0520_02.page

20 may 2002

i'm listening to moby's new album "18." too mellow. i was intrigued because _time_ reviewed his album, and the title of the article was "the sound of omnipotence." hm. that's a bold statement if i've ever heard one. so yesterday, when i was at virgin megastore, i picked it up, along with the old wheatus album. you know, "teenage dirtbag." so cute!

so that first picture up there on the left is the first picture i am posting from the sony dsc-f707. no, i don't have my own yet, but thursday, friday, *and* saturday, i went to fry's to play with it. the last two days, i brought along my own memory stick so i could take the pictures home and look at them more closely. manual focus and aperture control are going to be nice things to have. so saturday i finally took the plunge and ordered the camera, along with a tripod, remote, UV filter, etc. it should get here on wednesday. i'm excited. :)

so i went up to the city three times this weekend. yup. friday, saturday, and sunday. friday night was alan's birthday dinner at the san francisco straits cafe. i ordered a lychee martini, and shit, it was strong, like a glass full of strait vodka with a lychee thrown in. not sure if i liked that. the food was decent, but i ordered this chicken that was hella tough and didn't have enough taste. the middle picture up there is one of the appetizers, this cube of raw tuna with taro chips on top and a kicking wasabi mayonnaise dribbled on the plate.

after dinner, a few of us watched _in july_, a german film that one of alan's friend's brother BOUGHT. wow, how do you get into that business? he basically tours european film festivals, and if he likes the movie, he'll buy it and release it here in the states. at first, it sounds cool, but i just wonder about if he can break even. apparently this movie cost about $25K, and it's not doing very well.

i liked it, though... it's kind of like a more digestible version of _serendipity_, a romantic comedy about chance encounters. there's a really nice scene where the two main characters, july and daniel, are getting baked on a barge under the full moon. in the background, the cowboy junkies' rendition of "blue moon" plays. it's one of my favorite songs.

after hanging out a bit at the afterparty at a nearby bar, we headed home. 3am bedtime.

the next morning, i wrote this to myself:

it's a weird mix of feelings i have. for the first time in many years, i am happy and content and excited about life. i love my friends, and coupled with the new friends i am making, i feel surrounded by good people and privy to good times.

last night, when i was driving back from the city at 2am, with alan sleeping in the passenger's side, some good music piping in, i felt like i could have driven all night long.

yet... there is this gnawing feeling, the knowledge that i am not exercising a much deeper and crucial part of me. it's not so much of a panic or desperation but a rather knowing that my life is nowhere near a peak right now. and then there's the accompanying fear of what might happen if i find love in this stage. given my current disposition, things might be so good that i won't be able to handle it. there's no way things can stay great. it'll fuck up. *i* will fuck up.

saturday, alan and peter went mountain biking, and jay was on call, so i woke up to an empty apartment. i got a haircut, and it was pretty bad. i made the HUGE mistake of asking the woman to thin my hair out, so now i have all these spiky short hair sticking straight up in my part. FUCK. how annoying is that.

after the haircut, i zoomed over to fry's for the 3rd round of testing and fondling. this time, i did a test with various aperture settings, and then i took some pictures with my p1 of the same scene to compare. in the end, i have no idea how to judge the results, but at least i felt like i was doing something, you know?

there were so many people looking at digital cameras. and most of them know very little about what they want, or what's important, etc. and even worse, the salespeople there are pretty ignorant, too. and with well over two dozen cameras to choose from, it's just a big old mess that made me sad and frustrated.

then, i hit stanford to watch taiko play at SUN (stanford university nikkei)'s children's day fair. as usual, there was like no one there, and the performance was rather sloppy. the group knew it, too, so i am hoping they'll use the experience to motivate them to practice harder or something. *shrug*

i went home, took a shower, ordered my camera (!), and watched the lakers beat the kings. poor kings. maybe if they had stojakovic they'd have done better. maybe.

alan, margaret and i had dinner at krung thai. we had a pretty cool conversation about relationships and stuff. margaret said that she realizes that alan and i are both really picky about women, and because of that, she has decided she won't set us up any more. heh. alan and i have gone out with some semi-high-profile women back at school, so i'm thinking we've sort of developed some expectations of what type of person we should be with.

the reason why i wanted to go to krung thai was because there's a bed bath and beyond near there. i needed to get some dinnerware, and they were having a sale.

*sigh* so jay's moving out next friday. our living room is crammed with a ton of shit, and it reminds me that in a week, i'm going to be living alone. margaret asked me if i was sad that she was "stealing" jay away from me, and i said that of course, i was kind of bummed. but just like when jeremy's impending marriage made us move out of brenton, i told margaret that jay's moving out for the best reason.

anyways, after dinner, i called up mike to see if the clubbing trip was still going on. it was, so alan and i (sans peter, who bailed in a very sly way, heheeeh) headed up to glas kat. wow, it was pretty empty. but the upstairs hip hop room was packed, and once we got in on our FOURTH try (on the coattails of 11 women who were having a bachelorette party), we saw that this was where the action was. i saw this girl who had a nice height... she was like 5'10", and i remember thinking, "ahhh... there's a good height."

after hanging out for a bit, alan and i decided to say our goodbyes and head to another club. a club with better music. a club with better visuals. the only thing i'll say is that we stayed until closing at 3am, when the lights went on, and i remember thinking, "egads. the women here look even worse now!" and when i went home, i wrote myself:

there is something perversely pleasing about seeing a scantily clad woman shimmy around to marilyn manson's "dope show."

bedtime: 4am.

sunday was dim sum day. koi palace, baby. although we got there at 12:30 and got seated at 2. holy shit, man. the food was good as usual, but they didn't have the egg custard soft cakes. i mean, that's what i got there for! i was actually pretty pissed off. there was this one waitress who kept on teasing me because i was asking everybody who worked there if there any of those soft cakes. motherfucker.

after dim sum, we hit union square and did some shopping. as usual, i directed the group over to abercrombie, where i bought my first pair of swim/surf shorts in basically ten years. (no, i don't swim at all. i know how, and i'm bad, and i hate doing it.) and a pair of yellow reversible basketball shorts with pockets.

ah, and now i must talk about the shoes. see that picture on the right up there? SILVER SHOES! i mean, in dim light, it's just grey, but in bright situations, it looks cool. i saw that there was a steve madden store, and i kind of went in to make fun of the shoes, because frankly, i think most of them look ugly. (AND they're way too trendy and stuff.) but then i saw the glint of silver and blue and gold (the three colors that the rascals line comes in), and i was immediately taken.

do you remember those plasticky things where you see a picture, and when you tilt it another way, you see another picture? that's what my shoes are made of! they have those thin vertical ridges where you can run your nails back and forth and make this zippery "zip zip zip" sound. ah, that brought back memories.

anyways, i put the shoes down and went with the guys (and ting) up to nordstrom's. but within a few seconds, i just left them and headed back down, tried them on, walked around, admired them from all angles, and paid for them.

silver fetish. i can't help myself.

you know, if the sony dsc-f707 camera was black, i'd like it less. and if it were champagne, i wouldn't buy it. conversely, if the canon g2 was balck, i'd like it more, and if it were silver, i'd seriously consider it.

why are we so strongly attached/opposed to certain colors? how do we come to prefer certain colors over others? can you train/untrain this sort of thing? it's fascinating.

i was kind of disturbed yesterday to know that we had dim sum and shopped, and before we knew it, it was 7pm. seemed like the day just vanished. i went home and watched the x-files series finale. lame. and i don't like scully's hair. i haven't watched the show in years, and i wanted to know what the final conspiracy was. but it just wasn't done very well.

topped off with some naked _time_ reading, my weekend was over. 2am bedtime.

so now i'm sipping on a banana berry smoothie with immunity boost. this particular smoothie makes a statement to me. because i really hate blueberries. yet i only get this flavor now because i read that blueberries are good for you. and the whole immunity boost thing is about the fact that since i've been sleeping so late for the past two weeks, i feel just slightly ill every day. ok. maybe there is no statement to be made. just triggers of thoughts.

[digression: i had AMAZING parking karma this weekend. the four times i had to park in the city, i found parking within a few minutes. friday was particularly amazing, as it only took me 60 seconds max to park at straits cafe and the landmark lumiere. it almost makes me think that living in the city wouldn't be so bad. "almost" is the operative word here. i still hate the place.]

but back to the triggers. saturday night, alan and i were walking to the 2nd club, and at a particular intersection, i started walking faster. alan thought i was just being an eager beaver, but i replied that it was because the homeless man on the corner was making me really sad.

that situation and the smoothie thing remind me that it's important for me to know *why* i do what i do. i have this compulsion to explain my life, even though i have no one to answer to and no real reason why i need to do this. maybe i just want to understand myself. on a tangent, what frustrates me terribly is why the hell i got so depressed back in march, and why i'm seeming completely cured from it now. not understanding the reasons for my mental state just makes me feel like a complete slave to entropy, like the universe is just tethering me to a pole and whipping me around, laughing evilly.

anyways, i think one of the coolest things about k1 was that when we would talk, she would sometimes just stop and say, "why do you think that?" i kept me on my toes. and it kept me honest. i swear, some people just bullshit all the time. they just say random stuff, stuff that makes no sense. and why do they do it? i have no fucking clue. but i do know that they think they can get away with it. lame.

anyways, my weekend was good. i'm starting to get used to enjoying them, and it worries me because something is bound to happen. it's like an earthquake in califonia. or another al-qaeda attack. horrible things to look forward to.