In Transition

I was listening to my ipod, slightly sleepy, comfortably seated in the back seat of a black cadillac on my way to JFK on Monday. The driver was a quiet and well-mannered young man who minded his own business. It has been raining in New York for almost a week but the day I was leaving, the sky had cleared and everything was clean and bright.

I sat in the back seat of the car thinking,
"I wish this car ride would never end."

I didn't want to be back in LA. I didn't want to be anywhere.
I just wanted to be in transition. Just like this- alone, listening to music, the scenery changing and irrelevant.

Unless, perhaps you are like myself, then we can meet at midnight at a cramped bar in Soho, huddled together at the bar, drinking bacardi and coke and cranberry juice and talk about music and art and writing, and how the Manhattan skyline reminds you of home even if the sense of home is lost in the actual streets.

Up in the Air

Let's see. My best friend just moved from New York to Singapore with her fiance. They won't be back for at least three years or never, since Peter wants to start a business in Shanghai. Their wedding is going to be in Singapore possibly during the semester. There's a high chance I won't be able to attend. My sister, who was staying with me for a couple weeks, went back to Seoul for a month, before she takes off to Madrid for a workshop, and then back to Boston. My crew from college is currently living/working/married in London, Madrid, Dubai, Seoul, Hong Kong and have no desire to visit or live in the U.S.

I'm helping a good friend ship all his stuff to Korea tomorrow because he's leaving back to Seoul on Saturday. My Seoul friends are attending the Dubai friend's wedding in Bali in June, but since that is way too far from where I am currently situated (without the money to travel around the world) I can't attend that wedding, either.

As for family, my cousins in New York whom I bonded with during my stay in NYC are moving to Hong Kong next year.

Everything and everyone being up in the air all the time - a reason for my anxiety.

A Windy Day Poem

What You Need for Painting

By Raymond Carver, Based on a Letter by Renoir


THE PALETTE:

FLAKE WHITE
CHROME YELLOW
NAPLES YELLOW
YELLOW OCHER
RAW UMBER
VENETIAN RED
FRENCH VERMILLION
MADDER LAKE
ROSE MADDER
COBALT BLUE
ULTRAMARINE BLUE
EMERALD GREEN
IVORY BLACK
RAW SIENNA
VIRIDIAN GREEN
WHITE LEAD

AND DON'T FORGET:
Palette knife
Scraping knife
Essence of turpentine

BRUSHES:
Pointed marten hair brushes
Flat hog hair brushes

Indifference to everything except your canvas
The ability to work like a locomotive.
An iron will.

From Beijing

This is a part of a letter a friend wrote me from China:

Sometimes, I think life is hardest when you're trying to change it, to make it better. Acceptance of something is easier, though not necessarily the most recommended route. You and I are constantly changing our lives and as creatures of habit, change is hard. There are too many unknowns. Hang in there. Sooner or later, you find the parts of you that you wouldn't give up for a greener side.

=)
Helen


*Helen and I met in Seoul. She is originally from New Jersey.

Autobiographical Character Sketch

This was submitted to a certain film school that rejected me:

Tidbits of faces, places, conversations and moments that unceasingly fill my head.

On traveling verses shopping-
You should come, too. Instead of buying two,three Michael Kors bags.
Michael Kors is only three hundered dollars.
Only three hundred dollars?!
Yeah...CJ and I talked about it and we have psychological issues.
So two people with psychological issues got together and came to that conclusion?
It’s either that, or we’re superficial people with vanity issues.
So you’d rather be mental than be superficial?
Yeah.
Jamie?
Yeah?
We’re more similar than I ever thought.

On best friends who drunk-dial you daily from Tokyo-
Laughing is like crying, I don’t cry, I laugh. You, Addie, are a diver. I don’t like diving. I like breath strokes. I try diving but I see myself doing breath strokes again.

Matt on one of the greatest singers of our time-
Andrea Bernanni or something, HE’S BLIND! Before I was like, why does the dude look like he is always sleepy??

On Sun’s chipmunk cheeks that are about to burst-
Her eyes are brimming with tears but a stupendous smile engulfs her entire face. Have you ever felt so lucky you feel like you’re going to burst?

Hae-kyeong on laptops from IBM, the IBM T40 versus the IBM T30. It’s like this. You have a BMW. I have a Sonata. Jee on “smoke” rising from New York City streets. Yeah, New York is so dirty. No wonder they staged Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles coming out of the sewers here in the eighties. Harvard Law school student and dear friend Kerry on the topic of “despair, failure and loss of faith.” My biggest tragedy is that I’ve never experienced a tragedy. Jason on the topic of his squinting Asian eyes. If my eyes were any bigger I’d feel exposed. Boyoung on the topic of our own people. I think people should be free and not oppressed. If you’re oppressed you turn out like…Koreans. Cece brutally honest again. When you look at them they’re so ugly but they’re so happy. It’s cute. It makes you think about a lot. Like, why am I so unhappy? Timmy’s support on my choice of life. Don’t worry, Addie. Ten years down the road if you turn out to be a poor writer living on cereal every day, you’ll have rich and powerful friends like me to back you up.

But Gustave Lebon, French Sociologist, nailed the dilemma: To respect tradition is a condition of existence for people; to know how to disengage from it, a condition of progress.

And in the library five-year old curly-haired Tizian Frohn is hugging his Magic School Bus books to his chest and exclaiming these are my books forever and ever and ever!

I don’t want to be anybody else, I just want to be the best version of myself. Are you still swinging at the biggest piñata in the world?

Music from Asia

First video (old school):
Seotaeji /SUH-TAE-JEE/ & Boys - The most famous Korean pop group that ever walked the peninsula. A living legend. They released this song right before the group broke up in 1996. They changed the landscape of gayo (K-pop) forever.

Second Video (old school):
Eco - A popular all-girls group from the mid-nineties. They had a couple of hits then disappeared off the face of the earth. But this particular song lives on in Korean kereoke (this word is japanese, the korean word is 'No-Rae Bang' i.e. NRB) lovers. It's one of those songs that everybody knows and loves but not many people remember who sang it. This is the one I always sing when I hit the NRB.

Third Video (new):
Jay Chou - The "Seotaeji" of Taiwan. He took a quarter of the world by storm when he debuted with his first album in 2000. He is an amazingly gifted singer/song-writer. All of China, and a large portion of Asia, is obsessed with him. He is still very active. This is one of my favorite music videos of all time. It's a work of art. Jet Li is in it, if you're interested. My favorite part is at 3 minutes 10 seconds when the break-dancing and Jet Li's fighting is intercut with each other.

Fourth Video(relatively new):
M-Flo - I'm just throwing this one in. It's a Japanese group. I had a friend who listened to M-Flo all the time and got me interested for awhile. Another good friend of mine, was actually friends with "Melody" and would hang out with her in Seoul/Tokyo.

Midnight Snack

The can of chili can was marked "HOT" in capital letters. Spicy American chil? 'Big deal,' I thought to myself. Koreans dip green pepper in red pepper paste as snack food. Eating spicy food is a sport in Korea. When I was a kid, my mother filled a bowl with water and washed half the Korean food that was put on the dinner table for me. The water diluted the spicy red pepper sauce/paste/powder on the food. I remember the specks of red pepper powder floating around in the bowl of water that grew darker shades of red as the meal went on. All Korean kids went through years of training to eat spicy food. As an adult, almost nothing would come across as "spicy" unless you were directly squirting Tabasco sauce onto your tongue. I looked at the label on the can, again. 'Seriously, whatever.' I dumped the entire can of chili onto the sauce pan and stirred.

Half an hour later, I am wiping tears from my eyes. My nose is runny, too. I am currently pacifying my tongue and stomach with a cold glass of milk.

While I was eating the bowl of chili and my eyes watered up, a couple of things crossed my mind. The first was that if it's hot for Koreans then they should have a warning sign on the product - "Spicy even for Koreans." In fact, I think that should be the official name for the highest level of spiciness that people refer to on the "spicy scale" if there is such a thing.

Koreans have an entirely seperate word for spicy, hot, food that makes your eyes and nose water. It's pronounced (roughly) mep-dah. It means that the food is so hot (not in temperature but in taste) that it stings. Koreans think that meh-woon (a verbal variation of the noun above) food chases away the heat. So we eat a ton of meh-woon food in the summer. In fact, Korean people actually say, "It's so refreshing and cool," when they eat anything that is especially spicy.

As I chewed on the last bit of my chilly, I wiped the tears from my eyes, and continued with my mulling. Wait a minute. How COOL would it be to write a scene in the future (this is the writer in me kicking in) where the main character is eating food that is so spicy she/he is crying and then while she/he is wiping tears from her/his eyes and eating the chili, her/his friend (significant other, family member or friend - it can be anybody) steps into the room. They start talking. It starts out as a normal conversation but then ends up with the other person leaving the room (out of frusturation or anger) and the person eating the chili pushes the bowl of chili away and start crying vehemently. This time because he/she is upset.

I think that would be cool. Both ideas. I guess I have power over the second idea but not over the first one.

*Reading this post over, it doesn't even make any sense. I can't follow my own logic.

Church Approves Fishnet Stockings

I have just been told that a picture of me in fishnet stockings, a short black skirt, and black leather boots is going to be published in a church magazine.

So I attend this church called Mosaic. Mosaic doesn't believe that church is a building so we have services all over LA in different venues. One of these places include a nightclub in downtown LA. I go to that one. But just because Mosaic holds church services at a nightclub doesn't mean people show up looking like they're going clubbing. This is why I was surprised just now, when I received an email from their graphic designer telling me that they will publish a picture of me in fishnet stockings in one of their publications.

A random poem I wrote was chosen to be published in a magazine that's put out yearly by Mosaic. Everybody who is being published in this year's issue had to have their picture taken. I didn't want a picture of me next to my writing piece (it's awkward!) and I was busy, so I missed their photo shoot. They tracked me down and told me to send over pictures via email. Generally, I'm not even a picture person. So it was difficult to find high resolution pictures of just myself. I went through a plethora of digital files and found some pictures that might work. Among them was a full length picture of me in the fishnet stocking outfit. I was about to go clubbing in Hollywood when my roommate shot the picture of me. I sent over six files including that one to the magazine graphic designer. Then I added a note saying that I knew the fishnet picture might not work but she could just crop my face from it.

She wrote back within ten minutes and said that the "party outfit would work best" because it was the only high-resolution, full-body picture.

Uhh...I'm still relatively new to this church, and I don't want to be known, in the Mosaic community, as the girl with the fishnet stockings and leather boots without any given context. And I just remembered something else. The second line in the poem contains the word "naked." Whatever, they can handle it. So I guess this is how I make my debut at Mosaic.

Santa Monica & Malibu

My sister's told me a number of times to invest in a camera. We had a camera back in Korea, but she got first dibs on it. I haven't gotten around to purchasing a camera yet, but in the meantime, the blackberry picture folder on my hard-drive is getting really fat.

* A Santa Monica Sunset on my Blackberry: April 11th, 2009


















* A Malibu Sunset on my Blackberry: February 14th, 2009






* My day reminded me of the lyrics to Savage Garden's "Santa Monica":

In Santa Monica in the winter time
The lazy streets so undemanding
I walk into the crowd

Beauty so unavoidable
Everywhere you turn its there
I sit and wonder what am I doing here

But on the telephone line
I am anyone, I am anything, I want to be
I could be a super model or Norman Mailer
And you wouldnt know the difference
Or would you

In Santa Monica on the boulevard
You'll have to dodge those in-line skaters
Or theyll knock you down

I never felt so lonely
Never felt so out of place
I never wanted something more than this



ps) In Santa Monica, you can see the sun setting behind the mountains. In Malibu, you can see it directly dip into the ocean.

MPG

A friend and I somehow ended up talking about Mark Paul Gosselaar today. At first, I was in denial that I too, had joined the band wagon and had a crush on Mark Paul Gosselaar back in the day. But then we looked up pictures of him and I admitted, "Who am I kidding. Yes, I had a crush on Mark Paul Gosselaar...like every other girl in America." Having said this, he is a million times better than Jack Zefron, or Zack Jefron or whatever. We grew up with the better stuff. Then we Googled his current age and found out that he was only thirty-four years old!

So he was fourteen and not twenty-four, when he started to play Zack Morris in Saved By the Bell ?? And then my friend said, "Yeah, back then, shows with high school kids actually starred high school kids."

And I thought about it and it was true. We can't do that anymore, can we? Shows with high school kids have too much rated R stuff in it for kids to be starring in them. We would have to cast the twenty-five year olds as fifteen year olds.

Mark Paul turned out alright, too. I hearted him when he appeared on NYPD Blue. Sigh. Oh, and married to the same women for twelve years? In Hollywood? Bravo. He has two kids and they both have normal names like Michael instead of names like Maddox.

Bananas

So I've heard other Asian-Americans tell me that I'm a "banana" or "white-washed". Along those lines, people have also asked me if I grew up in Connecticut or New York. (Places where there aren't a lot of Asians.) Whatever. It doesn't matter. My point is, I'm sure my readers are well-acquainted with the terms "banana" or "oreo." Well, here is a twist to that.

Jennifer Wilkins was my American co-worker at the International School I worked for in Seoul, Korea. Her parents were missionaries and she had lived in Japan and had gone to a Japanese school. She had attended high school and college in the U.S. but had returned to Asia because she felt more comfortable there. When she was sitting on the floor, she always kneeled with her feet tucked under her bottom. She could sit like this for hours. She said it was from her days in Japan and that it was only natural for her to sit like that. Jennifer taught me a new word when she said to me, "I'm an egg."

Hair Model

I can forgo many things but I cannot skimp out on haircuts, skin care products and toilet paper (Charmin, anyone?)

So several months ago I was picking up base, make-up remover, and moisturizer at a department store, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I thought it was a saleslady trying to sell me a product. I wasn't going to buy anything besides the three things I came to get. I whooped around to face a blonde lady in her late-thirties/early-forties.

"Excuse me, but I had to comment."

I raised my eyebrows. What was this lady going to tell me?

"You have the best layered haircut I've seen on anyone."

"Oh, thank you. It's very nice of you to say that."

"I really mean it. Did you get your hair done around here?"

This launched us into a conversation about hair and hair stylists. I told the lady that I had just moved from Asia and had been introduced to an awesome hair stylist here in Los Angeles. The lady told me she was visiting from New York. She asked me if I could let her in on the name of the stylist. It wasn't top secret information or anything. I gave her the name of the stylist, Jerome, and the name of the salon he was with.

"Thank-you very much," the lady said. "People are so private about these things. You've been quite helpful."

I forgot about the lady. I also forgot about Jerome for awhile. Back in Korea, my hair-designer, Young, had been a good friend for over 5 years. I had the color of my hair, the length, and the style changed every six weeks. It was pure joy. Here, in California, I decided to grow out my hair again because it would be more cost-efficient. I did the math and decided I could afford to go to the salon every four to five months. When it grew out, I could go every six months.

This morning I went to the salon to get my hair cut. It was getting messy and I couldn't stand it anymore. I made the appointment a week in advance and as Monday approached, I could find my footsteps getting lighter. By the time I walked into the salon at 11:30 am this morning, I had a huge smile slapped onto my face. After I sat down on the chair, Jerome asked me how the last haircut went.

"Fantastic. I loved it. In fact, a lady visiting from New York, stopped me one day and told me that it was the best haircut she'd ever seen."

"Oh!" Jerome said in his french accent, "she dropped by."

"What?"

"The same lady. She came looking for me. In early December? She told me that she met a girl who had just moved from Asia who had a fabulous haircut. I remembered you, because I don't have many customers who just moved from Asia."

"That's great. I can't believe she actually came. She actually came?"

"Yes, she wanted me to layer her hair like yours," he paused. "You are a good hair model."

Jerome's comment made me secretly smile - which is the best kind of smile. He's not a people pleaser, and he has high aesthetic standards. Ah, my French hair stylist called me a good hair model. It's shallow but I savored the compliment. I'm still savoring it. I'm a good hair model. Lalalala ~

Addie's Quotebook

I've written things in the dark - more than once I have frantically sifted through my purse in a dark theater, hoping that the specific line won't slip through my fingers until I located my quotebook and pen. When I finally pull out the pen from my purse and open my quotebook to a blank page, I would jot down the lines without even looking at the paper. As long as it was legible and documented, I was happy.

So I've had my quotebook for about five years now. I'm going through my sixth quotebook. I started the quotebook when it became unbearable for me to let inspirational words, sentences just disappear into thin air and be forgotten. The best dialogue from real life situations are original, juicy, tangible tid-bits that burst with energy. They cannot be duplicated.

The first quote I ever wrote down was one from a film that I didn't like very much. I was surprised the other day, when I came across it, because the quote was entirely in line with a desire I've had that I had never verbalized or even recognized.

Here are a list of the first quotes in each of the six quotebooks I've accumulated:

"Caught between two worlds but perfectly happy." - Nicole Kidman, starring in Bewitched

"I'm a 6-year-old with an 8-year-old brain." - Quinn DeVita, 1st-grade student

"We have built-in-gaydars; boobs."* - Andrea Moreno, a friend I met at a workshop in Iowa

"The psychologial background is different. Driven people are damaged people who are looking for answers." - Nadia Chou, my sister

"I'm always constipated. It's so uncomfortable. And I'm telling you this because I feel comfortable about our poop relation." - Sarah Jo, a good friend

"You have words in your head and you want to see how they look on paper." - Marilynne Robinson, on being a writer

I have to be honest. This past year, I've been extremely lazy. The quotebook is becoming a hodge-podge of other things. Instead, I have a manila envelope sitting on my desk full of post-its, napkins and tattered pieces of paper. I've jotted down quotes on these. I've sworn to myself a million times that one of these days I'll sit at a Starbucks and go through the envelope and "quotify" my quote book again. I haven't yet, but I will.

(*This quote was a result of a question I asked Andrea regarding a cute guy that worked at the ice-cream parlor.
Me: Do you think that guy from Whitey's is gay?
Andrea: (Decisively) No.
Me: How do you know for sure?
Andrea: Because girls have built in radars. I'll take off my glasses and show you what I mean by that.)

The past 24 hours

The past 24 hours have been fun:

1. I went to bed at 6 am after working on my screenplay for twelve hours. I sent a copy of the file to my email account, double checked to see if the file was saved, shut off my computer, and climbed into bed.

2. I got up at noon today to find out that my newly installed Final Draft (screenwriting software that costs an arm and a leg), had not saved the final draft of my screenplay on my computer. I checked my email. The file sent was not the one I had saved last night. I had lost more than half of my screenplay. It's due tomorrow.

2. While trying to calm down about the screenplay, I opened a bottle of Bananaberry Juice. It was from Starbucks. I had gone to Starbucks yesterday at 10:53 pm to pick up a venti latte and was told that they had shut down all the machines. I came back with a Bananaberry Juice and a Red Bull. This morning, while trying to keep my head screwed on straight regarding the screenplay that had disappeared into thin air, I knocked down the brand new bottle of Bannaberry juice and it spilled all over my desk.

3. Because of parking registration complications, I had to park on the other side of the property coming back from Starbucks yesterday. It was a ten minute walk back to my apartment from my parking spot. When I came to the door, I realized I had locked my keys inside my car.

3. While trying to "cook" (I don't cook) some dinner, I realized that I actually didn't know how to use either of the two can openers in my own kitchen. It took me about half an hour to punch a two inch hole through the can of tuna. I took a fork and proceeded to scrape out (with much difficulty) the tuna onto the frypan via the two inch slit.

4, Huffing and puffing I successfully made a popular Korean side dish to eat with my rice. I then popped out another popular side dish that was thankfully, pre-packaged and ready to eat. Mm Mm. Dried seaweed. I stuffed a strip into my mouth, chewed, and then immediately spit it out. I picked up the cover of the package. The expiration date said 07-28-2008.

5. I am now done eating dinner. I still have a screenplay and a short story due by tomorrow.
The screenplay is half done, and the short story is non-existent.


6. While looking over this list, I realized that I've lost my ability to count to ten.

The People I Left Behind

I found out while I was in Boston, that one of my best friends from high school in Korea, was in Los Angeles for English language studies. We met up today, and had a quick lunch. I learned that my friend had re-named himself “Henry.” The entire time we were hanging out, we spoke in Korean. It felt odd; the people we talked about, the memories we shared, they seemed so long ago.

Even though Henry had lived a few blocks away from me, he didn’t even know I had been working at the International School of Seoul (ISS) the last two years I was living in Korea. Which only meant we had not met during that time. ISS was a large school with four divisions - the (American) Elementary, Middle and High School, and the British School. My two-hundred co-workers were all American, Canadian, British, South African, Australian (Aussies) or New Zealanders (Kiwis). The students I worked with were from over sixty countries. In other words, I was living in Korea, but not really.

During my time at ISS and including my time in California, I was surprised that Henry and I had not seen each other for nearly three years. He was one of those friends that even if you met up with them once every year or two, you wouldn’t really feel that time gap. However, it wasn’t the time gap that I felt today, it was the life gap.

Hanging out with Henry today, I remembered the last several years of my life in Seoul. My desperate attempts to escape the society I belonged to eventually led me to cut ties with most of the people around me whose lives were deeply rooted in the Korean soil. I wanted to get out. I wanted to see the larger world. I didn’t want to be stuck in Seoul, in the small social circles that were closing in around me. I especially felt the need to cut myself away from the "elitist" friends. I wasn’t interested in attending the weddings of acquaintances whose grandfathers owned Samsung or LG Electronics. I wasn’t interested in whose uncle was running for president. I wasn't into landing the best job or the best man. I was still most comfortable in jeans and a T-shirt and I found myself showing up at luncheons and dinners increasingly out of place. I could see my friends, five years down the road, talking about what car/property they owned and what prestigious private schools their children would be enrolled in, and how much their husbands were making. The thought of it made me want to jump into the Han River and kill myself.

I wasn't opposed to wealth or social status, but these were not the driving forces of my life. To many people around me, they were.

While I pondered what path in life I was to choose, and the options I had, a librarian position opened up at ISS and I applied for the job. A professor from my alma mater sent her kids to this school. Tuition for preschool students at this school was $20,000 a year. Professor Baek had given me an "A" in her class, but when she found me sitting in the ISS Elementary School library, checking out books to her children, she shook her head and said,
“You can do better.”
The original Korean phrase doesn’t sound as condescending but the exact English translation is not available. She wasn’t trying to be mean, she meant that she didn’t want my “talents” to go to waste. I guess I can say it's an Asian thing, as well as some of the things Professor Baek knew about me, which led her to expect certain things from me.

Whatever the case, around this time, I disappeared off the face of the earth. Most of the people in my life were distracting me from the life I wanted to pursue as an artist. I couldn’t keep the people in my life and move on to the new life I wanted.

This is why Henry and I hadn’t been in touch for so long. I remembered Henry’s older brother, Jin - a graduate of Seoul National University, working for SK Telecom (one of the top firms in South Korea), all his "eligible" female friends turning into (in his mind) potential wife figures. Near the end of my life in Korea, I was so disgusted with Jin that he was one of the first to go. Eventually, I cut all ties with his circle of friends, which had been my circle of friends as well. Henry was the black sheep of the family, very different from Jin. In high school, we congregated weekly in the neighborhood playground. We would sit side by side on the swing sets, in our school uniforms, Henry smoking cigarettes and me complaining about homework. He was one of the very few people I had kept in touch with.

And yet, today, I realized even with Henry, I felt disconnected and at odds. I was no longer that person. Henry smiled and waved bye to me as I dropped him off in Westwood. I drove away with a heavy heart and a new realization sinking in. I didn’t feel comfortable hanging out with Henry anymore. He knew me as 周 貞 延 (my name spelled in its original Chinese characters, most Korean names have coinciding Chinese characters.)

During lunch Henry had put down his spoon and said,
“Foreign life is hard. When you finish your studies and come back to Korea -”
I didn’t even hear the rest of what he was saying. He didn’t know that I didn’t plan to return and I was tired of explaining, tired of making people understand. Henry had known me for so long but he was clueless. Two of the most central characteristics of what defined me, call it American, call it being an artist, were still oblivious to him. I didn’t want to live my life explaining myself to people anymore. We used to be such good friends, now we had grown apart, and yet, he didn’t see it. Only I did.

Somehow, along the way, I’ve made specific choices of who I will keep as friends and the ones I will drop. And Henry, even Henry, didn’t make the cut. It's not his fault or anybody else's. It may be because I am not yet strong enough. The person I want to be inside, does not show its true colors on the outside, the way I want them to. And until those colors solidify, I cannot be with people from my past who will compromise the person I had been all along, the person that I was not allowed to be.

For a very long time, I used to think that I could keep all my friends, even if we were separated by oceans and continents. It’s not possible. And that's okay.

Buying Books at Bookstores

My sister Nadia and I spent several hours at various bookstores on Harvard Square today. I was astonished at the selection of books these stores had. The best part was that the books at the used bookstores were almost just as good as new, but they were less than half-price. This made me return two (brand new) books I had bought at the COOP and buy two of the same books each (so four books) at Raven. I gave two copies to my sister and kept two copies for myself. We would read them and discuss them together later.

"You guys have a great selection!" I told the guy at the cashier. In Los Angeles, I had to go to five different bookstores/libraries before I found the same book. I didn't tell him that because I didn't want to further bring down the reputation the city already had for being shallow. The cashier looked proud.
"Yes, well we don't accept all used books from sellers. We go through them and find the ones that are needed. It helps that the people here are at a high-reading level."
My sister smirked.

"I wish I can live here," I said to my sister, on our way out of Raven. "I'm a geek at heart."
"You're not a geek at heart. You are a geek."
"No, I'm not," I was indignant. "I'm only a geek inside, on the outside I don't look like one."
"Right. Your glasses and your laptop bag?" Nadia pointed at the items. "Spending all your time in the library and at bookstores on Harvard square during what's supposed to be your Spring break?" She had a point. Funny. During college, my friends and I started a book club and later we joked that we were the Ultra Nerds Club (UNC). They made me a "secret member" because they knew that I had an aversion for nerds. There is no escaping your true identity, I guess.

I then told Nadia that I had trouble finding books in Los Angeles,
"The best way to find them is on Amazon but for some reason, I don't like buying books on Amazon."
"I hate buying books on Amazon unless their text books," Nadia said. We were walking towards our third book stop.
"Buying a book is a physical process. The fun and love comes from that process. Going to the bookstore, browsing, turning the pages of the book, deciding if you like the texture of the cover or the pages, etc. When you finally decide to purchase a book, you have a personal relationship with the exact book you are purchasing."

Funny. In Korea, we had spent much of our money buying books off of Amazon. When the brown boxes arrived via postal mail, we would call each other excitedly,
"Hey! Your books arrived! Can I open the box?"
There were many bookstores in Korea with a large selection of English books (Kyobo Bookstore being one of my favorites. I spent a good portion of my life here.) But back then, something about buying books fresh off of Amazon was magical. That magic no longer existed here in America for either of us. Understandably. We now had access too all the books we ever wanted in the three dimension. Half price.

Thoughts on the Umbrella

I woke up late this morning and saw the rain drizzling outside the slanted windows of the tower room I was occupying. I was supposed to meet my cousin at Union Square at 2:30 p.m. It was already noon. I remembered I hadn’t brought an umbrella with me and wondered how I was going to get to the train station without getting too wet. A newspaper did the trick.

I knew that once I was in Manhattan I would be able to find those umbrella vendors who showed up in cities all over the world whenever it rained. The umbrellas they sold were usually around 10 dollars. You could count on the vendors to show up right outside a subway station on a rainy day - be it Paris, London, Shanghai, Seoul, and I was betting New York as well.

The train from Bronxville (basically Westchester) to Grand Central took about thirty minutes. I thought about the umbrella during that time. The umbrella is an interesting device. It’s universal and timeless. Even with all the new technology and savvy scientific developments, the umbrella remains the same simple invention. China had umbrellas in 21 A.D. Not to mention that Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt had umbrellas as well (Thank you, Wikipedia). I also thought about the umbrella vendors all over the world. Did they keep tabs on the weather 24/7? They always looked very happy when somebody purchased an umbrella. Not like regular street vendors. Maybe they could smile because it was a part time job, and a pretty lucrative one at that. Was selling umbrellas their sole occupation, or did they had other jobs on the side? If so what? Did they rejoice and grab their stash of umbrellas in the closet when the weather forecast would predict rain?

When I finally got to Union Square and climbed the steps to the ground floor, my expectations were met. There he was. The umbrella vendor. I’ve noticed that these vendors, no matter what city they’re in, all sell a variation of the same black umbrellas. The one I bought in London (which I still have in my closet back in Los Angeles) is black with a cheap brown wooden handle. The one I bought in Seoul is black with a silver handle that gets scratched easily. The one I chose today was a black one with a shiny new silver handle. No scratches. It was five dollars. Half the price of what I remembered it to be. That made me happy, as if I had just earned five dollars.

I opened my new umbrella and stood under it, and looked at the time. 2:25 pm. Perfect timing.

Aboard the Lucky Star Bus

Yesterday, I was in Boston. Then from Boston, I took the bus to New York and I spent a night in Brooklyn, in an all African-American neighborhood, crashing at a friend's boyfriend's house. Now I'm at my friend's place in Westchester where Sarah-Lawrence is located. There's a castle (a real one) across the street from where I am staying. I've been told that it's been on the market for years and nobody wants to buy it. These are two very different neighborhoods, for sure. In any case, I'll be going back to Boston on Friday. When I go back, I will be crashing with a friend in Jamaica Plain and not with my sister in Somerville.

While on the bus to New York from Boston, the Lucky Star pulled over at a McDonalds for fifteen minutes. I sat in the bus and watched people get off and buy their McDonalds and sit at the picnic table outside smoking and eating. The warm sun was shining down on the scene, melting away the New England winter. One of the Spanish speaking teenage girls went over to a Chinese boy and asked for a light, and he lit her cigarette for her. It was a casual exchange that didn't need much verbal communication.

There were all sorts of people. Different colors, different sizes, different ages, and most of them were speaking in different languages. I detected various accents in the languages as well. The Chinese people were speaking Mandarin and I surmised one man was from North Africa because he spoke French with an accent and he was black. He sat next to a fussy white lady on the bus (she didn't understand at first that this was the $15 Lucky Star bus from South Station to New York Chinatown, not a $150 American Airlines ticket from Logan to JFK) and by the time we got off in New York the two were friends.

I sat on the bus soaking all this in and I thought it was beautiful.

Viktor the Car Dealer

I told him we were in Los Angeles and that we weren't up to driving all the way out there if the leasing prices weren't any good.
"We lease cars," he had said, when my roommate and I had called to check. "When you come, make sure to look for Viktor. Viktor. Look for Viktor, okay?"

As many of them had been, Viktor also sounded a bit desperate on the phone. Rightly so. It was clear that not many people were buying new cars in this economy. In fact, I've been told it's a great time to be buying a Mercedez because dealers are willing to sell them for the bare minimum.

My new roommate Diana had just moved from New York City to Los Angeles. She needed a car. We had been to three different dealerships, driving all around Los Angeles. We had spent the past several days packing, moving and unpacking. By the time we called Viktor we were tired. I was tired. Extremely tired.

Yet, we drove all the way to "Los Angeles" to find out what deals Viktor could offer us.
(The dealership was clearly NOT in Los Angeles. It was on the very outskirts of Glendale.)

"We don't lease. We only sell. Who said we leased?"
This is what our buddy Viktor told us when we finally got to this dealership in "Los Angeles".
I looked at Viktor who was either Eastern European or a member of the mafia (Diana's input) complete with greasy hair. At first, I was confused. It slowly dawned on my tired brain that Viktor was a liar. How surprising. Lying care dealers. I wasn't even angry. I was just tired.

Diana and I got back in my car and silently drove back to our apartment in Los Angeles.

New Apartment

I moved into my 12th floor apartment today.

In the morning I went over to the leasing office to talk to my leasing agent Craig. I had to sign some paper work and get my keys. Because of a faulty (former) roommate situation and a lazy cousin situation I'd been bombarded with all sorts of problems since I had moved out here last summer.

Craig, my leasing agent, was aware of some of them as I had been trying to sort out these problems directly related to rent and the leasing conditions of my former apartment.
Craig had been very helpful and had more than once lent a listening ear. Every time I looked at him, I was reminded of the hackneyed phrase "peircing blue eyes" because that's exactly what they were.

We were on friendly terms by now and had chatted about hybrid cars, facebook groups that had people burning hearts on Valentines Day, nice places to hang out in the neighborhood (the Whisper Lounge) and where to get good furniture at an affordable price, as well as how much to tip movers and delivery guys. We also agreed that people moving into the city should not complain about rent being expensive. "If it's too expensive then go back to the Valley" - we both agreed.

This morning, Craig offered to show me the new place that was ready for move in.

It was gorgeous.
The smell of fresh paint welcomed us when I stepped into my new home. Granite kitchen table tops and brand new fixtures greeted me. The wooden floors in the living room were waxed letting out a shiny warm glow. The windows that lined the entire side of the living room didn't have a spot of dust and a panoramic view of the Hollywood hills could be seen.
The view from the master bedroom was even better. I would get a direct view of the sunset because the room was facing south.

Craig and I stood side by side in the master bedroom, looking out into Los Angeles.

I could not help but stammer. And I only realized later why there was such an awkward silence while I tried to string together the sentence.

"I, I don't know how to ask you," I was drawing out the sentence unnecessarily because my brain wasn't working and all of a sudden I could not think of the word "subtle."

Finally, it hit me, "without being subtle, but-"

Craig looked at me. I realized there was no "subtle" way of going about this.

"Uhhh, are you guys allowed to accept gift cards or what not as a token of thanks?"

Craig blinked and then opened his mouth, "No, no, no. Absolutely not."

Only later, while we were leaving the new apartment and Craig was holding the door open for me did I realize what I must have sounded like in that bit of conversation in what was to be my bedroom. Some sort of confession of love. Oh, God.

Shortly afterwards, I ended up dropping off a Starbucks latte at the leasing office with Craig and Rosa (another wonderful lady who helped me.) While dropping off the latte at Craig's desk I stepped back and accidentally rammed into the divider behind me, almost knocking it over. Everybody in the office looked up to see me and the divider swaying back and forth. My face turned crimson. I was suddenly aware that I had not washed my hair that morning due to lack of time and that I was wearing sweats and looked like crap.
"Oops," I laughed nervously and rushed out of the office.

I am a clueless, hapless, world-class klutz.

But I love my new apartment.
I wake up to the sweet kiss of the morning sunlight enveloping my entire room.
California, thou art growing on me.


(Hmmm. As I write this a loud car alarm has gone off in one of the parking lots. It's 4 am. What? Argh!)

Explanation of My Profile Picture

*This is an entry explaining my profile picture

I was a junior in college. My school was and still is 6,000 miles away from where I am now in Los Angeles. Some friends and I were camping out at school, pulling an all-nighter. Doom and gloom filled the classroom we were occupying. We were in an impossible situation.

We were all taking a drama class from the very famous Professor J. He was an actor turned professor, a Shakespearian scholar and a true 师, 스승, if there ever was one. None of us wanted to let him down.

The following day was the day of our production. My team had chosen to stage an adaptation of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest. Other teams had chosen their plays and had been rehearsing for weeks.
Believe it or not, we didn’t even have our script. Yes, and it was the day before our performance.
This production was supposed to make up 40% of our entire grade that semester. There were 6 of us. We were good friends. We were certain that the next day would be the end of us all. Suddenly, Sari, who had gone to tutor for an hour, pushed open the door to the classroom. She was known to be Miss. Optimist.

“Hey, everyone! I brought cookies! Chocolate chip! My favorite!”

I ripped open a bag, pulled out a cookie and passed the bag around the room. I stared at the blank Microsoft Word page on my laptop. I couldn’t type because the creamy chocolate from the cookie was making my fingers sticky. I put down the cookie and glanced at my fingers. I blinked. Then I looked again.

“Everyone, look!” I laughed as I thrust my fist forward.

It looked like I was giving everyone the thumbs-up signal. My friends looked at me as if I was stir crazy. There was absolutely nothing to laugh about. But when they saw the perfectly shaped smiley face on my thumb, complete with the dash of curly hair and freckles, they too, burst out laughing.

Kelly had her new digital camera with her and documented the moment.

We all went back to work. Kelly and I finished the script at two in the morning. It was a play with just six chairs on stage and no other props. The next evening at the English Department’s Drama Festival, we witnessed six other fantastic pieces. Students from that same class went on to pursue acting degrees at the New School or at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts - this wasn’t a casual, low-key drama workshop. But guess what? Guess who won 1st place that night? Team Choco-smile. Team Choco-smile that didn’t even have a script 24 hours prior to the production.


This is not based on a true story, it is a true story.





ps) There is no adequate English translation for the word 스승 which I've employed in the text. It is a word with implicit veneration for the one who the word is used for. It means "a true teacher."

Rice Cookers and LA Tap Water

I spent three hours and went to four different stores in Koreatown today trying to buy a reasonably priced rice cooker.

The last time I had gone rice cooker shopping was on the other side of the world. I was running an errand for my mom. She had asked me to pick up the largest rice cooker I could find at the largest home appliance store in our neighborhood. My purchase ended up being a rice cooker for twelve people. It looked like a mini spaceship. It was apparently the rice cooker from heaven or something. Or you would think so, the way it was commercialized. It actually had gold bits in the pot (or something like that) that helped the rice taste better. Don't ask. I don't know.

Today, in K-town, I found myself thinking, 'It's essentially a pot with a heating device attached to it. I can't believe they're making buyers pay so much money for such a simple device.'

I swear, it's the Asian sellers banking off of the Asian buyers' mentality.
Rice is an essential part of life and defines a large part of the Asian experience. Thus, the rice-cooker, no doubtedly, is an essential part of life.

Conclusion? Make it look super high-tech on the outside and put a ridiculous price tag on it because Asians care about looking good on the outside and saving face, and nobody wants a poor man's rice cooker.

Well, I found it. The poor man's rice cooker standing in the far corner of the fourth store I showed up at.
In relation to the rice cooker, I also figured out the answer to a daunting personal mystery today. One of the guy's (he was about my father's age) at store No. 1 told me that I should make sure to use drinking water when preparing the rice.
"Don't use tap water," he said in Korean.
"Really? Why not? I've been using tap water since December when my sister came from Boston and chastised me for using drinking water for everything that I cook including ramyun."
The man looked horrified,
"LA water is terrible! Beware of the calcareous in the water!"

Calcareous. There is a word that rang a bell. Melissa (one of my closest friends from college) and I had been in Paris for language studies during our sophomore year. During the first month, her skin had broken out like crazy to a point of physical agony, due to the calcareous in the water. (She had super sensitive skin.) The word stuck with me. Until that point, the only other time I had come across that word was in geography class way back in middle school.

I usually never have skin problems but these past few months it's been puberty all over again.
(Well, I never really had skin problems even during puberty.)
I was concerned and had dug into emergency funds to purchase such things as 'Clarifying Cream' from Shiseido but to no avail.
Well, there you are.
All along it had been the water. Mystery solved!

How interesting. New York City has the opposite water effect from Los Angeles.
Not too long ago, I read an article in The Los Angeles Times about a man who was bottling New York City tap water and selling it and making it a profit out of it. While reading that article, I remembered how when I was in the 3rd grade, I thought it was odd that Stacey used to drink water straight from the tap, in her apartment in New York City. This is Stacy from The Babysitters Club.
Now I believe that Ann M. Martin, the creator of the series, is a conlady who sold millions of her "airport-fluff books for pre-teens" to innocent children like me so that she could live in her New York City apartment and drink her Perrier and San Pellegrino. My children will not grow up reading The Babysitters Club. But I'm sure there's greater evil out there now than Stacy, Claudia, Dawn, Mary Anne and Kristy's world of babysitting.

Lifestyle on a Budget

One thing I do that I can’t give up no matter what my bank account says is brunch. The Little Next Door, is a laid back French restaurant in the heart of LA with a cute little cat logo. I dine here somewhat frequently. People complain that the service is slow and crappy at The Little Next Door, but others believe that this is the mark of the bona-fide French experience. C’est vrai. Most of the waiters at the restaurant are French and the best part here is the dessert.

Soon my brunch friend, Jessica pulled-up in her spanking new beamer and handed her keys to valet. Jessica Collins shared the same name as the business school at the university I was attending. This is because her family had donated $110 million dollars to the b-school which resulted in a name change of the school that matched her name.

As soon as Jess sat down, she crossed her legs, leaned over and exclaimed, “Addison, seriously. How do I let my life-style happen on my budget?”
When she said this, I pulled out my quotebook and documented her quote. It was a good one. It summed up one of the dilemmas of my current life. And my solution to her question would be starving or eating cereal.

Jess usually valet parked her car, worked out at Equinox, tanned regularly at tanning bars, lived in a high rise in west LA, and hung out at the most trendy restaurants and bars in Hollywood. Once Leonardo Dicaprio had summoned his bodyguard for her, to fend off a rude lady who was cutting in line to go to the bathroom:

Jess:
(to herself)
I really really need to go to the bathroom.

Leo:
(to himself)
I wonder if I can wait. I hate co-ed bathrooms because the lines are longer.

Rude Lady:
(cutting in front of them and shooting Jessica a nasty look before she hurries into the bathroom)
You’ll live!

Jess :
(mouth gaping open)
I can’t believe she did that!

Leo:
That is so rude! Do you want me to do something about this?

Jess:
Yes, please!

(Leo gestures for his guard to come over.)

I generally don't have a problem with people living by the standard they were born into, unless they impose it upon others. I know that some people think that other people are snobby and ungrateful, but I think if you were to look at it that way wealth is ALWAYS relative. It's like an average American saying that people like Jess have nothing to complain about. Well, if you put it that way, the average American has nothing to complain about compared to the children in rural Cambodia.

Anyways, back to brunch in Los Angeles, California with my friend. On a different level from the Collins family I was thinking the exact same thing. Today, I found myself having a bowl of cereal near midnight. There wasn’t much in the fridge. I realized this was my second meal today that consisted of cereal. I wasn’t on a diet, I was budgeting. Perhaps if I didn’t go eat out at The Little Next Door twice this week (but it was brunch!) and didn't have to pay $160 for my phone bill I would have more money for regular meals. Yeah, whatever. Life is about sacrifices.

The concise version of my story is that I am now a poor student and I wasn’t either before. But because I’ve chosen to pursue a form of pure art, it might get even worse in the future. I have a long lost artist cousin that I recently got in touch with. He lives in New York. He lives with his brother who graduated from Columbia law school and is a high-flying lawyer who can afford many things that he (the artist cousin) can’t. I told him that I hope my sister at Harvard will graduate soon and start rolling in the money so that I won’t have to pay rent and I could go live with her. We both laughed for awhile (online) and then there was a long (online) silence. It’s hard to go from steak to bologna. I can’t stand bologna so I’ve been eating a lot of spam lately. I see a lot of spam down this road that I’ve chosen.

Conversations with Xavier Jost

Xavier Jost was tubby and had a big head. He could be found strolling about the school premises with determined and purposeful steps. Young Xavier was two years old.

One day, Xavier (with much difficulty and a some help from his nanny) pushed open the glass door of the library where I worked, and stepped in. He headed straight for the 'transportation' section. It turned out that Xavier was obssessed with fire trucks. His favorite book was "Sam the Trucker" and he had memorized the book by heart.
I didn't know anything about Xavier then, and I made the mistake of trying to introduce him to books that were made for kids who weren't yet in school. Books made out of card board and had large pictures. He clearly wasn't interested. He sat down and carefully chose a DK book (a publishing company that specializes in illustrated reference books). Xavier's eyes soaked in every detail as he slowly flipped through the pages.

A little while later Katie, my co-worker, the ESL teacher, and Xavier's mother, came in to the library.
"Hey Xavier! What's going on?" She asked brightly.
Xavier looked up from his book and said,
"I screamed today."
"Oh no." Katie looked very serious.
"Xavier, what did mommy say about screaming. When do you scream?"
"ONLY during emergencies."
"Yes. That's correct. Then why were you screaming?"
"Because I was outside playing with Sebastian and Sebastian was screaming."
"Was Sebastian screaming because of an emergency?"
"No. He was screaming because Mary was running."
Xavier answered honestly, looking up a his mother with his wide blue eyes.

I was astounded.
But more astounded than me was the thirteen-year-old ESL student I tutored after school every day. Tristan Chen was a giant of a boy. He stood at 6 feet tall (the middle school volleyball team and basketball team were dying to recruit him), gawking down at Xavier. I had scolded Tristan the other day for confusing the lower case letters "b" and "d" - I doubt Tristan knew the word 'emergency.'

One day, during lunch break, instead of joining all the teachers and their gossip in the Teacher's Lounge, I ended up sitting outside on the bleachers with Xavier - the autumn sun shining down on us. The green artificial turf was covered with crunchy brown leaves. The air was chilly but the sun was warm. Xavier was wearing a soft blue beanie+baseball hat with the flaps pulled over his ears.
Xavier pointed at the sun,
"The sun is shining."
"Yes, it is." I said. I was feeling a little melancholy.
"The sky is blue." He pointed at the sky above us.
I looked up. It was inded.
"You're wearing a red jacket. Hahlmunee is wearing red, too."
Mrs. Jun, Xavier's nanny, was wearing rouge pants with a white floral pattern. For some reason,
after Xavier pointed this out, it looked even brighter, bursting with life.
I tugged at Xavier's furry hat, "Yes, and you're wearing blue."
He giggled and then pointed at the thermos I was holding.
"Is that hot?"
"It is inside."
"Be careful."
Then Xavier was quiet for a long time.
"What are you thinking about?" I asked.
The little boy's face twisted into a storm. He looked at me,
"Do dinosaurs bite?"
"What?"
"Do dinosaurs bite?" Xavier asked again. He wasn't joking. He was asking a perfectly serious question and he wanted a perfectly serious answer.
"I'm not sure." I paused, "I think they might but I don't know because I've never met one."
"Oh."
He looked disappointed, then his face brightened.
"Dora the Explorer, met a dinosaur."
He couldn't pronounce 'explorer' very clearly.I had to have him repeat the word a few times and he became quite frusturated.

It was through this conversation that I realized something.

If Xavier could talk like one of us (adults/older ppl), this meant that he could think like one of us. Right? Wrong.
Xavier's amazing ability wasn't that he knew things that other children didn't know but that he could express verbally, in clearly constructed sentences, what a 2 year old was thinking inside.

That could be genius, but different from how I had first perceived 'genius' to be. I had expected brilliance from him, in that he would one day (maybe even now) understand things that I could never understand and explain them to me and the rest of the world.

That day though, I realized that talking to Xavier and seeing the wonder and seriousness in his eyes was refreshing, not because he understood things that little kids could never understand, but because he was seeing and understanding things for the first time -
It made me feel like I was opening my eyes and seeing the world for the first time.