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.