0 Assorted knowledge 2: Public transportation edition at 23:47

Public transportation

1. Use Bart.gov and nextmuni.com
 -My tip for coordinating your trip: you can use nextmuni (and nextbus) to see when you'll arrive at a destination by setting the stop to your destination instead of your current destination.
  -I thought google maps' public transportation function was extremely functional for this, but it actually grabs information for bus and Bart times from a schedule, not real time, so it's useless at night. Bart.gov and nextbus gives information in real time.
 
2. If you're not going to campus, it takes about the same time to get to Southside from either downtown Berkeley station or Rockridge station, by walking or bus.
2.a) That said, Rockridge is one stop from MacArthur station, but Downtown Berkley is two.

3. Making a little effort to go to the farther cars (on the ends) when it's busy will get you a better chance of a seat. And a quieter/less crowded car.

4. At night, the 51B at Rockridge will wait for people from Bart.

5. At night, trains from Rockridge and Downtown Berkeley will wait for each other at Macarthur station, so if two are leaving from each station at about about the same time, just go to the closer station.

1 Assorted knowledge from one with a foot on either side of the bay at 14:00

Driving
1. During rush hour, just stay in the same lane on the 80 going east (out of the city), as long as it's not the rightmost lane (the one that people force themselves into after zooming by traffic in the exit lane). Everything gets faster once you get on the bridge, especially after treasure island.

2. Certain streets have timed lights so you never have to stop. Franklin, Fell and Oak: 25mph. Sunset and Great Highway (both directions): 30 mph.

2.a) coming up Sunset at night: if you get caught at the first red light (after the turn), you will also be caught at the immediate next one. But if you accelerate to at least 50 mph between the two, you will make the second and all consequent green lights (coast back down to 30mph!)

3. Going to the outer Sunset, with no traffic, going 280 ->brotherhood -> sunset is faster than 80/101->fell.

3.a) At night, do not speed on 101 south. You can speed on 280 south.

3.b) cops often wait after the turn on the bridge around Treasure Island.

4. Do not ever go up College St during rush hour. Even walking is faster. Instead, continue up Claremont and Piedmont to get to campus.

5. The 24->80 merging section is the worst designed piece of highway ever. As soon as possible after the turn, get to the leftmost lane (if going to the bridge). You can go back to the fastpass lane after it splits to 80 and 580.

6. Going to University is faster via Oxford than Shattuck. (tip from Glenda Tam)

Parking
7. Only "I" parking is free on Saturday. Not D.
5.a) the north (left) side of Dwight st, after college, is I, but the right side is D.

8. Arrive between 5 and 6pm on Friday. It is after people leave for the weekend and before all the people coming for evening stuff arrive.

9. No one ever parks on Dwight and Piedmont/warring, but it's all I up there.

10. There are segments of Ashby near Fulton that you can park forever.

11. You can park on Campus on the weekends (for about $1.50/hr)! Perfect for hitting up grad receptions but not parking super far away.

0 That; This is what I think about at 14:49

Gasps of either laughter or sobs.
Hesitancy, silence before a yes or a no.
Eyes, a window of pained thoughts, but of whose pain?
"I'm sorry." for what?
The thrill, the hope - I want to know you.

0 This is what I think about that: Chillun's at 13:19

This halloween, I finally broke out of my traditional annual introvert shell by going out to Regeneration's Halloween event, Trunk or Treat.

Because Oakland in general is not a safe place to go around the neighborhood at night (much less also knocking on random neighbor's doors), Regeneration hosts an alternative evening in their parking lot and gym. Vehicles replace houses - trunks are filled with candy - and carnival-esque activities are held in the gym.

I was roped into the responsibility of hosting a mask-making table this year. Initially I was stressed about such responsibilty - I have to be artistic and creative and funny the whole evening? what if the kid asks me for a dragon mask? A butterfly? How can I express that in mask medium? - until Erin suggested the kids make the masks themselves. Which is the format Christina had in mind when she asked me, anyway. I'm not sure why I thought otherwise.

Hosting that table was very conducive to interacting with the kids, though initially, interaction did not cross my mind as I raced to keep up production with the demand for mask templates. When I discovered that both the five-to-eleven-year-olds and I were capable of coloring and talking at the same time, I started asking questions and starting conversations.

"What's your favorite candy?"
"What is your costume?"
"Are you gonna share with your parents?"

Speaking my cute/children's voice (which is half an octave higher than normal, and at a slower rate of speech), I started to realize how easily the questions and comments came, and I felt like I was following certain unspoken rules of engagement- compliment their costume no matter how much effort they (their parents) put into it, call every girl's costume cute and every boy's costume awesome, give overwhelmingly positive critiques of their masks (which were random blotches of color, though I'll be the first to day I'm not sure I could have done any better), etc.

I'd like to think being able to hold a conversation with kids, as shallow as it was, is a mark of good children skills. But speaking to them in these governed phrases seems insincere, like as an actor or vocalist and I felt like I was watching myself. I was now repeating the inane, obvious cliches I had heard other people use in their babble to kids. If I had only witnessEd people treat kids more maturely, would I also engage with them differently?

Yes, it makes me happy to see them happy. But the teacher in me constantly asks, "How can I teach them something from this?"

I found the parents easy to talk to as well, since we could talk about their kids. Plus, they were the only ones who got my costume. If an 8-year-old-asked me what I was, I just said, "It'll be funny when you're older."

P.S. My costume was: a formal apology.

0 Stories of Spain 6 at 18:00

"Jamon!" I proudly proclaimed to the same woman at the counter. She just nodded and a few minutes later gave me the same thing as the previous morning, the coffee and the ham-in-a-bun. Not even a smile! Well, I thought I was cute.

I took my luggage with me and got onto the 22 bus, the same as yesterday, hoping it would take me to Santa Justa station. Sooner or later as we got downtown and kept going, ignoring the mustard yellow street signs that pointed elsewhere to Santa Justa station, I realized this bus was not going to take me there.

I end up at Prado San Sebastian again, because it's the end of the line, and probably after 10 minutes of wandering around studying the maps, I understand I need to get on the 22 bus. After another 15 minutes, I find the island and stop where the 22 is, and get on as the drivers switch to a young woman with short, dyed black hair. After I find a seat, I observe her settling-in ritual, which involved reaching up to turn on satellite radio, and immediately James Blunt's You're Beautiful blasts through the bus's speakers. We listen to American pop for the rest of the ride and I wonder if Spain has their own pop music. (The answer is, not really).

At Santa Justa's ticket counter #10, I spend the initial two minutes trying to buy a train ticket using only the words "Cordoba" and several strategically paced "Si"s, to no avail. In a strain of rapid Spanish from the teller, I hear "Quantas horas?" I recognize 'quantas horas'. I repeat it back to him. We stare at each other significantly. I want to tell him numbers, but I only know how to count to 5 in Spanish.

He tries a different tack, and on the back of an invalid ticket he writes '12:35'. "Si." Underneath that, '17 euros'. I take out the money. He gives me my ticket and change. "Platform six," he says in merciful english.

I hustle all the way to the platform for my train that departs in four minutes, and have to put my bags through the x-ray. "Coach numero uno," the person who rips my ticket says, and those words mean nothing until I see lights on the car closest to me blink "coche no. 4", and I realize my car is all the way at the end.

A whistle blows through the station and I start running, dragging my luggage, trying to gain some traction with my Rainbows on the slippery floor. The last person through the door, a man wearing an orange polo and a wide grin, leans back out and helps me lift my bag onto the train as I arrive, panting. "Gracias," I mutter.

"De nada", he smiled. "Casi, e?" He continued with rapit short streams of Spanish in a tone that sounded like he wanted to be acknowledged but not necessarily answered, so I said "si" in politely hesistant intervals. I put my bag up and after I settle in my seat, I see the grinning man loudly cracking jokes with the people around him.

Then, I get kicked out of my seat by an old guy in a suit because it turns out trains have assigned seating.

0 Stories of Spain 5 at 12:11

Minimart

On the second evening in Cordoba, I discovered this candy shop/minimart in a little nook near the Plaza de Saint Nicolas. The entrance was not a door but simply heavy strips of plastic. Initially I was put off by the lack of air-conditioning, but the refridgerator of frias bebidas made up for it.

The first time, I bought a two-liter of water, and at the counter the young man just counted in his head and said, "uno bente." I showed him a handful of coins to have him take whatever he wanted, since I didn't understand numbers. As he handed me my change, though, I held up a 20 euro cent coin and asked, "como se dice?" (That means, "how do you say...", which is wrong - I should have asked "como se llama" - "what is the name of this" )

"Bente," he said, and then took a few more coins. "Dias", he said, holding up a 10-euro cent.

He held up a 50-cent, and I interjected, "cinquenta," the only number I knew. He smiled and nodded. 

"dias, bente, cinquenta," I repeated slowly.

Pictured: Flamenquin. Which is not ice cream nor water nor related to the rest of this post at all except it's in the same city

"Bien," he said, nodding. I thanked him and turned to leave, but two kids running through the plastic threshold collided with my navel.

"Perdon," one of them squeaked before their attention was totally taken over by the shelves of candy. I laughed.

On a Domingo (Sunday) afternoon, I went by the shop again for some ice cream on my way to the mosque cathedral. This time, there were four yelling girls already in the shop, unchaperoned. They could have been sisters, since each were a different age, and the eldest in a cleanly pressed uniform was trying to chaperone the others by yelling over than the others. I also assumed she was in charge since she had a fistful of coins in her hand.

It was chaotic; the three younger sisters would randomly grab something from a shelf and put it on the counter (one had to jump), obviously grabbing whatever they wanted, each time messing up the eldest sister who was trying to add up the cost and judge if their haphazard selection would go over their parent's allowance. To add more stress, one little sister would add another piece of candy or bag of chips while the eldest's back was turned as she reprimanded another one.

 The clerk and I made eye contact and I grinned, he rolled his eyes and said, "ninas."

In the meantime I communicated that I wanted a scoop of vanilla ice cream in a cone, though he couldn't fulfill my order while the girls were still throwing and removing things from the counter. Eventually they shorted it all out and the younger three ran out of the shop as the eldest counted the coins in her hand and handed them over.

And then I got my ice cream.

0 Stories of Spain 4 at 13:36

When my friend Sarah comes back in the afternoon (and after my nap), we look for ice cream but end up sitting in a Starbucks reading for a few hours. If you know me, that is actually an activity I thoroughly enjoy as a tourist, or as a person in general.

Anyway, as the afternoon wears on and it cools off, I notice rollerbladers. At first it was the occasional solo or wobbly couple, but it becomes too frequent and regular to be a fluke. People actually take it seriously as a form of transportation.

After Sarah goes home for dinner I stay at Starbucks for two more hours, then force myself to explore more. I walk through the gardens in front of the Alcaraz, and find an interesting, well-lit fountain with a lion on top.

On the other side of the Alcazar are more restaurants and shops and bars. I spend an hour slowly eating a flan, and journaling.

I like flan in the states better. Or whatever it it's called. Custard?

At around midnight we explore an international food festival, which means tents featuring beers from that country. I didn't take a picture but I had a samosa from Thailand, and then we played on some really awesome playground structures. Also at one point this drunk guy stopped me and told me I was Asian.

We walk back some 3 km to Sarah's house at 1 AM. On the way a guy on a bike asked us for directions. Well, asked Sarah, I guess. On a big bridge, we pass by the fire station, which bears the emblem of Sevilla in the middle. Sorry you can't see it clearly, but if you're curious, just look it up.

 Featuring Sarah on the right.

I end up taking a taxi home after fruitlessly for a bus for half an hour. I get back for 8 euros instead of 12. The first taxi ripped me off. At last I go to sleep at 2 AM.

0 Stories of Spain 3 at 23:10

Let's start with the most important thing, eh? Food!

On my first full day in Sevilla, I went outside across the plaza to where a few other groups of people were sitting outside, eating breakfast. Wait, is that beer they're drinking? It's 10 o'clock in the morning. Hm. I went inside, to the counter, confident in my meager strategy of pointing at something on the menu randomly (which, you know, worked out so well for me the night before). But there was no menu, no chalkboard or signs or papers of any sort at all. I guess people just know what they want for breakfast, all the time. As my eyes wandered around looking for words with a price next to them, the large lady behind the counter stared at me intensely, hands on her hips.

I looked at her and sighed, still mute. "Caffe?" She said. I nodded, and she turned around quickly and added some grounds into the machine, and turned back to me. "Con leche?" leche means milk! and con means "with". I nodded again (maybe a feeble "si" came out). She put the cup on a saucer with a spoon and a packet of sugar (azucar). But I didn't move. I wanted at least some bread, dang it. I pointed at the basket of bread I suddenly noticed, and she took one and sliced it and put it in the open toaster. She says something in Spanish that I interpret as, "Anything else?" I point at the thin slices of ham I see in front of the basket. When the bread comes out, she drizzles the halves with liquid butter from a decanter, and puts piece of the ham in it. It goes on a plate, too, and I take them outside.

Well I'll be damned if it isn't delicious. The bread is warm and very soft when I expected it to be dense. The butter, well, it's liquid butter and soaking through to the plate, but the ham is also good. I empty the whole packet of sugar into the coffee and it's palatable.

I meet up with my friend Sarah, who's studying abroad in Sevilla, and we go downtown for the sights.

The entrance of the cathedral in Sevilla

We walk around the touristy area and down charmingly claustrophobic Spanish cobblestone streets. I hardly notice any of the shops and their wares as we catch up. Sarah goes home for lunch and I find a little restaurant in an alleyway around the corner of the cathedral.

Featured in this picture: Other people, and my Kindle.

I ended up taking a nap on a park bench, with my bag as a pillow hoping I wouldn't get jacked while I slept. Which I didn't! A nice siesta for me in the shade.

0 Stories of Spain 2 at 14:25

Before we begin, a picture of the jam session from the last post:

The most important thing about life in Spain that I didn't listen to was that everything is later.
Lunch is late. Dinner is even later. I'd generally say everything is about two hours later than typical life in America, and I could have factored that into the jetlag thing. In Cordoba the past two days I've woken up at seven, showered and dressed by 7:30 and still was up before the sun. Forget about breakfast at that time, unless you're fine with capsule coffee and yesterday's sweet pastries. (Turns out, I was.) Lunch places don't even open for business until 13:30 (1:30 PM), and dinner typically starts at 20:00 (8 PM). I hadn't really considered this time thing when I read about it, because they said the same thing about the Dutch when I went to Amsterdam, and my schedule transferred pretty typically. They're actually quite serious about it here!
Anyway, to continue with a more chronological narration:

I took a taxi from Santa Justa estacion to my hotel, since it was 5 km or so away from the city center of Sevilla and I couldn't look up the bus lines before I got there. I checked into my hotel at 20:30, at which time the sun was still out and there were a lot of kids (maybe a hundred) in the plaza outside my hotel, playing football and running around and all sorts of kid things. I showered immediately and sent some emails to tell people I was still alive, and went down to the hotel restaurant because I was starving. Only the bar was open, however (this restaurant didn't follow the rest of Spain time), and there were a few men sitting at the counter watching the football game. I decided to be adventures and point at something random on the menu that was decently priced. Huevos Rotos con Salteado de Gulas it is! I recognized none of the words on the menu besides "tiramisu" anyway, and ignored everything in that section. What showed up was super interesting.

Huevos = egg. Rotos = broken. So huevos rotos means broken egg, or refers to everything but hardboiled eggs (am I right, Spanish-speakers?). True to its name the dish had two sunnyside eggs that were well-done. Underneath that were a bunch of freshly fried chips, so fresh from the pan that they were still soaked in oil to the point that it would collect and drip as I transferred it to my mouth. But that's not what Salteado de Gulas was. That referred to the layer of white and gray worm-looking things between the eggs and the soggy chips. I suspected they were eels or seafood or something, because it was way too wobbly and uniformly thin to be strips of pork or any other meat. I don't eat seafood, by the way, I'm allergic to at least shellfish and aversive to everything else. I ate one but it was indistinguishably salty from the eggs and chips, and I started to feel nauseated so I didn't eat anymore. So for 6 euros, my first meal in Spain was essentially two eggs, a piece of gulas and some chips until I got sick of the grease. I found out the next morning that gulas = baby eels. Sigh.

I was exhausted but I took a walk around, just to explore. At other bars down my block there were a lot more people watching the game, sitting around and drinking. Other than that it was really quiet. I went back to my room and passed out.

0 Stories of Spain 1 at 00:59

Hello,

This is my first update from Spain, although I've been here for four days now. I actually set a lot of time each day to stop and journal my trip (feeling at times that I'm doing it rather obsessively), but I hadn't posted while I had internet at my hotel in Sevilla, and now that I'm in Cordoba it's much more difficult to find internet access.
I'm doing well! It took me over 24 hours to get to my hotel on the first day, and at one point in the airport in Barcelona (BAR), I was delirious and sleep-deprived but I couldn't sleep because the airport doesn't announce where flights are boarding and at which gate, so I had to stay awake and constantly check the board to see if my delayed flight had arrived yet.

On the last leg of my four flights, I sat next to a really interesting guy named Elliot, who was from Chicago but had spent the last year teaching English on some island on the south of Spain, and was continuing onto Cadiz from Sevilla, to teach English for this next year. He was very funny and the kind of guy who has no shame, and doesn't stop talking, and his Spanish was excellent. Unfortunately I only started talking to him since we started the descent, since as soon as I boarded I immediately knocked out.

I had to wait at the baggage claim longer than everybody, because I still didn't have my bag and the carousel stopped moving. I had a somewhat valid fear that my bag did not make it with me, since my transfer at O'Hare was tricky enough for a conscious person, and there was another complication at Barcelona. But I prayed for the minutes that the bag didn't show, and the carousel next to mine the one I was waiting at started moving - and spat out my luggage. Victory!

I wandered outside for the bus, and saw Elliot dancing as three Africans played on their shell drums. "Do you get yourself into these situations often?" I asked him, laughing. He shook his head with a straight face, but cracked into a grin and admitted that he did. Then he told the Africans that I was a percussionist, and in their French-accented English, one of them told me to play his drum so he could sing. So he demonstrated a few strokes and beating spots on his shell, and I started drumming a funk beat. The other two, who were women, fit into my rhythm, and the guy who gave me his drum started rapping. No kidding. I actually have no recollection of what he said, but we played and danced and sang for five minutes or so, entertaining the rest of the travellers waiting for the bus.

Soli Gloria Dei,
Yi David Yang

0 This is what happened: Reading at 17:12

These are all the books I'm concurrently reading.

(Well, I've finished Love Wins and A Credible Witness. But on my Kindle, I'm going through The Tipping Point and A Time for Everything.)

Actually, there are way too many books for me to be actively reading concurrently. The ones on top are the ones I have picked up the most recently, and I have a predilection of wanting to pick up where I left off, which leaves the books on the bottom resting at that last position longer.

Most of the time when I take the bus to school in lieu of biking, it's so I can have time to get some more reading done. It makes the time pass by rather quickly, and sometimes I am so engrossed in a novel that I forget my stop. (Okay, that actually only happened once - since then I've been too paranoid about missing my stop that I look up every few sentences to get my bearings.)

When I was younger and learned English, I had a totally voracious reading appetite. I remember going to the public library weekly with a canvas tote bag full of books, and exchanging all of them for another dozen or more; without exaggeration, I read about a hundred books a month. They probably weren't full length novels, since I was rather new at the whole English thing, but the volume was impressive. In high school I'd find myself (guiltily) finishing entire novels at Barnes and Nobles in the span of a few hours, though I had first gone with the intention of finding some book for school.

If an addiction is a habit until it becomes unhealthy, then I was addicted to reading. The first time I can remember being close to dying was sometime in my elementary years. We were walking back to the car from the library, and I was already nose deep into a book from my tote bag - I'd probably finish it by the time I got home. My parents got ahead of me and crossed the street, and I squeezed between two cars, still reading, and almost stepped out when I heard my parents yelling at me - and I looked up and a car raced by right in front of me. I almost died by reading! There is probably some high nerd accolade for that, if I had achieved ending my life prematurely that way.

Another example of reading being hazardous to my health: I remember many nights during summers, especially around the time I discovered the Redwall series, when I would make myself comfortable on my parents' bed, propped up with a pillow and a blanket, and read for hours and hours through the night. I had such amazing willpower and self-denial at that time - I would be so, so, so thirsty, but I wanted to keep reading and I didn't want to interrupt it by going to the kitchen and getting a cup of water, even if it would take ten seconds. I don't know how many times I shuffled slowly from the bedroom to the kitchen, navigating with one hand in front of me as if I was blindfolded, and doing the careful maneuver of drinking some water without removing my eyes from the pages. I think I was so stubborn about reading, I could have died from dehydration or a burst bladder.

I guess now I have other obligations and things to do, like chores and practicing and surviving, but I wonder why I don't have the appetite I once had to just lose myself in a book. I'm too easily distracted by ever-present Starcraft VODs and pictures of cats on the internet.

0 Tales from Oakland: Laura at 08:35

"Whose soup is this?"

Laura's voice is piercing over the conversations in the main room of Street Level Health Project. I look up from transcribing an interview to see her looking around at the several Latino men standing around.

"Whose soup is this? You gotta clean it up. No leaving trash around here." A man confessed by coming forward with a sheepish grin. Everyone is smiling; even Laura's rebuke is with a smile and a tinge of laughter.

I heard the unspoken values. This space is yours; would you leave trash in your own house? No one else is going to clean up after you - you have to clean up your own mess. You need to take responsibility for yourself. This empty bowl of soup, which you asked for when you had nothing, and was given to you freely out of love, is your integrity.

The laugh and smile on her face says: You are welcome here, and are loved and valued. But we are not trying to feed you, or clothe you, or heal you. We want you to believe in yourself. We want you to love yourself.

1 This is what happened: Rose Hill at 02:01

There's something beautiful about this picture that I couldn't put into words.

But if I had to try...


I turned off the engine, finally, after having driven for an hour. This time, we didn't get lost winding up the many zigzags of Rose Hill, and found the right terrace after a left at the chapel, right, left, and one more right. I got out to stretch and look at the smog of Pasadena.

I got the Costco flowers from the backseat as my mom got a plastic Kohl's bag from the trunk. I tried to find the gravestone, but the grass had been pretty freshly mown, and all of them were obscured by the same layer of dead grass. I brushed off two of them with my shoe before finding my grandpa's portait with a pink background.

I tried to brush off more with my shoe as my mom came next to me. She immediately knelt and scooped up the dead grass in handfuls, and tossed them aside. I set the flowers down and also shoveled with my hands.

I don't know how to grieve. I don't know how to respect the dead, but I can get my hands dirty.

We tried to look for the holes in the grass below the gravestone to put the flowers in, but the grass looked perfectly uniform. I tried to pull at the grass, hard, to reveal some new patch that had been put accidentally put over, but found nothing. My mom took from the bag a small sickle and pruning shears, and started cutting back the grass around the gravestone, "before they get crazy."

I finally found an artificial slit in the soil and dug my fingers in, ripping out grass and roots and dirt in cubic inch chunks. I needed the shears to tear through some thicker clumps of roots, before I could remove the two rusted metal containers for flowers. I took both of them to the fountain to hose off dirt from both the containers and my hands.

I brought them back, filled with water, and placed them back in the holes. My mom tried to put all the flowers in one vase, but there were too many. She took everything out of the wrappers to arrange them into each vase. I took the shears and the sickle to rinse off, and took a picture.

0 This is what happened: Being home at 20:49

"Three hours? That's such a long time. And you do it alone?"
"Well, it'd be pretty useless if you could have a Retreat of Silence with other people."
"How do you sit still for three hours? We try to get the high schoolers to do it for five minutes, and they knock out."
"I think most people just sleep."


If you ask me what I've been doing since I am home, I would probably tell you, "Nothing."

That's not very close to the truth, though.

Having come home with minimal amounts of things, and especially not my marimba, has let me to be painfully aware of the state of boredom. And this state of boredom has made me aware that I cannot be still.

What used to be my first instinct upon getting up in the morning (or sometimes in the afternoon, as vacation would allow) - warming up and practicing marimba - has been transmuted into an improv session on the piano (and sometimes vocals, and then I wonder why I can't even hit an Eb having woken up five minutes ago). I have been sporadically reading, viciously catching up with people, cleaning, fundraising and doing clerical work in preparation for BAyUP. I have managed to turn a previously barren room into a barely navigable place, with all my multitasking.

I am free, but the less obligations I have the more I create things to do. I'm mentally drafting a blog post about Marimba and Heaven, and another to put on our class blog regarding children's ministry. I worry about reaching my fundraising goal, and communicating in Chinese to parents who would probably willingly give.


"I think if we could do whatever we wanted, we wouldn't do anything and just sit around all day."
"What? If I could do anything, I'd definitely be playing marimba all day."
"Yeah, David, you're a do-er, aren't you?"


Why can't I sit still?

1 This is what happened: Temporary tattoos at 22:08

I love the backs of my hands. They're always convenient canvases for temporary tattoos.

I usually draw when I am listening to something only, and need to keep my hands occupied. I did this a lot during high school, and I understand it looks like I'm not paying attention when I'm doodling on my hands (and in high school, forearms) - but my English teacher would suddenly call me out and ask what topic we were talking about, and I would recite the past three or so sentences she said, word for word, and after a while she got used to the idea that I was still listening.

I like black, or just using one color, because it's limiting. Here are a few that I've done this semester, though none are very good. Some have too much and some have too little, and I never know what I'm doing.

Matt Kim's LG Talk

Sarah Lin's LG talk

Nate Lee's LG talk

Physics: Acoustics midterm

Katamari Damacy Soundtrack

Closeup of Narwhal for Katamari Damacy

I have not a clue what this is from

On BART

0 This is what happened: A forgotten poem at 21:27

In 6th grade, I spent a week at 4,500 elevation somewhere in California with a hundred other sixth graders as part of our Outdoor Ed program. Everyone had been looking forward to it for years; I, at my sixth new elementary school that year, had heard no previous stories of the goings on the week of Outdoor Ed.

I learned miscellaneous skills like how to whistle with an acorn shell, the necessity of drinking several quarts of water a day to stay hydrated at high elevation, and etiquette such as always passing the salt and pepper shakers together, or which side of the place setting utensils go on, and other things I don't remember or do anymore.

For an activity on the day before last, we sat down in a big room and were given half an hour to write a poem or a recollection about our experiences that week. I had a piece of paper and a crayon, and wrote about ten couplets about nature, throwing in (appropriately) some of the biggest words I knew. And I knew some pretty flowery language in sixth grade - reading was my official sport back then - and I even threw in some metaphors and similes. I'm pretty sure those couplets weren't in iambic pentameter but they definitely rhymed. I didn't put my name on it when we turned it in, partly because they said it could be anonymous but mostly because I ran out of room with my crayon.

The next day as we sat at correctly-set tables for breakfast before we were to be ferried back to suburbia by big yellow buses, one of the camp directors announced that they had come across something special from our activity yesterday and wanted to share it. My heartbeat started to drop, then race quickly as she started reading with careful inflection the poem I had scrawled in crayon. I prayed, prayed, prayed she wouldn't single me out as the author, and then realized she couldn't have since I didn't put my name on it, and then I wished instead that I had written my name. "There was no name on this poem, but I think whatever student wrote this really learned something this week." She said from the stage, far away from where I was sitting.

As we headed to the buses a half hour later, nobody in all the conversations I eavesdropped was talking about that poem. It probably wasn't that good, anyway, but I wanted to hear some validation of my writing, to see if anyone else had recognized whatever it was the director did. I pulled Raymond aside, one of my few friends. "You know the poem that the lady read? I wrote that yesterday."

"Oh, really?" He seemed enthusiastic, like he always did. "Good job! It was really good!"

"What did you think of it?"

"I liked it a lot."

"Thanks, Raymond." We got on the buses and went home.

1 This is what happened: Na na na na na na na na na na Bus at 18:21

I was waiting at the bus stop at 8 AM, too early on a Sunday to be going to school, so I was unhappy. I started to play the Katamari Damacy soundtrack on my iphone, though, which is the best soundtrack ever to start off my day. Sasasan Katamari, the first track, started playing as I looked down Noriega street toward the ocean and could see the bus coming from seven blocks away.

My chronic problem is forgetting to bring my essentials because I change bags so often. This time I had elected not to bring a bag since I was just going to rehearsal and a concert all day, so instead I had my black coat with deep pockets to hold my earplugs and water bottle, and my concert clothes already on. The bus was approaching one stop away from mine when I reflexively reached into my pocket for my wallet, and instead felt nothing.

My heart skipped a beat and everything seemed to halt as my mind raced, calculating whether or not I'd be able to run across the street and down the block to my house, go to my room and extract my wallet from my other pants, and get back to the bus stop. If I was lucky, the bus would be caught by the red light, and I'd have another 20 seconds. If only I had realized I didn't have my wallet on me earlier! Or remembered to check my pockets thoroughly in the first place before changing them and leaving.

But in the space of the second all those thoughts took to blink by, the soundtrack moved onto the Main Theme, Katamari on the Rocks. (Playing this strongly recommended). If I ever had a battle music, this track would be it. The opening stereo beats made my decision for my legs, and I was already running across the street before I knew it.

I have never felt more encouraged and purposeful than I did that morning, sprinting in all-black clothing with the power of a full brass section as a fanfare for my mission. As I opened my gate I glanced at the bus, which to God's glory was kneeling and loading one-by-one three elder citizens. I unlocked my door to a completely dark room - "Don't-a worry, do your best!" -, grabbed my wallet, and was flying back out in under ten seconds - the bus was rolling up the street again as I closed my door.

I ran back up the block, but as I was crossing the street I realized I had safely beaten the bus and would make it to the stop before it got there, and slowed down to a trot.

1 Tales from Taiwan 2011 Edition, part 4: Buses at 09:39

My Chinese character recognition has improved this week by 10 times the amount of characters. Booya! Consciously utilizing my synesthesia to learn new characters is really helpful. I've actually been speaking pretty little chinese, however, so my speaking skills have not improved.

8. The midi-ized bell tones just rang for the hour... but it's 11:20!

9. The escalators, and doorknob directions, are not consistent/correct. In America you'd be hard pressed to find an escalator heading away from you (i.e. that you can use) on the left of the one approaching. As for doorknobs, I guess they never heard of "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey", but I guess that's probably not as catchy in chinese as it is in english.

10. More about buses! There are several flavors of buses that I've experienced here, a much greater variety than just AC transit (new and old) and muni buses (electric and gas, and occasionally super old). So far, I have been on:

Upper-deck only, double seats with an aisle down the middle
4 sets of double seats in the back, standing room/four priority seats
Same as above, but with two priority seats facing the back
8 single/priority seats in the front, lots of standing room with plastic handles, double seats in the back
Only side-facing seats, less standing room

And there's probably more that I haven't seen.

People really respect the sanctity of priority seats here, to the point where young and capable people get on a bus and stand instead of taking a priority seat until a senior citizen gets on. Unlike the American way of doing it, which is "I'll just sit here until I see someone who needs it. Then I'll get up, no harm done to anyone, right? I'm just utilizing the space." But when I take the priority seats in the front (in the absence of old, handicapped, pregnant women and mothers with children), I get tons of stares that I only notice if I'm in a backwards-facing seat. But no one ever says anything, so suck it, passive-aggressiveness. Then again, I also get stares from dancing on the subway to my headphones. And singing. On a crowded car. But chinese people are just weird.

Lastly, this trip I've gotten over the fear of taking the bus in a foreign country. I mean, come on, I can't even read the stops or know where I'm going most of the time - I feel comfortable taking any random MUNI line in SF because I can at least figure out which neighborhood I'm in or where north is, but with the perpetual cloudy weather all week I have a very limited internal map because I don't know where north is. But I've used the bus pretty frequently, once or twice a day, and it's not so scary anymore. Especially because the taxis are so cheap here, compared to America, so no matter how lost I get it'll probably just cost six dollars to get back.

0 This is what happened: Tales from Taiwan 2011 edition part 3, mosquitos at 07:51

I just realized how much better these would be with pictures, but I didn't even bring my computer to Taiwan, so I may just add them retroactively once I get back to the states.

7. I haven't been sleepiing well lately, and last night was the worst. Having been exhausted from a full 7 AM to midnight day, I brushed my teeth and went to bed immediately after getting home.

A good night's sleep was not in store for me, however. Imagine the least soundproof house ever and a solid wooden bed frame where the word "mattress" had never been uttered nor heard in the house. The comforter provided some cushioning, so I slept on top of it in all my clothes and another thin blanket, but it's been about 13C so I was never really warm.

I had barely closed my eyes, it seemed, when a phone rang at rock-concert level decibels in the living room. The ringtone was unfamiliar and I wouldn't have put it past the lack-of-insulation to say it was coming from a neighbor's house. Each morning from bed I could hear the conversations of the open-air breakfast place downstairs and across the street, after all. But after half a minute both my mom and my grandma's doors opened and the phone stopped, followed by their conversation in Chinese - it turns out my grandma called it, or set it off somehow, because she wanted to test if it was working. My mom had brought back that phone for her since she was losing her hearing and needed a louder phone. Go figure.

Being very sensitive to light, I couldn't sleep for another ten minutes while my grandma used the bathroom and settled back into bed. I slept, but was pulled slowly into half-consciousness by my hand continuously itching my other wrist until I realized I had a mosquito bite. I put some saliva on it, the quick fix, and was woken again when I realized I was scratching my other arm. As soon as my sluggish mind figured out it wasn't the same bite, meaning I was being actively bitten, I cursed the little bastard that was getting full off my blood and keeping me awake.

Keeping someone awake is a form of torture, did you know that? It feels terrible, really. It's one of the few interrogation techniques officially approved by the US army to use, since you're not actually causing blows, or something like that. I could almost metacognitively see my thoughts descending into madness.

It's actually impossible to sleep if you know a mosquito is in the room. My mom and aunt both testified to this at dinner as soon as I mentioned that I knew I kept getting more bites throughout the night. The presence of the little bugger is more harrowing than a tiger in the room. At least a tiger you can hear coming; with a mosquito, you are left with nothing but despair after the fact of having been bitten. At first all I wished was that it would leave me alone after the initial strikes; then I hoped it was not under the covers or inside my shirt; then, when it confirmed its presence by buzzing past my ear, that proximity alarm like a shark fin circling me in the ocean, I just prayed that it would not bite me in the ear, so I wouldn't lose my hearing.

There was no way that I could rest my head without leaving one ear exposed, however, and being completely facedown or face up would expose both, so that was out. Which ear would have to go, then? My left, decidedly, though it had better hearing. If I tried to sleep with one hand over it the back of that hand would just be bitten, and if I tried to sleep under the cover, well what was the point in doing that if it was small enough to get under my covers anyway? I needed to leave a hole to breathe, and surely it could follow the draft of my breath. Or what if it was under my covers anyway?

At the end of the day morning - thirteen bites. Three on my left hand, three on my face, and seven on my right. And maybe, total, an hour's worth of sleep.

0 This is what happened: Tales from Taiwan, 2011 edition part 2 at 15:13

A few more observations and an actual tale this time. Still fun stuff. This is not the heavy post.

4. The buses here still move with the doors open. I'm pretty sure in the States the buses are hardcoded to be unable to disengage the brakes while the doors are open. Everything is faster this way but it makes me nervous like when I start driving away in my Odyssey before the passenger door is closed.

5. Old people have absolutely no shame in staring at me. I think they're trying to figure out the color of my hair. It's still kind of creepy.

6. I was at lunch at a restaurant so proud of their Peking Duck that they put it up in huge English letters where their title should be. This story is not about the duck. I got up during the meal to go to the restroom, but as since I was being treated to lunch by my rich Aunt, we were many folds deep in the restaurant's many corners and layers. I asked the closest waitress whee the restroom was and was given a rapid string of turn directions I forgot immediately except for the first two. But as I started on that trek, every waitress I passed gestured my next turn before I even had time to make eye contact and look at them pleadingly. Each of them knew what I was looking for, but how? There was no way the first waitress could pass the word to look out for a good-looking ABC wandering the restaurant with a full bladder. The only proper conclusion is they all have telepathic powers as part of the job description. I found my way back just fine.

0 This is What Happened: Tales from Taiwan, 2011 edition at 03:52

This is what IS happening? welcome to a special edition of TiWH as I write with brevity and lack of punctuation because I'm only able to access the internet via my kindle which is a terrible writing tool.

1. the words painted on the roads in  Chinese are ordered correctly, as in you will read it correctly instead of backwards like in the US. so you never get things like the chinese equivalent of Ahead Stop or Only Turn Right when you read it from top to bottom.

2. My grandmas first question upon recognizing me was of course, "Do you have a girlfriend yet?" Though I guess its an improvement that she mistakes me for 22 now instead of 12

3 The distribution of SIM cards/unique phone numbers is strictly controlled by the government-you need to have two forms of idetification, like many things in Taiwan, and it takes half a day to getr your number activated.  don't remember the process being so hard. Probably all this to deal with fraud companies with which I am familiar on a face-to-face level... it would be interesting if my actions two years ago somehow influenced this change. But thats a story for another time.

more to come!

0 This is what happened: Stories 2 at 02:37

All from today, by the way. None of these have any point.

At Cafe Strada in the morning: I got my drink (a large mocha) from the barista on the right, and walked it over, with the smoothness only a marching band nerd has, to the counter with the lids. I grabbed a larger one and tried to put it on. As I pushed on one side, the other disengaged - ah, it's gonna be one of those cup/lid combinations that wouldn't succumb without a struggle, or would feign synergy until a most opportune moment of my unawareness and disengage as I tip it deeply for a long sip, and ruin everything.

I held two points of it down with my middle finger and thumb at the 3 o'clock and 6 o'clock position, and then subdued the 12 and 9 o'clock with my other hand. It fit securely and I even lifted it by the lid to make sure it was on properly. Then I noticed the little arrow on the opposite side of the drink-opening that said, "align with cup seam." It was already perfectly aligned. I did it without even knowing.


I walked down Bancroft, both hands around my coffee to warm my fingers since it was still chilly. I noted briefly to myself how busy, yet silent the edge of campus was on a school day - everyone was just going somewhere, to class or lab or research, not walking to a club or event with friends. After I passed the RSF and the sidewalk crowd thinned out, I noticed another set of footsteps echoing mine, and the distinct muttering that accompanied it.

The muttering was distinct and irregular, and I wanted so badly to give him the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to a cell phone conversation, but I could hear every word and they didn't form coherent sentences. Instead they were conversationally spaced phrases, full of that charming ebonic inflection and catchwords ("brother"), and I consciously decided not to put in my earphones and instead listen to him. After living in San Francisco for three years now, I've accepted that I have phases of tolerance for the homeless and hippies and black people - sometimes their words and rants, while probably life-enriching with their prospective, simply wear me down, like the black man who sat across from me on the bus last week and just ranted about Asians for the ten blocks he rode the bus, while I pretended to listen to music on my earphones that weren't plugged into anything. So I listened to this man behind me for a few minutes, just analyzing and absorbing his unique inflections and deep voice until he overtook me at an intersection (I observed the stoplight, he thought it was invisible).

Between my midterm and lesson I went to Blue Bottle for some caffeine, in celebration of finishing and in necessity for my lesson. The only person was a man with a carriage, so I only waited a few seconds before making eye contact with one of the baristas, whose face I knew but name I didn't. "What can I get for you?"
 "Can I get a latte, please?" I raised my voice, just in case, so I wouldn't have to repeat myself.
 "Sure... do you want a free cappuccino instead?" Was this a trick question? I've never been offered anything free at Blue Bottle before. Maybe someone had ordered it and hadn't come to claim it for half an hour, I thought.
"Um, sure." I walked forward, but he had made no further indication of permission. He wasn't smiling like usual. I felt awkward and a little guilty of receiving something for free. "Um... did someone just not claim it, or something?"
"No, I just made an extra one." He stated. He looked angry - at himself? Or disappointed? I sorted out the ninety cents I got in change from Cafe Strada in the morning and put it in the tip jar. It mollified at least a little of my uneasiness at taking something for nothing.
"Alright, thanks a lot, then. Have a good day." I walked quickly away, and ran across the street to catch the light.


Maybe once or twice a week when I get to my doorstep, I spot some suspicious dark spot on the floor and have to assess what it is before setting foot near it. Usually it's just a stain (and the same stain, at that), but with my fear of spiders I always have to visually check before stepping foot near it. Today when I got home there was another dark spot. This spot had a tail. This spot was mouse-shaped. It was a little mouse and it wasn't moving.

This was so extraordinary that I just stepped carefully around it, took off my shoes, opened my door and went in. I was carrying my briefcase, my backpack, a sweater and jacket that I had taken off since it was much warmer by the afternoon. I was mentally exhausted and went through the ritual of putting everything away (on my bed), hanging up my keys and washing my hands. I went back out, put on my shoes and stomped the floor near the mouse to see if it would scamper away. I thought I saw it fidget at one point, but I was pretty sure it was dead.

I didn't want to touch it with any part of my shoe. I went back inside and looked for a small box, but only had a particularly rigid Berkeley Bowl bag to put it into. I remembered the broom the house had in the garage closet, and also found a dustpan so I wouldn't need my Berkeley bowl bag. I mechanically swept it onto the dustpan, except I kind of just rolled it over onto its back, where I could see its little paws and mouth and chest heaving as only a little mouse could. On its back it moved weakly to try to flip back over onto its stomach. It wasn't in mouse heaven but it was on its way.

It's so cute, I thought briefly. Then I opened the garbage can and dumped it in.

0 This is what happened: Headlights at 21:16

"The best time to fix the roof is when the sun it out." A slightly more modern metaphor is, "change your lightbulb when it is still day." My personal application (which I have yet to learn) is, "don't change your headlights in the dark."

I forgot the context, but one evening I had also driven my Odyssey to meet my mom at Costco so I could get gas. As I was trying to follow her car out of the parking lot, she stopped, called my cell phone and told me one of my headlights was much dimmer than the other, and to go replace them immediately. It was dark. I asked if I could go get it in the morning, and she said no.

Did you know you can't change one headlight? They come in packages of two, even, but everyone and every site on the internet says you must change both at once. You also can't touch the bulbs with your bare fingers, or they will burn out in a matter of days. So I bought a pair of new headlights, drove home, and had to wait until my engine cooled off before reaching inside and messing around.

I spent the cooling hour looking at first through the manual for instructions, but the procedure wasn't even referenced, so I went inside and searched for instructions on changing headlights on a year 2000 model Odyssey. The instructions are hard enough to follow, I think, with adequate lighting, since it's all in text and referencing parts of the engine with names that mean absolutely nothing to me. As soon as I started, with construction worker's gloves and a flashlight between my teeth, I realized pictures wouldn't have helped anyway; what I was working with was almost always visually obscured by other engine parts.

This is what I had to work with.

I can't tell you what I did, because most of it wasn't correct, and I spent a lot of time unscrewing parts I ultimately didn't need to, and removing entire plastic panels just to get vision of the wrong section, and getting my hands very, very greasy. Now you might not know this, and I certainly didn't see this coming, but the access routes behind the left and right headlights are not symmetrical. There I was, 45 minutes in the darkness, sweating and now heavily salivating over the grip of my flashlight, proudly having taken out one headlight and finding everything on the other side unsettingly unfamiliar.

The most difficult part of the night, measured by time spent on a single step, was installing the new lights and trying to get them to stay. There's this little piece of metal behind the holding mechanism that locks the headlight into place, and it's held into its hinge by a screw. However, it pops out quite enthusiastically when you are removing a headlight, and I wasn't paying attention to its original position when I took both the original ones out and dropped the first one, and caught the second. For over ten minutes I struggled with getting this oddly-bent piece of metal in the correct orientation, and which part to insert first, and at which angle, all by feel since I couldn't see anything and my mouth was tired.

Here is a shark riding shotgun.

I had long since given up on the gloves since I needed the tactile feedback, and everything inside a car engine is coated with the most stubborn glue of oil and years of dirt tempered by engine heat. Like during all my high school physics tests, I was reconstructing in the moment what I should have taken the time to memorize and understand ahead of time. Finally, with a hardly-satisfying ping each headlight locked into place. I reinserted the large rubber stoppers I didn't even know existed prior to that night, put the sections of a plastic vent back into place, replaced the panels and tried my best to close the engine without getting the grease over too many things. It took me a day of constant hand washing to get my hands clean again.

Though I did feel like a bad-ass from that hour of entirely manual labor, it took much more time to fix in the night than it would have taken during the day. Or at least with proper lighting.

0 This is what happened: Rockridge at 23:13

I love Rockridge Bart. It is my favorite platform for public transportation by far. I hate waiting, you see, I despise and fear the anxiety of unknowing, I am paralyzed by uncertainty. I am jolted by the sudden windy roar of arrivals in underground stations, though I've had minutes to expect the next train's arrival as announced on impartial red lights like reverse raindrops.

I hate airports and never showing up at the right time, always unmercifully early, or in one case, unforgivingly late. There is nothing in-between, no small window of perfect timing that makes you feel like God has blessed your journey, your commute now a pilgrimage as you walk uninterrupted, with purpose, from the bus down the stairs through the turnstile down the escalator into the welcoming open doors of the right-destination train and the doors beep as you cross the gap and close immediately because finally you are here and now they can leave.

At Rockridge, freeway traffic muffles the train's electric harbinger with its own irregular cadence of rumbles and gravel. When the train (SFO/Millbrae) is still a couple of minutes away, you can see it approaching silently, crawling along the center of the freeway, each section jostling and following one another like an impossibly large and fast mealworm. It is here. I am gone.

1 This is what I think about that: Response to "Young Musicians and the Ethical Swamp" at 17:27

This is a response to an SFCM professor's blog post which was put up just over an hour ago, entitled "Young Musicians and the Ethical Swamp". In it he writes (very eloquently) about how terrible and wrong it is for young musicians to be writing concert reviews these days. You can read it for yourself, he's a good writer and I have nothing against him - except I couldn't stop laughing while reading the post.

I was intrigued by his description on facebook of "young, active musicians" writing reviews as "an ethical quagmire, an absolute wrong, and potential career suicide" and just had to read it to see what was so wrong about it. But after swimming through his seas of metaphors and cliches, I found hardly any criticisms beyond 'inexperience' but plenty of thinly-veiled admonitions: "Monstrous wrong", "Potential damage to their own careers", "utter failure to comprehend the most basic level of appropriate behavior". The whole post just sounds intentionally scathing and defensive and hardly constructive to any "young musician" currently writing reviews.

First, I feel that age makes little difference in reviews and the expression of opinion, as long as there is a grasp of the fundamentals of writing and expression through a written medium. I won't be romantic and cheesy and say that even an 8-year old's opinion of a concert is valid and we can learn something from their opinions, but the experience of the same concert from a 20-year-old's perspective and an experienced 60-year-old's may differ greatly, and I want to hear both of theirs.

Second, I've never written a concert review before for the same reason that I've never enjoyed a concert review written in the paper; I don't understand the point of its existence. On what basis are you supposed to judge a concert? By its genre, or professionalism, or quality of the program, or the venue, or the production value, or their artistic statement and whether or not they achieved it, or......

I mean, I've been to amazing, AMAZING concerts where I was riveted every moment, and I've been to concerts when I've fallen asleep in the middle of a program (and these two experiences are not mutually exclusive). But what am I supposed to put in a review if I were to write one? The subjective approach, while potentially funny, has no objective value and of course largely depends on a bias: "Jack Van Geem played super well tonight! I'm glad I got my program signed because I'm gonna put it under my pillow and hope to absorb his talent through his autograph." The objective evaluation, on what there is in music that could be measured objectively, is dry (and funny in its own way): "Van Geem had over 99% note accuracy in his performance tonight. The sound quality of each bar and note he hit was perfectly controlled. The tempo of the pieces were appropriate and did not change inappropriately during the pieces."

I only know what I like, and to an extent I know what is good, but that is heavily biased by my own tastes and oftentimes my blood sugar at the time.

Third, I think that the opinion of young musicians is relevant and useful because we probably communicate in a different language than the older generation. I think my professor feels especially defensive about his generation's authority to write reviews because he has been used to seeing the same names under the headings of newspapers for so many years, and the familiar is comfortable. But if we kids don't ever start to gain experience in writing because older people keep saying it's an ethical atrocity, then there will be a sudden gap of musical review-writing talent when they all die and there are no contemporaries with any experience.

Finally, as an ending and as a disclaimer: I don't care much about classical music, so this pithy battle has little emotional investment from my part. Well, not that I don't care, but I don't understand it at all. Maybe the majority of the people reading that blog post will know of this unspoken set of "professional ethics in a musical community", and if that's the case they can have their circlejerk for all I care. Until someone writes these ethics down and explains them to me, it just seems pretentious, no matter your age, to be writing scathing, destructive (I wanted to write unconstructive but that's not a word) criticisms of a generation that's trying to learn.