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!!!

Puerto Rico!!!!

so the fags and hags are headed to puerto rico in just a little more than 20 days here and i am very excited! I plan on making a minimum of 3 outfit changes a day. I have a few hats, floppy straw and bucket. I also have some shorts of varying lengths, lots of dresses, 3 bikinis, big chanel sunglasses, linen pants, sandals, heels, wedges. SERIOUSLY!!!! So here are 2 pics of 2 dresses i recently bought. I'm very excited.
Yellow! i've been feeling like exploring the world of yellow.

But this next one really excites me
Now i knwo you are thinking "why the hell is she excited about some mexican mumu dress but here is my vision. First off it's a mini one and i have hot legs. Secondly i plan on wearing it as a bathing suit cover up for walking tt and from the beach. are you seeing my vision?? Finally, have you ever owned a mexican peasant dress? I own 2 and i wear them while i'm blowdrying my hair and lounging around my house and they are the most comfortable things ever so i suggest you buy one stat so you can see what i'm talking about.

Today i saw a girl wearing biker shorts. Seriously, what the hell is that about.

velour rompers

so last night cathy told me she was ordering this online
I was really excited because while i actually look terrrrrrible in jumpers (i'm not sure but i imagine mainly because i look bad in strapless things) i LOVE the idea of a velour romper suit. And mainly it's because of these pictures from my mom circa 1981

click on the pictures to see them close up and note that on one trip she had the romper in 2 colors. She was 30 in these pictures. for reals! perhaps there is hope for fabulousness with age.

today i got a locker at the library and this was seriously the highlight of my week. who am i?

confession # 42343343

there are some moments of living alonedome that are truly fantastic. one such moment is coming home from a night out wiht friends, completely trashed, and eating trader joes microwave jaipur vegetables and cous cous alone on your couch while watching sarah jessica parker on oprah, tivoed. few things can top this. one thing that possibly is better...popping in your sex and the city dvd and watching someone whose love life is more fucked up than yours.

*****BTdubbs, need to buy more sex and the city, stat.

*****Dubbs dubbs, whoever has my SAC season 3 disc 3 please give it back. it sucks to be left hanging.

so what i'm saying it, despite all of my bitching, there are moments that i would not trade.

TV finales, musings

god this week has been some great television. tragic at times, disappointing even, and yet somehow oddly hopeful, but overall leaving me feeling very strained emotionally like it all somehow applied to my life or something. Or maybe i just want my lame life to work out the way that fiction does, but really i kind of just want the soundtrack.

gilmore girls ended like for reals and the final episode ever really sucked. it felt incomplete, but worse it made me feel like i was not being respected as a viewer for all of the work i put into it. I feel sometimes like i have these fucked up relationships with my shows. I care about teh characters, i relate to them sometimes, and the shows i can't relate to i keep watching and they become like these terrible disfunctional boyfriends that i just can't let go of because i keep saying "they'll change! they'll get better!! i just have to give them time! Sweeps is coming up!" This was how i felt about studio 60 and many many others shows that i decided to purge earlier this year. But anyways so gilmore girls ended and after six (maybe seven?) fucking years of sexual tension all we get is a kiss? what the hell. That is bull shit, but i guess it's a little hopeful. I found out veronica mars got cancelled with one episode left. this is truly tragic, and i say that in a completely overly dramatic way. But really do i need another incomplete ending in my life dangling there with no closure? I still do wonder what would have happened to Angela Chase. But these shows are like artists, never respected in their time, because if they had been they would have inevitably come to produce really lame seasons like felicity season 3 and dawsons creek seasons 4 through the final episode and lost season 2 and beginning of season 3. Maybe they need to end so i can remain hopeful or longing or something.

the office ended today. so so good. the moments we (and by we i mean me and my invisible readers) discussed earlier this week happened. pam beginning to shed a little tear of hope. i shed with her. Grey's anatomy, despite being overly dramatic at times with the musing music and such, touched me quite deeply this week. All this talk about committment and choosing and being left behind really...just...ummmph.

i don't knwo if i believe in love anymore, real or fictional. i mean i kind of hope that i do but i dont' know if i do. it all seems liek my shows that get cancelled leaving me feeling like something's missing (stupid john mayer song). and i know that comparing my ideas and experiences with love to cancelled teen dramas seems trite but i am all about the analogies because my goal in life is to seek to understand and be understood and all that shit so i feel liek this analogy fits. but anyways to relate to another vagina icon i feel like i'm having a carrie bradshaw moment when i ponder, how do you get men to commit? like how do women get men to marry them and shit? it kind of boggles my mind because who wants to spend their life wiht someone that has so many flaws, male and female alike? (tv has lots of weddings that is where all this is coming from). it's one of those things that i can't make sense of. I do kind of subscribe to that whole "taxi light" timing theory because it feels alot better than saying they just didin't love you as much as the person they choose ultimately to commit to. But then again the taxi light theory takes it to a whole new level of "seriously? what the fuck! that is retarded!" which brings me back to the whole "really awesome shows cancelled before their due time" analogy.

this is a little bit off topic but there is this patty loveless song that is relaly awesome called "you don't even know who i am." Casey introduced me to it and have been hooked ever since. So it's this woman leaving her husband and the omniscient narrator is talkign about how the woman left the car and dropped off her kids and left the keys and her wedding ring where would notice it. and then she leaves a note next to the grocery list and it says

You don't even know who I am
You left me a long time ago
You don't even know who I am
so what do you care if I go

And then her husband comes home and sees all this stuff and he starts to think about it and then he sits and ponders and finally decides to call her. And you the listener thinks that he's finally going to tell her how much he appreciated her and stuff. But no, instead he says

He left the ring on the pillow
He left the clothes on the floor
And he called her to say he was sorry
But he couldnt remember what for
So he said Ive been doing some thinking
Ive been thinking that maybe youre right
I go to work every morning
And I come home to you every night

And you dont even know who I am
You left me a long time ago
You dont even know who I am
So what do I care if you go
You dont even know who I am
So what do I care if you go

So i'm not really sure what the point of that was but it's a really good song! And i come from a really good happy family so i'm not quite sure when i got so jaded and pessimistic about love. blame it on the shows and movies. And they just make peopel break up for the sake of ratings and cliffhangers so i'm not really sure why i even pay attention.

guilty pleasures: i get so eeeeeemotional baby

so i was reading emily's blog and she linked to some other entertainment blog, i think entertainment weekly. anyways they had a segment talking about guilty pleasures and in one they talked about tv show episodes that made them guiltily (or perhaps not so guiltily) bawl their eyes out. And we've all been there, tv watchers or not, where we are watchign something, a hallmark commercial, 2 lovers breaking up on our favorite teen drama. And something about it feels very real and as moana on the bachelor said "it rocked me to my core!" so i decided to dedicate this post to such moments in tv watching history. There are many that i have forgotten, namely scenes from Felicity, so i expect you the readers (tory) to fill in your most painful tv scenes.

ER, circa season one. A red headed woman comes in with her husband and they are so excited about having their first child and then somehow in all the mix she ends up having eclampsia and dies and Dr. Greene wants to comfort the husband but he's so sad he's just like "no no!! you said she'd be ok!" and then he slams the door on Dr. Greene. Dude i think that was the first time i bawled while watchign television.

Dawson's Creek promicide episode. Joey asks Pacey to dance and they do. He mentions her mother's bracelet and she's like "i can't believe you remember that" and he kind of leans into her and very painfully whispers "i remember everything" and the piano plays in the background and he kind of leans into her, breathes in her neck, caresses her back and oooooooh one of the few moments in television where i feel it not in my eyes but in my heart. and i always imagined that my breakups would be this romantic but they weren't. le sigh

Veronica Mars when she goes to confront Logan to tell him that he was the one that raped her and i think she's trying to figure out why he is so grossed out that he had sex with her because like every girl she's trying to figure out what's so wrong with her and hello, they used to love each other! and finally logan breaks down crying and is like "i'm your brother!!!" and sweet baby jesus again my heart felt it before my eyes did. You all need to watch this show like right now. It's the only thing on tv that can make my heart flutter but also drop into my stomach. moments, people, moments!

the Sex and the City episode when charlotte tells them all "maybe we could be each other's soul mates?" The "moonriver" episode when big leaves her the record for when she gets lonely and the plane ticket "for when i get lonely." The series finale, need i say more.

The OC season 1 finale when they are at Julie and Caleb's wedding and Ryan and Marissa dance but they know this is their last dance because he is moving back to chino and then in the background Jem is singing "maybe i'm amazed at the way you love me all the time. Maybe i'm afraid of the way of love you" or whatever and oooooh.

Dawson's Creek series finale when Jen is making her dying last words to her daughter and sand sarah mclauglan "angel" is playing. "i thought i would give you a little list of the things that i wish for you...i want you to spend a lot of time at the ocean because the ocean makes you dream and i insist that you, my girl be a dreamer. God. I've never really believed in God. In fact i've spent alot of time and energy trying to disprove that God exists. But i hope that you believe in God because the thing that i've come to realize is that it just doesn't matter if God exists or not. the important thing is that you believe in something." truth!!

My so called life, i could be mixing up my episodes but I think this all might have been the same one. So Angela just caught her dad was cheating on her mom and she runs home crying because i think she also made a fool of herself at a party wiht the guy she likes. And "Everybody hurts" is playing in the background and she runs to her mom and cries in her arms and it's like she's a child again but also for the first time she has sympathy for her mom cuz she knows the truth.

last 6 minutes of Six Feet Under series finale. Holy shit it's worth watch the 3 crappy seasons before it just to get to this episode.

Grey's Anatomy (yes lame but still has it's moments). The episode in season 2 when the girl and the guy have a pole stuck in them and the girl has to sacrifice herself to save the man. The whole scene of her sacrifice if very sad but i think i really broke down at the end when her fiance Danny comes into the hospital and asks Derek what she said before she died. and he says "she asked me to tell you...she wanted you to know...that if love were enough she'd still be here with you." seriously people! Seriously! and then Later Derek is in the elevator with Bailey and starts breaking down and she very calmly without looking at him pulls the alarm to stop the elevator. He cries and then she's like "are you ok" and he composes himself and she starts the elevator again. ahhh

Alias season 1 and 2, every episode. but especially the first one where danny, her fiance dies. and then anytime she goes to see vaughn and cries and he's super supportive. damn you michael vartan!!!

Felicity, everything that sally said made me cry. I think i'll watch this week and update you guys on the moments of this show

and finally a very recent scene i watched like 2 weeks ago on Gilmore Girls. This show gets so much crap from non viewers but so much love from anyone who has given it a shot. Seriousy it's REALLY good. So ok, Lorelai gets really drunk at the town's karaoke night and she wants to sing a song to her graduating daughter. So she gets up and sings "i will always love you" the dolly parton version which is suprrisingly way more awesome than the Whitney version. Anyways it's all very beautiful because it makes sense in the context of her singing to her child who is leaving home, but then...then, her ex, Luke, walks into the bar right during "bittersweet memories" and i swear to god she looks like she might falter but that bitch keeps on singing. But this time it's not for her daughter but for the love she lost, the man she will always love. it especially kills me when she sings "we both know i'm not what you need" because she cheated on him so it's true!! and i mean...ugh just watch

things

i'm watchign this movie "nine lives." it's pretty good. it's these 9 vignette's about 9 different women whose lives are a little fucked up and who fuck up their lives a little bit. And in the end, as with all movies that are written by latinos, they are all interconnected in some strange, unexpected way because aren't all all interconnected? anyways it got me thinking sometimes how life is just really sad. And sometimes it's directly sad and sometimes it's indirectly sad when we witness the sadness of others. And even if we are happy, seeing someone else's sadness can bring us down but also make us really appreciative of our happiness. One time orges told me "i found this book called the prophet while in prague! it's so amazing." and i said that i knew it and had read it because my mom read it to me. Anyways he quoted it to me

you're joy is your sorrow unmasked

this movie got me thinking about that. you can't have one without the other because they mutually constitute each other. Sometimes life is really awesome, and we are reminded of how wonderful it is because of the bad times we've had. And sometimes life is shit, and the shittiness becomes apparent when we compare it to the good times.

you're joy is your sorrow unmasked

...

things i kind of love

do you ever see people that you know that are sort of awkward but not to the point where it's hopeless, and you just want to give them a makeover? i just ran into my stats TA who is just such a character. He was wearing a very dreary colored pair of tapered jean that were also loose fitting. it kind of amazes me that such jeans are made let alone that people still by them. And i'm sure that the only reason levis continues to make these is because to some people this is their favorite cutot buy, mainly because thye don't know any better. I have this belief that the clothing industry should take a stance and just stop making these offenses to fashion. They should say "look old man in oklahama/unfashionable commoner/dorky grad student, we know these jeans are your favorite cut but they are a crime to fashion and thusly we shall stop making them forcing you to buy only normal bootcut jeans" or something liek that. Anyways he was wearing these jeans, some rugged useful shoes and a army green t shirt. And i imaged that with normal jeans, or even maybe some high end seven jeans, and perhaps a bitter fitting version of that t shirt from american apparel, he would have looked quite normal if not attractive. I see people like this all the time. Young girls wearing high wasted jeans and ecco old lady sandals. and i think...she has a nice body under all that stuff, all she needs are some tighter better fitting jeans, a properly fitting shirt and some cute flats or even more simply some converse all stars. it just makes me sad. This kind of just plays into my whole attitude toward life and the world. I see so much potential and htat is how i keep the constant disappointment from bringing me down.

Today i was reading mcsweeney's thinking to myself (and to emily on gchat) "i could be friends with these people." this is the same thought i have when i read go fug yourself or sandra cisneros books or john mayer's blog or other things by people i respect and kind of like. And granted it seems silly to say that things you willingly choose to read would suprisingly be likeable to you since if you are choosing to read them it is probably because they are reflecting your views. But still, i think in anohter life i could have been a writer. true story. my editor would have hated me and said "use spell check before you send this shit to me!" but still! ugh! there is a part of me (the fat, unpopular, high schooler) who thinks that i could be so much a cooler person if i just had some artistic venue for expressing myself. but most importnatly an art that people would read and say "wow that is EXACTLY how i feel" because isn't that what art is? so somehow this all led me conclude that this summer i'm going to become more cultured. I went to the public library to rent videos. Yes i live in a crazy version of the cultured world where i think videos equal culture. I guess what i meant by culture was that i'm going to become more cultured in things related to modern media...or something. So anyways i downloaded a bunch of indie music and bossa nova/jazz the other day and i'm going to listen to it while i do pretentious things like reading the new yorker. Maybe i'll even read more books.

So this is off topic but because i've been reading lots of magazines and today mcsweeney's i have decided to start a new segment called "things that i kind of really love." Perhaps this will be followed with "things that should die" on days when the spirit so moves me. so here it is in it's full glory

THING I KIND OF REALLY LOVE w/o 4/29/07
Spring - i really had no idea to invigorating glory of spring. purple, white and pink trees blooming everywhere! tulips! daffodils! like for reals! I'm not sure if spring is objectively as awesome as i think it is or if it's just that i've been cooped up for 6 months (what feels like 8 bagillion years) in the never ending midwestern winter. Whatever it may be i suggest you go outside, stare at the buds popping out from the tree outside of your house and appreccccccceate.

taking a day to organize your music/add labels/make playlists - there is nothing more cathartic than taking a few hours to compile the perfect "unrequited love mix." i mean really sometimes you feel sad and you want a soundtrack to your life to reflect these things. thus i recommend taking a few hours this weekend to create the soundtrack to your life.

Feist - along this same note i discovered some really good music while cleaning out my itunes. liek feist. she is totes awesome. you know how when you listen to some of the indie pop music out there right now there is always that girl with the sirenesque voice singing in teh background who has no name because a true artist takes no credit for their art? she is that girl. Might i recommend the "monarch" album if you are feeling a little down, and the newer album if you feel poppy.

farmer's markets - i usually criticize people who go to farmer's markets because it seems liek something a majority of people do just to be like "oh i went to the farmer's market" like that somehow makes them epicurean or takes them up a notch in the intellectual scale. No, you are still stupid even if you buy organic vegetables! But now i live in a small town about a block from the local farmer's market, and about an hour from many many farms so this shit is really fresh. And the people who go are real locals, not transposed city folks. And it is very unpretentious. last week i bought a sugar free raspberry muffin, sugar free apple butter and some apples. tomorrow i'm going to wake up early, take my reusable grocery bag and walk that long block to buy buy spring mixed baby greens and asparagus, which the foodnetwork tells me is in season.

Ina Gartner aka The barefoot contessa - what a charming, lovely woman, alwyas trying to please that insatiable jeffrey by tempting his pallet. I love this woman. I don't necessarily want to cook her food but i want to go to a dinner party that she throws. And let me tell you, this woman is the definition of hag. All of her friends are faggggulous gay men who do the tablescapes for her social events. as she would say "who doesn't love that?" Ina is like the mother i never had. She has no self control when it comes to eating things that are clealry bad for you, very un-my mother. Also she makes that horrid paula deen look like the white trash that she is.

charmin moist wipes - I have tried other brands and these are by far the best. As with all charmin products, you pay for what you get. And if you've never tries a moist wipe and you are totally grossed out that we are even having this conversation, like serioulsy TMI! i suggest you run out to your local target and make that purchase. Try it and tell me it's not the one thing that's been missing in your life.

leave comments (which i know you won't but i say it anyway) with things that you love

EDIT

pictures from previous entry on mini dress added and fixed

my life as a townie

well today i woke up with a new sense of life or rebirth or something. i'm not sure but i felt liek doign something with my day. I decided to be a townie and do thigns like

- go to the farmer's market
- sit in a cafe and blog (mainly because i havent' done so in a whiel because my internet at hoem is really shitty and keeps kicking us off every 5 minutes which makes uploading pics a bitch)
- taking pictures of flowers in bloom and shit like that

so i woke up and took a gander into my closet. I have too much clothes...
i contemplated wearing my new dress that i'm going to wear with a belt. trust me it looks better in person. but then i remembered that it's rainy outside so i opted for some skinny jeans and rain boots.
dubbs dubbs look at my cool new red patent leather flats i will be sporting come real spring. All the boys keep making fun of me saying things like "so did you get those on your way to see the wizard." and things like that. Little do they know that i went as dorothy for halloween once adn i had shoes liek these only my mom spent all night gluing glitter on them. they were awesome.
i walked outside to see NATURE IN BLOOM!! Flowers in birth and stuff. it is quite amazing this whole spring thing. We never see it in LA because when things die we just replant them. but believe me when i say, there is nothing like seasons. There is also nothing like living in 80 degree weather everyday.
i was very excited about buying some fruit at teh farmer's market since i usually never wake up early enough to go
um...apparenlty teh farmer's market doesn't reopen until next week. mother fucker. perhaps i will go tomorrow when i'ts supposed to be open. things that are important, knowing when things are opened and closed
i was kind of peeve but nothing was going to stop me from getting a steamed bun at my local "asian" bakery. I use teh term asian very losely as this is ann arbor

nature!!!!
a dreary april day in Annie
eastern accents!! a journy to the orient!! doesn't it just make you feel liek you are sitting in a tea garden in japan. Only japan is full of white people and there are no flowers just brick walls. totes authentic
so a curry beef bun, some bi bim bop sauce, coffee, and free wifi. this truly is the life of a townie.
3 posts later it's late and i have to get back to go to work. thus ends my day as a townie. it was good times and quite relaxing.

Chicago

Soo this is late but 2 weeks ago maybe 3 now, i went to chicago. what a truly fabulous town. True story! It was like New York (well what i imagine of new york since i have yet to go) and San Francisco combined!! No mean people, no hills, no chinese. god it was so awesome. I stayed with Orges who fed me and gave me drink and rubbed my feet when they cramped up due to my leg edema...I had not 1 but 2 breakdowns during shopping because it was just too much. eeemagine! shopping causing mental and physical overload! eeeeemagine!!

My first stop was the flagship macy's. there are only 3 in the fucking world so when you have an opportunity to see one you go. Now i consider myself a seasoned shopper and very little impresses me but this...this was just...ok so here was one side of the macy's

here was another. it was so grand that i started to have heart palpitations. I tried to find teh bathin suit section and then i tried to look at jeans and then finally i hit the shoe section and i wa slike..."I can't do this!!!" and i walked out. too much. Oh wiat i just remembered i actually bought a bikini. So typical of me in the midst of my panic to still be able to try on clothing and make purchases. it's super cute and i look pretty good in it to, if i don't say so myself. Although apparently my boobs have shrunk which is a sad sad thing.
thank god Orges came and picked me up with a welcoming "hey baby!"
then we made our way to the modern art museum because we are like, cultured and shit. Before making it there we stopped at the American Girl Place!! ahhhh josefina here i come!!! The san Francisco show room is waaaaay better. here I am, an american girl!
the sears tower. shit really is tall here.

So orges and I went to the Modern Art Museum and saw this exhibit by this guy, i can't remember his name, but it was really good. He did stuff like have a carpet on a wall that you could touch and mold to show the fragility of art. But then he also had one room that was just carpet on the floor to show that art is very contextual and if you do the same thing in a different context it's no longer considered art and why is that? i mean it wasn't that deep but we made it that deep. I swear our convo would have been a scene from a movie about the best first date ever. they guy also had this exhibit which was the whole entrance of the museum covered in foam covered in foil And then you as the visiter/viewer/artist could participate and write, carve, whatever you want on the wall to show how art is constantly changing!! i know!! So anyways we didn't write anything because we preferred to be just viewers .

see this is orges...viewingpeople wrote very emo things like this. "i wish i was as invisible as you make me feel." Deep, not!
to things like this. "i'm too short to write something up there" to whcih someone responded "i feel your pain." I felt it too.
and then there was apparently a big hilary duff fan cuz these pink papers were everywhere. ironic much! And yet trying a little too hard to be ironic thus losing it's irony thus becoming ultimately IRONIC!!
Then we went to the top of the hancock tower for martinis and deep convo about nothing and everything. Then i was drunk and wanted to take a picture in front of a bar outside of orges's house called teh "tin lizzy." get it, get it!! the Tin Lizzy!! Too bad it was too dark to actually see the sign. look real close
So there was a jewler right next to the tin lizzy and in the darkness i thought i saw "stevie nicks jewlers." This seemed plausible and quite probably that you'd have teh stevie nicks jewler right next to the tin lizzy bar. So i got very excited. Again look really hard you can see me swinging drunkenly in front of stevie nicks jewler!!
in the daylight i realized it was in fact Steve Quick jewler. soooo not as cool.
so then i did some more shopping on Michigan ave, note the fog covering the top of what must be a giant building
the weather was totally cray cray. i'm talking like 40 mile an hour winds with rain AND ice. it was all coming at you horizontally instead of falling vertically and it hurts. my face had red spots after. I hit up the nordstrom and the bloomies and many other stores but then my legs gave out and orges had to rub my cramped up feet. I think that wearing heels is fucking up my feet which makes me kidn of sad. Liek what if i have to start wearing orthopedic shoes because my feet are all cramped?????

Orges playing guitar hero at best buy
me and teh city scape...and the world's biggest faching. vagina power!! Also known as teh building the little girl climbs down in "adventures in babysitting."
the married with children fountain! only turned off because otherwise the water would freeze
me and teh world's most giant faching. I am acting out being teh pilot of my own pussy. Ivan, Cathy, you know the motion i'm making. This takes the term "gaping" to a whole knew level.
orges doing very dirty things with the world's most giant faching
somethign called "the bean." it's a big silver ball and when you look at it you can see the whole city scape from it, or something. basically it looked like the flight of the navigator space ship in the middle of a chicago park. I wondered if this was where Elsa Peretti got her inspiration for the Tiffany Bean of if the bean got it's inspiration from Tiffany's. I shall wiki...apparenlty it has nothing to do with tiffany's or elsa peretti
our reflection from "the bean"
my minds eye, also known as my inner faching
so all in all chicago was very good times. Good people, good food, good city. i love it and cant' wait to go back. and i leave you with this. A lesser known fact about chicago, they love puns.

the weiners circle, a hot dog/ burger stand. get it!! get it!! it's like a PUN!!
my favorite pun of all though, tie me up noodles. Apparenlty they made a mistake and meant to call it "thai me up noodles" which would have been much more punny. Plus the menu on the inside said "thai me up" so clearly they were having identity issues.