Suburbia! (without a car): The Holiday Installment

Dear American Internet, let me just say this:  Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you all ate mountains of food and passed out immediately afterwards due to a massive food coma. As my white great uncle said to me while helping himself to a large serving of lard (gravy), calories do not exist on thanksgiving. (yes, you read that right. white grand uncle.)

It was great eating home cooked food and red meat. Yes, red meat not turkey meat. Personally I don't like turkey and neither does anyone else in my family. Yes, turkey is an American tradition but does tradition have to taste so awfully bland and dry? That by the way was a rhetorical question. In any event, we decided we were going to be mavericks and eat roast beef instead. And let me tell you all, it was dericious. I will probably post pictures of this at some point in the future and write more on the topic but for now I need to return to bed. Food coma and early Black Friday shopping calls....

**Updates!! (As promised by my slacker self)

I guess I should say a few words about my actual thanksgiving dinner. This year, we actually had relatives come over. This may sound a little strange to the people who have friends and family over every thanksgiving. This is actually strange for my family partially because we live in the middle of nowhere of Not New York, NY where it snows until the end of April and a good time means driving in a car and admiring everyone else's Christmas decorations. I wish I was not kidding. Alright, I am exaggerating ever so slightly but the ratio of seriousness to kidding around borders on almost alarming. Anyway, so this year my great aunt and great uncle came over for thanksgiving and they brought with them.......

DOG!!! I love this dog. He is ridiculously well behaved and just like me will do all sorts of things for food especially if it is red meat. Just as long as it doesn't involve actually obeying any commands. His usual tactic is to follow you around if you are holding food and STARE YOU INTO SUBMISSION. You WILL give him the meat and he will certainly not sit for it. You will also leave thinking that he is a good boy. He is that good at manipulating the human mind.

This was our thanksgiving turkey cleverly disguised as a large hunk of roast beef prior to sticking it into the oven. I guess you can also see parts of my lovely kitchen stove. Let me tell you, that is a rare privilege. It usually runs away the second someone approaches with a camera.

AHEM. Internet, bear witness to the first appearance of an incredibly shady character. INTERNET SAY HELLO TO MY SISTER'S ARM AND TORSO. Talking about her will require a separate new blog post where all her infinite wisdom shall be shared undiluted by my own comparatively witless commentary.  This was our "turkey" coming out of the oven after being roasted in a fiery pit of flames for several hours. It is difficult to see this but the roast beef is actually sitting on top of a dish with a picture of a turkey on it. Blasphemy never tasted so good! Now although the picture hints at this, I have to mention that my thanksgiving dinner was schizophrenic. Half the dishes were American and the other half were Asian. Internet, although my taste cortex was overwhelmingly ecstatic with all the delicious food, my brain was confused because I'd be eating gravy one minute and then kimchee the next. All throughout dinner, it was screaming STOP THE CULTURAL KALEIDOSCOPE OR I SHALL FORCE YOU TO CONVULSE TO THE BEAT OF THRILLER ON YOUR FLOOR. I ignored that warning. The dog thought I was playing a game.

In all seriousness though, my mother cooks amazingly well and outclasses me in every basic cookery technique. Except for one. Like any true college student, I have mastered the art of boiling water to perfection and exploiting its many usages that range from making instant ramen to unclogging clogged toilets.

Suburbia! (without a car): The First Installment

Internet, this is just day one of my return to suburbia land. Already it has proven to be a most illuminating journey. I must share an important lesson with you that I learned today and it is this: Don’t ever leave the city. Actually, let me amend that. Even if you want to leave the city, THE CITY WILL NOT LET YOU. It’s like the kind of annoying boyfriend that clings to you when you least expect it. Kind of like a parasitic chewed up piece of gum on the underside of a school desk; you never know its there until you accidentally touch it. Actually, I have to admit that my analogy isn’t entirely correct. It’s not that the city doesn’t want you to leave, it just makes it exceedingly difficult to do so. So the correct analogy would really be the manipulative bastard boyfriend who hides your car key while you’re in the bathroom and then miraculously finds it after hours of fruitless searching. 

But once again, I can’t place the blame squarely on the city. No, it’s also partially fault of the sinister evil force that calls itself Amtrak. Let me back up for a moment here to explain something. Usually I go home by plane but because I was a huge slacker and only started looking for tickets 2 weeks before thanksgiving, price tags on plane tickets started looking more like the price tags on the Ipod touch pre Black Friday. Now to be economical, I decided this year would be the year to try new things. Amtrak and an eight-hour train ride home couldn’t possibly be so bad right? Oh the naïveté.

I think the day just started off poorly. I woke up and it was raining. Anyone who knows anything about living in NYC will know that it is close to impossible to get a taxi when it is raining. Its like everyone in the city is the Wicked Witch of the West’s cousin or something because the minute rain starts falling from the sky, everyone is inside a taxi avoiding the rain like it’ll melt their skin off. Or give them an STD. I don’t know. In any case it was a pain in the ass just trying to get to Penn Station while juggling all of meine luggage.

Once I actually got to Penn Station though, I thought my pilgrimage would be much smoother. Internet, that was stupid thought number 2. Penn station was pandemonium. People were running around like their underwear was on invisible fire. Now I am admittedly a noob when it comes to Penn Station. I have no idea where anything is in that ungodly underworld. Now despite the somewhat negative image outside people have of New Yorkers, they are generally a friendly industrious populace. Internet, today New York had its period or something because, holy crap, everyone was snarky. Even the people who could not possibly be on their period, namely Y chromosome carriers and the elderly, were PMSing like no tomorrow. Seriously, I just wanted to yell, ALL OF YOU STOP OVULATING.

When 1:15 rolled around, I was a happy camper. It meant I was going to FINALLY get on my train to suburbia. But then at the crucial moment when we should be starting to board… over the intercom I hear, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we apologize. There will be a one hour service delay for the train with service to not New York City, NY.” My articulate response: Fuck.  The retrospectively funny thing is that Amtrak never really gave us a reason for the delay, which makes me think it must be something either shady or hilarious. Maybe the train operator got drunk and they were giving him IV fluids to sober him up. Or maybe a passenger started freaking out about THE SLANTED TRAIN TRACKS AT YONKERS. (Seriously why the fuck are the train tracks at Yonkers so slanted?! Any more angled and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the train would have plunged into the water. )

Anyway, I was going to be a good sport about the delay. After all, everything from planes to parturition gets delayed and I was armed to the teeth with Nietzsche and Dan Brown. But you know who was not a good sport about the delay? The rest of Penn Station. You would think Amtrak just told everyone instead of tickets, they would require everyone’s first born child for boarding. Now I initially felt sorry for these Amtrak people….until it turned out that they were the ones ovulating the hardest. Ask them a question and you may as well have just asked for finger amputation surgery. You would think people in the service industry would have better manners but apparently, they also went to the same diplomacy school as my brain and famous alumnus Montgomery Burns.

To be continued when I am not so tired

Announcement!

Internet, I have an announcement to make. As usual, this year I will be leaving New York City so I can spend this Thanksgiving with the wonderful people who made my existence possible. I am of course talking about my father, Meta-Lincoln, and mother, Raptress Jesus.

Let me tell you, growing up with these two as parents was not an easy feat. I will however say, we never had arguments at home. Ever. I mean seriously, have you seen my father's mecha arm!? You disagree with the man and then all of a sudden there is a smoking hole in the wall an inch from where your face is. That kills your desire to argue faster than the time it takes for....I don't know... the stench of Abercrombie to reach your nose before you can even see the damn store. For those who are fortunate enough to not know what I am talking about....there is a new Hollister that opened fairly recently on Broadway. I swear, you can smell that place a block away because it is the one place in NYC that doesn't smell like cancer and urine of dubious origin. That arm is probably why I was such an awkward unsocialized child in high school. Seriously, try asking your friends to hang out at your house when your dad can blow off their knee caps for not bowing at the proper Confucian angle of inclination! Daddy taught me proper Asian manners....and by proper I mean proper for life in the Han Dynasty.
 
I am told that ordinarily when your dad is being unreasonable with you, most people go complain to their mothers, and say something in a super nasally voice like, "Mom.. Daddy's being unfair~" (aka. "WOMAN! KEEP YOUR MAN UNDER CONTROL!") I, however, never grew up with that luxury as my own raptress mother would snarl and snap incoherently at me. If you've never had a raptor threaten you, let me tell you it is a terrifying experience. Plus they have weird breath that no amount of floss, Listerine or Clorox will remove. Come to think of it though, living in constant fear as a child is probably why when I got to college my amygdala was like, "BWAHAHA FREEDOM!" thus dooming my sense of self preservation forever.

I am also of course, for the most part joking about my parents.(Prizes for whoever figures out which parts are true!!) I was raised by two extremely normal people and I'm sure being that they are normal, neither of them would take it as a compliment to have an entire blog post about them floating around the interwebs. Especially if that blog post happened to be written by Saiyan L. Maybe one day though, haha.

ANYWAY, my parents aside, I wanted to announce my mini blog series on life away from the city, away from college and the civilized world. I present to you: Suburbia!...(without a car). In other words, house arrest. Happy holidays to all!

Return From Azkaban

Internet, I declare my triumphant return! My return to being a lovable bum that is. No one is happier about this fact than my inner child who has once again gone rampant with the dopamine happiness laser beams which is a source of tremendous confusion for my amygdala because everything has stopped being so terrifying. That includes the NYC taxi driver who almost ran me over with his manic driving while I was walking home. I mean, the cab basically stopped abruptly in front of me, honked like a mad man and all I did was blink and then I continued talking to my mother on the telephone. Something is VERY off with my sense of self-preservation. Meanwhile, my inner Asian is rocking itself in the corner in its personal sandbox/Zen garden. The combined recklessness of my reckless lifestyle and reckless lack of studying is making it very anxious.

The past few days while I was neglecting my lovechild Blog, have been a oscillatory mix of awful and brilliant. My life is a freaking sine curve. It starts off at zero, and then progresses upwards and then just when you think your life could have a vertical asymptote, BAM! Your life goes plummeting down the drain along with the dubious contents of your toilet. Of course, once you've hit the lowest of low points, your life graph starts swinging up again, only to repeat the process ad infinitum. It's frustrating. I won't bore you with the details of the downs. Just know that it involved a broken phone that mysteriously worked only when I was within a foot of a Verizon Wireless Store, a fantastically well written essay on the importance of clinical equipoise, why the lateral geniculate nucleus is super special awesome and how the bubonic plague was actually spread across Europe by the vegetarian vampires from Twilight that fed on infected rats and the occasional human when they were too weak to resist temptation. YET ANOTHER REASON TO DISCOURAGE THEIR GROWING POPULARITY!

There were several highs this past week as well mostly from going to see a Dir En Grey play at the Gramercy Theatre on 23rd St. Internet, I rarely ever rave about my personal tastes. (Lies!) But to anyone reading my blog who has not heard of Dir En Grey, they are vis-kei/J-Rock band from the country that brings you high tech toilets for "your superior furushingu experience," disgustingly cute anime characters and perversions of disgustingly cute anime characters.

The toilet switchboard has more buttons on it than a primitive TV remote. But more importantly, look at the picture of that poor girl on the bottom left! SHE IS BEING ASPHYXIATED BY HER GINORMOUS BREASTS! We probably couldn't even hear her screaming because the sound is muffled by HER GINORMOUS BREASTS! Come to think of it... that may be the point. Ew. Moving right along.

Dir En Grey had an amazing concert in New York City and as always my crap extremely trustworthy camera that was excavated from an archaeological dig in South America ran out of batteries and so I resorted to using my phone to take pictures instead. I was fortunate enough to be sort of near the front. By fortunate, I mean I survived t he pushing and shoving of a throng of vicious fan girls who thought that the presence of an inch of space between people meant that they had enough room to squeeze their entire body into it in the attempt of getting closer to the stage. Maybe there would be enough space if these girls could liquefy themselves but I don't think the fan girls have evolved the power to exist only in two dimensions just yet. My amygdala does not like this idea.

At one point, a girl jammed her sweaty hand on my stomach. During songs she would try and claw her way in front of me using her fingers. Internet, I tolerated this shenanigans for about 30 seconds before screaming "ARE YOU SERIOUS?" in her ear. The hand disappeared so fast. By the way the screaming in the ear thing is not as cruel as it sounds because the music was so loud that we were all going to have permanent hearing loss by 35. Screaming was a required means of communication that just happened to be a bitchy indulgence. All in all, fans were surprisingly well behaved except for the ones who acted like if they got to the front, one of the band members would fall in love with them and take them away to some exotic island where they could live together forever speaking only in broken English loan words. I can picture the conversation now. Hunger would be indicated by "Hamubagaa!" The desire to stimulate the island's failing economy would be, "Shoppingu!" And if they felt like being festive and throwing a party they would just say "Meri Kurisumasu!" Scintillating!

Anyway, pictures. These are just 3 of the pictures I liked best of Die (guitarist) and Kyo (vocalist).

I would just like to point out 2 things.

1) Kyo (center and right) is standing on the equivalent of a rock star's milk crate.

2) THERE IS A GINORMOUS BLONDE HEAD.

That is all.

Edit: I lied. That was not all. If you would like to listen to one of my favorite songs by Diru click here

Halloween, where art thou?!

Internet, it has come and gone. By it, I could mean one of two things. The first possibility is my sanity which I fired back in the 1850's for being an absinthe drinking bum after its return from a vacation in Paris. The other is one of the few times of the year when furries can come out in their fursuit regalia and the ordinary world just thinks they just have far too much time on their hands. Prison escapees also spend this day looking much less conspicuously like prison escapees. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am talking, of course, about Halloween. Welcome to my several-days-late obligatory Halloween blog post.

Personally, I love-hate Halloween. It's one of those pseudo-holidays that cycles between awesome and terrible. See it was terrible at first when I was wayyy younger because I lived in a far away land that did not celebrate Halloween. It was only when I moved to Halloween celebrating territories later because of an series of events involving a oxygen harvesting crime syndicate and an air tank cartel that I singlehandedly took down at age three (long story), that I realized, not only did I get to play dress up...I GOT FREE CANDY FROM STRANGERS. Anyone who has gone to an anime convention with me knows that it is my personal mission to get as much free candy and other sweet stuffs from as many random people as possible. Internet, I know no shame when it comes to this. I have declared all out warfare on the entire cast of Axis Powers Hetalia because Italy refused to share his gelato with me.

Be ye not fooled by the extreme girlishness of this dubious "Italy" character. He is a male.  Evidently a severely bulimic male considering the girth of his waist and thighs in relation to the copious amounts of pizza, gelato and pasta he must surely ingest.

Anyway, going back to my mixed relationship with Halloween. Several hundred cavities after the first bite of free candy, you start to question your ways and you begin to think the unthinkable. Could I have outgrown Halloween?! (This is especially true when you are a pre-teen and you are desperate to prove to your parental units that you are all grown up and are quite capable of making adult decisions about adult things like mortgages, pre-nups and the cute boy next door.) The next few years of Halloween then become super lame because you spend it trying to prove to yourself for some godforsaken reason that you are above dressing up and getting candy.  If anyone reading this is still young and impressionable, let me save you a lot of time and worthless deliberation. YOU ARE NOT.

I finally came back to my senses this year. I started dressing up for Halloween again. Internet, some people need a 12 step plan to quit nicotine, my inner child needs one to quit costumes. Every time there is an occasion to put on a costume, my inner child starts firing dopamine happiness lasers at the rest of my cerebral cortex so that it is forced to shut up and be trapped hostage in an alien world of unicorns and sporadic dancing to Caramelldansen in a blonde wig fueled by a cocktail of Red Bull and Holy water.

But besides dressing up, there are other things that are fun about Halloween that can be appreciated by children ages zero to one thousand. The decorations! Some restaurants, for example, will put up some skulls, fake spiders and cobwebs to frighten their paying customers into paying the bill. It's a subliminal message. You see, the waiter or waitress will hand you your check, smile and say "Thank you" only what they're thinking is, PAY OR YOUR DECAYING FLESH SHALL FEED OUR FAKE SPIDERS.

Now Internet, I am going to be truthful for once. I don't like spiders. I'm not afraid of them persay, but I just don't like them. I don't trust anything that can still sorta hobble after you hack off a leg or three. This threat is very effective on me. But this year, I went to a restaurant with a friend of mine and found this:

If you couldn't tell and once again I would be surprised if you could because my camera is as old as a trilobite fossil... there is a black BIC pen hanging on the cobweb. As if my dislike of spiders weren't enough, now even the pens masquerading as terrifying Halloween paraphernalia are going to haunt me in my sleep.