Category: San Francisco

earlier today, this article – Click! – was on the front page of cnn.com. To make a long story short, there’s a father living in Pennsylvania who believes that polygamy is a good thing and therefore is teaching his 10 year old daughter about this. Surprisingly, the courts said that it is illegal for him to do so, even though he is arguing that polygamy is part of his religion and that he should have the right to teach his own child to practice whichever religion he wishes.

honestly, i’m really surprised that the court ruled that way. for the most part parents are allowed to teach their kids whatever the hell they please in regards to religion. for instance, i couldn’t imagine the courts getting involved if he taught his daughter that women are totally subservient to men as many religious zealots think… or if he taught her that gay people are evil sinners that will go to hell… or if he told her that masturbation will make god hate you forever. honestly, it terrifies me to think of the crazy shit that a lot of people teach their kids. and it’s not just the parents. i just read some statistic saying that almost a third of US school systems dont teach their students anything about evolution. hell, in some states you legally aren’t even allowed to teach that evolution is anything more than one of many possibilities of how the world works. in fact, according to recent polls, 47% of americans do not believe in evolution whatsoever. 47%!!!

-v

friday night, after stuffing my freezer totally full with a *ton* of Trader Joe’s food, caryn, joey, and i went to the Up and Down club for this new monthly club night. the night was ok. didn’t really spend much time dancing or anything. instead i spent most of the night kicking it outside w/ the smokers. Afterwords, we went back to joey’s house to drink some more. oh yeah, on the way there we stopped by jack in the box. space is so tight in the city that fast food places can’t have drive-thru windows, but people still want to eat food late… so they just have an outside walk up window. like a drive-thru, but on foot. i dont think i’ve ever seen that at a fast food place before. anyways, we ended up staying up till 6 am at joey’s house looking at old photos from *years* ago. it was pretty crazy..

the next day, caryn and i went to the flower conservatory. it was hella cool. they had a ton of different kinds of orchids. orchids are so damn crazy and intricate. they look like some kind of weird alien species. the place also had these crazy lilly pads that are supposed to grow up to 8 feet across and hold up the weight of a full grown person!! unfortunately, the ones there were only like 3 feet across or so, but were still pretty cool.

saturday night i tried to continue working on my mobile. unfortunately, it looks like it totally wont work. the glue is not strong enough to hold it together, and when i tried to pick it up, the whole thing pretty much crumbled in my hands. ugh. oh well….

-v

i’m a total loser. i’m registered to vote in Sunnyvale instead of SF. i’ve kept meaning to do a change of address so that i could vote in SF local elections, but have just been to lazy and lame to do it. i just finally filled out the online form today. it turns out that to vote in a local election, you only need to register 15 days in advance…. which means that if i had just gotten my ass in gear 2 weeks ago, i could have voted tomorrow. *sigh*.

-v

another thing i found while digging through email was this old quote i always thought was really cool…

“In some alternate dimension
Seashells hold humans to their ears
And listen to the sounds of machines”

-jeffrey mcdaniels

from time to time i have this huge urge to do something creative. i’ve always really wanted to be able to make something cool. unfortunately, i have very little creativity in me. even though i’m really into art and stuff, other than building the ducky car, i really haven’t made anything of my own.

over the last several weeks caryn and i have been toying w/ the idea of building a mobile. we went to several stores to try to get ideas of how to make one. finally, after a lot of brainstorming etc, we came up w/ a plan of how we would design this mobile and what we would build it out of. it’s kind of hard to explain what it would look like w/out drawing it, but basically it would consist of concentric right angles formed out of multi-colored mosaic tiles.

after tracking down the supplies we need to build it (and revising our idea a few times since certain parts did not exist), we spent a whopping 60$ for pieces to make just one mobile. we started putting it together and… ummmm… errr… well, now i have this horrible feeling that the mobile will not work out. all of that planning will probably amount to nothing. argh! oh well… back to the drawing board…

-v

i’ve always tried to not delete old email. in a way, email that sticks around in your sent box or email you received is kind of a journal in it’s own right. i tend to use email *constantly*, so chances are, if something is going on in my life or i am planning on doing something, there will be a record of it in my email. i’ve worked here at consumerreview for a bit over 3 years now, and today did a little digging through some mails i have laying around from when i first started here. it’s so weird! so many of the emails are about raves etc. it’s crazy to think how much a part of my life they were at that point, even though by then my interest in it had been waning for years. it’s also pretty trippy to see who of the people who were my friends back then are still my friends now, and who has fallen through the cracks. it’s pretty nuts how much can change in just 3 years. on the flip side, a lot of the stuff i wrote about back then, i’m still into now. i wonder what parts of my current life i’ll keep w/ me when it’s 3 years from now? how different will i be?

It keeps making me think of this book i read back in the day, where the main quote was “I gave my life to become the person that I am right now. Was it worth it?”. If you think about it, at any given time, if we take a current snapshot of our lives, it really does come down to that. everything a person has ever done in their life… all the places they’ve gone, all the jobs they’ve had, all the choices they’ve made, all the time they’ve spent.. basically everything in their life so far, they have given and spent in exchange for the present which is: their current personality, a bunch of memories, and interpersonal relationships that they have formed. as we continue to live life, the amount of time we have traded to be who we currently are keeps going up… and we can only hope that the barter is still worthwhile.

-v

over the weekend i celebrated thanksgiving a bunch of different times. i celebrated on thursday at my aunt’s house, friday at my parent’s house, and saturday at caryn’s family’s house in Clear Lake. it was a crazy thanksgiving marathon that just wouldn’t end. luckily, i actually really like thanksgiving and love the food, so i had a good time. it was pretty interesting to see how different the 3 versions of thanksgiving were, how different each group of people would interact, and how differently the exact same food items can be prepared. going up to Clear Lake was pretty cool. i met a ton of different people from caryn’s extended family and struggled to remember who each person was and how they were related to her.

although celebrating thanksgiving so many times almost took up my whole weekend, i did have a little time for some other things too. friday night i went to see the play “the book of liz”. it’s a play written by david sedaris and his sister amy. it was written in their usual wacky, off-the-wall, funny style. also, we went to natasha’s birthday. really good thai food. and it was good to hang out w/ people who i haven’t seen in quite a bit.

once again i’m lagging on posting in my LJ. argh. i never had time to post about: hiking down to stintson beach w/ joey and caryn, going to the “Tv On The Radio” concert, Yan’s latest house party, and other stuff that’s been happening… oh well.

a couple of nights ago, i saw the movie “13 conversations about one thing”. the movie was made up of several loosely intertwined stories that showed differing viewpoints on happiness and what it means to people. i gotta say that this was definitely one of the better movies i have seen in a long time. it was very interesting, thought provoking, and emotionally powerful. it really hammers in the point that your happiness and fate are really what you make of them.

i’ve been watching a lot of Survivor recently (yeah, i’m pretty addicted), and find it so funny how Rupert is having such a different experience on the island than everyone else. most of the castaways see living on the island as an ordeal that they have to struggle through. they constantly are depressed and complaining about lack of food, shelter, and whatnot. on the other hand, Rupert is just looking at it as an incredible vacation in an exotic locale. he is loving every minute of it. one man’s hell is another’s heaven.

of course, for most people, no matter how happy and excitable they may be, the amount of fun and interest that situations bring about also depend on the newness of the situation. things that at one point excite and interest people to no end, eventually usually fizzle out after being experienced a ton of times. humanity’s constant striving and searching for something better and new may have helped us over the centuries as a species, but in a lot of ways i find it really really sad how we can never be satisfied. we can spend months anticipating something: that new house, a drivers license, whatever…. and soon enough we couldn’t care any less about it.

i once read an article about a wandering group of refugees in Sudan. these people had lived their whole life in the hot climate of africa and had never experienced modern technology. these people had never experienced cold. yes, cold. they did not know the meaning of cold. all temperatures they had ever experienced ranged from warm to hot. the article describes how the refugees, upon arriving at a red cross shelter, were given a iced beverage form the refrigerator. they were totally amazed and shocked. could you imagine that? cold is something we *completely* take for granted. everyone knows what that means. but what if that was a new and exciting sensation to be experienced? something totally unheard of and enthralling. it must be the most amazing and crazy feeling in the world to feel something cold for the first time.

if something as trivial and mundane as coldness can be new and exciting for someone, it really makes you think about how everything around us must be interesting for at least *someone* out there. i’ve driven the commute from SJ to SF a kajillion times. maybe even more. everyone takes that drive for granted and grumbles about it. but i always try to stop and think about how for someone who’s never driven it, it’s probably a very scenic and nice drive. and shit, for someone who’s just gotten their license, driving that route (or *any* route) is an exhilarating adventure. i’ve gone to santa cruz a ton of times too, and yes it’s fun, but i always try to wonder what it must be like for people who have never seen an ocean before. someone who came from kansas or something; someone who, during their life, has seen pretty much nothing but flat plains… and all of a sudden you stumble upon this incredible gigantic mass of blue unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

the list goes on and on. imagine seeing the snow when your whole life has been lived in a hot climate. or flying in an airplane when you’ve never known what it’s like to be a million feet in the air. or taking an escalator if you’ve lived your whole life in cambodia and haven’t ever seen such a weird crazy thing. all these things can be so new and thrilling…. and yet for the most part, we dont let them be that way. it’s always “shit, i can’t stand this 9 hour flight, when is this damn thing gonna land” or “goddamn, it snowed again, i can’t believe i have to shovel that crap” or “sheez, why is this stupid escalator so crowded”.

we rush through our lives treating everything like a hassle or inconvenience. anything that isn’t new or rare goes by either unnoticed or unappreciated. there’s so much stuff out there… so much *not new* stuff. so many things that are just begging to be enjoyed. we rush by those things, constantly searching for something more exciting than the last thing we tried. something flashy.. something cool… whatever. we just keep on searching for that ever elusive thing that’ll make us happy when we just need to realize that we can make *ourselves* happy by enjoying what we have.. because it’s really only the perception of what we experience that is important.

-v

when i finished school a few years ago, i was so relieved. thank god! no more studying. no more busy weekends. no more constantly being stressed out. i was so glad to have gotten that part of my life over with. i was so psyched that from now on i would just work at a job where the work stopped after business hours, and i would not be working during nights and weekends.

strangely enough, all of a sudden i’m starting to feel very differently about all that. i’ve been kind of missing school lately. i miss learning new things on a daily basis. i miss being pushed into examining the world around me more closely. i miss trying to figure out the answers to complex questions. it’s nice to have something to stretch your mind to its limits on a regular basis.

in a lot of ways, work used to do that for me. programming was tough. i was constantly learning new things everyday and struggling to keep afloat. most of the engineers i worked w/ had at least some formal training in web programming, but i had to just pick stuff up as i went along. of course, everything i was learning was all on the same topic, computers, and not diverse as the learning in school is, but at least it was new and interesting.

now my job doesn’t really seem to have much more to teach me. i’ve learned most of what i need to know to do it well, and therefore am not pushed to find out new things. dont get me wrong, i still love my job. it’s a lot of fun. the people are cool. it’s *great* to have projects you work on be seen by over 10 million people a month. bt i definitely miss the learning….

-v

for the last year or so, i have not been eating at home. pretty much ever. almost every single meal i ate was at a restaurant. now that i’m trying to actually stick to a budget, i obviously can’t keep that habit up. so recently i have started eating at home and cooking more. it’s actually been hella cool.

this weekend caryn and i cooked up a storm. we made a ton of good meals. saturday morning, she had the idea of trying to make “mcgriddles” at home. mcgriddles are a new kind of breakfast sandwich at mcdonalds that are basically a sandwich w/ eggs, bacon, and melted cheese in between 2 pancakes instead of bread. dude, these tasted soooo damn good!

the following morning, we made eggs blackstone. they are a poached egg on top of an english muffin w/ cheese, grilled tomatoes, and hollandaise sauce. i’ve never tried to poach an egg before and it turns out it’s really not that easy. each time i would try to pour the egg into boiling water, the egg would just dissipate and flow all over the place. i fucked up a bunch of eggs in the process and had to start over a couple of times. in the end, i pretty much got the hang of it though.

then, sunday night, we decided to make sashimi for dinner. we bought some green tea, miso soup, rice, salad, and some raw fish. the dinner was soo damn good. it’s funny, when you go to sushi, the best part is the sashimi and it’s sooo damn expensive. i usually can only afford to get a little. but if you just buy the fish at a store, you can get a *ton* of it for way cheap. the meal we ate would have cost a zillion times as much if we had ordered it at a sushi place.

-v