Random Thoughts Day 82

1.  John Legend is a real enough person that I feel a mix of excitement and envy for him every time I hear "All of Me" play in every deli and passing UPS truck.  It's not like he isn't well known, but it's not like he has the reach of Beyonce, either.  And I think it's also because he's not a 17 year old pop new-comer which means he probably doesn't take success for granted nor feel that fame is directly tied to success

2.  I think the last time I was unironically excited for a pop group was in second grade for the Spice Girls and N'Sync and Destiny's Child in 3rd/4th  grade.  Therefore, I don't see how anyone over the age of 10 can be so in love with Taylor's Swift or One Direction.  There's just not enough depth to revel in before it sounds like elevator music.

3. I've run out of funny little lines (wait, I was funny?) It's like the well is dry.  Just nothing will be conjured up.  How did I come up with 3 or 4 of these a day? How do comedians do this constantly? I feel like everyone can come up with a story--bad or good, everyone can come up with something that has a beginning, middle, and end.  But a joke? No matter how much you can dissect one to build one up, there has to be some unexplainable click somewhere in there, I think.

4.  There's this baby named a really unisex name like Sawyer or Marlowe and I couldn't tell from his/her clothes so when his/her parents introduced him/her I just smiled really widely and was like "hiiii"

5.  Question: When individuals publicly comment on the death of a famous person on social media, what is their purpose?  Is it:

1. To respectfully salute the person as she/he passes on?
2. To seek solace and communally mourn (mourn communally) with fellow members of society?
3. To subtly brag that yes, they know this person and are interesting enough to have enjoyed their work and contributions?  Because honestly, I've never seen you wax poetic about Philip Seymour Hoffman our post the quotes of Maya Angelou or marvel at the extraordinary life of Nelson Mandela when these people were alive.  I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, though.  Maybe you guys all talk about the genius of Peter Seeger at those tupperware parties you never invite me to.

We raise children only for them to become traitors

Everyone loves babies (except for the people who don't like babies).  They're chubby and soft and adorable and easily entertained (except when they're crying their heads off).  Old people dote on them, showering them with treats and toys and funny faces and babies easily express their gratitude, unadulterated enthusiasm whenever the candy-giver and game-player shows his/her face.  Old people mistake this for singular affection and appreciation, a magical connection.  When really all the babies like you for is because you give them what they want.  A juicy strawberry, a riveting game of peek-a-boo.  You've merely domesticated a feral animal and she now knows to come to you for sustenance.

People swarm other people who have babies, raucously spitting out baby talk, inquiring about weight, sleeping habits, and diet, it all feels like a real and flowing conversation.  But then the baby has to be put down for a nap, and all the grownups realize they really didn't have anything in common after all.

Babies grow up to be children, children have specific and contemporaneous cultural needs.  Children are people conscious of social hierarchies and relationships.  That toy that might have been adorable and treasured is now embarrassingly outdated.  That sweater is too frilly and thick, all they wanted was a t-shirt from Target with the latest Disney fad plastered on the front.  Or they didn't want toys or clothes at all, don't you know the newest smart phone renders everything else obsolete?

Children are polite to old people because everyone tells them to be.  They're friendly but condescending, egotistically relishing that their mere presence is a whole lot more important to the old people than vice versa.  Even as children grow into young adults and adults who appreciate the lives of old people, it is more out of guilt than genuine desire.  Even when younger people appreciate the wisdom of experience, there's a bit of humoring involved as the role of caretaker is reversed. A close relationship with an elder becomes something to boast about rather than inwardly appreciate.

I'm way too proud of myself on the rare occasions I behave like a grown up

1.  Like when I don't laugh or make a face when someone says something stupid in a professional environment

2.  When I don't interject that someone is being an asshole when it doesn't involve me/ mind my own beeswax (except, sometimes, I get annoyed when people are just bystanders because they think they're being polite)

3.  When I hold my tongue before I comment "wow, your feet are really red" or "you look thinner" or "your mom is pretty crazy, huh?" (in all seriousness, what comes off as an observation sounds like a judgement)

4. When I say thank you to accept a compliment instead of some stuttering deflection (they're just being nice, they don't really care!)

5.  When I don't blabber a long-winded explanation in person or email

6.  When I go to an event and I don't blurt out, I'm here for the food!

Dream Diary Post 13 Day 81

Walking into hallway with nice french windows  on the right hand side and wooden floors. Straight in front of me was one of those metal buffet warmers filed with some sort of panini/waffle filled with scrambled eggs and breakfast sausage, a cafeteria-riff of waffle tacos I suppose.

I was at a talk featuring Sarah Silverman and it was Q&A time.  There was this one guest with messy bleached blonde hair almost dreadlock-like in texture and she was asking too many annoying lame questions basically insinuating that she and Sarah must have similar creative struggles, were comedy equals, and that she smokes a couple puffs of weed before she sleeps.

I wanted to ask Sarah Silverman a couple questions about her creative process, how she came to structure her one liners. She called on me with a knowing and sympathetic smile, like how some of my teachers did in high school, as if she sensed my nervousness.  She said she loved my performance in Peep World.  I smiled politely, not wanting to ruin the good-naturedness by correcting her that it wasn't me (heart-brokenly she must have confused me with another Asian).  I continued with my question.  Did they just pop into her head, did she observe something and then try to formulate a one-liner out of it?  Except when I was asked to provide examples I was totally stumped.  The crowd moved on and Sarah called on another person while I wracked my brain and Youtube for examples.  I raised my hand again but I was repeatedly passed over for new question askers.

Random Thoughts Day 80

1.  It's survival of the fittest, and I feel like I can barely catch my breath

2. Being an entrepreneur is a hustle all the time (no shit, but it's just what's on my mind)

3.  Things, delicate things, do they mean anything?

4. Is my life worth more than a cockroach's? To me, yes.  But isn't a cockroach's life worth a lot to a cockroach? How would I like to be ended with a smash

5. Every now and then in blows my mind that you can just walk into a book store, read the books, and then leave.  Imagine if you can do that in a mattress store.

6.  I really can't remember if I watched You've Got Mail in the theaters, or I just heard about other people watching in theaters, pictured myself watching it in the theater, and then memory and imagination blurred after the passage of time

7.  There are some people that are so impressively good at tearing down my new experiences and accomplishments  that I was so purely excited about before and making them seem absolutely pathetic.  Except I've learned to take it in stride and give less of a shit about what they say.  One of my bosses (that sounds like such a major word, he technically was my boss, but I always feel like that word is reserved for the corporate world) once told me that you don't have to let anybody make you feel bad about yourself.  And like everything, I think it's half true half not.  I feel like sometimes you shouldn't stand for bullshit, but sometimes, you should act like the person isn't even worth your time.  In a way, it's true, they win if they make you feel crappy.

And also, I now give them the benefit of the doubt that they don't totally understand what I'm doing.

8.  I don't want to be a people pleaser.  I don't want to fake smile and fake laugh at your jokes.  But I can't help it.  The silence is too awkward for me and I feel like I should throw you a bone.  This is not a humble brag, I won't even pretend it's compassion.  I do it not for your sake, but mine, I don't want you to hate me, even though I don't respect you.  Why can't I be like that girl who doesn't even smile when you utter a lame punchline, who barely gives recognition that she heard it?  I want to be like January Jones, stoic and confident, unaccommodating to pandering efforts to feign camaraderie and small talk.  A lot of people think she's a stone cold bitch, which seems a little bit true sometimes  in interviews when it's obvious she feels her character's competitive relationship with others as if they were her own.  But I think she's mostly just a genuine person who isn't easily pleased and eager to please, which in turn force people to make a greater effort to get into her good graces.

9.  Are people inherently good or bad? I don't think there is such thing as an opaque evil person.   Or rather, people do malicious evil things, but I don't think they feel inherently evil.  They perhaps have an impulsive uncontrollable urge to do bad things, but I do not think they derive any true pleasure from it other than a temporary dopaminic high. On the flip side, I think that this means that people are fully responsible for their actions.  For all intents and purposes,  to do evil is to be evil, regardless of the nature of your soul.

10.  I am not very eloquent, and my thoughts and become entangled with my tongue resulting in a incoherent dithery string of "words." Especially when someone asks, so what is it that you want to do?

11.  I think I would probably "win" the marshmallow experiment.  Not because I don't mind delayed gratification (which I'm only sometimes good with), but rather because I'm so fearful of authority

Dream overview

My dreams are telling me I miss high school, which basically means, it's officially too long ago for me to remember what it was really like.

Because while I miss some of it, the only reason I really mourn it is because I will never be in that time space again.  

I miss the mundaneness, of walking through the hallways, talking during lunch, joking around after school, coming home and eating a snack and watching bad tv, 

I was back in school and it was graduation day, for some reason we would have two graduations, one before and one before and one after college.  I ran into a former teacher here and there, they remembered me, even though I never visited them, I felt pleased but also embarrassed since I still sucked at small talk in my dreams.  We went to the library, and it was so cool, like a treehouse.  there were two parts, both had to be accessed by ladders.  The shelves were shaped like branches with no sharp edges, like we were in the kids section of Barnes and noble.

I rationally remember, but also don't remember, the stress of it all, of hating waking up before the sun, tests tests tests, projects projects projects, to be the best of the best of everything, the petty jealousies and gossip, even though I wasn't even in the running. I do remember the raisism though, internal and external, overt amd covert.  The girl with the effortless bangs who wouldn't hold my hand during square dancing because of my Asian cooties, even though this wasn't a problem when we were in the same class in second grade, the portly blonde boy who all the teachers loved, who called me japanese like it was a four letter word and I was frozen, mouth shut, knowing I should say something but instead just stood there feeling the contours of shame in my tummy. Who was going to care, anyways? The gym teacher regularly rattled off his favorite Chinese take out items while he timed my flex hold.  Chow mien, lemon chicken, beef with broccoli.  Did I eat those all the time at my home? Silence.

I found my old binder from photo I.  And while there is only one photo left that I really like, It was a reminder that I did enjoy that class, even though I often did the homework at the last minute like any other obligation. But looking through, I miss the creativity, the obligation to be creative, that while it makes creativity work when you obligate it, it's also like like sometimes telling you to play.  I miss the creativity mixed with structure and method, thinking of an idea and then working on the technique to make it happen.  The fstops, the exposures, focusing the picture and letting it burn, setting it in a cool tub of chemical.  (Things that I learned and  I wrote down that I barely understand now.  It's funny how you can understand something so fully and not know it at all in the future, as if you haven't learned it at all, or unlearned it.  Even though the evidence is right there that you once knew it. )  Not worrying about practicality, society, what it is all for.  Just creating beauty and hoping someone will agree with it.

Nostalgia is Greek for old wound, as I learned from mad men, and Wikipedia, but more memorably mad men. 

Random thoughts day 75

I completely forgot what I was about to type. It's that weird temperature where it's too hot to use a blanket but too cold not to

Allergy season! I feel constantly covered in dust, sniffling, unclean

In my dream a line of food trucks set up in the middle of the night in front of my house.  One of the trucks rang our door bell and gave us a whole tray of burgers as samples.  I was trying to take the proper photo of them in neat rows against the pale pink table top to Instagram but frustratingly they kept bunching up no sliding out of their relegated rows.  

I was trying to floss my teeth.

There was a coffee table full of various cookie pies, a hybrid if pie and cheesecake.  Chocolate chip, Oreo, and more.  They tasted like paper.

Hugh Laurie took this buntd shaped magical cake out of the cabinet and kept taunting us asking if we wanted to try it.   Except it was covered in whip cream and chocolate sprinkles, neither of which I'm particularly fond of.  I kept imagining how this cake that didn't look very good would be able to manage to taste very very good.

Dream Diary Post 12

A I was looking for one of my older pay checks that I had socked away in one of the drawers in my bedroom.  I was so sure it was in the top one but I couldn't find it.  People were over for some gathering, but at the stage of quiet conversational lull after the initial lunch festivities and before dinner.

I sat on the ground rummaging through the second drawer, pulling out handfuls and handfuls of treasured knick knacks that I still admired, but thought the world of when I was younger when I started heaving loud scratching sobs because my childhood was over.

I couldn't stop because a stupid emotional classical score was playing. 

Dream Diary Post day 73 11

We were on a school bus. We stopped because there was a ice cream truck outside and my grandma wanted to get ice cream. I was afraid she was going to fall going down the big bus steps but she didn't.

We were on the street where I lived on Montgomery. It was a sunny day and the grass was green. There was a little Chinese girl kidnapped by the old lady and old man that lived on the house on the far left with the white paneling and the white roof. The old lady had a curly white perm and the old man wore a plaid shirt and baggy khaki pants and a black leather belt as old men tend to wear. They carved words into the little girl's face with a switchblade. The old couple let the girl's parents visit her in the basement, but she couldn't go home. My parents and aunts decided to go to the house and rescue the girl. The general consensus was, this is absurd, we all know they have her, we should hurry up and rescue her before they know that we know.

We're in the foyer of their house, it's airy and cool, and has all the pretenses of a casual conversation between neighbors. Except all of a sudden the old lady is swinging kitchen scissors in our faces so we try to run out the door. Except she grabs me and blocks me and shuts the front door and I'm alone with her. She carves my initials into the inside of my lower lip with a switchblade. I scream and it stings and she releases me as I try to open the door as fast as I can. I'm crying as I stumble back into the sunlight down the stone steps towards the sidewalk as I keep telling myself it's just flesh, it's just flesh, it will heal.
Sent from my iPhone

Faux-girl power pet peeve

There's that recurring trope in romantic comedies where the main female protagonist is jealous of her male love interest's new hot close lady colleague but at the end it's revealed that said hot lady is a lesbian, or even better, a lesbian in love with the protagonist.  I hate that.  It's like the only way to remove girl on girl competition is to replace it with lesbianism.

Like that episode of family guy where Meg proclaims that she is a lesbian just to feel some affection from another human being, and Lois calls her out on it.

Or to bond over hating the same guy they both have a crush on (see: hos over bros)