islanded in a stream of stars

I'm so so sorry about being tardy in responding to comments. I've got both an exam and a presentation both this week and the week after, and I'm going home next Thursday with Lillian so I'm trying to get everything ready in advance.

I've been trying to cobble together an older women and medication management website as a final project due a month from now. It's the most glamorous subject matter, but I hope it's comprehensible or at least readable. I've got about 75-80% of the content up now. I swear if I stare at it much longer I'm going to down the bottle of Martinelli's sparkling apple cider I have on reserve for emergencies.

It seems that the plumbing in the apartment goes haywire before I have a counselor training workshop to run. Last month our only toilet...well, on second thought, this is too gross to discuss in polite society. Let's just say it was a shitty morning. Earlier in the week we had no hot water in the showers, but on the bright side we conserved water.

The kitchen sink resembled something out of a horror movie yesterday and today, but I think I now worship the emergency plumber who came this evening. We had to periodically bail out the water and stuff from the sewer and the pipes that would bubble up when the tenants in the apartment above ours would turn on their dishwasher. On the bright side, lilbabiangel888 was kind enough to get us sushi for dinner as the kitchen was a mess. Lysol may be my Xanax; I'm starting to see why my old roommate Rose would obsessively clean things when she was stressed. You feel instant gratification as you see and realize that you've theoretically killed off 99.9% of bacteria and viruses on various high-use surfaces. That, and I suspect that breathing in the chemicals kills off some of your brain cells in the process.

Many happy returns to gandydancer and storybox! I hope you had wonderful birthdays.

Dear X: Semi-feeling me up in front of your mother, even in the guise of a friendly hug, is just awkward. Even if you're slightly drunk. It's especially awkward when we share the same grandmother. But you're my cousin and ultimately one of the most decent guys I know my age, so I won't snap at you this time.

So, within the past week:

I got Kim Cattrall's autograph while passing by some random restaurant in Rome. She's absolutely stunning in person - maybe even more so than the brief glimpses I've seen of her on screen.

The AARP apparently will offer me a complimentary travel kit should I join today...at the ripe old age of 20. Do my web browsing patterns really mirror that of a baby boomer that much? This must be a sign that I should get off my sorry butt and get ready to apply for my gerontology grad program this fall.

Morgan Freeman practically fell on top of my dad yesterday night as we were leaving the theater where we had just seen him perform in the Country Girl. He was quite the gent about it, being very apologetic while being crushed by a horde of autograph seekers right outside the stage door. I also caught a glimpse of Matthew Broderick, who was in the audience that night. I swear these things never happen to me when I'm in LA, although meeting the cast of Finishing the Game last November at the premiere was one of the coolest experiences in my life so far.

It is crazy how much less expensive things seem, even in New York, after Italy. I've heard more French spoken on the street and in the stores these past few days than I did the entire time I was in Europe.

Whenever I finish my two news stories (hahaha, as if I ever turn anything in before deadline) I have a lot to still write about Italy (I know, I know, that's what I always say). I guess I could sum it up as follows:

It was overcast with the vague sense of dampness at odds with the electric bustle of a big city at night. Arriving in New York's JFK last night was, in some ways, remarkably similar to my arrival in Italy at Milano's Malpensa airport.

As much as I have learned of life from the stories people have shared with me, some things really must be experienced to be understood beyond an intellectual level. I won't remember every church and fresco I saw, every note of each piece performed at the concerts I attended or even every lick of gelato I tasted. But what will stay with me is the impact atoms of personalities colliding into each other in transit, with even the relative brevity of contact subtly or significantly altering the trajectory of each party in the encounter.

I've gained enough confidence to at least make some effort to haggle with street vendors. I can navigate subway system in a language I don't know. I've learned that falafel and döner kebab stands are the best deal the other side of the Atlantic. I now know what it's like to be on a train for 13 hours (I spent ~77 hours in total on trains) and hope to never repeat the experience. I've felt the spine-tingling experience of the otherworldly when entering the darkened majesty of cathedrals that have laid witness to thousands like me passing through. I've scrubbed off the dust and dirt of centuries settle on my skin after wandering from one side of Rome to the other.

I don't know if I'll ever return, but I've brought back enough to last me for what I hope to be a lifetime's worth of value. But at the same time, I won't forget what I left behind.

No thanks to the moron(s) who pulled the fire alarms in my apartment building at 2:17 this morning, I've stayed up for more than 24 hours. Scarily enough, this is the first time my brain was still just functional enough to be aware of this fact.

Lessons learned:
1. Taking an extension can end up causing a lot more pain than it's worth.
2. Procrastinating by actually writing papers due this coming week is still procrastination.
3. The most surprising things will keep you going, push comes to shove.
4. Psych textbooks don't come close to describing the reality of actually doing research - you don't realize how deadly dull it is to recruit participants for long surveys. Sirens in the background and planes flying overhead on the therapy tapes are just as likely to elicit *headdesk* behavior as are interrater reliability tests.

I think I'm going to crash on the couch now before my brain becomes too scrambled. It's going to be a long two weeks before finals come around...

It's quite possible I'm one of the few people who *isn't* picking up the last Harry Potter book. Ah, the joys of catching a morning flight to New York tomorrow! Family, friends and museums - what more could one ask for? It's a pity I won't be joining my "other" family with the ever amazing eyepiece_simile in Cape Cod this year, but we can always see about next year.

So, in the mail yesterday I picked up the most peculiar postcard, which featured San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts (which is roughly an hour's drive away).

"I want to buy your house. I am not an agent. Call me."

Well, you have to give this mysterious sender named Jason props for being to the point.

Today's equally unexpected postcard was of the Kremlin, straight from Moscow. Martina, a high school friend who's also at USC, sent it to me. It's been nice reconnecting with old friends lately - within the past week, Sophia and I checked out the Qwik-E-Mart recreation and walked around Shoreline, and I had lunch with PP (she who teaches choir and intro) yesterday when we ran into the class valedictorian and her mother. This afternoon I met up with Alison, whom I haven't seen since 5th grade though we don't live that far from each other. I hate borrowing clichés, but the two and a half hours we talked made up for those nine years apart. And as weird as it sounds, I actually like the meetings over at my boss's house - there's something surprisingly cozy about the start up environment when you've got three people jammed in a home office trying to figure out what went wrong again when rerecording the newest "how to" site voiceover.

But not all of these encounters have been that pleasant, although the one I'm thinking of is actually imaginary. I had a philosophical sort of nightmare straight out of Sartre's Huis Clos (No Exit) or the Prisoner episode "A, B and C" that involved me at a party in someone's rather bourgeois living room where I was trapped presumably for all eternity as my ex kept hounding me about why we broke up. I've been receiving some awkward messages lately from him; he really is a great guy, but all I want is for him to find someone else who'll really make him happy and appreciate him for who he is. The way things are now, the current extremes of awkwardness makes the prospect of being locked up with Inès or Number 2 an absolute picnic by comparison.

On a not-so-related note, I've been reading this fascinating and equally humorous book by Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, which focuses on the sources of our regular dissatisfactions than the title would suggest. His commentary about how insistent we are about how unique our perspectives and feelings are, leading us to mistakenly disregard the feelings of others when put in a particular situation as a poor predictor of our own when placed in the same scenario, really struck me. A wise and generous man once told me that I'd come to enjoy John Barry's chamber orchestra album the Beyondness of Things over Eternal Echoes. I found this remark rather strange at the time - considering we came from such different backgrounds, it seemed rather unlikely that we'd eventually come to have the same view. And yet as I've been reorganizing my soundtrack collection to accomodate some newer material and listening to works I haven't heard for some time, I realize how right he was. If the Beyondness of Things is a nostalgic view of life as we'd like to remember it, highlights of breahtaking and sometimes heart-wrenching majesty, Eternal Echoes recognizes the quiet beauty in our everyday lives. It takes a certain degree of maturity to appreciate the more ponderous tonal colors of Eternal Echoes, a deceptively sedate musical retelling of the moments that show us for what we are when we're in our element.

I don't remember what the point of that story was, but I do remember thinking that my own memory problems seemed to corroborate with the points Gilbert was making, which might explain why I'm willing to trust his argument so much.

( And last but not least, a totally unrelated LolCat meme )

Lesson of the day: rat (mouse?) blood is virtually impossible to wash out after it's been baked on brick for several hours in direct Californian sunlight. On the bright side, we at least have a neighborhood rodent catcher with friendly intentions, if not the most welcome.

In a house that has almost twice as many printers as it does people, only one seems to work on a consistent basis. And of course, the printer we thought we had fixed managed to break down just as I was in the middle of printing something out for a meeting with my boss. For mysterious and unknown reasons, I seem to have internet access for 15 minutes max on my laptop before it randomly dies on me. Somehow technology and I are having an extremely inconvenient breakdown in communication, so I apologize if I'm being really slow in responding to people. Unfortunately it means that I'm kind of behind on work, which is really not so great.

This weekend I'm off to Moraga for the <a href="http://www.monsterdlp.com>Monster Diversity Leadership conference</a>. Come to think of it, it's a little ominous to head to a summit that has the word monster in it, but it looks like it should be interesting. The Navy will be there as a corporate sponsor; hopefully whoever's representing them won't remember that really awkward incident last year when they tried recruiting me. Awkward as in I was laughing so hard from nervousness that I ran the opposite direction from the uniformed officer and hid in the girls' bathroom until he went away. My valor in the face of the unknown is absolutely astounding. 6 AM wakeup call tomorrow. I'm not sure if I'd entirely mind someone hitting me over the head with a frying pan to really make sure I'm awake, but I have a feeling I'd regret it later.

Our neighbors one house down the road had valet parking for their party this evening. That's right, complimentary valet parking with two valets parking at least 12 cars on a road that's easily at a 35 degree angle. Those throwing the party the only Muslims on the street, as far as I can tell; the husband is occasionally mentioned in Business Week and prefers to drive the candy apple red Ferrari he bought eight years ago, and the wife has been faithfully jogging 4 miles a day ever since I was born. Sometimes they take in their nephew, but no one actually knows what the boy looks like or why he only stays for three weeks at a time at seemingly arbitrary moments throughout the year.

Just one house up the road, my special ed teacher neighbor is trying to figure out how to juggle attending her veteran son's trial for the armed robbery of prescription painkillers (which I've angsted enough over at unnecessary length, it seems to me) and babysitting her schoolteacher daughter's two-year-old son. The scientist husband has been spending more time on the golf course with his buddies lately, but the schoolteacher daughter's twin brother has come home for the summer, finding work at the same lab where his father is found during the weekdays.

Across the street is the Hispanic architect and his family who actually grows and raises their own food. The chicken coops were built so far up the hill that it looks like they plop down like wingless pigs to the feed bins that rest 20 feet away from their gas grill barbeque. There used to be turkeys, but they disappeared three Thanksgivings ago. The rooster stopped crowing around that time after my mother kept calling to complain about the unwanted 5 AM wakeup call. They (the humans, not the animals) live in a house that has become a landmark when giving directions due to the off-white paint job with firehouse engine red trim. If you have ever visited me at home, you'll know the house to which I'm referring.

And then there's me and my family, and I am too close to these subjects to know how to sketch them in pat phrases.

On an unrelated note, this post with my attempts at advice for high schol grads was apparently my 850th. I wonder how long it will be until I reach 1,000.

When allergy medication tells you not to operate heavy machinery while under the effects of the drug, food processors do indeed count as heavy machinery. Just because it's a small Cusinart doesn't mean that you can't potentially cause a lot of damage!

Somehow, eyepiece_simile is still my friend (I think? I hope!) after nearly destroying her kitchen today for our joint family Young Frankenstein dinner party. I swear, I'm normally not such a zombie-esque butterfingers.

I mix metaphors the way I do pesto sauce - in incomplete and uneven chunks. I should probably get some sleep before I wreck further linguistic (is this an adjective that can also describe linguine?) havoc.

Dear floormates,

Next time you start dry humping shirtless in the hallway, I will seriously consider 'accidentally' stepping on you if you are blocking the entrance to the bathroom again.

Not so much love,

Me



My mother claims that because I'm asexual I shouldn't mind if people are getting it on around me. I do think it's reasonable to be annoyed by the inconvenience factor if those who are doing it are blocking access to something vital like your bed, and it's many more kinds of awkward if they're being rather noisy and oblivious to the rest of the world. And this case, I really wanted to wash up before all of the water in our building is cut off for the night for maintenance work. Enough said.

I'm not quite sure why, but I find it incredibly funny that I have a test in ... creativity.  I actually started laughing when reading my notes on different theories, which probably is making my roommate glad that she gets to move out in a few months so she doesn't have to live with a wacko anymore.

It feels rather absurd that the majority of our grade is based on how well we do on the tests for this class.  Our actual creative projects are only 5 percent of our final grade.  It's not exactly rocket science difficult, but still.

Then again, you can't really complain about a class where you play with clay for an hour...

I've been walking to and from psychology building pretty much every day since the end of August at least once a day. And yet today - OK, technically yesterday now - I noticed the gigantic palm tree in front of the main entrance for the first time. I'd like to think that I've had a vague awareness of this tree's existence for some time, but only now have I really acknowledged this tree's presence.

I'm really intrigued by weird unconscious phenomena. Why did it take me so long to notice the palm tree, and what was it that finally made me notice it? I seriously doubt I was primed by anything that I had seen/read/heard, but who knows. To quote from annasmiles, ''I like my major so much if it were a guy I would make out with it.''  Erm, well, metaphorically.

I'm trying really, really hard not to wake up my roommate from laughing too hard at what I'm listening to. I can't think of any composer besides Elmer Bernstein who could make a storeroom inventory list so entertaining, except maybe Henry Mancini. I'm seriously surprised that none of the singers cracked up in recording this.  I also have a bad habit of laughing during performances/rehearsals of any sort; I probably ruined a lot of takes on Birnkrant 616 and bell choir practices and the 24 hour plays...and now I should shut up so that I can wake up on time for my 8 AM statistics lab.  If morning were a person I'd strangle it.