Category: thisnthat

pictures and updates to come soon. but very very briefly:

– jer’s family is cool =)
– epcot center freaking rocks
– jer’s dad is an unbelievably amazing musician. anyone know any alt-country music producers?

– got digital cable installed today, cancelling dish network tomorrow. our new plan comes with a dvr and a cable modem. we now have history channel international, bbc america, and a third c-span station! and with the dvr, i can tivo washington journal and simpsons to watch when i get home! joy!
– got a new case for my digicam. (we lost our old one, a really nice soft gray leather one, in japan) This less attractive replacement is better than nothing.
– i still think my photo printer is freaking cool. waiting for the wallet size paper cassette so i can start printing out labels. keke.
– i hate jcrew, but i’m guess i’m going to have to start liking it because they have decent office-appropriate clothing. grawr. expensive. but decent.

good gracious, i’m a total yuppie. 0_o

After a week of anxious waiting, my canon cp-200 card photo printer finally arrived on Monday. It’s already one of my most satisfying purchases. It was super easy to set up — I got the whole thing hooked up and printing photos from my s200 digicam in less than ten minutes. The prints are surprisingly good quality because of its dye sublimation printing process. I’d say that they come out to about or a bit better than Ofoto, which i consider the best of the online digital photo developers. Printing is really fast — a 4×6 photo takes a little over a minute to print, while card size photos are produced in a about a minute’s time. Plus, it’s just so darned fun. Watching the chemical process of a picture emerging on paper happen before your eyes is one of those simple marvels of science, be it in the darkroom, in a polaroid, or generated by this printer, as each layer of primary color gets coated onto the paper.

i got a USB cable today to hook the printer up directly to my computer, and i’ve gone nuts printing out all those old pictures i never had a chance to develop. it’s fantastic! I’m going back and making postcards/printouts of some of the nicer pictures i’ve taken over the years to send out to friends and family.

do you want a postcard? leave a comment and i’ll pick something out for you! or if you have any special requests, i might be able to honor those too. ^_^

three albums up. alice’s birthday, catalina island, and coachella. no captions yet, but maybe later this week.

v. v. briefly

radiohead was amazing
pixies were fucking awesome
the rapture blew me away
death cab was sweet and sorrowful. i love you, ben gibbard!
beck should not have been at the gobi tent
such a shame wilco wasn’t there
sweatproof sunscreen isn’t. your eyes will sting anyway.
101 degree heat and 50,000 people not a good combination, but stretching out in the open patches of grass on the polo field felt nice.
music festivals are awesome, even if there are 50,000 people and you can’t get closer than 1 mile from the stage. nice just to be there.
left after radiohead and skipped out on kraftwerk cuz we were too tired and didn’t want to deal with the challenge of 50k people leaving the festival at once. boo no kraftwerk
still coughing up the pound of dirt i inhaled walking back to my car after the show
traffic on the 10 freeway sucked on the way back because there were two stretches under construction
the denny’s at ontario airport was a bit of a godsend
hearing about day two made me wish i could have stayed.

can’t wait till next year!! :D

hope you all treated those fine ladies to something good today. =)

(something like my hair, which i will eventually post a picture of. really.)

1. Working makes it hard to post in a blog. and before you get all excited, it’s not like a real permanent thing or anything special, i’m just helping out a friend at his small business.

2. My blog comments are getting porn spammed. paresh, how did you deal with this?!

3. I really really want to go to Coachella now, but I ain’t got tickets. Know anyone with a pair o’ tix (for the Saturday show) that they want to get off their hands? Share the love, baby!

4. I don’t speak smart. I talked to some of my old professors today (wise and lal) and i love them i love them. I just hate how I talk stupid at them. Bah, I’m such an intellectual whore… or would I be more of a groupie? Either way, the point is that i’m out of my league.

5. Working makes you want to paaaaaartay. I wanna go out and shake my booty!

6. Sitting at a desk all day makes you fat. I resolve to put my gym membership to good use.

7. I only saw a total of 15 minutes of the entire Apprentice series, but apparently I had seen enough to get quite pissed at Omarosa. More importantly though (for Trump, anyway), his self-promotion series has done its magic on me: jer and i are seriously considering going to Trump’s casino in Palm Springs… cuz Dave Chappelle is going to be there! :D

8. Catalina Island is purty. The semi-submarine ride is a rip. I’m not paying $20 to launch 16 ‘torpedoes’ of fish food. Then again, we did pay exhorbitant prices to get on the stupid thing. Long story. Anyway, pictures from this trip are forthcoming.

9. it’s bad news when your dentist decides to explain a procedure he can do for you by citing the show ‘Extreme Makeover.”

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.