11/30/02
Per request of Paul and Rass, I am adding an additional journal entry tonight to mention tonight's events. But before I get to that, let me tell you what happened the weekend that Glo and Jonathan came up. So, after surprising Glo upon her arrival (she thought she was going to Jonathan's cousin's place), we went to go eat at Tommy's Joynt, a cheap, yet scrumptious, cafeteria style restaurant. We ate there, and chit chatted about random stuff. On the way back to Brandon's place (we walked), we walked through the transvestite hooker area. All of them were speaking Spanish. As I walked by a larger one, he stuck out his hands, and pinched my cheek (face cheek) and I reacted by just moving my face away. I never looked back to see what monstrosity touched me. The next day, we went to eat at Johnny Rockets where half our order was messed up, and we ended up getting half our meal for free. We then went to the SF International Auto Show and perused the numerous cars there. I was most thrilled about the Volvo SUV, being a huge Volvo fan. I was also thrilled about checking out the new Mercedes line-up. I could care less for the American and Korean cars. No offense, but they make the worst cars out there. That night, went to a Asian fusion restaurant? Pretty good. Then went to a club that played house. 

Next morning, went to get breakfast/lunch in Hayes Valley. The most amusing thing during our meal was this gay guy who was sitting adjacent to us. A pigeon flew up from the ground, and the guy screamed like a girl, and brought his arms to his chest, while moving himself away from the pigeon. Then we went to the adoption center on Fillmore and checked out the kittens and dogs.

Came back to LA for Thanksgiving, and the first thing I did was sink my fingers into Metroid Prime. After much anticipation, I finally got to play it, and I must say WOW, this game rocks. It's better than I expected, and I had high expectations. 

Thanksgiving dinner was at my cousin's place. We thought we would be cooking something, but ended up not, since my cousin's mom bought a precooked turkey and a prime rib, and all that was necessary was for us to heat it up. Overall, I was pretty satisfied with our meal.

The day after, Kristina and I went to South Coast Plaza to do some shopping. I wasn't in a shopping mood, so I didn't purchase anything, whereas Kristina did. Then, went to Costplus to do some shopping.

So today, Saturday, I went to go eat at Julienne's, figure out a new cellphone plan and pick out a new cellphone, went to Curry House to eat, visited Lisa, Paul, and Rass. The interesting part is here. So while at Kristina's place, waiting for everyone to arrive, I receive a call from Lisa's cell. Thinking it was Lisa, I was kind of surprised to hear that it was Paul talking. He started blabbering about stuff, and then hung up. THen throughout the night, I kept getting a call from him, but I knew he was drunk and was just trying to pester me or something, so I just kept rejecting his call. After dinner at Curry House, Brian and I went over to Lisa's to check out the situation. During my time driving, I received two more calls from Paul, and each time I rejected the call. When I got there, I found Paul and Rass, crouching in the garage, giggling like little girls. Out popped Paul. He ran towards us, and gave us a big huge. Inside, Paul and Rass were being just as roudy and obnoxious, especially towards Lisa, who was vexed already. Lisa was headed out to Santa Monica to go meet up with some friends, and during the whole time, Paul just kept being obnoxious and what not. So as Lisa was driving her car out of the driveway, Paul kept harassing Lisa, and I don't know what led up to this, but next thing I know, I see Paul on top of the hood, then on top of the trunk, then kicks the car as Lisa drives off. A minute later, we see Lisa coming down the street, all pissed off about what just happened. I decide to leave. I'm tired of talking. Me, Brian, and Rass come to my place, while Paul stays to "talk" things over with Lisa.

Yesterday (sunday), Kristina and I left around 2:30, heading back to Berkeley. It took us almost 9 hours to drive back. Ugh..

11/22/02
Today was spent doing absolutely nothing again. Now how many days would that be of doing absolutely nothing? Let me think? Well, I've been up here for over a month and still with no job to occupy my precious time. Today was no different than any other day. Here is what my day consisted of: woke up at 10:30ish, did my morning piss, ate some breakfast, checked out the newest downloads on the various newsgroups, noticed that my stupid AT&T broadband stopped sometime after I reset the IP Address so Coming To America did not download, surfed Aint It Cool, Planetgamecube, IGN Cube, Entertainment Weekly, MSN, and various other websites. Then, I started checking out the new Volvo XC90 reviews. For those of you who don't know me too well, I am a huge Volvo fan. The new XC90 is Volvo's SUV and has won Motor Trend's award for best SUV of the year. Sometime during the late morning and early afternoon, I continued watching an anime called Witch Hunter Robin. The second season is starting to get quite juicy. Watched this week's episode of 24. And its 6:23pm right now. Gonna make some dinner and then head out to some parties tonight. 

11/18/02
This past weekend, Kristina, Brandon and I ventured off to Monterey/Carmel area for a weekend retreat. We began our trip, leaving Brandon's place in the city at around 10:30 in the morning. First pit stop was Brunch-ish sort of thing at Burger King. After that, we had awhile before our next pit stop; Artichoke capital of the world (dunno the name of the city). I had never tried artichoke at all, so I gave the fried artichoke a whirl. Nothing special. Afterwards, we spent a good amount of time antique shopping. Of course, I didn't want anything since I was low on cash with no job and all. We spent a good 2 hours there, walking into each store, perusing antiques that looked old, and things that weren't even antiques. The most amusing "antique" I saw was a tin canister to hold tea leaves from Ten Ren aka Tea Station. So after antique shopping, we went to Monterey, and arrived there late afternoon. We immediately started looking for a place immediately surrounding the Monterey bay area, but couldn't find anything cheap, so we decided to delay our search until after dinner. After eating a pretty good dinner, went found a Travelodge to stay at. Stayed there the night.

Next morning, we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and enjoyed 3 fun hours looking at the plethora of aquatic life.  We got to see the feeding of the fish. It was pretty amazing to see the fish swim really fast because its not something you get to see everyday..ya know. After the aquarium, we set out to Carmel and checked out Pebble Beach and the local shops surrounding the area. The area reminded me of the San Marino crowd. The clothes were very PTA mom-like. Kristina and Brandon got into a fight. Debated whether or not we should ditch Brandon. They made up, we went to go get dinner at PortaBella. I ordered the special, not knowing how expensive it was ($31!!). And the meal wasn't even that great!

Took some fun/cool pictures in Monterey and Carmel. I'll post em up whenever I get them.

11/14/02
For those of you unaware, yesterday was my 23rd birthday. To celebrate, I made reservations to go eat at the California Culinary Arts school in SF. Arranging people to go there was another challenge, since I had made reservations for 14 people, and finding the 14 people was proving rather difficult. The whole weekend, up to the day of my birthday, I was trying to find people to go. It ended up that only 10 people were going to go, so I had to reduce my reservation. When we got there, I was surprised that there were less people than the restaurant could hold, so I was beginning to ponder why we had to make reservations. When the waitress came and told us how many of each item was left, I finally figured out that you needed reservations so that the cooks could prepare a certain amount of each dish. Dinner consisted of a 3 course meal: an appetizer, a main course, and a dessert. Overall, everything was okay. Nothing extraordinary like other places I've been to in San Diego. The presentation was nice, but as I mentioned, nothing that you wouldn't see at another restaurant. But for the price, I guess there's not much to complain about.

11/01/02
So yesterday was Castro day. My getup was a gothic minister. Before arriving at Brandon's, I applied dark blue nail polish to begin my transformation. At Brandon's place, I applied pale face makeup, blackened my lips, and accentuated my eyes with eye liner. The whole process took me awhile to finish. When he arrived at Castro, after what seemed like an eternity in the taxi cab, we arrived at Sonia's pad. Her place was decorated with numerous lights and Halloween knick knacks. Candy was dispersed throughout every room and on every table for the party guests. Rooms were dimly lit to enhance the creepy feel for Halloween. With all this fun and decoration, can you guess what I did? I walked around the place, seeing who was around, and then ended up just standing outside, chilling in the cool air, eating a packet of grape flavored nerds. Everyone from the group eventually came out and just chilled outside. A few minutes later, Winston, Shinobu, Gary, and Edward showed up. As we started walking towards the main streets of Castro, the San Jose crew showed up, and this one guy we knew dressed up, what looked to be like, a Japanese school girl, and man, did he look like a girl. He wore a white furry cap with fake braided hair, a furry white jacket and a halter top I believe, a whit mini skirt, and high legged boots to finish the costume. We were all shocked at just how much he looked like a girl. The only thing missing was the waxing of the legs. So we started walking down, and when we reached the tip of the streets, we lost everyone that wasn't part of the original group. Nicole then called us, wanting to meet with us, so we ditched the rest of them, and started heading towards the gas station, our meeting point. Walking through the crowd in Castro was something I had never experienced. Not the walking on the streets of Castro, but walking through jam packed streets for the first time in my life. The streets were crowded like a can of sardines, and weaving in and out of the crowd was a challenge. At times, it seemed like there was nowhere to move, but with perseverance and a little brute pushing, we  managed to traverse through the sea of people. Upon arriving at what we thought was a 76 gas station, we realized that finding Nicole would be nearly impossible. Kind of like finding a needle in a hay stack, especially with our mobile phone out of service. This was not surprising, due to the fact that everyone and their dogs were using their phones. So, we walked on Market Street, heading back towards Brandon's place, and just noticed all the costumes that people were wearing. The most common one we noticed was guys dressing up as one of the characters from the Royal Tenenbaums. The costume consisted of a brown 70's ish suit, with a button up shirt, facial hair, sunglasses, and a cotton head band. We must've seen about 7 of them. All in all, Castro was an OK experience, probably because all we were doing was just walking back towards Brandon's place, rather than just chilling on the streets seeing all the commotion. There was this one guy on top of a row of porta potties, jumping on top of them. Anyways, most of our night involved just walking back to Brandon's place. When we got there, some people wanted a late night snack, so we went to this Cantonese restaurant. I ordered this curry beef stew dish. Very disgusting. Everything about it was just disgusting. On top of that, Kristina and I had a little tiff about her inability to dance salsa/hip hop and attacking me verbally.

The next morning, I woke up around 9:20, got ready, and just veged around while everyone else was still sleeping or chilling in their sleeping area. I shelled out $2 for meters, when I really didn't need to. Brandon said he didn't tell me that I didn't need to be shelling out $ because he said that I wouldn't believe him, which was true. I kept wondering why I was the only one putting money in the meters and no one else was. So once everyone was up, we went to eat Dim Sum. It totaled to $15/person. Afterwards, we went to a museum in Golden Gate park. Some cool stuff there. Then we went to Fillmore St and saw some cats and dogs. Then went to eat at Victor's for some pizza. Then went back to Berkeley, rented a movie, and began watching the beginning, but decided to stop because we were tired. 

10/31/02
Halloween is upon SF and tonight, its out to Castro to see what SF has to offer on this night of fun. Gotta go pick up Dzuy from the airport and drive to the city to get ready though before we head out. 

10/29/02
So yesterday was another day spent at home all day doing nothing, but I did find myself being productive. I started off the day fixing a cover letter for an internship at a local radio station. I realized that music was my passion, and that it would be something I would totally enjoy (perhaps until I find out what the business actually entails). So I sent out my resume and cover letter to Alice 97.3, a radio station similar to STAR 100.7 and STAR 98.7 for those of you in SD and LA, respectively. That same day, I finally decided to cut up my pumpkin. This year, I tried to do something other than a normal pumpkin face. This year, I decided to make a little scenario so to speak of a grim reaper, a freaky tree, a tombstone, an owl and a moon. Poking the pumpkin with my pattern was pretty annoying because it made my write hand very sore. All in all, I would say I'm pretty satisfied with the results, although I really have nowhere to display my masterpiece for everyone to enjoy, except the occasional passerby. Ok, what may you ask happened to the pumpkin seeds? Well, I decided to try something fancy and soak the seeds in green tea. So I did that, and then I started cooking the seeds on the stove top. It was taking awhile to cook, and I was wondering if I was doing it right, so i looked up how to cook pumpkin seeds on the internet. One page I perused mentioned slowly roasting the seeds in an oven. So I transplanted the seeds onto a baking sheet. I was forewarned many a times about the power of the microwave oven here and how it cooks things real fast. Too bad I didn't think of it this time, cuz the seeds ended up being burned! And I was so looking forward to munching on them... Oh well.

Today was probably less eventful than yesterday. Today I went out to lunch with a High School friend and discussed events and people. It was pretty fun. I also went out to purchase the newest Christina Aguilera CD, even though I already had it on my computer. Other than that, the whole day was spent downloading junk and watching Knockaround Guys on my computer. Now I see why the movie wasn't released on its original date, which I believe was a couple years ago. The only reason it was brought out was because of the star power Vin Diesel has at the moment with the release of XXX and whatever other movies he had.

Halloween is only two days away!!! Castro party, here I come!

10/24/02
Recently downloaded the new Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Craig David, Santana, Whitney Houston, 8 Mile Soundtrack and 3 Doors Down. So I'm still unemployed, but still applying to stuff. People directly above me were noisy again, for the nth time, until slightly after 2am. Kristina hopes they get evicted for being so obnoxious.  Tonight, its off to MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in SF. It should be free tonight. I just wonder how many pieces I'll actually like, since I'm not a huge fan of modern art. Occasionally, there is something cool.

10/21/02
Ok, so it took awhile to figure out what I wanted to be for Halloween, but after much angst over what I wanted to be (though not by choice, but more by budget), I am going to be a gothic minister. And for those of you who care, I am still jobless! FUDGE! And still doing nothing!

10/18/02
So today involved going to Ranch 99 with Pam and her roommate. I wanted to try this Filipino bakery/restaurant there. I got in, and was immediately confused at how I order and what to order. The setup resembled something you'd see at Panda Express, but without the option of 2 or 3 item combo meals. Looking around, I decided to get a thing of beef calderada and a side of rice, a pork bun, and a drink. I was shocked to see how much it cost ($8.25 I believe). Anyways, that meal was ok. Went to Ranch 99 afterwards to do some mild grocery shopping. Mainly went there to take Pam and her roommate since they don't have access to a car. So when I came back, my cable modem was down, again. Having enough of this bullshiznit, I called up AT&T to see if they could find the cause of the problem. Now comes the interesting part of my day. As I was talking to this chick, I noticed she had some sort of accent, almost Southern. I gave her my phone number and she asked to confirm that I was from California. I knew that she wasn't from this area. So later on, while there was some dead silence, i casually asked "What part of the country are you from?" "Eastern Canada," she says. I went on to tell her that I had read/heard somewhere that people in India get trained in American English and become customer service representatives for other companies. Later, after discussing my cable modem problems, she transferred me to a Level 2 tech representative. I asked this person where she was from, and she said Western Canada. She put me on hold after I discussed my problems with her, and when she answered the phone again, she said "Thanks much for holding." LOL! What a huge distance they transferred the phone call to. Anyways, ain't that amazing how people you call for customer service aren't even located in the U.S.?

10/17/02
OMG, can I be ANY stupider!! After realizing that I had sent out a couple resumes with editing on it (things like notes on a second page and red words to note certain things in my resume), I sent another resume out, WITH the shit on it!! FUUUUDGE!! I thought I had deleted it off all the pertinent resumes, but apparently, that was not the case. CRAPOLA! So tonight, I went to a break beat club and two of the girls got hella drunk. Didn't get back until 3 or so. Tomorrow will be another day of "job hunting." DAMN I'M STUPID!!! God, I wouldn't be surprised if the people I sent out my resumes to looked at it, and went "This guy is LAME for sending this. Definitely shows inability to do things correctly." UGH. 

10/16/02
Ok, so finally, after days of using a 56k modem to access the internet, I finally have cable modem set up. So far, I've gone to an outdoor "rave" (really wasn't), done one interview, watch TV, and play Castlevania Symphony of the Night for Playstation. Sucks not having a job. Kinda getting desperate now  =X. 

Anyways, today, was quite interesting. I was expecting one guy to come and install the cable modem, since that was the case in San Diego. To my surprise, it was two guys: one Mexican and one Filipino guy. So they came in, and inspected the place, looking for a cable outlet, but I didn't know where it was. I mentioned that I did see some wires outside the window, so they went out and inspected it. To my surprise again, they mentioned that the cable was running upstairs, where it shouldn't be, and so they disconnected it. Hehe. Kristina doesn't like those guys, so it serves them right. Another surprise came when 2 more guys popped in, and the Filipino guy said that these two were trainees or something, so now I had 3 guys in the apt setting everything up. The guys said that this service was really fast (supposedly 1.5MB/sec), about the speed of a T1 connection. But I'm beginning to doubt that with the speeds I'm getting. Not exactly record breaking. 

Tonight, its off to a break beat club in SF!

10/10/02
STILL have yet to move up!!! And most of you know why.

10/08/02
The day began with a visit to the dentist to get my bleaching kit. Did that once for about an hour until I started feeling some pain. heh. Fiddled around with my computer. Talked on the phone. Ate dinner with Josh Liang and went over his menu for his brother's new Hawaiian restaurant.

Why is it that so many Asian parents are so homophobic? As I was visiting my cousin last night to get a prehistoric dial-up modem, my uncle hollered at me to go to where he was to discuss my future career/school plans. As we sat there, discussing, he kept asking me what I want to do with my life, but I hadn't the slightest clue (although now I realize that I would really want to pursue something related to music). He brought up the idea of becoming a nurse ($70-80k) and then specialize in a field (maybe $100k+). I kept saying I don't know, I'll think about it. So as we were finishing up our conversation and I was getting ready to leave, all he could say was "I don't think its a good idea. Don't do drugs, alcohol, and don't become gay." *shakes head*

Decided I'm going to delay my moving up until Wednesday.