Year: 2004

friday night caryn and i went over to joey’s house to watch a movie w/ him and catherine. the movie we ended up watching was Thirteen Days, a movie about the cuban missile crisis. in high school, despite the many years of history we had to take, unfortunately we never really spent too much time concentrating on any modern history… like pretty much anything after WWII. sure we kind of glossed over the vietnam war, kennedy, and the cuban missile crisis, but we really only learned a tiny bit about each and most of that information i’ve already forgotten.

watching that movie was pretty crazy. it’s totally insane to think just how close we came to having a nuclear war that would probably have wiped out most of the planet. the nuclear missiles that russia had in cuba could travel to the US in a mere 5 minutes, so any attempt at defense or hiding in bomb shelters etc would have been totally useless. due to some insanely lucky circumstances, and a president who wanted so badly to avert war, we somehow managed to pull through the situation. but it so easily could have ended differently. what if a situation like that had happened when we had an incompetent trigger-happy president like bush in control? i shudder to think what might have been.

-v

Stephanie and i broke up over a year ago, and since then i’ve only seen her a few times. i think maybe 3. several month ago she had a kid named Hunter. i know i’ve already posted this several times in my journal, but still i must reiterate that it still shocks me every time someone my age, who i know, has a kid. so weird! anyways, i’m not big on babies. they kinda make me nervous, and i’m definitely not down to hold them, but if someone makes one, i feel like i should probably go see it. so here and there i’ve talked to steph and we’ve tentatively planned to meet up at some point so i could check out this baby.

today she calls me out of the blue and says that she’s in my neighborhood and is down to stop by with her baby. so she comes over. sooooooo weird! i gotta say, it was truly bizarre to see her w/ a kid. her son was 5 months old already so he was pretty big and could smile and stuff by now. so we kicked it for a bit and talked about her son and life and stuff. turns out she is probably gonna move to nebraska! crazy eh? well maybe 8 or 9 minutes later the baby started crying and getting antsy, so she took off. luckily i never got asked to hold it or anything…

-v

my friend sage works at an ambulance company, and last night she got stuck w/ the worst shift ever: midnight till 8am. when all of us went to dinner for sharon’s going away, she was begging people to come kick it w/ her for a few hours so she wouldn’t have to endure the thing alone. staying up till all hours of the night didn’t sound very appealing to me, but i was pretty curious as to what an ambulance dispatch center would look like, and thought it might be interesting to hang out and see what happens. i agreed to come hang out from 2-4am. i didn’t think i could survive awake till 4am, so i decided to take a quick nap from 1 to 2.

at 2 am, my alarm goes off and i’m utterly confused as to what the hell is going on. why the fuck is my alarm on in the middle of the night?? oh yeah. ambulance shift. i’m exhausted, can barely see straight, and have a *very* strong urge to call and flake. somehow i force myself to get up and drive down there anyways. the ambulance center is tucked away behind some houses, so if you didn’t know it was there, you’d probably never even notice it. i walk in to the place and am surrounded by blinking monitors, walkie talkies, and other electrical mumbo-jumbo.

sage gave me a rundown of what everything is, how stuff works, and what a typical day on the job of an ambulance dispatcher is like. it was pretty cool since this is not something everyone gets to check out. since this was the middle of the night, she didn’t get any calls, but we did hear a few calls come in over the walkie talkie from other ambulance crews around the city. it definitely seems like a pretty crazy job. i honestly dont think i could handle it. it would be too depressing for me. listening constantly all day to people who are badly injured and stuff. yikes! definitely not for me… but it was cool to just check out.

-v

yesterday i drove down to palo alto to have dinner w/ sharon, dave and some other people. we were getting together because sharon is about to take off on her cross country trip in her RV and she’s gonna be gone for 6 months. normally i would think “wow, i’m not gonna get to hang out w/ sharon for a whole 6 months”, but this time it’s just the tip of the iceberg. after she gets back from her trip, she’s moving to New York to go to Cornell for 6 *years*. wow, that’s such a long time!! i already dont really get to see her all that often seeing as she lives an hour and a half away in santa cruz, but it’s gonna suck extra much now.

it’s so weird how, as life goes on, slowly but surely people that you are friends with start setting out and going far away. people that i used to see day in and day out, i hardly ever see them nowadays. i guess it makes sense. everyone’s gotta live their life and do what they gotta do, but at the same time it’s so sad to see people leave, especially when they are part of the handful of people who you have been good friends with for ages. sure everyone makes more friends along the way… but there are some people who just have been your core friends for years, and those are people who are impossible to replace. Erica, Natasha, Yan, and Sharon… out of the people that i have been close with ever since at least 10 years ago… they are the only ones i still kick it with. soon there will only be 3.

-v

thai food:

when i was in thailand, i took a one day thai cooking class. the class was way fun and it really amazed me just how simple and quick so many of the dishes were. it was crazy that food so delicious could be made with little to no prep time, and a handful of key ingredients. after coming back, i was eager to try cooking some thai food here. i went to a few asian markets, but couldn’t find the correct ingredients that i needed, and soon gave up.

a couple weeks ago though, i went over to marcel’s house, and he made some green curry chicken. it was bomb. i guess he was able to find all the necessary ingredients fairly easily. all of a sudden, my urge to cook thai food was back. so last week, i dug around on the net and found a site listing several thai grocery stores in the city. the store i ended up going to was super small, cramped, and full of tons of funky foods. it was pretty interesting to just wander around the 3 isles and check out the random concoctions that were for sale. after browsing for a bit, i bought what i needed and left.

later that day i cooked some basil chicken and green curry chicken. the basil chicken turned out just ok, but the green curry was actually pretty damn good. i think i’m definitely gonna want to try making some thai food again in the near future. actually, caryn is pretty into thom kha gai, so maybe one of these days we’ll try to make some of that.

tivo:

for new years, my parent got me a tivo. it was the only thing i was hoping to get, and i was really psyched to have it. i spent the next day trying to set it up (the initial set up takes a while) and then programmed a bunch of shows into it. having tivo seemed like a huge benefit to me. i hate sitting down to watch tv and watching pointless garbage because there’s nothing on. if i take a lunch break while working from home, what the hell is gonna be on around 2pm in he afternoon? now w/ tivo i can sit down and watch tv at any point in the day, and see my favorite shows w/out commercials.

but there’s a downside. tivo just makes watching tv too good! before tivo, i really would watch tv very rarely. when i had free time, since the tv shows often sucked, i would actually do something productive or read. now, knowing that there are good shows waiting for me on tivo, i gravitate to the tv way more often. in a lot of ways i really dont think that’s a good thing. but what can i do? with tons of episodes of south park, real world, etc building up…. i just cant resist it…

-v

i spent most of this weekend helping caryn get ready to move. she’s moving to my house after january 11th. since we’re going on our trip in just 6 months, it seemed a bit pointless to move tons of her stuff over to my house, just to put it in storage a few months later. so we tried to get as much of her stuff into storage as possible. she signed up for door to door storage which is pretty damn cool. they come by and drop off these huge wooden containers, and you just fill them up. then they take them away and store them. soooo much easier than renting a truck, packing it, driving it, unpacking it again at the storage place, etc. surprisingly, getting everything ready was less painful than i thought it would be. by the end of the weekend, everything was locked up and ready.

not only that, but we also had enough time to cruise up to jamie’s house in sac and make sushi. caryn and i were in charge of buying fish, and grossly overestimated how much fish to buy. once we got there, we came to realize that everyone else had brought too much foo as well. there was *so* much food!! luckily all the food was really damn good though. josh and kim made this bomb crab salad, chris made tempura, and then we all attempted to roll sushi. i’ve never tried to make sushi before, but in reality, it’s not all that tough. of course, we all had plenty of sake bombs to go w/ the meal.

-v

The last 2 weeks have been pretty hectic and busy. Haven’t really had to time to update my journal or anything, but here’s a rundown of what’s been happening:

Sat dec 20 Blackout :

We recently changed the way we pay our electric bill. Now we have to put this little meter-reading card in our window at the end of each month. Well, unfortunately I totally forgot to do it for November and we were a little nervous as to how the electric company would react. Saturday night, we were hanging out at my house and all of a sudden, everything went black. Uh-oh! Turns out that it wasn’t just our house that lost power though, the whole neighborhood had gone pitch black. It was actually pretty exciting and fun to have all the power go out. Caryn and I hung out at our house for a while w/ Erica and Kevin. We lit candles all over the place and wandered through the rooms w/ flashlights. After a bit, we decide to venture out and see what it was like outside, so we grabbed some glasses of wine and headed out.

Being outside was pretty fun. How often do you get to see your whole neighbor hood all in pitch black?? It was such a strange sight. Lots of people were wandering the streets trying to figure out what as going on. We tried to call random people on their cell phones to see how widespread the outage was and it turned out that practically half the city was completely dark. Cool! We wandered down to joey and catherine’s house and they came and wandered around too. It was funny to see that certain restaurants were still open and serving by candlelight. Certain bars were doing the same thing. Later on that night (the power was out for about 8 hours!) a bunch of us went to a couple of bars and hung out in the dimly lit rooms drinking. What a night!

Sat dec 20 Circus :

The night of the blackout we had tickets to go see the circus performance called “seven fingers”. Luckily, the palace of fine arts was in one of the few sections of the city that still had power. Phew! The performance was really cool. It was all done in a similar style as cirque du soleil. Cool trapeze, and acrobatics performances, mixed w/ music, funny bits, and theatrics. All of us enjoyed it.

Dec21-24th Shopping :

The next few days were crazy and hectic. I pretty much always leave my holiday shopping till the last second, but somehow this season it everything seemed even more rushed and crazy. I think it’s partially because my work only gave me 2 days off for the holidays (25th and 1st) and also I had a bunch of different family obligations planned, so I really needed to get everything done in a hurry. I spent several days going to work and then stressing as to what to get various people. There was a lot of difficulty w/ some of the gifts, which I won’t bother going into the details about here, but everything was so crazy. Over the next several days I was totally exhausted. Trying to hit the malls on the 24th was insanely hard. Ugh!

Dec 24th Decorating the tree :

On the 24th we decided to get together and decorate the tree at my parents’ house. Because of so many different plans for the next few days, this was the only day we could do it. It was also one of the days of hannukah, so we celebrated that too. Caryn came over and go to light her first Hanukkah candle ever. It’s funny to have people take part of traditions they’ve never been a part of before and see how they experience it. During dinner, we were talking about the different Christmas light displays we’ve seen, and caryn happened to mention that at Vasona Park they have this thing called the “fantasy of lights” where you drive through the park and there are tons of different characters and stuff made out of Christmas lights. So my mom decides we should all just pile in the car and go see it right then and there. Totally random. The fantasy of lights was pretty damn cool. Afterwards, we decorated our tree as planned.

After getting home, caryn and I exchanged stockings. Now, this is something I’ve never done before. I honestly wasn’t sure what goes into a stocking or anything. In fact I didn’t actually even get her and actual stocking, but instead just wrapped a bunch of little gifts. The stocking I got from her was hella cool. Tons of fun small stuff like rubber duckies, hot sauces, little champagne bottles, candy, etc. t his whole stocking tradition is pretty cool!

Dec 25th Christmas :

For Christmas we drove up to rocklyn and spent it w/ caryn’s step mom’s family. The last time I visited her family, I had met her dad’s side, so now there were all new names and faces I had to memorize. And since it was Christmas, there was a *ton* of people there. Trying to figure out and remember who was who was nearly impossible. I didn’t really spend too much time talking to any of the people there. Afterwards, we went over to her parents’ house and kicke4d it w/ her dad and step mom for a while. That was much more nice and chill. Her parents bought me a travel book for me for Christmas. A nice and thoughtful gift, although it turned out to be a book I already had. So they exchanged it and got me lonely planet’s “southern Africa” which looks super interesting.

The next day was spent trying to do more last minute shopping and stuff. Ack. So stressful!

Dec 27th Christmas part 2 :

So, 2 days after celebrating Christmas, we drove up to rocklyn to celebrate Christmas again. This time w/ her dad’s side of the family. This was the second time I’ve met that side of the family, so I was much more comfortable that time. Caryn’s family is all really nice and I can totally tell that they make effort to be friendly and accepting w/ me. That’s pretty cool.

Her dad did most of the cooking for this Christmas, and he’s a really good cook so the food was hellza bomb. There was also a gift exchange that was pretty cool and funny to watch. We ended up staying there till a little past midnight.

Dec 28th New Years a bit early :

My brother left to go to Vegas this new years. He left on the 29th, so the only time that my family and I could celebrate new years was on the 28th. We went over there and had dinner, ate lots of food, and opened gifts. I had earlier mentioned to my mom that if “Santa” was still confused as to what to get me, he should get me Tivo. I didn’t think
she would actually go for it, but in the end, that’s exactly what I got. Shweet!! My dad made a toast saying that 2003 had been a year full of hardships and lots of bad things and that he hoped that 2004 would be better. It was interesting, because he said that despite the many unlucky things that happened, there was actually one very lucky thing that happened and that was my brother’s car accident. It was cool that instead of seeing it as an unlucky event, he saw it as all of us being super lucky cause my brother came out unharmed.

Dec 31st New Years Eve :

For new years a bunch of people went out to dinner at a restaurant called Andalus. It was a nice tapas restaurant in the mission. The food was sooooo good. Everything we ate was incredibly delicious. They had some pretty good drinks too. Afterwards we went across the street to a bar called elixir. The bar was packed, but instead of being packed in a festive and exciting way…. It was just packed. The midnight champagne toast was a bit confusing, abrupt and didn’t actually happen at midnight I think. Oh well. Afterwards we went to the Luna lounge to try to go to the popscene Nye thing, but the line was too long. After trying to figure out what to do next, we went to some house party. I don’t think anyone was doing all that much drinking and due to all the breaks in between doing things, we were all kind of running out of steam. Eventually we went home.

And now it’s the beginning of 2k4. Hopefully it’ll be an exciting and awesome year. I think it’s already gearing up to be. Caryn is moving in with me in just a couple of weeks which should be cool. And then in July we’re gonna take off to travel around the world. How crazy is that?!

-v