on friday, decadence stripped at the octet and overtones west coast a cappella fall showcase. down to boxers and a tank top. was fun. are thinking of way to top that for our own show, which will be… when? WHEN?!?!?! and WHERE?!??!?!!??!?!?!? AUUUGHHH THE STRESS!
on saturday, after singing with magnetic north (i’m searching for polaris…) at the theater rice showcase, i walked down shattuck in search of food. as i waited to cross shattuck at center, some guy who was walking by going north grabbed my arm as he breezed past and said “smile! smile!” a minute later, as i was walking near barnes & noble, he came back and said “i hope i didn’t scare you back there,” asked me if i was a student, asked me what i studied, told me what he was doing (it was long; i didn’t listen–he said something about studying, but reading thousands of pages that wasn’t for his school, so it was like he was doing school, but not for his actual school; i didn’t see how on earth i was supposed to be impressed by anything he was saying), and he asked me for my number. took out his little flip phone and everything. i said i didn’t give it out and that i have a boyfriend. i didn’t know how to react and i didn’t want to tell him anything more about myself. he said that he didn’t believe it for a second–“what, you’re gonna get married or something? i don’t believe it”–and that sometimes, we should just live life, and not judge on how people live, or something, so i said “well. that’s not how i conduct my life.” it was really strange. so, i can just go up to anyone and start talking to them, and make them talk to me because they don’t know what else to do or how to walk away without being rude–even though grabbing my arm earlier could be considered “rude,” not “friendly.” i think he was probably 10 years older than me. as i continued walking by b&n, i was lured inside by the big 30% off sticker on the davinci code, which connie really enjoyed, so i got it. then i wandered around fiction/literature, happened upon the c’s, and got jim crace’s latest, genesis. because ryan was looking at it online when he was here, and in the uk it’s called “six.” i just looked around for 20 seconds on barnesandnoble.com and couldn’t find it. we were looking at “six” on amazon.com. amazon.com is having technical difficulties right now, or something. there was this woman who came in as i was waiting for the person to scan the barcode on genesis (it didn’t work after 45 seconds of moving the barcode under the red line light, so she had to punch it in) and asked the person trying to scan the barcode how to find a certain book. the cashier said to wait. the person breezed away past a table and knocked a bunch of things down to the floor, said “oh sorry” and continued breezing. i went to extreme pizza. i got a meat slice, which that day was a hawaiianish kind of thing. i read the first few pages of genesis. as i was getting up to leave, the breezy person came down and sat at my table and said “oh, you shouldn’t leave, people who are reading shouldn’t have to move” or something. she thought i was moving so she could have the table, i guess. so she asked me waht i was reading, sat down next to me, looked in my b&n plastic bag, asked to look in both of the books, said that she liked the sensibility of the books i chose, and proceeded to tell me that she was a writer herself and that her books were crappy crime fiction books because she wanted to explore psychopaths to better portray them in her own writing, because all the villians in her writing to date made sense, or you could understand them. she said something then about her friends, who did “something to me, and i coudln’t understand it, and i thought they were my friends, you know? so i want to know about psychopaths. just things i’ve been going through.” i nodded. she asked me if i wrote and said i look like i did, or something. she asked me if i liked poetry, i said yes, that i liked marianne moore. she asked me if i wrote poetry, i said not since high school. she said “you know, the bookstore across the street [motioning to pegasus] has this poetry thing, we should go together and bounce poems off of each other–” i made a noncommittal mmph. she said she liked my scarf. she was older, i think she had blondish wiry hair, her pink lipstick was only on the outer edges of her lips because she went “mmm” a lot, but without the sound “mmm.” oh! she said she was published. she wrote a lesbian sherlock holmes story called vittoria … something. “that’s V-I-T-T…” she said. “well in one of the stories in the canon, you know, the original sherlock holmes stories, at one point he’s flipping through his files, right? and one of them is the something of vittoria something, but there’s no story called that. so my assignment was to write it.” something about it getting good reviews on some website, or something.
ah. Vittoria the Circus Belle! that was it. hurrah google. http://www.schoolandholmes.com/untoldcases.html is a listing of untold stories. or something. i really don’t know much about sherlock holmes.
anyway, so i left before she could say anything more about meeting to bounce poems off of each other, or her psychopath so-called friends that “did this thing to me.” haha. she was nice, though.
what was it about me on saturday that made people talk to me? was it just cuz i was by myself? it might have been my purple pants, or my sequiny scarf. shrug. i don’t walk around by myself outside as much as i should, i think.
i read genesis. i posted a favorite sentence in my livejournal already. i liked it. it is a book about sex. it was rather depressing. all the characters were so flawed, dull, cruel, or annoying, and i like how he goes into how all his characters think, exposing them for how they really are and telling us about how they think they are, and such. he likes to tell you things that happen, so you already know that she’s going to end up pregnant, but then you keep reading anyway because he makes you want to find out what led up to that, because there is so much to the story besides just the obvious big thing that happened, and things. so in that way it reminded me of being dead, of course, because obviously at the beginning you know they’re dead.
i also finished life of pi last week. i liked that book a lot too. i wanted it to be real. i was so nervous during the book. some parts made me so outraged. i think the guy’s a good writer. yann martel. i don’t know about the “forward” promising that the story will make you believe in god…? i liked what he had to say about god and religion though, a lot. all in all it was an awfully cute book, cruel at times too, and always funny.
i said the same thing about kavalier and clay–that i wanted it to be real. the sentiment i had about genesis wasn’t that, though, but i still liked it–more voyeurish, maybe, wanting to watch the story unfold, instead of wanting to be in the story.
yesterday, sunday nov 9, was my sister’s thirteenth birthday.
my dad called. he said that mrs. rae, my piano teacher, passed away on friday. another parent from the studio called him just then, and he called me to tell me, and the rest of my family wasn’t home.
twice has my father given me news of death. the other time was when my grandma died in taiwan. my mom and sister had gone to taiwan to say bye to her, but ray and i couldn’t because we had school. he told me and ray a few days after my mom called home and told him. i remember he told us to sit on my bed because he had something to tell us.
the topic we went to right after that on the phone was my cousins kevin and maggie–their baby is due any moment now. (strange to say “the topic was my cousins.”) it sounds trite i guess, but isn’t that a big moment? if it was in a novel you were reading, and the character’s father calls her on her sister’s birthday and talks about her piano teacher’s death and her cousins’ child’s imminent birth, wouldn’t you pause for a moment and think about the implications of the author putting death and birth practically in the same sentence?
why didn’t i visit mrs rae when i was home?
did i see her at all after hearing news that she was sick?
why do i procrastinate on these things?
once, a long, long long long long, long, long long time ago she said in a yearly letter to the parents “some of you have been worried about retiring. well, i’ve been teaching for forty years and i fully intend on teaching for forty more” and i have always though of that whenever anybody remarked “she is 72 years old, you know” or anything like that, and, well, you know how death is, you really don’t think it’s that final, it’s not something you expect to happen, you don’t think about death when someone was there for you since you were in second grade and saw you for 40 minutes and more a week and watched you grow up and helped you and was exasperated with you when you didn’t practice but clearly had potential, and after your junior prom told you you were beautiful when you showed her your arthur mintz picture of yourself and kept it in a little frame–i was a little embarrased by that, because was i a kiss-up, were the tuan family kids teachers’ pets?–no, we liked to talk, we liked to please. i know i have more to say. i’m stopping now, though, because there are things that i feel that i don’t know really how to, well, yeah.
today i got dinner with jennnnnnny at sushi afloat. they got me seafarers of catan!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! so we played it after dinner, with splag and melinda and steve. j and a played together on a team, since it’s max 4 people. what i want to know is, do i need the settlers 5-6 player expansion pack in order for the seafarers 5-6 player expansion pack to work? because i want to get in on some 5-6 player action, even though that would probably take an additional three hours. yeah, so seafarers gives you edgepieces that fit together puzzle-like, so your board doesn’t fall apart. it looks nice, also, when it is all on the table. it is fun. ships! islands! and a new “resource”–gold! we had WAY not enough seafaring this game. it was pathetic. melinda and i both made a halfhearted dash towards one of the gold-laden islands, but gave up. haha… anyway, j&a won. then we played taboo. directdk will be happy to know that i brought up tentacle rape anime in random conversation twice in the last week. and both times, people had heard of it, and i was surprised. anyway, yeah. you know, my keyboard is noisy, and when i type stream-of-consciously like i do when updating my livejournal for long periods of loquacious time, it probably annoys my sleeping roommate. good night. i never say good night in my livejournal. what is going on? who am i?
Settlers of Catan roxorz!
It’s amazing the stuff that happens sometimes, but then you realize that life isn’t a novel, and stuff that happens sometimes has no meaning, even though it would be a good/significant thing to happen in a novel. And I’m not discreting your belitting your experiences, I’m just sharing mine, because I’ve had those same moments/thoughts too.
It’s true, stuff like that always reminds me that I can’t take people for granted, ever. I think it probably helped me in high school because a lot of reminders like that befell me so I always was aware that I had to live life to the fullest all the time. But I think I’ve forgotten now. Maybe I can remember.
Oh, I think your dash was more than half-hearted, in fact, even all-out, but your board positions just didn’t seem to give up the resources you needed to really “settle”.
You are Mufasa’s boy!
I ask you what happened in your day and you say, “Oh, nothing much.” And then you write this. You were hit on by a man *and* a woman in the space of an hour?
The Da Vinci code is so good! It really gave me a lot of perspectives on things, religion, art history, etc. I just read it today in 5 hours after buying it like two weeks ago. Oh, and Settlers is awesome.