Synchronicity

Every once in a while, you will meet that person. Not the love of your life, nothing romantic and cliche like that. I am talking about that person who once you meet them, you wonder how either of you could have survived this long without knowing each other. The person that gets you more than anyone else and appreciates you in all your weirdness. You know the one.

Mine is my best friend, Hector. I found him at a random festival in San Francisco that I decided to go to at the last minute (I'm not fond of crowds). I went with my friend (who only decided to go because I was going), who randomly met up with a friend she hadn't spoken to in ages, who just happened to be his roommate. He was only able to go because someone decided to cover his shift at work, the day before. It was all happenstance and serendipity, us meeting.

We bonded over pizza crust (I shared, even though it is my favorite part) and held hands so we didn't get lost in the intense crowds of people. Also, I think at one point we were both abandoned by the people we came with. Anyway, after sitting on the steps of the Asian Art Museum to escape the chaos, talking about the Arctic Monkeys and I Heart Huckabees, our heads exploded from the ridiculousness of our similarities and we have been inseparable ever since.

Me and Hector at Interpol 2010

Aside from having almost identical taste in music and movies, throughout our friendship we have noticed more and more startling similarities in our lives. For one, we were both bullies in elementary school, which is surprising because we were both so cute and tiny as children and mild mannered as adults.  The most amusing discovery came a couple weeks ago when he sent me a picture of his sixteen year old self. Now, we are about three years apart, so when he was sixteen I was about nineteen.

To illustrate why this is so amusing, I will just post our pictures side by side.

Me and Hector, circa 2006

Had we known each other at this time, we would have had matching hair, well almost matching. Pretty damn close. It would have been awesome. My favorite thing about these pictures is how we parted our bangs on opposite sides. Oh, and in case you were wondering, I was pretending to be a zombie (ugly faces were to ward off people from taking my picture). I know, I know, not a very good impression.

Paper Dinosaurs

Weekends don't mean much to me since I have been unemployed. So, for the past year, every day of the week has felt the same. I don't cringe over Monday mornings, I don't rejoice over Friday afternoons. The only real difference is the fact that I can go on all day adventures with my brother since he is home during the weekends. I am sure that everyone with dreadful 9-5 jobs are wishing they could strangle me through the computer after reading that, but trust me, I am over it.

Anyway, the highlight of last weekend would have to be my newest craft project. I was loaned two how-to origami books, one completely devoted to dinosaurs. So how did I spend my Saturday night? Systematically folding National Geographic pages into dinosaurs, of course (I didn't have any colored paper). They didn't turn out half bad for my first attempt. Sure, me and the Apatosaurus had a bit of a misunderstanding, but we eventually worked it out.

My fascinations with all things dinosaur is starting to become an obsession, much like with the zombies.

On Sunday I picked up some origami paper in Little Tokyo (and Hello Pandas!).  As soon as I got home I started making pinwheels and cranes. I had some trouble with the first crane, and after being mocked by the instruction book (it said that most Japanese children know how to make them) I decided to call in a professional: my brother. He swooped in, fixing it in seconds, making me feel kind of special for not being able to figure it out on my own.

Now I am so incredibly stoked about origami. So far, the Stegosaurus is my favorite, but I really want to hang hundreds of cranes from my ceiling. I may need to get more paper.

The Problem with Writing is

I have too many projects going at once. It starts off innocently enough, filling my time with productive activities rather than sitting around playing too many video games. Last November, I jumped into National Novel Writing Month, beginning on day two of the challenge. 50,000 words in thirty days? Oh yeah, I thought to myself, I can totally do that. I made it to 22,000 by November 30th and haven't made much progress since. I haven't forgotten about it, in fact, I think about it daily. However, I think I have only written about a paragraph since the end of the challenge. I guess I need structure to keep me motivated.

The goal of 1700 words a day kept me writing, but it was difficult to achieve, hence not even reaching half of 50,000 words. Sometime in December I found the amazing website 750words.com, where it tracks your writing and gauges your mood based on the words written. It puts it all into these neat pie charts and graphs, which I am not sure why I like so much, and gives you badges for writing continuously. I haven't made it past the penguin badge, which you get after writing for five days in a row. Ok, so maybe I just have a short attention span. The website should be enough structure to keep me motivated. Should.

I started this blog to get me used to someone else reading my writing, even if it is mostly my closest friends and family, or whatever anonymous stranger stumbles across it. Once the blog started I stopped writing my 750 words a day. Who wants to be obligated to two websites? I know, I should do both. It has already been a week since my last post. A whole week flew by and this blog was lost somewhere in the back of my mind. Even now I am fighting to keep my attention on writing; distracted by facebook, friends messaging me, texts, phone calls. It is taking all of my will power not to just save a draft and go play Final Fantasy 7 for the rest of the night. But it is important for me to finish, since I already started, so here I am.

It is February, my least favorite month of the year for whatever reason, and luckily the shortest. March is Script Frenzy, another month-long writing challenge, except instead of a novel, you write a script. I'm sure you probably could have figured that out from the name. I decided to do it back in December. After dreading coming up with a story, I decided to finally write the zombie story that I have been kicking around my brain for the last three years. Since I was so ill prepared for the last writing challenge (mostly because I didn't know about it until it started) one would think that I would spend this  month gearing up for my script. One would think. I have a rough outline (very rough) of what I want to happen and about a page of story. I suppose it is better that nothing.

This brings me back to the original problem: I have too many projects. If you have been keeping track, there is the novel, the blog, and the zombie script. Not to mention the never ending quest for employment. I have created so many things to keep me productive and motivated that I have done just the opposite. All I want to do is watch movies and play video games.  Maybe I will watch zombie movies for "research".

Weekend Adventures

I love Chinatown. It is like stumbling into an another world; one with signs in broken English and paper lanterns. Last weekend, Yano and I took the subway there for the Chinese New Year celebration (it is the year of the Rabbit, in case anyone was wondering). I had never been to one of these celebrations and had only ever been to the area once before, but it was nighttime and I may have been a little tipsy, so I hardly got the full experience.


We got there by noon and wandered around a bit before the parade started, stopping to get delicious pastries to soak up some of the caffeine sloshing in our stomachs. Carefully making our way through the thick crowd of families with small children and old people, we ate our sticky pastries, a little put off by the Chinese donuts which were moist and eggy in the center.

While watching the parade, I realized how odd the whole ritual is. It is, essentially, groups of people walking or being driven down a street, waving, carrying signs, while being cheered at. Sure, I understand the marching bands and Chinese dragons, they are at least a performance. It the city officials in fancy cars and beauty queens that perplex me. Why are we cheering for these people?

Overall, it was a good day. We didn't get home until almost eight o'clock, with only having spent about $40 on the whole trip. Success! At some point, when I finally generate some sort of income, we can be a little more frivolous with our adventures.  It would have been nice to buy a shirt from the Lebowski Fest booth or a ridiculously adorable hat that looked like a panda, but these are things that I can live without. Adventures, however, are one of the few things that keep me from going completely insane. 

Nothing welcomes the Chinese New Year like...bagpipes?

Disater Preparedness

For those who know me, you know that I have an unhealthy fascination with zombies. I can't quite pin point the exact moment I slipped into this ridiculous addiction, but I know that it will probably take electroshock therapy to get me out. It has taken over my brain. I am now constantly in survival mode; scanning areas for quick and easy escapes, always knowing where my exits are, as if at any moment the apocalypse could be upon us.

Zombies are so often brought up in my conversations that I think I have infected my loved ones. For Christmas, my Mom put Swiss Army knives and LED flashlights into our stockings. Not just for general disaster preparedness, but specifically "for the zombie apocalypse" -My mother's words.

It has gotten so bad that I have even prepared my kitten for when zombies plague the lands. It started out as curiosity. Maybe boredom. Anyway, I wanted to see what she would do if I put her in my backpack.

In case you can't tell from the pictures, she loved it. Now, this little experiment was quite some time ago and to this day I still can't keep her out of my backpack. If it is hanging on my chair, she will paw at it until I pull it down for her to climb in. If left on the floor, I will find her napping in it. She has even started packing herself into any bag left unattended.

                                                  

I have created a monster, but at least she will be ready for the zombies. 

First Post of the Year

It has been five months since I boxed up all my earthly possessions and relocated my life to sunny Los Angeles. I have spent many days during this time debating whether or not it was a wise decision. It has taken me longer than anticipated to find a job, I am poorer than I have ever been in my whole life and I don't know anything about this city. Not to mention the fact that all of my friends and family are now 400 miles away. It seems like the most reckless and impulsive thing I have ever done.

Eight months ago, I was jobless, living at my Mom's and doing a whole lot of nothing. Sure, I was enjoying being  unemployed during the summer for the first time since high school, but any future plans were pretty much nonexistent. I figured I would get a job once my money ran out and then just go from there. Not too ambitious. And even though I wanted nothing more than to move out of my hometown, I was really good at making excuses to stay. Apparently all I needed was an invitation from my brother to come live with him.

So I packed up my life and moved. What I didn't realize at the time was how difficult it would be to leave everything I knew behind. Now I was in a giant city, where I didn't know any of the streets or bus systems. I spent the majority of my day alone. I had to figure out how to get a job on my own. I missed everyone so much. Every day my bank account got closer to zero. Some days, all I wanted was to go home.

But I didn't go home. If I had, I would never have gotten to watch Night of The Living Dead in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I would have missed taking the subway downtown to Little Tokyo for amazing sushi and $2 beer. Or seeing Interpol at the Greek Theatre, surrounded by lit up trees under a starry sky. I would have been stuck in Santa Rosa, wishing I was anywhere else.

Last Thursday I was sitting on the beach in Santa Monica, digging the heels of my boots into the sand, reading Running With Scissors. My afternoon had unexpectedly opened up, so I took advantage of the sunny day and wandered alone around the Pier; something that would have terrified me eight months ago. As I watched the sun slowly sink towards the ocean, I realized why I moved here: I needed to begin my life. Well, that and the perfect beach weather in January.