we're headed to the island of puerrrrrrto rrrrico tomorrow night! woo!! this trip has been like a year in the making, and although it started as a trip to ibiza for financial reasons it turned into what it is and i'm quite satisfied. I've been researching what kind of street food we can get and it looks like they really like swedish salted cod fish. sounds kind of gross but whatevs! i'll eat it! also turns out it's gonna rain the whoel time we're there, and not just that, the rain is going to follow us around the island. whatevs! as my mom said "it doesn't rain in the casino." true story.

speaking of my mom i've spent the past 2 nights showing her how to use picasa which has seriously been my worst nightmare. Have you ever tried to show your parents how to use teh computer? It's like teaching a child to crawl. awful. now she says i have to show her how to add music and make slideshows because she wants to buy a projector and make peopel come to our house and watch her slideshows. yes, my life is sometimes like a sitcom.

let's see what has been going on. cathy and i went to see the grunion running, but it was just one grunion and it died after being trapped on shore 3 times. stupid fish. here is us with our grunion, respectively.

the one grunion and some kelp
so then we picked it up and took pictures with it because we are all about respecting nature

my dad had this totally awesome flashlight that you could wear on your head like a spelunker.
night fishing
so i will be sans computer for the next 2 weeks as this is our attempt to exxxxcape from the shackles of technology and leave our computers behind (but of course bring our ipods and mini dvd players and such). so peace out as i sway to the boriqueno sounds of reggaeton

Holy cow!! Puerto rico is officially a week away and i have been working on an itinerary and doing some research which is getting me (and the rest of the gang) very excited. Like for instance we are going to see a cockfight at the only arena in Puerto Rico that allows tourists. and cathy is going to throw down bets while smoking a cigar and wearing a panama hat (her fantasy, not mine).

And then cathy and i are going to fly kites from here!!

and then we are going to beach here wiht the gays, because apparenlty this is where the gays kick it.
and then we're driving through the motherfucking cordillera!!
and then we're gonna hike through the rainforest! the only rainforest in the united states! and i am going to wear my north face cool max top that i bought a while ago on sale because i'm all athletic and shit!
seriously!! i am jealous of myself! And i have gotten some really bomb shopping deals like a james perse t shirt for 10 dollars at a consignment store. And a mini jacket for 10 bucks at the macy's 1 day sale, originally $104! And some espandrelle wedges for 40 bucks, 50% off! And some yellow patent leather flats for liek 30 bucks also 50% off. I am so jazzed, i want it to be here. And on friday cahty and i are finally going to watch the "planet earth" series on her parents giant HD tv. unlike asians, mexicans do not buy high tech cool new things like HD tv's so i have yet to watch anything on HD. And tehn we're going to some stanford young alumni 80's mixer thing which should be tons of fun (sarcasm). And then i'm going to see this guy from high school perform at a coffee shop so i can say "look at me now ye, who never asked me to prom! look at me now!"

Will let you know how it all goes.

love and shit

So i saw this movie called "once" today and it was kind of amazing. It's one of those things that while you're watching it you get really lost in the moments. it was all pretty raw footage but it worked. It's about these people, both musicians who meet on a street corner one night while the guy is playing some music. The girl is this Czech immigrant and they spark up a week long friendship where they just play music together and record and album and stuff. It's a really random plot but it totally works and the girl is very...i don't know. She's like what natalie portman tried to be in the garden state only more real. She plays that muse character that makes the guy get up and get his live going, a muse in the true sense of the word. I cried, but not those heavy cries but like the kind of soft, low cries that come from your heart. And the music, it's like damien rice meets josh ritter. Seriously go see it.

Anyways it all made me think about those people that you only know for a short time but who really have a long term effect on you. it also made me think that another thing i should have been, aside from a dancer, was a musician. It's kind of funny to say because it's not liek i dont' have any musical talent. i played piano for 9 years and was really quite good but i didn't have raw talent. my problem was my teacher said i didn't play with passion so i'd always have to feign passion. But that's odd because i really love music and when i listen to it it fills me with passion, but when i tried to play it it never worked that way. So anyways if i coudl express myself in words succinctly i would be a fucking poet/musician and maybe another musician would fall in love with me and maybe we would spend our lives making beautiful music together. But as we know from past experiences poets, while being all romantic and shit, tend to be liars. le fucking sigh. i guess i'll just have to settle for a tenure track professor someday.

britney and fallen heiresses

Ok so anyways for no apparent reason cathy and i are watching old britney spears music videos and trying to see when it all went wrong. First of all "sometimes" might be my favorite britney song of all time second only to "email my heart." Original CD, check that shit out. I had this fond memory of being at my friend gina's house after shcool. Ryan and i used to go and we'd watch trl. And she had this cousin, whose name i cant' remember, but he was a dancer. And he danced in "sometimes"!! and one time we asked him to show us how to do the choreography, which looked super simple. Needless to say it was not and we ended up giving up, sitting on the couch watching the video and eating bagel bites. good times indeed.

Clearly the beginning of the end happened with "slave for u." It was her asserting her sexuality. But you look at her body (or rather i look at her body) in that video and i think "fuck if i had those abs i would wear nothing but chaps all the time." How did she go from that to the britney of the cottage cheese thighs that we see now a days. As i told cathy, perhaps it is all meant to be one big lesson for the world that if it can happen to her it can happen to anyone of us. I guess what i'm saying is, put down the flaming hot cheeto!!

I request that you watch this video and have a fucking moment for yourself!! it can happen to you!



"you'll see THAT
you're the only ONE for me!!"

apparenlty i missed the premier of top chef? how does this happen? seriously when i'm in LA i lose all track of time and can't function without my tivo.

my hagdome runs deep as the sea

Wow so i know i use the phrase "i had a moment" a lot, but seriously when you pay attention to life and just observe sometimes it's hard not to have moments. The past 3 days i've spent trying to find a decent place in LA to study with WiFi. It's been nearly impossible. So i finally decided to go no Yelp and let the people tell me how it is. I don't know why i didn't think to do it earlier. BTdubbs, yelp is fantastic. If you have not used it yet i highly recommend it. So anyways i came upon this place in hermosa beach called "planet earth: Eco Cafe." i was intrigued. A san francisco, hipser organic loving cafe with free wifi and lots of outlets in the heart of beach usa? for reals? So anyways i hopped in our family SUV and made the commute and it was quite ridiculous. It wasn't quite swearage because they weren't trying to be anything other than who they really were. they were this couple from michigan who had lived all over teh US and just wanted to open up a nice local neighborhood coffee shop by the beach. So i had what the owner tommy termed "the best sumatra ethiopian blend fair trade coffee you will ever have" and a health shake made of almond milk, hemp, fruit, and lots of other random sources of protein. I even chatted it up with the locals and now we all know each others names and i'm going back tomorrow maybe to do some leisure reading. Seriously, awesome.

So anyways i'm doing this research for a prof whose writing a book and it's mainly been on racial identity but this week i was doing the section on gender identity and i came across a lot of really interesting stuff like the origins of gender identity and black feminist critical race theory. So critical race theory is basically this way of looking at the word of academia with they refer to as "the academy." And what it says is that the academy should acknowledge that they are a hegemonic system that is not promoting objective knowledge but rather a one sided Eurocentric perspective on learning. It promotes European American male values and presupposed that they are the right way of being. And when women enter these academies they are forced to subconsciously or consciously suppress their femininity. Well Black feminist critical race theory takes it a little further and says that Feminism itself is a hegemonic way of looking at womanhood as it promotes ideals of the upper middle class white woman. But what about other ways of being a good and right woman? so anyways i read this awesome quote that really resonated.

"The price of good education, a euro american education, in short, was, and still is, the denial of one's Black cultural identity. This is the price of entry to the middle class. It is this legacy of education as a double edged sword that creates a similar suspicion towards black teachers on the part of black students as exists on the part of the black community towards black members of the police force. The presence of black faces does not changes the essential nature of an institution, nor does it alter it's ethos

All that talk about suppressing minority women's voices made me wonder how much of who i am has been silenced at one point or another. In many ways i feel that to get to where i am i had to hide a lot of myself growing up. I had to act a certain way to make myself desirable to my teachers. I had to not be mexican and not be loud and prove that i was as good as the guys. All that shit. I kept the real me for my homelife and my family. And when i got to college i made a promise to myself that i would not be someone that i didn't want to be anymore. So i just let myself be, and that was probably where all of my issues started because i had been suppressing all these various aspects of myself for so long. But whatever, it was for the best.

Ok so anyways this got me thinking about the gays, my gays and how they have really made my life better. Initially I was reading some basic gender identity developmet stuff talking about when the concept of "gender" starts to form. At about 7 kids start to have a sense of gender permanance where they realize that it is unchangeable. It is at this age that kids start to hang out with their own gender and all of this start to perpetuate commonly held gender social roles of how to be. So girls will play with other girls and boys with boys and so on. I was thinking about this time period and i remember having female friends and then i remember not having them. And i was thinking of why this happened. My first pre school friend was Ryan, a mo. We were bff and then that whole gender thing hit and i had a few girl friends but at a really young age i realized that hanging out with girls was not fun. I found it to be really limitting. Girls would say things like "we can't do that, that's for boys." And when you hung out with all girls guys treated you a certain way, like they were better than you. And i always thought that was dumb. Thus began my love affair with the gays. I have this distinct memory of one of my first gay friends in 1st grade bringing his my little pony to school. he got so much shit for it from everyone. Other kids would say, "you cant' play with that! that's for girls!" and i remember kind of admiring him because his response was "so waht. i want to play with it." The gays weren't the weird kids to me. They were my friends, the only ones who let me be who i wanted to be. I wasn't "Cristina, a girl.' I was just me, and i loved that about them. And to me they weren't guys, they were just my friends. We acknowledged each others underlying humanity. And i remember as we hit puberty and i started getting crushes on guys it always bugged me how straight men treated me different. I had to act a certain way around them. I couldnt' let them know that i was smart and funny and stuff. I just wanted to be treated like me, and liked for who i was regardless of whether i had boobs or was thin. The gays accepted me and for that i am forever grateful. They made me who i am today. And actually i think my issues with straight men all stem from these early relationships i had with gay men. And this is probably why I am still friends with gay men. They reaffirm who i am, who i really am. And i don't have to be the ideal woman or worry that they won't want me if i talk to much or have an opinion. So some of you have probably heard me talk about my hate for women who claim to be fag hags but really they just use the gays because they want to say they have a gay friend. this little tale i told you tonight is why i hate them! The reality is true hagdome runs deep. A real hag loves her gays because being with them is like being home. Not because they dress well and can dance. So to all you fake hags out there i have 2 words for you.

YOU SWEAR!

So in conclusion, this one is for all you queens out there who through your struggles and unconditional friendships made me who i am today. A hot hot mess of a woman.

Wisconsin or bust

Now i put off this post for various reasons mostly that my internet in michigan is super crappy and constnatly disconnects making it really hard to download pics. But i'm at home now and the internet is a bit more stable so here it is. For memorial weekend orges and i made plans for me to drive out to chicago which we would use as a jumping point for "vol1 of 50: All gone to look for America." We learned many things on this trip but the two main purposes of the trip were revealed to us quite early on. They were 1) find our spirit animals and 2) discover what it really means to live life in miller time.

I drove out of michigan on an early friday evening. My 4 and a half hour drive consisted of this
very dull. a few observations i made:
- michiganders love wendy's the way that californians love jack in teh box. Seriously, it was on every exit. they also love bob evans which is like an unglorified denny's only with a smoking section
- There are 2 waffle houses on the way to chicago, very exciting
- waiting to pee until the very last minute and then getting stuck for 45 minutes in stopped traffic with no air conditioning in humid weather might be up there with child birth. It was teh kind of moment where i looked around, saw some tupperware in my car, and fashoined in my mind how i would go about relieving myself into said plastic ware. Luckily cathy stopped me by letting me know that seh woudl in fact judge me if i did such a thing, so i held it because cathy judges very few things.

So i arrived late and we decided to drink some reisling and watch apocalypto. I confess this movie was unexpectedly awesome. I thought i was gonna get all chicana and start talking about all of the cultural inaccuracies and how natives are always misportrayed but no. you know how there are those moments in life when you know things are happening for a reason adn you are right where you need to be? this whole weekend was like that. it was all very spiritual. Case in point watching jaguar paw get in touch with his inner animal spirit brought on major theme of the weekend: orges and i would travel the midwestern countryside to find our animal spirits.

Our first stop was a farm called "apple holler" orchards. It was very campy.
Golden GOAT bridge! get it! get it! yeah, i know.
Orges touched goats
i acted like a tourist
we procured some apple wine, apple butter, peach honey, apple pie, caramel, and finally cheese curds. Another moment when i knew being at apple holler was fate. As i caught a glimpse of their selection of strawberry wine the song "strawberry wine" started playing. fate? i think so!

anyways to all of my california friends, this is a cheese curd. It kind of tastes liek nacho cheese if nacho cheese were solid but a bit sweaty and kind of squeaked when you ate it. That really is not a good description but seriously it's good, and i don't even like cheese. We later realized that the bag contained 12 servings so in the end we each ingested 6 servings which was liek 10,000 calories.
We continued to drive and ended up in milwaukee. Milwaukee is a really depressing place and i was starting to feel kidn of down when another sign hit us, a literal and figurative sign. Actually this spurs a convo we had where orges said it cracks him up when people misuse the term "literally" like if i were to say "a sign literally hit us!" clealry a sign did not hit us but i'm trying to make a point. So anyways i noticed a sign that said "kite festival, today!" ahhh how fantastic!! So we bought kites (orges a jolly roger and me a ladybug) and made it just in time for the grand kite releasing celebration.
there were signs everywhere that said "danger! stunt kites!" how awesome is that!!

So we flew kites and the speakers in teh park blasted "let's go fly a kite" from mary poppins and i swear to you i started to tear up from sheer joy. It was quite possibly the most magical moment of my life.

You can't see my face but my body language is expressing my euphoria. This was the moment, running with my kite, that i realized what my spirit animal was. I am a ladybug. The rest of teh weekend orges tried to get me to get a lady bug tattoo and for a few seconds i considered it. It was that awesome. I suggest you all go fly a kite this weekend.
We then drove around some hipster part of milwaukee trying to find wifi access which was a bust. Then we it started raining and the microbrewery we were going to visit was sold out. I started to freak out "worst road trip EVER!" But then we reassessed teh sitch and decided to fuck this micro shit and head to the miller brewery. 2 words, "miller time." Seriously miller time truly is a state of mind and i think that is the greatest lesson i learned from wisconsin.

I even bought a shirt that said "milwaukee's best." Seriously, who am i?!
at the end of teh tour they give you 3 pretty hefty sized beers for free. Since i don't really like beer i gave mine to orges and he found that the only way for him to chug it was to hear the clinking of teh glass so he toasted himself. It was all very pavlovian (yes i did just go there)
We drove to madison, hoped to find a white castle, but apparently white castles do not exist in southeastern wisconsin. After checking into our hotel and getting a nice buzz from the apple wine orges had a brilliant idea. We seized the day and crashed the wedding downstairs. When in madison do as teh madisonians do.

Here we are dancing at said wedding to what else but "shout." We also drank free beer from teh open bar.
i was having a really good hair day
Then we drunk dialed everyone we knew and told them how our lives were better than theirs. yes, we are assholes. We met a really cool shuttle driver named Pauli who i kind of wanted to join us for dinner just so i coudl be liek "pauli!!" but alas. We ended up at a couple of very loud undergrad bars and orges was so drunk that he literally lost his train of thought jumping from "Alec was on the jungle gym" straight into "and then he killed everyone!" he later told me he was talking about sara's boyfriend and then accidentally started talking about battlestar galactica. very strange. Anyways we got in a cab with a very nice lady who talked alot about falafals and orges said something about how awesome it would be to have the biggest falafel in teh world, and i was like, seriously how drunk are you, my friend. Then i got sick from the afghani food and vomitted all night in teh toilet while orges passed out.

We woke up and it was like our dreams had been answered because legally blonde and the wedding planner were both on TBS. Thank you, tv gods. then we ended up at some place called lake wingra and went kayaking. Another few key observations. I am extremely out of shape. I rowed for like 5 minutes before my arms gave out. And orges kept yelling that i was getting water in his face because it was very windy and teh water was blowing off of my oars. Realization, had i been alone out there i might have died. I made up for my lack of athletic prowess my serenading him wiht some celine dion "my heart will go on." There is something about being stranded in teh middle of a lake with the wind blowing against your row that is just very moving.
so let's just zoom forward. We stopped at a sex shop and bought salvia. then we went to a museum of modern art, v. cool. then we headed to chocolate city, usa, aka burlington wisconsin.
What happened next was by far the most moving part of the weekend for me at least. We drove through lots of rolling hills an farm country and came upon this old lutheran church that had been built by some norwegian settlers in the 1800's. It had this adjoining cemetery taht you could tell was one of those really local cemeteries where generations of families had been burried. Some of the tomb stones were so old that the words had worn off, and we both wondered if anyone ever came to visit them. Which then prompted a discussion of teh "if a tree falls and no one hears it" variety. if you are burried somewhere but no one ever comes and visits you what does that mean? Orges's answer: you need to do things worthy of building monuments in your name so people will remember you.
someone with my name.
then we kept driving and encountered racial hatred. I was wearing a very ethnic shirt and i stopped at a stop sign and 2 men in a pick up truck yelled "go home!" to me. I wasn't sure if it was because i was not driving an american car or because they thought i was an illegal immigrant. Either way i was shocked. This is me in shock.
we drove by this guys house who collected old gas pumps and had them all in front of his house almost like a gas pump modern sculpture. If this were SF it would have been in the MOMA and tehy would have said it was a statement on modernism (ie oil) and nature (ie gas pumps on his land). We finally made it into burlington and followed the crowd to some place called Fred's. it claimed to have the best burgers but that was questionable cuz clearly these people have never had in n out.

The choclate festival that had been hyped turned out to basically be a local fair with rides and fun houses and shit. there were all of these teenagers running around. We ate corndogs and stuff and it reminded me of being a kid. Isn't it strange how things can remind you of "childhood" in a broad way even if it was not your childhood. Like i never ate corn dogs at fairs in my childhood yet eating that meat on a stick made it feel liek someone's childhood. i don't know
they randomly had tehse white tigers that you could pet or take pictures with or something but anyways here was teh sign in front of their cage. notice anything odd? Oh wisconsin, you slay me.
we rode bumper cars and teh ferris wheel and some crazy rotating machine thing and i found out that orges is afriad of heights which is odd considering his spirit animal might be a parrot.
So then we came back to chicago and i passed out. I woke up early and drove back to michigan, but not before trying my very first white castle. it was really good.

And that was teh end of our journey. It felt liek years but really was only 2 days of sheer bliss and childhood wonder. I feel liek we learned so much about each other and life and most importantly about ourselves (cue end credit music) Next state, ohio.

life and stuff

ugh so i'm in LA which leaves me with lots of mixed feelings. First of all there is a severe dearth of blonde pale skinned people. Now i never thought i would say that but 8 months of the midwest has really made me notice these things. I went to UCLA today to use their library since i have a bunch of research i have to do for a prof and i noticed 2 major things. There were HELLA asians there. And i'm not sure if there actually are hella asians or if i'm just used to not seeing asians anymore. i just dont know. But secondly there appeared to be lots of mexicans students, but i could have been confusing the persian students with latinos. i mean we are both dark skinned and stuff.

so anyways i was at trader joe's with my parents yesterday buying food for the week since our fridge consists of old bananas, diet coke, and 3 kinds of milk and soy milk (seriously my parents live like frat boys). So anyways in the midst of purchasing some secrets of the psyllium and joint vitamins for my mom i ran into this guy i went to high school with. he actually works with my mom and lives with this other guy we went to school with. They kind of looked at me like "oh we are buying wine and she's buying fiber and joint medicine." It made me feel very like...i don't know. I guess it was a twin peaks, because basically i felt like an uncool teenager all over again. And i wanted to be like...seriously i am cool now! i am not a loser! But who knows, maybe i am. So anyways, i asked what they were doing and they were working locally in the south bay and lived down the street. I confess, i judged them a bit. We do not live in a cool part of LA and to be 25 and living in lomita after college is my worst nightmare. so anyways i was having this mixed feelings like "i think they are uncool but do they also think i am uncool?" and then one of them made some comment about michigan being really boring and i was like "actually no it's not." and then the other guy said "well she'd know about fun more than we would. She lived in the big city, San Francisco for a while" And for a moment, the fact that i was in sweats and a hoodie on a sunday afternoon with my parents buying vitamins did not make me feel so bad. As cathy put it, "to them you were this cool hippy chick who ate organic food and lived in san francisco." I know moving to SF doesn't seem like a big deal with seriously peopel from my high school did not do ANYTHING! they all went to school locally and styaed in touch and all still hang out and it' slike...just not my life at all. Anyways all this got me really excited to go to my high school reunion in a few years. I had this image of getting the 2 people i still keep in touch with, and maybe having my parents drop us off. And then i would get wasted and judge people who used to be thin but got fat.

They told me that this girl we knew is getting married to the guy she started dating end of senior year, high school sweet hearts and all that shit. And they had bought a house. And as i was driving back on the 405 today in my parents SUV in rush hour traffic i was feeling like winona ryder in reality bites when she says "people are having babies! babies! i cant' even take care of a chia pet!" Only in my case it was more like, people are buying houses and getting married and i frequently ride my bike home after nights of much drinking to pass out on my 50 dollar mattress in my basement! It's weird how grad school make you seem like you have these very mature qualities like intelligence and wisdom, but it can also make you seem like an irresponsible 19 year old with no real future. I guess what i'm saying is grad school is basically college with a bit more restraint. So anyways point being all of this made me reassess my life and i concluded, I have a pretty good life.

Puerto Rico!!!