Author: Pearl L

there was a recall on a part in jer’s car, so i took it in to the dealership this morning at 8am. they told me to come back in around 10:30 or so, so i spent the two or three hours wandering around mini-malls and looking for a place to sit down and read without drawing too much attention. I ended up at a great clips and figured, ‘oh what the hell, i need to get a trim anyway.’

an hour later, my hair was five inches shorter and layered.

I really liked my hair walking out the door. it’s nice to not have so much hair flopping about, getting tangled and whatnot.

then as the day went on, i began to realize just how short my hair really was. you do the pull your hair back to tie a rubberband around it thing and you kind of notice you’re not grabbing very much anymore. And later on in the evening, after i washed and blow dried my hair, i looked in the mirror, and… i looked like the last time i ever cut my hair this short — i was ten years old and after it i vowed never to cut my hair so short again. I had totally forgotten my very justified vow when i sleepily climbed into the barber’s chair and agreed to getting my done. damn!

I want a recall on my haircut. =(

from tuesday, april 6th.

it’s 3:55am and i can’t sleep. jer and i went to bed around 10pm last night, and i woke up at midnight when i felt a strange cooling sensation on my eye. as it happened, jer had slapped on a bunch of salon pas patches on his back and neck before going to bed, and i had inadvertantly rolled over and planted my face into one of them.

talk about a rude awakening. i was in the middle of one of my typically bizarre dreams, and i did not like leaving it unresolved. i ran out of bed to the bathroom to wash my eye out, and of course i’ve been awake ever since. i spent the past three hours yelling at a friend online for being stupid with a girl, burning backups of movies on my hd, and browsing through job sites. All in all, I’d rather be sleeping.

i’ve had a lot on my mind lately, but most of it has taken the form of fleeting thoughts rather than anything particularly deep. a short list:

– jessica simpson on the cover of US weekly talking about how her marriage comes first, over fame, over anything else. where’s the cover featuring Nick talking about his marriage coming first? why the double standard in values? why is it taken for granted that it’s okay for men to be sexually liberated and not the same for women because of so-called biology? marriage and monogamy have biological benefits for men AND women — women so they have someone to care for their children and men so they can be certain offspring is theirs. it’s not simply saying women who are sluts abandoned and get what they deserve or anything stupid like that and giving men a free pass to behave as badly as they want to. it’s insulting to women to be treated that poorly and insulting to men to believe they can’t be any better. true equality isn’t about blurring men and women’s needs into indistinguishable lumps; it’s recognizing the equal responsibility each has to their society and to the opposite sex when it comes to personal behavior.
– writing off porn as sex negative is counter productive. the problem with objectifying women is, like most other controversial acts, not about the act itself but the motivation behind the act. a society that objectifies its women on a consistent basis does an injustice to both the men and women who participate within it. it does an injustice to women because it teaches people in society to overlook the non-physical assets of a woman and the associated contributions to society she can make. it does an injustice to men in that it reduces them to their sexuality and sets an example that behaving in such a base manner is all that anyone expects of him. it also limits how he learns to interact with women in any meaningful context, and may also keep him from finding happiness with a mate.
– men and women, watch what messages you take from the media, because its best interests are not your own.

just found these whle looking through my files…

Thursday, February 12. 2:02pm

i’ve moved downstairs while waiting for the housekeeping folks to finish the room. i’m sitting at a table in front of the elevators, looking out the floor to ceiling glass windows out at the patio walk. the style of the walk is somewhat reminiscent of one that might surround a tuscan villa, done in shades of beige and red. palm trees and ferns with red flowers line the walkways. It’s a little bit of paradise…

It makes the contrast between the hotel grounds and the outside that much more stark. Everything here is designed and planned, every seed drop assigned and cultivated, while everything outside seems to follow a sort of natural law. There is no artifice in the seeming chaotic order outside, as there is here at the hotel grounds. It’s a different way of thinking and seeing, as reflected in the surrounding environment.

I think of American ghettoes in particular when i think of environment and patterns of thinking. Humans are creative animals, obeying a sort of natural law of creativity and chaos. How then, does a human being grow up in a place where there are bars on the window, streets organized by gridding, and no outlet for creative growth? Areas of New York may possess two of the above characteristics, but there is Central Park, there are museums, there is art, there is intellectual activity, there are communities formed that serve and are served by its citizens.

And then there is are places like South Central LA, which seem to be nothing but endless stretches of cement, barren and barring, built to be structures that constrict and contain rather than centers of discovery and humanity. The city feels like a cage of cement and bars, encircled and locked in by even larger structures of cement and gravel — freeways. And there is no greenery, there is no life that surrounds people or reminds them of the beauty of nature, beauty that they possess also within themselves. Perhaps all of this is a stretch, but I feel a lot of these a subtle subconscious ways in which we interact with our environments…

How ironic that in the long march of progress we are so easily able to lose sight of our basic humanity.

Tuesday, February 17. 8:02pm

days like today make me wish i had a mobile phone camera!! or at least my digital camera. *wince*

I had lunch at the McDonald’s in Colaba, Mumbai, today while i was browsing the street markets for goodies to bring back to the States. I try to sample the local McD’s wherever I travel because it’s interesting to see the regional variations introduced into this international brand. India’s McDonalds (of which there are very few) feature a Veg and Non-Veg menu, a sandwich called the Chicken Maharaja Mac, a Paneer Salsa Wrap, and the conspicuous absence of pictures of big juicy beef hamburgers. My filet-o-fish seemed to be made from not-so-fresh snapper, although everything else tasted about the same. The tartar sauce was the same, their ketchup had the same sweetness to it, and the fries were close enough (minus the beef tallow now, i’m sure). But the ad McD’s always puts on their trays as tray liners was the thing i found profoundly ironic. McDonald’s in America stress how delicious (rather than healthful) it is to eat their food. In stark contrast, the tray liners in India assert the importance of nutrition in a person’s diet (very true) and how McDonald’s food is a great source of proteins, carbohydrates, and essential fats, and is very good for you (!!).

the ironies:
– McDonald’s is HEALTHY??
– McDonald’s food is HEALTHIER and hence superior to the diet the average citizen is eating right now, and is worth paying twice as much for than what he eats now for a lesser quantity? Hasn’t the Indian diet been enough to sustain a subcontinent for oh, several thousand years? It needs *McDonald’s* to improve on it?!
– Or maybe i’m just biased by this article where a man who ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month ended up riddled with a host of serious health problems. Or from reading bits of Fast Food Nation.

It’s one thing to read about Nestle and other transnational corporations interfering with the nutrition and health of citizens of third world countries for the sake of their pocketbooks (Nestle+baby formula, condom manufacturers+African AIDS crisis, etc), but another to see the subtle, insidious influence of western corporations for oneself. I love America, but it’s depressing to think that these corporations can become the face of a nation whether or not we Americans support them and/or their policies. It’s understandable that if this is all you see, this is all you can hate.

They say you can tell a lot about a person based on how they organize their desk. Some people are very concerned with keeping the surfaces of their desk clean and tidy, preferring to push the messes into the drawers, hidden away from sight. Some are just the opposite, fastidiously trying to keep everything tucked into its right place inside drawers and cubbies, but are somehow fine with leaving piles of papers and miscellaneous crap on top. And of course there are also those who leave everything a mess and those who strive to be neat inside and out.

Can you guess which one I am? I think the answer is pretty easy — I am type number two. I can organize and file the hell out of important (as well as useless) documents and items and easily access them whenever a need arises. But the top of my desk… whoo! Right now I have a stack of mail from yesterday and today sitting on my desk, a dvd drive box, an elephant figurine I picked up in India as a gift to one of my friends here, stacks of cds, loose pens and post it notes, a box of salon pas, a bottle of eye makeup remover and more piles of… random stuff. It really does drive me crazy, but i’m not about to put anything on my desk into the wrong place inside it. In the meantime, it looks like crap. I mean, it looks really bad.

I wonder if that’s what my life looks like to the outside person. I can’t lie and pretend that what people think really doesn’t matter to me — I’m still a good Chinese girl at heart and my mama did succeed in instilling some measure of decorum in me, despite my emphatic resistance. I know she’s concerned about the decisions I make, how they must look to her traditional/conservative Chinese friends. I know she has a hard time explaining my actions to them, and I feel bad putting her in that situation. It’s not her fault that I didn’t turn out to be the proper, good Chinese girl like she was when she was growing up; the circumstances of my upbringing were beyond her comprehension and control. I grew up in a different time, with a whole host of influences affecting who I ended up becoming. A different village raised me. In a way, I am not really her child…

What a profoundly strange situation my parents were in in immigrating here with me! I mean, just imagine what it must have been like: You are living in a new country, living in a transplanted version of a community from the home country, still carrying the same values, and yet despite the presence of a community of likeminded people from your home country, you still have limited means in trying to perpetuate those values to the next generation compared to what you would have had ‘back home.’ There is media and advertising and different social norms and completely oppositional ideas on how to achieve success. And not to mention the ultimate challenge: how do you teach your children to succeed in a society you’re still figuring out how to succeed in yourself?

I know I was a challenging daughter to raise, and to this day I know I still give them grief. I’m not proud of the headaches I’ve caused my parents (I’m still Asian enough to feel quite guilty, thank you very much). But at the same time, I’m eager to continue being who I am. I want to tell my parents, look ma, I’m that second desk, and I promise, in the end it will all be worth it. I want to keep hoping, keep believing for myself that it really is true. I need to believe for myself that it’s possible, that I’m much more than that messy exterior seems to say, that one day I’ll have it all together.

Mom and Dad, I love you, you’re wonderful, I’m sorry, but one day I’ll make you proud. I promise.

It is infinitely easier to consume and read than it is to create something from nothing, especially if you’ve been out of the creative business for a little while.

That’s more or less where i’m at right now, being a sort of erstwhile writer, posting the occasional ‘what i did today’ blurb on my blog or some regurgitation of that day’s browsing experience. I find myself focused more on the generalities of what happened in a day than in the small life lessons one can learn from those events. My excuse lately has been that I haven’t really had much happen to react and write about since I’ve settled down, stopped hitting the clubs and drinking every other weekend, begun to exercise restraint in my practice of making things more difficult for myself, gotten past the idea that creating emotional drama is some glorious form of personal expression and cut back on spending time with people who are still stuck in that mode. These changes began two years ago when I started seeing Jer, and to be honest, I find the peace I have with my life far more liberating than the “liberated” lifestyle I was living before. So while ‘nothing happens’ in my life nowadays, for the most part, I’m also content that nothing really needs to.

But it doesn’t make for particularly moving or relatable writing or art in the least bit. I’ve long been enamored with the archetype of the suffering artist. Growing up in the age of grunge rockers like Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder and living in the fiercely idealistic San Francisco bay area, a region with boasting quite a few prominent suffering artists itself, it’s not hard to see why. And, the emphasis on emotion — to be so young and to put so much faith in one’s emotions and believe so deeply that in this great wide world of falsity and deception and money and fame and sex and corporate junk, emotions are the one true thing in life. It really is a beautiful thought, and to be honest, a part of me still finds the romantic notion deeply alluring and compelling. It’s why I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind so much. I can’t say I’m completely past being a victim of my emotions, but I’ve learned the hard way that even those too can be betrayed.

So here I am now, quietly going about my existence, the hazy memory of me as a ball of energy and ambition slowly fading from public view. I miss it sometimes, and a part of me still yearns to be that artist suffering in the pits of despair and flying high in the throes of ecstasy. The highs really were so very high.. but the lows were similarly so very low…

Why all this self-reflection? I find myself in this state as I go through the process of looking for work, assessing my skills and hireable qualities and figuring out what to highlight in a cover letter. This cover letter business is really daunting. It’s like writing a personal statement all over again, and we all remember how much fun that process was. And because a letter is focussed much more on the practical “what will you do for my company” rather than the open ended “what can you bring to our campus?” the priority in it isn’t just you, it’s how you make yourself a saleable product to a complete stranger. The very act involves trading in a shred of holier-than-thou idealism for a slice of practical materialism. Maybe I’m a little late in coming to this conclusion — I’ve been spoiled and lucky so far in that most of my jobs can from personal referrals and people seeing me in action and being impressed with what they saw. And boy, it’s much easier being sought after than being the one seeking. I’m slowly coming to grips with it as I’m going through the hunt now. But at this point, I’m pretty much accepting that I’ll need to do whatever it takes to find something. I need to keep my mediocre-quality mind from turning into low-grade mush. I can simply feel the brain cells dripping away…

Speaking of dripping away, I think my mind is about spent. Maybe I’ll continue this tomorrow…

One last thing: I don’t want to lose my creative energies. I don’t want to fade away and become a consumer in the crowd. I still want to create, give rise to schools of thought, change the world for the better. But I must remember that it is a daily pursuit and requires a certain vigilance. I must resist the urge to be complacent, even when things seem so happy.

Wish me luck as this wilting flower figures out how to sell her seeds to the corporate world.

– Guys, T-Shirts, Mixtapes and Break-Ups – Ask A Girl – Stylus Magazine I’m such a sucker for geek nerd indie boys. damn.
– No Turntables And Two Microphones Too funny
– Friendster for your mobile phone This could only work in NY. One more reason why i wish i lived in ny!

i don’t know why it took so long to do this, but there’s a service out called kinja that lets you create, in essence, a blog of all the blogs you read. it is similar to xanga’s subscriptions page or livejournal’s friends page, only it only displays excerpts of posts rather than the whole thing. the digest you create is automatically shared, so other people can browse the sites you read and you can do the same for other kinja folks. it’s way cool! i’m still building my list of subscriptions, but you can see an early version here.

but it gets better. there’s a service called webjay, which grabs links to mp3s off a page and streams them to your winamp, windows media player, or iTunes. Couple webjay with kinja, and you can generate a webjay playlist stream with mp3s all the blogs you’re reading!

[ giddy~!!! ]

what you do/relevant links
– www.kinja.com
– webjay.org
– link extraction bookmarklet for webjay (only works for mozilla based browsers, sorry)
– use bookmarklet on your (or someone else’s) webjay digest. watch those songs leap into your winamp. enjoy muuuusic~!!! :D

[ Now Playing: 3 – 7-03 – Ben Kweller performs – Commerce, TX.mp3 ]
*dance dance baby!*

so i forgot to mention this earlier, but i stopped by fry’s on thursday. coincidentally there was a one-day sale on the 4x emprex dvd +/- burner (edw-4020) for $70. yea, it’s a no-name brand, and there are going to be some problems with it, but it’s much better than my stupid quad speed sony cd burner i’ve been using since freshman year of college. it’s fast, quiet, and it worked right off the bat. so very happy. :)

i go play with my burner. i still can’t believe i burned a 4 gig dvd last night in 18 minutes. hot damn!