Eleventh: The Last Day before the Last Day

More stuff from SF! Instead of scouring my brains trying to write some captions, I've decided to put a line of a song I know to describe each one. Hopefully, they'll make sense.

"Upside down, I'll find the things they say just can't be found" - Jack Johnson

"Damn, it feels good to be a gangster..." - Geto Boys
P.S. that's such an awesome hairdo

"You looked behind you to smile back at me" - John Mayer

Tenth: Chilly San Francisco

So on Tuesday, I was out of school for a field trip to the SF zoo with my AP Bio class. As much fun as I remember my childhood trips to visit Shamu in San Diego being, the zoo was actually pretty...dull.
1. Tuesday morning/midday? Very, very empty place.
2. We had these packets we were rushing to finish.
3. They should provide scooters because then my aching feet wouldn't want to secede from my legs.
Still, I brought along a camera for me and Simsters to snap some photos with, and we ended up taking some very cool ones. All photos credited to me or her.

P.S. So animals generally have these latin-ish sounding scientific names (i.e. lion is Panthera leo). It turns out that the scientific name for a gorilla is gorilla gorilla gorilla.

Monkey contemplating the meaning of life (it's not 42).
Giraffes do yoga, too.

Ninth: Three Takes on a Saturday Evening

A few more photos I snapped this past weekend in Santa Cruz:
Simple evidence that birds also enjoy long, meaningful walks on the beach.

The area on the right side of the photo is where we played "sticks": basically, you grab a stick and try to stick it in the sand as close to the ocean as possible when the tide rescinds (congratulations to Paul for winning).

Funky things to do with PhotoShop (check out the corner of sky blue sky).

Eighth: Two Takes on a Windy Sunday Morning

Over the weekend, karma finally began kicking in for me as I headed down to Santa Cruz/Aptos to spend Saturday night and Sunday morning in a few seaside villas - courtesy Steffo and her generous family. I'll keep updating with little snippets of what went on down there (e.g. raucous games of birthday mafia and some quality movie programming), but for now I'll make things quick.

I was fiddling with the D200 a fellow journalist happened to bring down for some photo opportunities, and can safely say that I took 200 horrible photos and 2 that I actually like:


The best thing by far about the villas was the proximity to the ocean; you could take a 15-second walk from the door and reach a small cliff that looked over the beach and the entire Santa Cruz coastline. Snapping these photos was a very satisfying way to kick off my Sunday morning.

Seventh: Music Men

I tend to think I'm familiar with every corner of my house, but just when I fall into this state of I've-seen-all-there-is-to-see, something like my brother's clarinet case comes up and proves me wrong. Rummaging through an upstairs cabinet, I came across the little box and was flooded with memories of when he used to go around the house toot-tooting.

During the same period of time while I was figuring out how to put the thing together (it came in 5 different parts), I decided to edit the photo of the clarinet to remind me of mid-20th century movie shots. I think I failed, but feel free to make your own judgment.

The piano where my brother, my sister, and I have all been trained... to hate piano. My brother's definitely the most accomplished, whereas my sister is still taking lessons and complains regularly about having to practice. I quit the piano in 4th grade, though I somewhat regret it now that I listen to a lot of songs where piano plays a major role in the instrumentals.

I was tempted to leave off with this picture of my guitar neck and "'nuff said," but I think that I've become used to idolizing the instrument and its related music without really explaining what drew/draws me to it. So the story:
After quitting piano in 4th grade, I began listening to a lot more pop punk bands, namely Green Day and Blink 182. As any addict of pop punk music knows, you can't listen to songs like "All the Small Things" and "Basket Case" without trying to air guitar or tap your feet to the drum beat. Eventually, my obsession with air-emulating such bands turned into a desire to learn to play guitar. 4-5ish years later, I find it's a great way to project how you feel, what you see, and what you think through a language as universal as music - something that can cross boundaries like nothing else. There's a song for basically every scenario:

Queen's Hammer to Fall - pump-up for a game/competition
Tom Petty's Free Fallin' - rainy California days
Journey's Faithfully/Jackson Browne's Running On Empty - long car rides
John Mayer's In Your Atmosphere - anytime you're in LA
Weezer's Say It Ain't So - under house arrest
Black Eyed Peas' Where is the Love - any events about saving the world (which we have a lot of)
Hamster Song - wanting a good laugh but secretly enjoying it

Sixth the...out of rhymes

I don't think I ever really appreciated candles until we had a blackout.

As I was diligently beginning my homework on Monday night, the lights began to emit an eerie buzz. Flicker on, flicker off, and just like that, our world was plunged into darkness (this sounds more disastrous than it actually was).
My sister's away at Science Camp this entire week, so the normal cries of "ARRGH NOT A BLACKOUT!!!" I'd hear from her room weren't present. Instead, I blindly inched my way downstairs and found my parents lighting a few candles. These lifesavers helped me to squint painfully at the text If on a winter's night a traveler and 3 pages of my biology textbook before I collapsed back into my chair, massaging my wounded eyes and nursing a minor headache.
Seeing as it was a little past 9, I didn't want to risk taking a "nap" that would knock me out cold for the night and possibly make me miss the highly anticipated return of the power. Instead, I sat in the dark living room playing guitar and making up rules for a new game I've invented called What to Do When the World is Plunged Into Darkness.
Afterthought: the power came back on at 2 AM.

I've been thinking I should take a picture of the funky wire/spiral/leaf art project my sister brought home from class one day, and here it is. She's actually dressed up the chandelier with a lot of trinkets (like tiny stuffed animals wedged in here and there), but the best thing by far is the Funky Monkey:

P.S. Happy birthday to a certain young lady, turning 13? 14? Can't really remember

Fifth that Essay about the Monomyth

What did I do with my weekend?

I just wanted to open with that for a little dramatic effect. From the picture, you might be tempted to guess that I spent my weekend flapping my arms trying to fly, but you would be dead wrong. In fact, I spent a good deal of Friday and a bit of Saturday plastic-skating on Davis field. The above is my favorite picture from Saturday night of me trying to jump on ice (credits to Steffo), which I just spent a dickens of a time trying to edit so that it resembled the freeze-frame shots at the end of movies like Rocky. If you don't know what I mean, simply imagine that you've just watched a movie about a young, charming amateur ice-skater who aspires to go pro and woo the lady of his dreams. The film ends with rapturous success and this freeze-frame of him doing his "signature jump" while his best friend and supporting character skates in the distance. Perfect ending, huh? I can already hear the Academy, Wikipedia writers, and Rotten Tomatoes singing its praise.

^ I realize that all that was incredibly corny, but 1. I actually spent quite a bit of time editing this photo 2. I happen to like it a lot 3. It's a very cool photo 4. No amount of corniness can change that

My court happens to have about 8 berry (I think they're berry) trees that bloom each spring. They seem to bloom rapidly each year, erupting in a fireworks show of pinks and purples before the seasons start to shift and the trees turn a darkish purple (which isn't nearly as nice-looking). I've been telling myself for a while that I should take a photo of them in bloom but hadn't really gotten around to it until this year. I actually didn't get them at their peak; there's a certain point when they are nearly covered with pink blossoms and artistically dashed with purple here and there. Still, they make for a nice setting when I go for jogs.

Fourth the Little mouse who traveled North

This is just about the only hat I've ever worn recreationally and consistently for any period of time. I got it on my A.I.D. volunteer trip in the summer of 2007, when I went to Taiwan to teach English to elementary school kids. One day during class, I paused in the middle of our culture lesson (the kids were asking me to draw a map of California) and had an amazing brain-child: I would ask the kids to sign the hat I had been wearing to prevent my head from baking at the mercy of the smoldering sun. I later got signatures from other kids on the trips - college students, our advisor, etc. When I got home and checked Facebook to see the horde of pictures my friends from Taiwan had taken, I realized how stupid I look wearing the hat. But it just goes to reinforce the important lesson I'm promoting: value inner beauty (wow look at those meaningful signatures) over outer beauty (hey that hat looks really dumb on you).

P.S. That's actually a Cheetos bag in the upper right corner, since I took this picture on my sister's desk and she was being a junkie.

There's nothing that represents the undiluted enjoyment of childhood quite like:

Pokemon.

I can't begin to explain how many things this old Gameboy has been through. My grandpa bought it for my brother some 17/18 years ago; it's been through plane rides, vacations, car trips, and an unforgettable day when my Magikarp finally evolved into a Gyarados. We've never gotten another Gameboy, but I think things are better this way; it helps to preserve the magic of our original one and the adventures we had with that little blue cartridge on the left.
P.S. Blue version is infinitely better than ANY other version.

This used to be my white whale.

P.S. I don't think I ever heard "Fourth the Little mouse who traveled North" in my elementary school days, but it rhymes, it sounds relatively meaningful, and it's a reference to a pretty popular children's book (tell me which and win a free high-five).

Third the Nerd

My backyard is relatively unremarkable in many ways, but relatively amazing in roughly 3:

1. This past summer, I used a tiny saw to cut down two (dying) bushes that were blocking the view from one of the downstairs windows with lots of dead branches and spider webs - VERY fun.
2. We used to have a jacuzzi-thing in the southwest side of our backyard, but some squirrels began making an underground kingdom right below it and it was taken out. True story.
3. This:Our green/yellow-lemon lemon tree. My brother and I used to sometimes spend boring days picking lemons down and playing lemon baseball, which is fun until you smash the lemon-ball with the bat, run from the citrus juice explosion, and have to fetch another.
More delicious, but maybe not as fun, is the ai-yu jelly (a jelly-drink-snack-thing) we could make with the lemons. We just had to go into the backyard and pick a few non-decaying lemons, bring them back to mom, and within half an hour she'd have a nice bowl of deliciousness waiting in the fridge.

My elementary school used to have this book fair every so often where they would stack tons of books and posters in the library that would eventually go up for sale. I was rummaging under the contents of my bed (something that usually requires gas mask and big honkin' gloves) and found these. I happened to get the John Elway poster on the left from a girl in 4th grade, and as every savvy 4th-grader knows, that's basically a marriage proposal.

Second the Best

There's an almost mythical quality to the original Lunchable's pepperoni pizzas. I remember snacking on these little delectables every time we had to pack our own lunch. I was an elementary school student, making (involving stacking the pizza sauce, cheese, and pepperoni) and eating (the best part) my own lunch; I had achieved a level of independence I wouldn't reach for another 10 years. All the same, there's much to be said for returning to the past.

Back around that time when I was raising myself to be an Italian chef, my family took a vacation to Hawaii. There's actually not much about the trip that I remember as particularly pleasant - it was gorgeous, naturally, but the scenic backdrop was punctuated by bouts of bad luck. On a snorkeling trip at the beach, my brother had our feet mercilessly cut by the razor-sharp coral that we tried to step on (couldn't walk without wincing for a few weeks). A few days later, we were visiting a volcano and the tour guide made a comment in Chinese that I didn't understand at the time. I later found out - amidst the laughter of everyone on the tour - that she had warned me against burning off my "little friend." If that's not child abuse, I don't know what is.

BUT Hawaii was indeed picturesque. I like to think that if I visited now, I'd focus less on the little trials and tribulations I noticed as a kid and instead enjoy how relaxing and serene it can truly be. The two plaque-things above are souvenirs that my brother and I brought back. We were visiting a village and an artist there offered to paint our names solely with images; mine's the one on top, and if you look closely you can see that my name is actually spelled arcing rainbow, happy leaping dolphin, second happy leaping dolphin, field of ferns, wide-eyed goldfish, poignant blade of grass, multi-colored parrot, sun over mountaintop, ecstatic leaping dolphin, large-winged insect.

First the Worst

It's a little weird how many things can spring up at you in one day. After taking a fair amount of time to figure out how to see photos I'd taken, I discovered that there were roughly 30 others on the same card - remnants of vacations my family's taken in the past few years. Credits to my dad:

JAPAN! Wicked, eh? Very cool place, very cool people, funky driving habits. As in all of Asia, mopeds are more common than cars. There are a lot of roads that are half pedestrian walkways, half moped lanes, and the traffic lanes don't really make sense. BUT Japan's saving grace: despite the overcrowdedness, the language barrier, and the millions of people who seem to blow smoke right in your face, the ramen is amazing. Visit, eat, and send me a letter telling me how right I am.

Keeping with the asian-feel photos, here's a picture of the HSR in Taiwan (High-Speed Rail). It's a toned-down version of the bullet train. I used to detest traveling from Northern Taiwan (Taipei, where my grandparents live) to the South (Tainan and Gaohsiung, where my mother's side lives) because the train ride takes roughly 5 hours. Traveling by HSR, it takes less than 90 minutes to go from North to South. I went alone for the first time this summer; I was interning at a college in the South and went North for a few nights to visit the grand-folks. On my way home, I got on the HSR dragging 1. my backpack 2. a big suitcase 3. a box of presents from my relatives to my immediate family back home 4. a guitar that I decided to take back to America from my aunt's house (see upper right for photo confirmation of guitar). It was still a comfortable trip.

But to stay true to what this blog is supposed to be about, I'm going to start showing a few photos I took myself. They're not talented or artsy, but feel free to bolster my confidence by telling me otherwise:

Though normal at first glance, my desk is actually the result of multiple reconfigurations. I've tried speakers there, clock there, light over here - basically every possible arrangement of my trinkets. I think this one finally works. The only notable problem would be that there's a drawer on the left-hand side that I keep banging my knee on whenever I get out of my chair. I tried to maximize the amount of usable room while still keeping my laptop on the desk - the entire right side is space for when I'm working. Is it dorky to mention this? Probably, but my desk is still cooler than yours.

Finally, irrevocable proof that I do indeed have a BLACK iPod, as opposed to the pink one that I am forced to use. I actually jumped into a pool with the black one in my pocket a few years ago; while it starts and scrolls, I can't seem to get it to play any music.