vicky christina hott mess

yeah, so i went two days on lemon juice, a record failure...

anyway, saw vicky christina barcelona and now i can say that javier bardem's character is the most attractive man i have ever seen... in a movie. whoot!

something i'm embarrased to like

http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/london-fashion-week-daviddavid/#more-7525

fashion is silly

master crap

flew into hnl last night. had a great (though) tiring week with alix. highlights include a banging aesop rock concert, a pretty disasterous usc frat row on opening night with the pitzer kids (alexa, matt, sam), pitzer bff drama, fairfax highschool swap meet where i scored an amazing cashmere sweater on the cheap, the gorgeous getty villa, sneaking into disneyland for free, and some dank cali-o.

now to buisness.
i am overweight. since october of last year, i've gained a whopping 25 pounds.
i blame this on three things:
1) gross vodka consumption
2) spending lots of time alone
3) the entire state of alaska

a shot of vodka has 90 calories in it. that means getting drank adds a good 1000 calories to my diet and a bit of umph to my backside. when i'm alone (either traveling or at home) i tend to eat more. this isn't depression or the filling of some personal void with cheese, but simply the fact that i like to eat well and get enormous pleasure from it. i like to eat very well and very often...
and finally, my favorite place in the world, alaska. on my private island in alaska, we didn't always have internet or phone reception or even light, sooo when we were bored we would eat. eat crappy food that was bad for you. ergo ten pounds this summer.

in lieu of all this, i'm going on master cleanse for ten days if it kills me. i did this lemon/maple syrup diet last year for 5 days and was completely fine (though i did start watching food network like i was a 12 year old boy watching internet porn). ten days is the standard, and what i will do this time. wish me luck, i'll be crapping a lot and probably get pretty grumpy. welcome home.

i flew into LAX on september 11th.

last year, when that day came around, i remember spontaneously sobbing while driving home on the pali. i was listening to some NPR story told from the point of view of a taxi driver whose first customers were driving to the one year anniversary of the attack on the towers. the story wasn't especially heart wrenching, but i had this sudden sweeping realization six years ago, someone had tried to destroy something that i felt a part of in 2007.

i won't claim to be a new yorker. i'm going to the city for only the fifth time next month, but it has come to represent something unequivocal in my mind. maybe it has something to do with the theatre or curry hill or fashion week or the fact that the new york times contains the words "new york", but that city has developed into the undoubted setting for my personal consummation. i feel dumb and may regret saying this, but through all my travels around the country and the world, there is no other place where i can see myself making a life.

to me, l.a. is the anti- new york. though i have come to appreciate certain parts of the greater los angeles area (namely malibu and the fairfax district), i could never imagine living in a place where rush hour constitutes 7 hours of the waking day, you can't drink the water, the clouds are brown with dirt, people want to be celebrities, and you can't walk anywhere. it is sprawling while new york is compact, ethnically white and hispanic while new york has a million faces, and bitchy where new york is... upfront(?)

if anything, the two things l.a. DOES have are Disneyland, and four of the best people in the world.

it's huckleberry season

i probably stock you on facebook...

in other news, i drove to crater lake today with my grandma jeannine. it's something like the 6th or 7th largest lake in the world, the clearest lake in the world (i guess they test these things), and it also is in the middle of a mountain. aml burns painted a picture of it that i found on google. here it is.

i've always hated spending time with my grandma. she's the woman who made me rewrite my entire math homework on a new sheet of paper when i was seven because the first copy had too many eraser marks on it. when i was ten and wanted to go on the east coast trip, she sent me a check for 15 dollars to spend for valentines day. i ended up not going, so the next time she visited, she tore up the check because "i didn't need it." she also likes spending time at cemetaries (geneology) and walking through old churches. we fight about everything.

that said, this week has been unexpectedly pleasent. one thing alaska HAS taught me is to shut up and just go with the flow even if the flow leads you to a three hour trip to jc penny (i didn't know they still existed) or a drive to look at wheat mills. i've discovered that when i just take those trips to Food for Less like a man, life goes smoothly, just like my bm's after a week of non stop berry eating. sorry, you didn't have to know that...

felines

i can't stand cats.

no plot, just spandex.

i am also allergic to cat hair. coincidence? i think not.

cabbage patch kids and everything unladylike

so i arrived at my grandma jeannine's house last night to discover a dirty dirty family secret...

my grandmother sleeps with a cabbage patch kid.

what.

the.

hell.

there's the pictures of the wretched thing. okay, maybe it's not as weird as finding out that she collects her dead friend's teeth, but it's pretty freaky.

these days, whenever i do something terribly unlady like or rough, i simply say, "Alaska," because, chances are i picked the habit up there

burping ... "Alaska"

passing gass ... "Alaska"

sitting with my legs wide apart ... "Alaska"

shoving food into my mouth like my nana shoving toilet paper into her cart at costco before a hurricane ... "Alaska"

not showering for 72 hours ... "Alaska"

Alaska has added so much to my character

things that don't work

now include my computer. i'm going to try to get it fixed while i'm in medford, oregon for the shakespeare festival from the 4-11th.

meanwhile...

saw neko case at bumbershoot festival in seattle. with the release of conor oberst's first solo album last month, i've been getting into americana music. neko (a member of the new pornogrpahers when not working solo) and her band, which included a banjo, were simply astounding. her voice was firm and smoky in her chest voice but sweet in the higher registers she used for her lullaby like ballads.

later at the festival while walking to reefer maddness the musical (http://www.reefermadness.org/), i heard someone shout "kalei" and turned to find lindsey bailey with whom i met up with at university of washington at midnight that night and tried, unsuccesfully, to find cool people in her dorm who were down to get drank on the first night of a three day weekend, got drank by ourselves until i had to leave at 2:00. went to the airport at 4:00 and flew from seattle to portland.

i'm staying at a hostel for the first time (above). so surprizingly clean that i called home about it. ferreal. that was, until i met the smelly lady who sleeps 10 feet away from me and the forty something indian woman on the bunk bellow me who always looks surprized...

will try to get my computer fixed so i don't have to walk 40 minutes to use the internet. yayo!