November 2011
1 post
September 2011
2 posts
Afternoon
Time seems like a roll of toilet paper nowadays: the more you have, the more you feel like you can squander. There’s always some shit you have to deal with, but its always a matter of how you can get it done with what you’ve got. But time is the enemy right now: the illusion of extra rolls of toilet paper in the cabinet, or an over-abundance of that terrible and unusable Cottonelle...
Noon
Wet clothes in the dryer; four quarters in the machine. The ceremony begins!
“Soon!” I tell myself, “Soon, you will begin the rest of your life! The scents of crotch rot and armpit stains are yesterday’s news! The future is filled with warm socks and clean underwear! Everything will smell like Tide with a touch of Downy! Soon, the cycle will end!”
Watch til it...
August 2011
4 posts
Morning
When you graduate, you’ve got this list of amazing stuff that you expect to do: travel the world, go on a cruise, hike Mt. Whitney —
“22 miles round trip? That’s nothin’. I’m gonna do that shit in a day.”
Today, I’m having breakfast with my dad.
…
In San Francisco, you can’t ever really tell if it’s early morning or...
TL;DR
Post-grad life is a weird limbo.
You’re frantically assembling fragments of a 10-page research paper during finals week of your last quarter in academia, then suddenly, you’re in your pajamas trying to think of clever YouTube video comments. You’d watch some random video blog, slide back in your chair and stroke your chin, and then after a long while, you finally think to...
To Geoff and Marissa
There’s something that people always say about romance novels: from the beginning, you always know who ends up with who — so why bother reading? We even joked about it in a Jane Austen Seminar class because, let’s face it, its the premise of just about every one of her novels. But there’s a reason why we’re so enthralled by these romances, why we keep reading on,...
This show is super hilarious. Does anybody wonder how the show’s producers find these crazy couponers? Its probably a phone call that sounds a lot like this:
Random Safeway Employee: SOME LADY JUST WALKED INTO THE STORE AND BOUGHT 400 BOXES OF COCOA PUFFS — THE COUPONS BROUGHT THE TOTAL PRICE DOWN TO TWENTY CENTS. WTF JUST HAPPENED.
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
5 posts
“Every watch has got a story. Everybody’s got a timepiece and a piece of...”
– Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange
via National Geographic
In a scene no human could have witnessed, an apocalyptic agglommeration of lightning bolts illuminates an ash cloud above Chile’s Puyehue volcano (map) on Sunday.
The minutes-long exposure shows individual bolts as if they’d all occurred at the same moment and, due to the Earth’s rotation, renders stars (top picture, left) as streaks.
May 2011
3 posts
If you’ve ever seen No Strings Attached, you’ll remember that awesome “Period Mix” that Adam made for Emma. Since I live by myself, I usually “do my business” with the bathroom door open, and I thought to myself: Why not have a playlist of music for taking a dump? A “Shit List,” if you will — to soothe my burning anus… and just sort of...
“A beautiful woman with a Biggie. Nothing else — just a Biggie. She sat...”
– Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy’s
April 2011
3 posts
LA: Day 5
One last place to visit during my final day in L.A.: the highly-acclaimed Umami Burger. GQ’s Burger of the Year mysteriously contains the “Fifth Taste”, a Japanese umami flavor that supposedly doesn’t quite fall into the standard categories of salty, sweet, sour, or bitter.
The titular Umami Burger, topped with a housemade ketchup special sauce and fried cheese.
The...
LA: Day 4
More free museums! More annoying crowds of kids, tourists, and locals! More great eats!
First off:
Griffith Observatory. Closed for renovation in 2002, doors re-opened in 2006 after $93 million worth of expansions and improvements. Originally the philanthropic project of a notorious industrialist, it still exists as a wonderful center for science as well as a hub for astronomical events for...
LA: Day 3
If you’re in the L.A. area, you’ve probably driven down the 405 and seen this weird building up in the Santa Monica mountains. This was because some architect thought it would be an awesome idea to have an art gallery there:
The Getty. Nothing to fear, though, because the construction of the museum simultaneously coincided with the planting of California Oak Trees along the...
March 2011
2 posts
LA: Day 2
With rainstorms looming on the forecast, we decided that this would be the best day for whale watching. Lucky for us, we found a pretty sweet deal on Travelzoo: $15 Tuesdays! So around 10ish in the morning, we drove about 60 miles south of L.A. to Dana Point Harbor in Orange County.
It was a day of awesome sights:
From the drive down…
… to the great view at Dana Point...
LA: Day 1
So, the drive down was hell. The Grapevine was closed off due to snow, and the detour to 58E was closed as well — we had to swing all the way to the west and get onto 101S, which was a huge pain. In all, it took me and my sister a horrendous 14 hours to finally get down to L.A., arriving at 3am in the morning.
Monday afternoon, we pulled our asses out of bed for some grub at Pink’s...
February 2011
4 posts
Freefall
Here’s a quick draft I wrote for an upcoming essay contest on modern love. Thanks to Mara for the link!
I went tandem skydiving a long time ago with some buddies. Being a huge control freak, the thought of jumping out of a plane at 18,000 feet above ground scared the crap out of me, but at the same time, there was something utterly appealing about it. The way you rescind control —...
Tamales
Two weeks ago, a couple of eight year-olds came up to my doorstep and asked me if I wanted to buy some tamales — a fundraiser for their school, $20 for twelve of them. They hadn’t sold any yet, and personally, I just couldn’t say no. So I give them the cash, and they write my name down on their blank order notices.
As soon as they left, I realized that the only info they had...
January 2011
3 posts
Fatherly Advice
While watching “A Christmas Story” with my Dad:
Dad: So, what would you do if you were stuck to a pole like that?
Me: Not sure… I’d need some hot water, right?
Dad: Yeah, but where are you gonna find it?
Me: I dunno… breathe really hard? Try to use your warm breath?
Dad: Pee. You can use your pee.
“Compelling moments call forth the game’s magic in the suspension of the...”
– via Stephen Seligman’s “The Sensibility of Baseball” in Contemporary Psychoanalysis
December 2010
7 posts
Wise words
itmustbevanna:
“ We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.” –John Waters
“I look up at the sky, wondering if I’ll catch a glimpse of kindness there,...”
– Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
November 2010
14 posts
“A-Long doesn’t know what “AIDS” is, he only knows that his playmates now will...”
– Check out the full story @ chinaSMACK
“Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and...”
– Mark Kingwell, via The New Yorker’s review of The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination
4 tags
Watch“Let’s all take a moment and remember the veterans that have shaped our lives today. Veterans like Edgar Renteria, Juan Uribe, Aubrey Huff, and Pat Burrell. Without veterans like these fine gentlemen, the world would be a much worse place.”
WatchIf absolute pitch exists, then is there such a thing as… perfect palate?
opera divertimento
Yesterday’s win was the final act of the opera. Our heroes were victorious at long last, after seven months of tension and madness, as they finally overcame a legacy of tragedy that had plagued the city until last night. It was a season of faith’s perfection, and the players looked at each other with elation as they rushed the field: they were the scribes of their own marvelous...
from torture to rapture
It isn’t just this moment itself, its the way the heart-wrenching miseries of the past were instantly and finally absolved.
After the Giants won the NLCS against the Phillies, my brother and I talked about how it was like to grow up as Giants fans. We went through all the years - 1989, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2003 - and remembered all of the anger and frustration we went through; our...
Watch“I’m feelin’ like I want to rage. Right. Now.”
October 2010
3 posts
