soles4souls update2

lol, did NOT expect it to take this long to ship out our remaining shoes, but people kept promising shoes and i felt too bad to say no so it's been like 6 months, but we've managed finally ship out the last of the shoe collection, only about 100 pairs. i've come to realize that altho people will promise and promise you that they've got shoes and that they'll for sure bring them next time, well, they may or may not. and honestly, you can't wait around for them.

either way, i'm incredibly proud of everyone who was so generous / supportive of the drive. i collected nearly 300 pairs of shoes (277 to be exact) which i think is pretty damn amazing.

i think the most surprising thing of it all was how amazingly simple it all was. i got the idea, wrote a few emails to souls4soles, received my boxes, wrote a couple emails asking for permission, put up a few letters, and waited for the shoes. the hardest parts were finding where to store them (and that ended up being pretty easy. i stuffed my uncle's car to the brim and then used a friend's warehouse) and packing them up. most people doing this kind of drive would have had many more problems than me. i had a boss who donated shipping materials, and a friend who took care of the cost of shipping. the same friend and boss even helped me pack up the shoes. how freaking amazing is that? i'm soooo lucky to have these people in my life. i can't even believe it.

so thanks again to everyone who helped in any way, especially kenny liu and annie chang. :)

the stakes

sigrid nunez in a feather on the breath of god - "two can play the game, but for men and women the stakes are not equal."

movies

oh man oh man there are a lot of movies i wanna see right now... let's see how many i actually watch?
zombieland, toy story 1 and 2 in 3D, whip it, where the wild things are, the invention of lying, and coco. and i kind of want to see surrogates.

sd 09 recap

oh man this was a good year! i don't know how many races or medals we won (i'm not one to keep track, or to even really care about medals), but i do know that we've done really good! for our last competitive tourney (treasure island) we brought up 6 boats: red, blue, white, women's, men's, masters. and of those 6 i think 5 of us made some sort of finals (tho we didn't win any medals). can you believe that? we are freaking awesome!

also chang started coming out to practice. and reep, russ, and louise joined sd. :) yay!

killer bunnies, snakes beware!

A pair of rabid rabbits has been caught killing a series of snakes near Cairns.
For three weeks Armando Del Manso believed his dog was responsible for the dead snakes showing up with teeth marks all over them on his East Barron property’s lawn each morning.
But it turns out it was a pair of rampaging rabbits killing the snakes.
The 42-year-old boilermaker first made the discovery Tuesday night when he spotted the two wild rabbits attacking a king brown snake.
“The snake was raised up in the air in the striking position and the two rabbits worked their way around him and killed him in two minutes,” Mr Del Manso said.
“I’m gobsmacked, it’s absolutely incredible.
source

“We were watching from the veranda with a spotlight, and I thought, who is going to believe this, they’ll think I’m crazy.”
Wildlife expert Paul O’Callaghan of the Cairns Wildlife Safari said it was the first time he had heard of rabbits attacking snakes.

sd sf

reep and i got to sf early friday morning and proceeded to have the best day ever! swasti took us to the airport for our 7.30am flight, which was delayed a little bit by weather. we checked into the marriot by 11am, took a nap, went out and ate at dotties, came back for another nap, woke up to meet mr and mrs greenleaf for drinks and apps at the cosmopolitian, and then dinner and dessert at mangarosa. it was fabulous!

the weather was great the whole weekend. nice and sunny if you can believe it! our host team ripple effect, btw, if freaking awesome. they actually cooked for us! they made like three kinds of pasta; it was so good. i napped three times on saturday. at night reep, russ, louise and i went to dinner at mochica, which served peruvian food. also very good.

sunday was another day of competition. i think 5 of our 6 teams made some sort of finals, which is unbelieveable! i think i only took one nap that day. but it was a really good one. janice and jason made me a "bed" and the three of us slept for maybe 45 minutes? twas awesome.

that night we went out wit the team to o'neill's irish pub with the team. while reep and i didn't participate in any boat races, we had fun nonetheless. a member of our team got pretty drunk and ended up passing out next to us in our booth. baaad idea, lol. we didn't do anything really mean (well, i didn't anyway) but whipped cream was involved. :)

anyway, it was a great weekend. and probably my funnest tourney ever. twas a super great way to end the season.

impeding god

anne graham lotz (evangelist billy graham's daughter) - "religion is an impediment to knowing god"

glass unicorns

erica jong in what do women want on the relationship between her and her mother - "so we are very tender with each other, like glass unicorns who might break each other's horns by kissing too passionately."

it's easy

"Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call. Go after her because that’s what you should do if you love someone. Don’t wait for them to give you a sign cause it might never come. Don’t let people happen to you. Don’t let me happen to you, or her. Shes not a fucking television show or tornado. There are people I might have loved. Had they gotten on the airplane or run down the street after me or called me up drunk at four in the morning because they need to tell me right now and because they cannot regret this... No! And so I always thought I’d be the only one doing crazy things for people who would never give enough of a fuck to do it back, or to act like idiots, or be entirely vulnerable and honest.

"And making someone fall in love with you is easy, and flying 3000 miles on four days notice because you can't just sit there and do nothing is easy too! And breathing into telephones is not everyone's idea of love but it is the way I can recognize it because that is what I do. Go scream it and be with her in meaningful ways because that is beautiful and that is generous and that is what loving someone is, that is raw and that is unguarded and that is all that is worth anything really. It makes sense and doesnt at the same time."

- anonymous

a plan

spike lee - "i ain't martin luther king. i don't need a dream. i have a plan."

club soda

another long beach tourney is over. this year so cow paddled under the club soda moniker. at the beginning we had around 25 people signed up, so we decided to go forward with another season. but come competition weekend, we only had 18 total, so we had to borrow a couple people from the northrop corporate team, water ninjas (it's good to have connections, eh?). overall it was a pretty okay season. not fantastic like last year, but it was still fun. and as usual, we did pretty well for ourselves, considering how many practices we had. i hope we can get a team together for next year as well, but as always with this team, we'll see when the time comes.

vast and endless

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." - Antoine de St. Exupery

erica jong - the perfect man

"The prefect man -- for any woman -- is the man who loves her constantly and fucks her frequently, passionately, and well; who adores and admires her; is at once reliable and exciting; and earthly Adonis and a heavenly father figure; a beautiful son, a steady daddy; a wild-eyed Bacchic lover and a calm, sober, but still funny friend. Can you find all these attributes in one man? Not bloody likely! And if you find them, will they endure for all the various passages of your life? Not bloody likely.

"Given this problem, what's a woman to do? Having two or three men simultaneously would seem to solve this problem -- if it didn't create so many logistical snafus... Because the fact of the matter is that nobody can spend 100 percent of her time getting laid, arranging to get laid, administering TLC to a variety of men with a variety of needs. And what woman worth her salt wants to be involved with a man whose needs she care nothing about?"

"There's the problem in its essence: Putting together one perfect man out of two, three, or four slightly imperfect candidates is just too time-consuming and tiring. We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion."

singular

lately i've been feeling rather lonely. last week and a bit seems like i'm not even dating reep anymore. he doesn't normally call (not even when i asked him to, once. which really sucked cause i had texted him to call me because i missed him. which i don't normally say). and i find out what he's doing thru his twitter. sad, eh? virtual stalking your own boyfriend... chang's gone on vacay too, which makes matters worse, as we tend to talk a lot. i'm not as close as i used to be wit a few others of my friends, which lately has started to weigh on me a bit. a friend of mine i used to be quite close to has moved cross-country. and a couple others, well, we've grown apart.

i hope i feel better after competition...

deep down

"I wish I could believe in God god because I feel like I am missing out on a lot of potential happiness or comfort. Unfortunately, as good as it may make me feel in some ways, the part of me that I respect most is the part of me that won't allow me to believe."

- postsecret comment

for fun only?

i watched the hangover recently, which was a pretty damn funny movie. however, i'm worried about the message the movie unwittingly sends out.

in case you don't know, the movie is about four guy friends who go to vegas for a bachelor party of one of them. the "bachelor" is a nice guy, his soon-to-be bother-in-law is a weirdo, another friend is a married morally challanged "smart guy" who you can tell has gotten way wit tons stuff before, and the last friend is sort of straight laced who's is kept on a VERY short leash by his girlfriend (he tells her they're going to napa for the party, not vegas.). anyway, they're only supposed to spend one night in vegas before heading back to la for the day of preperations before wedding day. that night tho, they start it off with a round of shots from the weird guy's flask.

the next morning they wake up to find their hotel suite in shambles, with a tiger in the bathroom and a random don't-know-who's baby in the closet. they can't remember a thing from the night before. they're all missing brain and liver cells (one ended up in the hospital with broken ribs), one of them is missing a tooth but is married to an "escort," and they can't find the groom. antics ensue.

in the end, of course, everything comes up rosy. they find the groom, make $80k, don't end up in jail, make it to the wedding and ditch the controlling girlfriend. whew! to add icing on the cake, they find a camera that documents their "missing" night. apptly they found strippers, met various d-list celebrities, and in general looked like they had a whole lot of fun. yay!

...wtf? how can it possibly be all flowers and rainbows if you can't remember a fucking thing but ended up in the hospital and pulled out your own fucking tooth! you didn't actually have a fun time if you can't remember a moment of it. why doesn't the whole weekend scare the shit out of these people?! oh, right, because they got away with it all. they didn't end up in jail, you can always get a crown, and i'm sure no one came home wit vd. all of which would not happen in real life.

i understand that it's just a movie. and that most people understand that movies aren't real life. but come on. you're basically saying that it's okay to get drugged up and drink way too much and black out and not remember anything, because you're gonna have fun (that you can't remember), and you're gonna be okay, and everything will work itself out. no matter wat trouble you get yourself into while you're blacked out, you can talk yourself out of once you wake up. and imagine the stories you can tell!

while all the main players in the movie are male, imagine if this were a group of female friends. how much you wanna bet that in real life, at least one of them (if not all of them) would be raped, and likely, multiple times by multiple people. imagine even, that it was not real, and it was just a movie about four women who went to vegas for a bachlorette party and got drugged and drunk and did all things the boys did. do you think this movie would even make it past the idea pitching stage? no, of course not. because there are serious dangers for women who are blacked out. unlike for men. ...wait, no, that's not right either.

...get real, hollywood.

yvr / sea

just returned from a great trip to vancouver / seattle. the main purpose of the trip was to compete in the rio tinto alcan dragon boat festival in vancouver wit space dragons. we flew up on a friday afternoon to get there in time for a team dinner wit our host team phat phish. saturday and sunday were tourney days. it was intermittently rainy, but not actually cold. there wasn't too much downtime, but the finish line set up was great, and there was a lot of good competition (space brought up 4 boats!). saturday night reep and i went to china town where we visited the night market and got some food. we ended up walking a few miles back to hotel which was a terrible idea cause our feets were killing us for the next few days. reep even needed to get a new pair of shoes!

on monday we went to whistler blackcomb. some of us had rented cars, so reep and i were pretty lucky to be able to add on last minute. unfortunately the zipline tour was already full so reep and i had to go separate of our team. but it was still a ton of fun. i loved it, as i love heights and speed, but i admit i did get scared when they told us we should go upside down and let go of the ropes. eck!

tuesday reep and i dedicated to sightseeing. we visited canada place, tandem biked around the perimeter and interior of stanley park, and saw the sights. it was a nice chill day. aj (also from our team) met up wit us on tuesday night.

wednesday we took a car back to whistler. reep and i had planned to go to vancouver island to kayak but the weather was really bad so we decided to kayak another time. aj recommended that we atv, which was a ton of fun. we all had little mishaps on the ride, but nothing serious. we also saw a black bear! reep and aj were gonna mountain bike (freaking awesome course, you and your bikes go up on ski lifts!), but they were too unprepared. one of the highlights was finding out that the luge course that they built for the 2010 winter olympics will be open to the public the year later. i'm so there!!

friday morning we got back to vancouver and reep and i got on a shuttle to seattle airport. we rented a car and promptly drove to the rei headquarters, which was kind of a bust. i was hoping they're have more paddling gear (not necessarily specific to dbing), but their section was even smaller than the one we have a home. =\ the climbing wall looked like a lot of fun but it's $20 a person and we'd have to wait a couple days! so reep and i skipped it.

on saturday we did sightseeing in seattle. we spent quite a bit of time at pike's place market. afterwards we went to the emp and sci-fi museum. we looked that the space needle but neither of us really felt like going up so we skipped it. that night reep went to play streetfighter. ...or tekken, i forget. i stayed home and slept.

sunday was pretty cool. we went kayaking around the san juan islands. we got a 2-person boat and totally smoked everyone else. hehe! reep was in charge of steering (which is apptly pretty hard to do, as you use your feet to adjust), and i was crazy paddling. reep kept telling me to slow it down and stop, which i was not happy about. lol. that evening we drove to mt st helens.

monday we went walking around mt st helens. i really wanted to do the upper portion of ape cave (it's a bit longer and more challenging), but we started it wrong and had to do it backwards. not recommended! funny tho. it was a mile to two to cave entrance above ground and i nearly quit. i hate hiking! but once we got underground i don't think i complained at all. not even when i slipped and ended up nearly flat on my back. i love spelunking (if you can call it that).

since we had a flight pretty early on tuesday reep and i decided to skip the hotel costs on monday night and instead drove down to portland to hit up voodoo donuts. from the little we saw, portland was pretty cool. "keep portland weird" is apptly the slogan. very young and definitely has a large counter-culture. must return!

all in all, great trip. quick fire impressions:

rio tinto alcan dragon boat festival is good for the specators, but organizers didn't really consider the athletes.

yvr is the best parts of sydney (friendly, clean) and nyc (the culture, cosmopolitain, polished) but all the latinos have been replaced by asians and a good many of the construction workers are female.

whistler is beautiful with a ton of activities, altho it has no night life.

seattle is like the worser parts of la (dirty and old) and sf (hilly and touristed out). =\ i'm really sorry to say this, but i've always loved seattle the times i've come before...

soles4souls update

thanks to everyone (esp chang and kenny for helping to pack up) we collected and shipped out 194 pairs of shoes (plus two shoes missing their mate)!! it's so amazing that we've done this. i'm sooo crazy grateful for everyone's help!

since we have a couple stragglers, we've held onto a few pairs of shoes for another shipment later this year. will update then with a grand total. :)

judgement

honestly, no matter how you feel about same sex marriage, you should at least respect carrie prejean (former 2009 miss california) for having the courage to say what she believes in even though it's probably not in her best beauty pagent interest to do so. i think a lot of people in her position and with her position, knowing that the judge who posed the question is gay, would've dodged the question. they would've blurred their answers so you wouldn't really know what their stance is. carrie, inarticulate as she is, very clearly states that she is not in favor of same sex marriage. well good for her. it may have cost her the crown but at least she wasn't bullied out of saying what she believes in. everyone is entitled to their own opinion and they should have the right to express it verbally.

(video of her response)

gone fishing

karl marx - "sell a man a fish, he eats for a day. teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.”

for your heart!

oh that karl, he always knows exactly what a woman wants, no? the tweed helmet with handy ipod holder is just what i need. ...if i was super rich and had a vespa and there were no laws against listening to dual headphone / earpiece devices while driving around... eh, cute anyway. :)

soles4souls

about a month ago i was on the piperlime website when noticed the words "donate your shoes" towards the bottom of the page. i clicked on the link, looked up the website, and found soles4souls, which is an organization that collects gently used shoes and distributes them around the world to people in need. this was what i'd been looking for.

i think i've always been civically minded, if generally too lazy to do anything on a greater scale. but setting up a soles4souls drive was pretty easy. i emailed for more info, set up a date, typed up some flyers, got a couple boxes, and waited for everyone else to do the actual work. i joked with my dad that if i collected 500 shoes i would personally go and help to deliver them (which is an opportunity that soles4souls does offer).

it's nearly a month later, and while i haven't counted up the shoes yet, i think i have definitely received at least 150 pairs. most have been from my chinese school class and from the la dragonboat community, notably from my team space dragons. i'm currently storing all the donations in my uncle's car (he's overseas so i took the liberty of stinking up his car).

the drive ends in about a week, and after that i'll be packing them up and shipping them out. bestline products has provided all the shipping materials. and best chucks has very generously offered to cover the shipping charges. i'll post pictures and another update soon after that.

thanks for everyone's support!

right to...

"if you can't trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?"

soles4souls email

the email i sent to the team, and the scdbc for their newsletter. also similar tot he one I gave my chinese school class...

"Every 17 seconds, Soles4Souls Inc. gives away another pair of shoes to someone in need. They have distributed more than 4.3 million pairs to people in over 125 countries, including Honduras, Uganda, Romania, and the United States. And you can help too! The people that truly make the non-profit organization effective are those who clean out their closets to personally drop off their gently worn shoes.

"From now until May 25th, I will be collecting your gently worn footwear and/or donations for Soles4Souls to ship the shoes to a person in need, whether they are victims of a natural disaster or subject to living in extreme poverty. It is estimated that Americans have 1.5 billion pairs of unused shoes lying in their closets. The charity can use each and every one of these pairs to make a tangible difference in someones life.

"Please bring your shoes to any Space Dragons practice and drop them off in the collection box that will be placed next to the benches.

"For more information on the charity, please visit http://www.soles4souls.org/. For information regarding the shoe drive, please email ..."

ah ha!!

i knew blogger used to let us change the post date and time, but i thought they stopped letting us to that. turn out, no!, they do! yay! i'm gonna go back and fill in some updates. hehe.

wind and fire

‘My mother always used to say absence is to love what the wind is to fire. When it's a small fire the wind kills it, but when it's a real fire it intensifies it.' - Diane von Furstenberg (as said on The City)

westec

went to the westec trade show today in la. twas really interesting getting to see some of our products actually mounted on machines. i've never even seen a mill (in real life) before today, much less a dro's, power feeds, lubrication units, and draw bars on the machine itself. very glad i went. :)

bday!

rip and i went to bandera in newport for dinner. we've driven by it a ton of times and once we've even tried going but couldn't get a parking spot. in any case, dinner was pretty damn good. good chicken, and good steak (they're a sister resturant of gulfsteam). afterwards we were in reep's car and he was getting his sweatshirt but it turns out it was a sweatshirt for me! everytime i went to sports authority i'd look at this sweatshirt. so he got it for me. :)

altho, i wore the thing the next day and not only did it dye my white shirt green. it also left a greenish tinge on me face! yeah... we returned it. but still, twas very thoughtful.

v-days

feb 13th - went out to ruby tuesdays wit chang and ting for a girls only night out. food wasn't as good as i remember it (altho mashed potatoes were just as good). funniest thing? ting got "inebriated" as she kept saying over and over. lol. we made her promise that she'd get tipsy again for my bday. ha!


feb 14th - reep and i went to the bella terra center off the 405 freeway. we were planning to eat at cheesecake factory (he likes cheesecake) but they don't take reservations so we ended up eating at pomodoro instead. which, honestly, was only okay. then we watched taken, staring liam neeson, which was really quite good. he was very believable in the role. as for presents, i'm getting him the street fighter IV collector's edition when it's released (i've already preorded it). and he got me the tiffany's necklace i've been wanting since forever. :) sweet!

jumping frenchmen!

"Among the medical oddities mentioned in a December Wall Street Journal roundup was "Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Disorder," in which a person, when startled, would "jump, twitch, flail their limbs and obey commands given suddenly, even if it means hurting themselves or a loved one." It was first observed in 1878 among lumberjacks in Maine but has been reported also among factory workers in Malaysia and Siberia. It is believed to result from a genetic mutation that blocks the calming of the central nervous system (but could be merely psychological, from the stress of working in close quarters)."

30 days

30 day email detox
what couldn't you do without? i think for me, it would be recreational reading. i'm usually reading at least one book. ..altho i have gone before wit a few empty weeks of only reading magazines (every couple months i'll catch up on my newweeks). and i'd have a really hard time witout a car. i mean, i guess i could ride my bike to work. but wat about chinese school and dragon boating? oy!

january update

1. started work on our kitchen. full redo actually. only thing remaining the same is the fridge.

2. definitely going to tempe and vancouver wit space dragons. vancouver airfare already booked. rip is going too actually, and of course, not without a bit of drama.

3. my chinese school teacher (cindy yen chen) is running for cerritos city councilperson.