes, her canned fruits and vegetables and box cakes are not really cooking but i love that her favorite part of the show is "cocktail hour" and "table scapes." If you've watched, you know what i mean. But now paula deen is on and she really really grosses me out. It could have been the time i watched her make a deep fried triple mayo egg sangwich. Or maybe it was the time seh had some left over butter in a dish and decided not to let it go to waste so she drank it. Watching her alwyas makes me wonder "do people really eat like this regularly?" and "is this what the south is like???" She just made some really gross sweet and sour meatballs with canned pinapples and ketchup and mustard. This is the kind of crap that they serve us at catered parties in michigan. Shit liek this would never fly in california. never! The "caterers" here also love to make various kind of 7 layer bean dip. Don't even get me started on my feelings about bean dip. it's about as mexican as a sweet and sour meatball is chinese.

paula deen uses such foreign ingredients to me like flour and buttermilk and deep frying oil. i know flour is a pretty standard cooking ingredient but i guess Mexicans just don't really use it because we've never had it in our house. She just dipped fried ochra (spelling?) into some mayonnaise and ate it on a stick.

I feel liek michael chiarello wouldn't let paula deen into his kitchen....EVER.

my recruit, my shoes

hello my peeps,
yes i have been gone for a while for various reasons which include but are not limited to food poisoning and recruitment weekend. Yes, it was the weekend that lets you really think about your life as you have to convince someone else to give up their early 20's and come to michigan so they too can become miserable and boring. Well all the free food was what got me the food poisoning. It was some kind of garlic induced thing i think. But my recruit was hella cool and we watched ace of cakes together and random travel channel shows. She felt that we would have made great college roomates and i informed her that unlike all of my college roomates i didn't hate her so yes, we would have been great roommates.

well one funny story. Let me preface this with some info. I came from a household where taking your shoes off in our house was considered a great insult and caused such angry comments from my father as "who does he think he is! he doesnt' even know us! This is our HOUSE and here they are taking off their shoes!" yes, my father is wierd but anyways whenever i have to go to someone's house (namely asian people) and take off my shoes i always feel this wierd sense of discomfort because taking of your shoes is really intimate. i know i know, it's wierd. Anyways we have this fancy dinner at a professor's house last night and i show up early with my recruit because i'm on set up committee. So all is fine, he has his shoes on, we have our shoes on. I mean this is a professional event! So anywyas a few other people show up shoes entact. Then a large group of about 6 Asians walk in the door and proceed to remove their shoes and leave them in the corner hallway. From this point on everyone that walked into the house (about 60 more people) saw the pile of shoes on the side of the door and thought "oh i guess i have to take my shoes off). Soon the party was full of people in their socks and some even barefoot! good god people, this is a departmental affair at a tenured professor's house. So i go up to the prof and i'm like "fred, you don't care that i have my shoes on right? because i notced all the shoes at the front of the door and i was wondering if i was supposed to take mine off." His response: "WE are not a shoe taking off family so i have no idea how that happened or why people keep taking off their shoes. please leave them on." And we both laughed. I didn't want to tell him that it was the posse of asian students that had come in. So anyways all the 60 pairs of shoes ended up blocking the walkway between the living room and the door and just looked really gross and dirty. Like seriously, there is a time and place for shoe removal. Is this not america!

Look on the bright side

Well today is a true "i'm alive, i'm a mess" kind of day. truly truly. So apparently with all my skipping stats class and "watching lectures online" (in theory more than reality) i neglected to note that i had a problem set due yesterday.

good
times

Well as it were the problem set was supposed to be "fun" and "relaxing." What statisticians consider a fun night of stats is kind of a nightmare to me. I spend a good 2 hours tryiing to find a computer that would run SPSS with teh proper patch i needed. Then i ended up at the undergrad library which reminded me of how little work i got done as an undergrad. This all ended in me frantically combing the city at midnight in search of a protractor and compass so that i could hand plot some geometrical points. It all sounds easier than it was since there were like statistical proofs involved and all kinds of crazy shit and at a certain point i just started laughing because my protractor broke and teh cheap pencil kept slipping out (remember!!) and my circles were off so i kept having to redo and redo over and over again until finally i was just like...whatever it's done.

So then i woke up with a wicked pain my leg, like cramps meets numbness. because i am crazy I imediately got it in my head that i must have blood clots in my leg from the travelling i did this past weekend. All sorts of things were going in my head like "maybe i have the gout. which medici was it that had the gout and had to be carried on that corridor across the ponte vecchia? don't fat people get gout?" I went to meet with my prof and told her that i thought i had a blood clot and she was like "you mean deep venous thrombosis!! Dick cheney has that! you shoudl go to the doctor." Well being a complete hypochondriac i was like "maybe i should!!" so i rushed to the doctor. So i don't have DVT, which is good, but i felt mildly vindicated by the fact that i do have edema in my legs most likely caused by all the flying/sitting, all the sitting in my desk/researching, and my bad posture. Now here is my question to you all. Why is it that i get all these ailments that moribidly obese people get? I am liek a fairly healthy person, i am definitly not obese, and yet....

so another off topic rant, i have this theory that short people have lots of back problems, or maybe just that i have back problems but i will generalize, because this world is made for normal sized people. For instance when i sit in chair my legs dangle off the side and i can't really balance myself on the floor causing my leg muscles to get relaly sore and my back to get all out of wack, and then i lean forward and throw off my spine and its' all just really really bad (i say this as i sit in my chair). Anyways my doctor cofirmed that all this sitting and bad posture could have definitely added to my adema. what's scary though is that people who have really bad cases of chonic adema have to wear orthopedic shoes like dansko clogs and clarks shoes. how sad. I mean i'm not there or anything, but it's sad. So i'm gonna go lie with my legs elevated because now they both hurt.

let's see what else went wrong the past few days. Oh yeah i slipped twice on my way home today on ice and my sinuses are totally flaring up and sting when i breath the fresh air causing me to have nose bleeds and what not. yay! But i must focus on the positive, like the fact that i didn't rip my jeans today, or the fact that the big O and i possibly found a house for next year and our rent will be SUUUUUUPER cheap. Or that i have decided to watch less tv (relative to me) and read more for pleasure. Also at least i don't have Deep venous thrombosis.

love's a bitch

** so i was having some formatting issues (spacings and fonts) so i went back and fixed)

So I’m watching “before sunset” which is such a FUCKING GOOD movie. Premise: years in the future you run into someone that you had a very deep love relationship with. But not the kind of relationship that lasts for years and years and was tainted by reality. No, I’m talking about the kind of relationship where you knew the person for a week, or a night or a few hours, but they left you wondering “what if” because they were never tainted by reality, and the fantasy of them can live on in you forever as the constant “what if” in your life, and even though you are with someone and love them you can still say that making out or kissing or holding hands or whatever with this other person for only one night was the hottest thing that has ever happened in your life, again, because it is not tainted by reality. Now make a movie from that feeling, that moment, etc and you’d have “before sunset.”

Who hasn’t had that fantasy where you run into someone you were with long ago, and you look fabulous, and in paris of all places. Damn you paris! I feel like I’ve always had this really intensely confused relationship with paris, being that I know I should love it but my time I spent there was a cold thanksgiving weekend where I stayed in my friend’s host sister’s bed and we both nearly got blown off the Eiffel tower because it was so crazy windy. David said that although he traveled through Europe on a vespa he never went to paris because he felt that paris had to be reserved for love and romance and therefore he would only go there with a woman. Perhaps that was my problem with my Paris experience, I was missing home and it was cold rainy and my boyfriend at the time was being a jackass. This all does not equate to love. My fondest memories of paris: smoking (ah Europe and my smoking days), eating really bad food, having a massive “I might die, just talk to me about nothing” panic attack on the underground, and most importantly my old college roommate, Miami, vomiting on that very same underground train a few days later. I guess in the end we were both even, her for the vomit and me for the panic attack.

Anyways in this movie these 2 people met when they were like 22 on a train going to, I believe, Vienna. So they have this torrid one night thing and when the guy gets back on his train the next morning they promise to meet in 6 months. The movie ends with you either believing they meet or believing they don’t depending if you are the romantic or the cynic. Well “Before Sunset” takes place years later when the guy has written a book about the whole experience. You find out that they never actually met up 6 months later because of some conflict but now he is on a book tour in paris and she shows up at the store where he is giving a book signing. Like HELLO THIS IS EVERY WOMAN’S FANTASY! Or maybe this is just my fantasy…Anyways what is amazing is that I have imagined moments like this in my life, but it’s more like I am at an open mic night in SF and some red haired tall quiet man goes on stage and says “I’m gonna sing a song that always reminds me of a girl. What we had was short but I always remember her when I sing this song” and then he starts to sing some awesome version of Mr. Big “to be with you” or cardigans “love fool.” And in this fantasy I look totally awesome and fantastically fit. I also have really good shoes and possibly glasses (even though I have perfect vision, damnit). The truth is that knowing myself and my luck I would run into an ex flame while looking shitty in my studying clothes after not having showered for 4 days. Yes, this is my luck. But I mean who knows, perhaps love and romanticism can prevail. Perhaps someday I will have my revenge and look fabulous. I mean who really knows.

There is this scene where they are catching up in a coffee shop and this convo goes down. The amazing part about it is that I feel like this could be any woman’s inner monologue, and I love that she just says it to him.

Celine: “how do I look? Do I look different now?”
Jesse: “you look…thinner. You look thinner.”
Celine: “so was I fat? Oh my god I was fat! I was a fatty! You wrote a book about a French fat girl!”
…
Celine: “I had this um, funny, well, horrible dream the other day. I was having this awful nightmare that I was 32, and then I woke up and I was 23…so relieved. And then I woke up for real, and I was 32. yeah”

I love her because she’s just a little bit crazy, just a bit. And most of the movie is her talking and the whole time kind of doubting myself like “am I saying to much” and him listening and looking at her with such affection thinking “fuck, I could spend the rest of my life on this park bench with this woman, but alas fate is cruel.”

And there is this part where she talks about how sometimes when you have those torrid kind of love affair things and they don’t work out, as they never do, you are traumatized and stunted forever because nothing can ever compare. So if that didn’t work out how will you ever find something that will. Like hello! Speak the words of my fucking soul! But like I said, this can really only happen with non relationships, the kind that are really short lived and leave you thinking, “wait so when I count the number of boyfriends I’ve had should I list that? I mean it doesn’t really count because it wasn’t a real relationship, but it was something…else.” Does anyone know what I am talking about? It's like really passionate, unnaturally so. I do'nt think that real love and real relationships should be that passionate, because if they were they would burn out quickly. Which is what makes the whole unforgettableness of it all even worse because you know it would have never worked out but you spend the rest of your life trying to get that feeling back because it just feels so fucking good. Has anyone has the fantasy come true of running into this person again and being fabulous, or are we too young still for these kinds of moments? I usually like to have parting thoughts, but really, I don’t know because I wrote this post last night but was too tired to tidy it up.

Cathy and I saw bridge to terabithia tonight which was seriously, about as traumatic as My Girl, only way more awesome. Weeping! We were literally weeping! So many eeeemotions