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.

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.

Stephen and Jerri: my flight from Detroit to Phoenix

oh man so I am BACK IN LA!!! i tell you i have never been so excited to come back to california. The winter has been too long! i packed the most ridiculous things like mini skirts and flip flops. I guess the thought of having to wait another 4 months to wear flip flops was too much for me. and i don't even like wearing flip flops!! i hate wearing flip flops to be exact! but i don't care! I have not seen my feet in 5 months. these things change you. Anyways I had teh stomach flu for the past 2 days which was nothing but good times. Nothing like being incapacitated when you have to write a 20 page paper. Well so now I am in LA writing said 20 page paper, hoping i can finish by noon so i can go to the mall with Cathy and Bobby. I haven't been to the mall in 2 months since the last time i came to LA. Oh no wait it's only been liek a 1 month and a half. ha! i tell you it feels like years.

So anyways we had 45 mph winds last night leaving detroit which made for a really interesting take off. But luckily i had this real oversharer sitting next to me so she talked me past my usual turbulance induced panic attack. She was this old white youth minister and she told me about how she used to get panic attacks but she started takin paxil and now everyday is the best day ever. I was like "wow ok, thanks" subtext "so you're crazy?? cool" no no jkjk i have sympathy for these types of things. hello i'm a psychologist! And normally i'd be really against anti depressants being of the whole Cognitive Behavioral Therapy school of thought but she made it seem so appealing. that was until 2 hours later when she was still talking my head off about working with "ghetto children" and "black peopel and latinos" and telling me all thse typical stereotypes about them and how "they just don't want to work hard because workinf hard is looked down on in their culture." Thank you Ogbu, but i believe your theory was debunked a few years back. boo ya! i wanted to be like "lady i have a paper to write, so can you please stop talking." Because seriously this woman could not read social cues. So then i started reading adn she started wtching "everybody hates raymond" on her dvd player which she did not know how to use. hate that show. So she didn't plug in her headaphones but she had them on so the sound was all loud and it's one of those moments where you can't be liek "hey Jerri, you forgot to plug in the spekaers like this." just awkward all around. At least she didnt' try to convert me.

So i read some articles but then got really tired. I figured it was all teh vomitting and the fact that all i had eaten over teh past 2 days were 4 saltine crackers. when i woke up the nice old man next to me started talking to me. Ulike jerry HE was super cool. His name was Stephen and he was 89. 89!! he had served in WWII and was telling me all about being stationed in australia on a secret mission with macarthur's troops for 44 months and how he feels bad for all the kids in Iraq cuz they have to carry all those heavy supplies through the desert for a war that is wrong, which i'm sure peeved Jerri since she seemed to be a staunch republican and very pro war. But imagine, this 89 year old man who was anti the war. I figured he'd learned alot in life and had concluded "war, what is it good for? absolutely nothing." so then I asked him why he was flying to phoenix because something told me i could learn from this old man how to live a happy life. he had worked in paper printing and his grand son was a nascar racer. He was on his way to phoenix because a woman he had known when he ws 18 and she was 14 had found him on the internet. yes, old people google! I was like "wait so how are you on the internet?" thinking to myself, wow if this man has a blog i would totes read it! But alas he doesn't, he's just in the yellow pages. So this woman about a year ago got in contact with him and was like "my friend and i were googling all the people we grew up with and you are one of the only one's left alive! come to phoenix to visit me!" to which stephen responded "um i haven't seen you in 75 years. you're not trying ot get a marriage out of me are you?" to which she responded "oh no no no i already buried 2 husbands. i dont' want to go through that again. i just want a friend. it's hard with all this modern technology and things are so different. I just want someone from my era who understands what it's liek to be me." amen! isnt' that deep! Anyways so she was this hella cool woman who had gotten married young. Her husband died of leukemia at 45 and she moved to alaska to get away from it all. She worked on the pipeline there (oil i assume) and then met her second husband 4 years later, some type of engineer. They married and moved to idaho or iowa, one of the "i" states. And then he died a few years back and she googled Stephen and since then he has been visiting her a few times a year. And what they do is she likes to take road trips and drive from her summer fall home in the "i" state to her winter home in Arizona so right now they were gonna drive back to her summer home. And i was like "dude is she ok to drive?" and he said "oh yes yes she's a very good driver. she has a lead foot!" Anyways i don't knwo what i was supposed to learn from this man but it seemed something like carpe diem esque. Like i need to enjoy my life because it will be long and someday i will have many stories to tell of the days before the internet. Anyways it was all a very moving experience and i realized that this was way more interesting than writing a paper.

So now i'm home and i'm gonna go do my work but i thought i'd share.

the south is a wierd place

So i'm in the south carolina airport, mainly because i'm too cheap to ever get myself good travel itineraries (woo for travelling across the country only to backtrack!! woo!). I really hate long flights. All the flights i've been on the last year have had hella turbulance and i wonder, has it always been this turbulant and i just didn't know or is this some type of global warming thing? anyways i usually have panic attacks and start hyperventilating into my vomit bag and whatever nice old lady happens to be sitting next to me tries not to look too concerned and the stuartess usually asks me if i'm ok when in a very breathless stressed tone i say "can i please have some water." very scary indeed. Anyways a few things of note

1. the food court has rocking chairs instead of benches all lined along the people mover. White, rocking chair, and old white people sitting in them staring at...the food court. i was on the peopel mover texting when i looked up and was like..."what the fuck?" I wish my camera battery were not dead so i could show you.

2. There was a big fat white man checking into the us airways counter and he had this gigantic plastic case, like 4 feet long. then i noticed that the check in lady was making some calls and looking at some papers that he had given her. I looked at a sign in front of him that read "please declare all firearms." I had never noticed that sign before. I thought the rules was NO FIREARMS, not declare firearms. Before this sign what did people do? did they just not declare their firearms?? Anyways i put two and two together and realized that this man was "declaring his fire arms," a gigantic shot gun. I know it was a shot gun cuz there was a picture on the box. I was like...please sweet baby jesus, don't let this big fat white man who is declaring a shot gun be getting on my plane. About an hour into my flight he brushed past me to go to the bathroom. leave your guns at home people!

3. I am sitting in front of a restaurant in the terminal called "phillips crab: pastuerized crab meat, hand picked." what exactly is pasteurized crab meat? Can you hand pick pasteurized crab meat? it sounds to me liek they are saying that it's somehow fake, but hand picked fake crab meat? i'm not really sure

My one consolation is that this airport has free wi-fi! thank you! finally! guns and internet! woo! I texted cathy to tell her of my journies through the south and she responded

"A gun?! wtf. we must roadtrip there!"

agreed, agreed. Proving once again that my stereotypes of the south are warranted. It is a very strange place where people sit on rocking chairs, eat fatening foods, carry guns, and hate black people.

Detroit or bust

Liveblog from LAX!! Did you know that LAX enacted a new policy at some point in the past 2 months whereby you have to arrive at your flight 45 minutes before take off otherwise they will not let you on? 45 minutes! Did you know that there was hella traffic on the 405 this morning such that a trip that would normally take us 15 minutes, 30 minutes with traffic, took us 45 minutes? Did you know that consequently I arrived 43 minutes before takeoff? Did you know that THE JACKASS LADY AT THE NWA COUNTER WOULD NOT CHECK ME ONTO MY FLIGHT NOR WOULD SHE LOOK ME IN THE EYE!! I kept saying, “mam I have 40 minutes. I assure you I can make it.” And she said “no, mam you can’t.” Did you know that LAX was empty and I have now been sitting in front of the terminal where my 8:37 flight was set to take off. Did you know that it is now 8:00? Did you know that they are now giving away my seat to other standby people? Did you know that I have to wait here 3 more hours for the next flight to Detroit? Did you know that I am in the worst terminal ever because all they have is a starbucks and a jetway candy shop? Did you know that I hate my life sometimes?!? No, seriously how wretched is this. When I asked when this policy was enacted they said “oh a very very long time ago.” I call bullshit. I have been flying in and out of LAX for the past 7 years at a frequency of at least 5 times a year and NEVER have they had this policy. I hate you, northwest airlines. How booty is this. Not only do they not give you food on a 5 hour flight, but they also don’t show a movie. The hell! 5 hours?? Seriously I hate Midwestern airlines.

Oh some aZian dude with a Purdue t-shirt is pissed because he missed his flight too. Oh how sad he’s late for his meeting. He barely got here though (8:39), unlike me who was here 43 minutes before, 2 minutes too late apparently. Turns out he tried to do online check in but their system was down. Wow that sucks for him. Now he’s trying to weasel his way up the list of standby people because it’s not his fault but their fault that he is late. Oh hell to the no, mr aZian man! You will not take my spot on the standby flight. Wouldn’t it just be utterly wretched if I got on this flight and got put in the back of the plane and he got on too but was put in first class because he was lower on the standby list? That would happen to me. Will I ever fly first class?

So a few things I have decided. a) I don’t care how stupid I look I am buying an airplane neck pillow. In fact I bought one in Detroit and used it on the flight here and it was excellent. No shame. I slept like a lamb. My next thought was, “you know since I always get stuck at the airport for at least 2 hours I should buy one of those DVD players to entertain myself.” Do they have longer battery lives than laptops? I will look into it. LAX has no internet. God I hate it here sometimes.

11:41 AM PST

One word to describe my feelings. WRETCHED! Truly truly wretched. I’m still on standby only now for another flight. A flight at 12:30 which I am told is oversold and has like 10 people on standby. The next flight after this is at 5 something or other which is also sold out. Truly truly wretched. It’s not even like I can go home. I’m stuck here. And if I want a guaranteed seat on any flight for tomorrow I have to pay 50 bucks, which I’m say I can’t afford right now. But my point is that being stuck at an airport is not so horrible. What is horrible is being stuck at the airport alone. It means that every time you have to pee or get food or buy water or anything you have to put everything you have away. And then you put all of your stuff away, lug it all to the bathroom and then when you get back your seat is taken! And your electricity jack is taken! And you just want to cry.

6:39 PM EST

Ok so I got on the 12:50 flight, thank the lord. Only problem is that because of raining and some crazy el nino type west winds the pilot had to come on and tlel us that we were going to have some really intense turbulence. Turbulent indeed! The pilot kept coming on every 15 minutes during the first 3 hours to tell everyone “sit down! No excuses!” like yelling at us. That is very assuring. I thought I was going to die like 3 times and I started reciting the “our father” over and over again and the pilot ordered the stewardesses to sit down for the first 3 hours. What I’m saying is I was really scared. To top it off I am sitting next ot his rather large asian dude who is reading Japanese comics on his computer but was passed out snoring earlier and then spent 20 minutes in the bathroom during turbulence. Never have I wanted to be in Detroit so bad in my life.