Sushi is an expensive habit to maintain

I'm at my aunt and uncles place in Irvine and we're all watching a really shitty movie on television and I am not having a better time. I cannot remember the last time my family sat down and watched TV together, let alone do things as a family together in a while. Every single moment I spend here is like vacation. I took a train and biked my way over because the train station is kinda far from where they live. I ended up taking a 3 hour long bike ride around Irvine.

I will not have my license for a year hence why the increased number of bike rides. I've been on a string of bad days following me losing my car but I've been able to keep busy. I'm currently taking a screenwriting class and I'm developing a script about solipsism although my professor is trying to change up integral points to my story. He's really big on big-budget narratives and confining shit to a 3-act format. I also have an acting class with Eric Barr, he's the head of the theatre department and I hope to learn a lot. My other class is Classical Theatre with Hornby aka ditch-every-class-session. I swear I'm the worst theatre student ever.

For the most part a new school year begins, friends leave and new friends come; I love em all and I'm looking forward to what this year will bring (especially now that I won't have my car).

On a COMPLETELY unrelated note, I would like to express the deepest contempt for my uncle who opens my mail without my consent and fails to tell me when delicate information passes through. I know you're reading this because you're a big snooper, too. Uncle, you are the biggest little girl I've ever met who incessantly gossips, spies and tattles.

Waiting for the Real Thing

During a nature hike in Riverside me, Bailey, Tasha and Jesse came across two scorpions and a huge huge huge centipede. We brought tupperware containers with us so we would be able to catch them. We brought them back to my house, here's what they look like:



Since then, the centipede lunged on one of the scorpions and ate it. RIP

Last Thursday was the day of the Art-walk and we were rolling pretty deep that night. Holly came over with Bock and her boyfriend. I felt like it was gonna be the last time I'm gonna see her since she's gonna be moving off to Oregon come the end of the month. August's art-walk was kind of a downer; we kinda glossed through not really looking at anything. Some guy at the Division 9 gallery had an installation with toys and Styrofoam and PVC piping. He kinda had it all over the place to the point where me and Bock bumped into it and the guy threw a fit. After a good 30 minutes there, we all decided to go back to my house. After an hour or so of being bored, I decided to get my taser out and we all played 'spin-the-taser' and might I tell ya Bailey takes it likes a champ! I'll upload a video of it later.

After all that madness, half of us went to the drive-in movie theater on Van Buren. It was my very first time at one and I had a lot of fun. We watched Pineapple Express but I think at this point in the night, the bulk of our group was half-conscious, so none of us really talked about it afterwards. I saw several shooting stars that night because the Perseid's meteor shower is going on(and up until the 24th of this month if you still wanna scope it out).

I spent the following week in Burbank where I just slothed around inside to watch the Games. I also played scrabble for the first time with Liz, Aaron and Lacy and I think I did pretty well: cube, cubes, then icecubes. Liz, Lacy and I aso went to Angeles Crest to check out the meteor shower during its peak. For some reason I was more able to catch the better ones at the drive-in. My brother is visiting from Kansas for a few weeks so I'm gonna spend a good amount of time with family. Me and my bros are gonna head to SF tomorrow to hang with my cousin Jimmy before we drive him down to LA.

Last night I headed back to Riverside to look for a job and go clubbing with everyone. This time around we went with a butt-load of people and whenever there's a lot of people, it's kinda hard to round them up to get them into one place. We'd often get sidetracked and this happens:





David and I decided that we should put money on a battle between Seabiscuit(scorpion) and Benji(centipede). David's bet was that Benji would subdue Seabiscuit within five minutes of being inside the same container. We have video coverage here. The light kicks in around a minute and a half in but it's an awesome video so try watching it the whole way through.




Don't question my ethics. As far as your interests are concerned, all the events captured in the video took place on a yacht 40 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, you ain't got shit on me.

Romancing the bone

Ross, Jesse and I were watching a few episodes of To Catch a Predator on Youtube. After watching Chris Hansen conduct a few sting operations on a some potential predators, I kinda felt irked at the ethical bounds they were pushing. Yeah I suppose they're doing a great thing by stopping predatory acts before they happen but it seems like the whole MO of swindling-in lonely guys seems to be more helpful towards creating predators than catching them.

This gave way to an idea that we should take it upon ourselves to catch a 'predator catcher', to see what extent of coercion they would try to employ on us "lonely" guys. We created a Yahoo! alias, romancingthebone288 (thank Ross and Jesse for that one), and we trolled on various personals chats and finally stuck to the 'roleplay' room. Our fast track method into finding a predator or potential predator catcher was to flat-out express our love for the 'touch of the younger kind'. We did so by quoting an Oingo Boingo song called Little Girls; if you click the link, you'll know why. Subsequently, we got barraged with mass replies but one that caught our attention was this guy from Ohio. This guy was trying to pimp out his 12 yr old step-daughter out to us, telling us how he gets off to watching someone else bad-touching her. We felt like we were opening up a huge huge HUGE can of worms and decided that we should stop before it got excessively worse. Afterwards, we saved the entire text of the conversation to my computer. I'm still deliberating on what course of action to take since I didn't anticipate on the whole thing snowballing out of control. This man said some serious shit that can't really be swept under the carpet.

How do I reconcile this with my previous thesis about Chris Hansen? Friends, I have reached a moral impasse. What started out as a laughable Oingo Boingo lyric has now turned into something dead serial. Thinking about it more, this interest kinda spawned out of listening to Oingo Boingo repeatedly for the past week in conjunction with "My Sharona" by the Knack. The 80s were very big into little girls, evidently. For those of you wondering who Sharona is, she is an under-aged girl that was dating one of the guys from the Knack. Wonder what she's doing now? She is a real estate agent in Los Angeles, who is still riding the coattails of Knack fame to slang houses; check here out here. She kinda looks like Alanis Morissette.

To coincide with today's blog's theme, I would like to give a shoutout to my cousin Drew from A.U. who had "My Sharona" playing at her wedding. Forever let it be known that she promotes sex with minors.




PS:
If you guys wanna see the Knack for free, they'll be playing on the 17th of August in the Woodland Hills Valley Cultural Center. Admission is an $8 donation for parking.

Concerts in the Park
Warner Center Park
5800 Topanga Canyon Blvd.
Woodland Hills, CA 91367

If you any of you are down to carpool with me, just let me know.

How did you make my rectum start quoting Garden State? Because I know ghost magic.

Today marks the day that I've finished finals so now I got two months of summer. I now have a bunch of free time in my hands so I might look for a temp job in Burbank so I can pay rent. I now have the time to start painting and reading books that I don't have to write papers about.

Mike came over yesterday so we cold brainstorm on a new project. We were gonna do a Ray Romano movie but I suppose things fell through. What we were able to do was salvage a script that I abandoned. We fleshed out the main character pretty well and we're taking the rest of this week to develop her story arc. Next Sunday we're gonna go to the Scientology celebrity center for brunch and research. I'm feeling pretty good on getting this thing rolling now that I reliable input.

An interesting piece of news for those of you who like video games; aside from watching a whole helluva lotta movies, I spend a considerable part of my time on my xbox. I caught wind that Netflix will be releasing their entire streaming library and will make it available for rent via xbox live in September. I really liked this idea because I even felt the effortless concept of pre-paid envelopes proved to be too laboring; walking to the nearest USPS dropbox was just too much for me.

Other news:

• Activist attempts to glue himself to the Prime Minister, but fails.
• Naked baby of the Nirvana album cover is now a teen and stresses how he can't live a normal life due to the fact that millions world-wide have seen his dick.
• Darren Aronofsky (yes, him) is directing the new Robocop reboot.

P.S. I don't think I can ever stop listening to Wowee Zowee

It's been a business doing pleasure with you

Today marks the first official day that everything in my house works. The guy came to turn on the gas today; and just like the internet guy yesterday, they were too quick to peace out from my house after they hastily finished their work. I felt really foolish to have my hand extended for a handshake (on both occasions) as they left WITHOUT SAYIN' A WORD TO ANYONE. It's a damn shame I have to miss so much class this week to wait on house duties.

I went to the grocery store yesterday and funny thing... I did not come home with a single item on my shopping list. My cart mainly comprised of things I could put into a blender. Pffft

Bailey and Natasha came to visit me twice this week and it makes me feel really good that they are so down to bike a few miles to see me! The other night we went to this wilderness trail on Central that I never knew existed. Keep in mind that it was 11PM and we were only guided by a single bicycle light. I saw 5 scorpions on our hike (all of which I stepped on, yep I'm so cool), a ton of stink bugs, a centipede and lots of animal poop (potentially human poop). They also came over again last night and we watched 'From Dusk till Dawn'. I don't know what to think of the movie because it looks like a load of cornball. I loved it up until the vampires (not because of the vampires specifically, but because it was a load of cornball). Another note of movies, it's taking too long in between for me to see something new and I'm getting pretty jaded with art-housey shit. So what I've decided to do is work backwards with old movies I never got a chance to see. On my queue is Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Rosemary's Baby, and some Hitchcock stuff!

I'm coming back to Burbank tonight for another fun-filled weekend. Mayhaps Ratatat, on the condition I find someone to go with me.

And for this post's piece of media, my friend sent me this and I absolutely fell in love with it:




really talented people

Can you burn a copy of that? On water?

So I officially signed the contract to the I'm gonna be living in next year. I mean... it's not the best house, but it's the only thing we all could find within driving distance and within our budget. The house's previous occupant was some japanese artist dude and he painted a big symbol on the wall; "harmony". They're still putting on finishing touches but I'm still kinda iffy about the design of the kitchen. All the cupboards have a sorta panda expressy kinda design to it and it's just too oriental for me. I have no reason to complain, I didn't have to deal with a bullshit realty company and it was the best place we could find during our time crunch.

Yesterday I came back to Riverside from Burbank because Janelle FINALLY returned from her study-abroad trip to Hong Kong. It was sooooooooooooooooo indubitably, unfathomably, inexplicably nice to see her again. We later met up with Bails and Tasha to goto AVE.

I picked up Adam and Michelle from Little Saigon today because that where the bus ferries them from San Jose and we spent a good amount of time in Westminster. I feel that whenever I'm in that area, I have a sporadic obligation to play out being vietnamese; some things never leave you.

We are prepping for our Vegas trip that will officially commence later today. To remind you it's a David's birthday/grad trip so essentially it's gonna be that last time I'll be with nearly everyone together. A last hoorah...







... shit son, there ain't no last hoorahs






P.effing S. While we were in Little Saigon, I had Michelle use her V-Power in order to get me a poster of Tuan Anh. If you are not familiar, he is pretty much the Vietnamese equivalent to Prince even though he is nowhere remotely as handsome and is too androgynous to the point where it is a phenomenon that old-fashioned Vietnamese folks enjoy him.




"Why does he look like a girl mom?"
"That's his style."
"What about my style mom?"




"How 'bout we do it doggy-style?"
"You're not gonna fuck me like a dog!"
"It's doggie style. It's just the style. We don't have to go outside or anything."

Dripping with sauceness

By the time of this posting, the last week of instruction has already passed with very little time to absorb it all. Friday's fifteen page paper was due at 5 PM, was finished earlier in the the day at 11 AM, which was worked on nonstop since noon the Thursday prior (no rest, very little food).

Friday night I mushed with Bailey and Tasha; we went to the rocks for a small amount of time. Then we regrouped with everyone to go to this one party and pool afterwards at Mark's place. In the state of mind I was in, I took time to reflect on the past year and how some of my friends are moving away, the ones graduating, the ones that already left and it gets to me. That this very well may be our last hoorah. I will be sad when they all leave even though I'll see a few of them during the summer. They won't even be that far, but it's something about them being within arms reach that's really comforting. What's also bothering me is finding a place to live for next year. We keep getting turned down everywhere we go. People leasing the house with inane questions, treating the whole matter like a job interview; this is about kids trying to find a place to stay. Aside from me telling the guy that I'd keep his place tidy and make payments prompt, he still presses on to say, "You got anything else to say to win me over?" I'm thinkin' to myself, what the fuck? This guy is fucking ridiculous. So now, it leaves us on the search again and it's less than a month away before my lease ends.

Vegas is still two weeks away and I still need to get an ID, so any help my way would be great!

BTW! When I was cutting my hair earlier this week on the balcony, I noticed that one of my cactus plants had a red bulb growing out of it. It kinda came outta nowhere within the past few days so I didn't pay it any mind. A few hours later that night when I came out for a cig working my ass off on a paper I find this:








P.S. Knowing my friends... we've pretty much had like 50 'last hoorahs' and I think we have it in us for a 100 more.

Eins zwei drei shiggy shiggy schweine

I'm hustling my ass off this weekend because I got three papers due next week. I also have my hearing about the DUI this Tuesday. I'm trying to get all my resources together and everything on my end seems to be cohesive in regards to the police report I got. On top of Tuesday's list of duties, I'm gonna audition for 'Unlearning Curve' so I can chip away at the 170 units AND $1000 for a touring show.
Michelle and I submitted our credit check for a new house. It's a 4 bedroom 2 bath for 1800. The house itself is pretty dank seeing as how no students have lived there prior. I would also like to mention what a total babe the realtor is. She's got huge melons and I'm trying ever so slowly and tactfully to win her over despite our age gap. I already have her number(shamelessly taken off her business card)! I have it all planned out; I got my Zorro outfit and I will send love letters via arrow scroll and it'll be PERFECT.
The other night I was at Jesse's place where I saw a lot of old faces and some new. Ever since Jesse put on that Glukoza song, I cannaw git it oot uv mah 'ead. The next night I hung out with Jimmy, Shaun, Bo and a few others; trading scary stories etc etc. And today I went to Donald's basketball game and later we're gonna pick up a new TV for the backhouse, w00t!
My maltese is getting sick; she's getting old and it might be that time. And so, I've been spending more time taking my dogs out to different parks to keep them entertained and active. I especially like walking my pit bull; he's such a big baby. He's really strong and runs really fast so I stand on my skateboard while he pulls me like sled-dog. He may look tough but he is a big baby and a mass attention-whore.

Kidnapped at birth

Since trying it for the first time last night, I have bought 3 additional bottles of Kombucha and I'm going through the motions to see which flavor is my favorite. For those of you who haven't tried it, it's a health/energy-type drink that is made of multiplying bacteria that grows on a culture that is in every bottle. This culture kinda layers at the bottom of the bottle which makes it look like some kind of algae growth. This bacteria is left to ferment in warm conditions so it's got trace amounts of booze, too! But I'm simply just thrilled over the idea that I'm taking the life essence of an organism for my own health lolz.

I went to the dental clinic today because my wisdom teeth are driving me crazy. The bottom ones are growing perpendicular to my bottom set so that it displaces my gums in a way that when I bite, I bite down on a piece of my gum. I got an x-ray(which I will put up later). I decided to take the train back to Burbank from Riverside because I got a flat tire last week. I got a lot of reading done and I have three papers due next week that I'm gonna start on now. I got off at the Burbank station where I got picked up by the John and the Jimmy...

...which I would like to segue to...

My Retarded Family

I don't know what it is about my family (namely the younger generation) that has got them to adopt a distorted way of thinking. Splitting off to different schools, it's expected that people embrace new things for the sake of coping with leaving the old. For me, college allowed me to be more receptive of politics, current events, music, new friends, food, pop culture, etc. In turn, I was able to see things from multiple perspectives and I learned to wait at least ten seconds or so before I'm quick to deride someone's opinion. My family however, remains virtually unchanged. They remain ignorant to things outside of school and work. They don't have any real passion for anything and to me, their personalities lack any real substance. In effect, they project amateur opinions on worldly matters under the pretense of being refined and educated.
Even being Americanized kids, they took on the same structure of moral code of all our parents. We live on a different plane of existence and have an equally divergent sense of communication. It's as though if I act upon my own self-interests, they are so quick to stifle it.
Say I had a cousin that was slightly younger than myself who does not agree with my predilection to argue with certain people. He feels that he is in the position to scold me; not really to resolve anything, but to feel self-righteous in doing so because he gets a rise out of sounding like a hardass. I assert that I argue because certain things conflict with my moral code and I need to vocalize that. Soon after a pointless harangue from these two brothers, their trademark sneer ensues. My family has this thing where they like to sneer at someone for prolonged period of time to display how mad they are and they get butthurt for the rest of the day. It makes me sick to my stomach that these kids blow their tempers all out of control and feel like they have the need make as much noise as possible along with pissing off many others along the way.


I don't even know what point I'm trying to make. More developments soon.



Love,
Solomon Vu

Little brown sausages lying in the sand

Two nights ago Bailey, Natasha and I went to the 'C'. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's the big yellow 'C' on the mountain right behind UCR. We thought it was a good idea at the time to eat some special cookies. Upon walking up the hill, we got really stoned and figured we didn't need to go all the way. We settled down at these rocks where we listened to music and ate junk food for a while. When it was time to go, I shit a brick because the path we took up disappeared. After a good routine of trial and error, we were able to stumble down the mountain, quite stonededly.

Today, I received an e-mail from my professor Erith telling me that all classes for the remainder of the quarter are canceled. I mean, there's only a few class hours left but it's music to my ears anyway.

I finally got to see Holly in the first time sine forever and I missed her so! She swung by my place with Mike and we took off to Claremont to paint a little. It's never a dull moment with these two. I bought Kombucha Green Tea, and it was the best dirt I have ever drank I TELL YA HWHAT! Which reminds me while we're on the subject of expensive novelty drinks; Goodwin's, the local organic food store, sells this pricey bottled water for a little more than $10. What's special about this water is that it is made out of 10,000 year old glacier water which I am totally down to buy once.

I also have the new weezer and ratatat albums which I'm really excited about. Stephen Malkmus is fucking great. Bye.