Category: thisnthat

today is the 2 year anniversary of the events of september 11th.

let us honor the memory of those who perished in the tragic events of that day.

the new postal service cd has been on aggressive repeat in my winamp these past two weeks. yes, i went and bought the cd. yes, i’m still listening to it after i bought the cd. i can’t get enough of it! there’s such a contrast between the sort of aloof sounding music and the earnestness of the lyrics that cobbles together a sort of synchrony that makes me completely addicted. so the cd is on repeat.. again and again and again and again.

“i’ll write you a song and it won’t be hard to sing
it will be a natural anthem, familiar it may seem
it will rally all the workers on strike for better pay
and its chorus will resound and boost morale throughout the day

i’ll write you a song and i hope that you won’t mind
because all the names and places i have taken from real life
so please don’t get upset at this portrait that i paint
it may be a little biased, but at least i spelt your name right…”

okay, i know i have lots to update on, but i have to say this first!!

so for maybe only the second time in all the months i’ve been on friendster, i go through and look through friends, friends of friends, etc. And it’s awesome! I read my friends profiles, kinda surf through who they know, encounter folks i haven’t seen/heard from/about for a really really long time, and do a little mini-catching up with on people’s lives. i really love looking at the pictures people post up. It’s amazing — most of these people are ones i haven’t seen since high school, or for at least a couple of years, and it makes me so joyful to see them with their friends (new and old) and in all these new places in their lives!

the one that i thought was the most adorable was (and it might sound funny for me to say this) the picture of my ex with his new girlfriend. They are seriously ridiculously, amazingly, unbelievably cute together. Dude, even he and i never looked as cute together as he does with his girl now!!! and he seems soooo happy too!! oh, it’s sooooooo cool!!!!!!!!!!!!

okay now i’m tired time for bed.

warning: extremely girly entry ahead!

keeping in mind that i’m the girl who once railed against falsity and unnaturalness in most forms, it is difficult to explain my current obsession with makeup. no, i don’t really wear makeup. i don’t even really know how to use it. but oh! it’s so much fun to look at! and play with! the only thing is that it’s like dealing with computers: it’s usually pretty darned expensive. it’s not like brian’s ‘i’m replacing three of my scsi hard drives’ expensive,’ but it does get there, especially when you are shopping for the good stuff at a store like Sephora. An Urban Decay lip gloss runs about $16; a kit of ten Smashbox eyeshadows sells for $38, and so forth and so forth.

My current obsession is with these Tony and Tina glitter pencils. Have you heard of Tony & Tina? Cuz I never did until recently. =P Anyhoo, their glitter pencils are pretty darned amazing — they have tons of glitter, but they are very comfortable to wear because the formula is so smooth. I tried a Too Faced glitter pencil a long time ago, but the quality really doesn’t compare — Too Faced pencils kinda scratch up the skin around the eyes a little bit, and the color doesn’t go on as easily as the T&T one.

So these Tony and Tina pencils sell for $18 on Sephora.com. $18!!! for ONE PENCIL!!! it’s INSANITY! so i’ve been trolling Ebay for the past couple of months trying to find a good deal on these darned things, but they never have the one i want (baby blue with silver glitter). I found a set of pencils up for auction the other day — something like 12 pencils (9 eye, 3 lip) — but what the hell do i need 12 pencils for?! I just want a baby blue one!! okay, and maybe the green/green glitter one cuz the one i had (purchased for 6 bucks off ebay.. so there!) broke in my makeup bag. =(

ok, that’s my makeup rant for the day.

there’s thunder and lightning out right now!!!! :D :D :D :D :D

*giddy*

i love natural phenonmena.

forgot to post last night that there was a small earthquake kinda close to home. It was so cool! I felt it!!

on another note, more pics from the gallery are up. feel free to post up some comments on the pics too!!

currently spinning: a cd my musically astute friend made for me, and the new postal service cd.

mini playlist:
– postal service – clark gable
– grant lee phillips – humankind
– neutral milk hotel – ghost
– vincent gallo – when
– the microphones – i felt your shape
– ugly casanova – hotcha girls
– sondre lerche – modern nature
– grant lee phillips – spring released

sorry i didn’t get to post this sooner — i don’t really have an internet connection here. i’ve been back in the bay area since about thursday, and will be here for a little while.

the past couple of days have been busier than i anticipated, which have helped distract me a little from missing jer. a few of jer’s longtime forever friends are visiting here, and i’ve had a chance to catch up with a few people. thanks to everyone who offered their support.. i’m so grateful to you, and i’ll will certainly take you up your offers! bwahaha!

the following is a boring summary of what’s been going on here. it’s cuz i wouldn’t remember otherwise >_roger dodger.

tuesday: breakfast at hennessey’s with michael, sharon, and shaun. then out with jen wong for a steak sandwich, also at hennessey’s. spent the rest of the day at the beach, then jen took me back to their place for dinner with the rest of her apartment. shaun gets pretty badly beat up in a skateboarding accident, and has to go to the hospital. =(

wednesday: sharon and michael take shaun to the hospital again for some x-rays, while i sleep in. finally get a hold of jer after a day and a half of silence (their internet went down). jen and sue visit, and i give sue a tour of the place while jen hits the beach. evening is chill… sharon, michael, shaun, and i watch jay and silent bob strike back, followed by the breakfast club (if you can name the link between those two movies, you get a cookie!), then a south park dvd.

-so tired-
lots on my mind.
maybe i’ll write them out tmw…

one thing: about that bikini model link i posted a few days ago. is it about a triumph of artificial over natural? i noticed today watching a little of ‘what about bob’ that everyone’s skin has visible imperfections. you could see bill murray’s pores, the mom had some wrinkles, etc etc. maybe i haven’t been looking, but i haven’t noticed those imperfect skin issues in recent movies of a similar mainstream comedic audience appeal. if there really is a difference, what’s the difference? it could be that makeup trends have gone from gaudy, aggressive makeup where the makeup is the focus to ‘natural’ looks, where the skin is the focus. that is, you have to make your skin look as perfect as possible — free of redness, visible pores, excessive oiliness or dryness, etc etc. but then, realistically, that’s not really that natural either.

and then my mind jumps to video games, in particular, tomb raider, where a movie, a hollywood film production, is made around the hotness of a video game character. a video game character has no pores, just big round boobs and a sexy tendril of hair in the face.

and then there’s that woman who is getting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of plastic surgery to look like barbie. why does she want to do that? why would she want to look so completely unnatural?

i wonder what the impact of the lack of detail and yet simultaneous realness of video games and electronic/digitized/mass manufactured renderings and models of humans is on our normal perceptions of beauty, and i wonder what impact it has on how we apply those standards in our everyday evaluations of attractiveness.

it’s so curious to me. i’ve been reading a lot more fashion and style magazines lately, and all the ads are so interesting to look at. like the one for jennifer lopez’s fragrance, ‘jLo.’ if you haven’t seen it, it’s a picture featuring a naked jlo seen thru a gauzy, filmy sort of curtain. and it looks so doctored. like, her skin is airbrushed to be perfectly dewy, her waist looks teeny tiny, her head doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the body, etc etc.

and you know, airbrushing is nothing new, but the extent to which we airbrush now is. kate winslet sued after a magazine ‘took few pounds off’ photographs of her that appeared in one of their issues. jennifer aniston was also the victim of egregious photoshop manipulation, after a magazine pasted her face onto a photograph of her from a few years earlier and put the photoshopped image on the cover. this was also a big deal because having aniston is one of the most profitable cover models a women’s magazine can have, and she had actually denied the magazine permission to do so. kelly clarkson had her ass doctored in the promotional materials for her bomb of a movie (if you look at the website, then compare it with the posters, you’ll notice a huge difference). etc etc.

so yea, this isn’t just airbrushing anymore. it’s digital recomposition. and it’s no longer limited to the funny farkisms you find online, but in magazines and advertising that sell a version of reality that really REALLY doesn’t exist, except in pieces digital artists used to make the image up in the first place. photographs look like digital renderings, and digital renderings look like photographs. the line is sooo blurred now that it really isn’t easy to tell, and that even if we could tell, it’s not sure to say we’d care. because that image/photograph is ‘HOT’ and we like it, whether it’s real or not…

so i wonder. i wonder what impact this has on people growing up nowadays. like, that trend with the super low rise pants. first of all, very very few people look good in those pants. britney spears is one (and borderline at that), keira knightly is another, but i think the list ends about there. and yet, i can’t tell you how many teenaged and tweenaged girls wearing those damn things this summer. it’s an awful look because it teaches girls that they have to flash skin to be sexy (not always true) and is really not flattering in any way shape or form: most of these girls have baby fat, which is cute, but ends up looking gross it’s ruched up cuz of the way the pantwaists are worn so tight. couple this with tight tiny midriff baring tops and you get a mini inner tube.

the whole point of low waisted things and midriff baring things is that they elongate the body, creating an illusion of height and length. and yea, they’re sexy because they show some skin and create some mystery about what you’re *not* showing. and if you’re going to show your body, show it in its natural form, not all bunched up in unattractive ways. and plus, the keyword is SOME skin. what kind of message is it to young girls in teaching them they have to walk around practically naked to be ‘sexy.’?? cuz what is ‘sexy’ really isn’t that simple.

the whole ‘baring everything between your boobs and your crotch’ trend seems to be dying down, thankfully. although it’s really a shame that teenaged girls don’t really have many options to express themselves in fashion. the media sells the image of ‘cute girl’ (1st album britney) and ‘sexy girl’ (christina aguilera, on the extreme whorishness side).. only recently has it come out with ‘talented girl’ (michelle branch, vanessa carlton) and ‘skater girl’ (avril lavigne). the default style for teenaged girls, tho, it’s cute sexy girl (hilary duff). it’s just so depressing that the homogenization has come so far…

anyway, the point was that these young girls are so easily influenced by what they see in the media about what to wear and what ‘personal style’ should be, even if it’s really awful, that who knows what these artificial images of how a person should look are having on people too. we humans are like any other species: we learn, we adapt, we gather information about our surroundings through our senses (most notably sight in today’s modern world), and we attune ourselves to what we need to out of social necessity. but when the real and unnatural can fool the eye so easily, what happens to our standards and ideas of what really is normal reality?

i could go on about movie special effects and so forth, but i’ll refrain from doing so for now. =P

trying to steady myself in the wake of jer’s absence.

i think the massive power outage in the northeastern US and Canada has taken down my web host for pearlescent.org, so i had to go back to blogger for a little while for me.

but i’m back! woohoo!!

here’s a half-assed update.

happy belated birthday to dennis p, whose birthday was on saturday. hope you had a good one!

happy belated birthday to ed t, whose birthday was sunday. i must remember to give him a call this week. *ties string around finger*

playing a lot of ‘the sims.’ it is unbelieveably addicting. have one character who is on the politics track, one character on the science track, and one on the medicine track. sims have thus far burned down three kitchen stoves, one fire having also claimed the life of one of the aforementioed sims (however she was ressurrected by the glory of reverting to a previously saved game). one sim has also experienced an alien abduction, but returned alive and seemingly normal. one of the friends of the sims doesn’t have a bathroom in his house (jer forgot to build one for him), so he always uses the bathroom of the couple’s house and inevitably clogs it every time. maid service is really handy. one household is now worth about 40k, with each of the two people in the household taking home about 500 each day. and we’re working on getting them their next promotions. so this game is really strange in that it’s a weird version of real life — suddenly even the most mundane aspects of life are important, like making sure your sims wash their hands after they use the bathroom. or clean up after themselves after a meal. or get to sleep on time. but somehow, messing with all those mundane little things is really really fun. heh. it’s almost like as hard as it is to control things in real life, you can at least sort of control them in the sims lives. or maybe it makes you feel the opposite is possible. cute little sims.

also played a bit of tennis recently. am in jer’s office tennis tournament, in both singles and doubles. jer and i lost our doubles match saturday morning (which wasn’t so bad, since it was the first time we ever played doubles together) and i lost my match tonight. note to self: since it takes you 40 minutes to get warmed up anyway, you should really play a match BEFORE you play a real match, so you don’t drop a set at love cuz you’re really not completely there. second note to self: more match play is required, cuz you are really really bad.

eating too much meat etc with jer as he is on atkins diet. *worry worry*

my longtime good friend n.c. is leaving for china for a year sometime this next week for an activity with which he is involved. i’m so proud of him for doing this trip, and i’m honored to be able to continue to count him as one of my good friends, despite how much time has passed. i wish him well.

i will be deprived of jer for about a month, so i will soon have more free time than i will know what to do with. please let me know if you would like to hang out, so i can plan accordingly (norcal and socal folks, i’m talking to both of you!)

pizza hut buffalo wings have only a gram of carbohydrates per wing.

‘the sims’-inspired thought: we could really use a maid around our apartment. =P

i’m going to *hella* miss jer. i don’t even know what i’m going to do.

xanga is so totally down.

(late update) gray davis got recalled. arnold schwarzenegger is running for CA gov. quoth a friend of a friend: “he would be the governator!!” i still think the recall is stupid. am considering voting for arianna huffington cuz i think she’s a cool person, but it’s one thing to talk and one thing to govern, and i have serious doubts as to whether she can govern. same for arnold. and cruz bustamante kinda blows, so i don’t really want to vote for him either.

more on election ballot: racial privacy initiative, written by our favorite UC regent Ward Connerly, is the little-noticed but uber-important proposition on the october ballot that needs to be voted down. here’s a site for your information. i would write more, but i’ve said enough on this sort of issue.

pres election 2004: howard dean is on the cover of newsweek this week. he’s good at galvanizing the public. definitely a plus. still kind of sad gary hart isn’t running, but i’m over it. democrats need to come up with a hard hitting unified attack if they want to take out Bush. the man needs to go.

a few more reasons why he needs to go: cutting benefits for America’s veterans in spite of his public opining of the importance of honoring America’s soldiers. and giving a free-for-all pass to oil companies to do whatever they want in Iraq.

another link off kottke.org: digitally retouching a bikini model’s photo. don’t believe everything you see in the magazines folks. it’s amazing what people can do with photoshop these days.

looking at new cell phone plans… again. any suggestions? we have t-mobile now. having the family plan is cool because jer and i talk all the time. it is not cool in that we don’t have nighttime minutes. grrr. there must be a better way! thinking of switching to verizon because sooo many people are on verizon, but i don’t like the lack of clarity, and the m2m minutes seem kind of limited. plus i really like the phones sprint offers. mm… samsung… LG… samsung…

btw, the motorola t720 is a CRAPPY phone. my friend went through 2 in about 5 months and is now done with them. the first one broke in about a month, the second one died a few months after that. the color screen is nice, but the battery life is wretched. plus, his phone reception was awful, since he was on AT&T’s GSM service, which at this writing continues to be practically nonexistent. he has now switched to a less snazzy phone (one of the motos, i think), and he is much happier.

oh, and i saw phone booth last week. saw the actress i was talking about in a few entries back, Arian Ash. really depressing to see her in her skivvies as a hooker for this movie. still hope her career is what takes off, rather than her clothes.

and that’s all i can think of for now. good night!