toastykitten

 How PG&E manages to be worse than LADWP but they are. 

Hi!

I keep meaning to write a public intro post, and then I forget or get distracted by one of my kids. Anyway, I jumped off Livejournal after being there for over a decade, and am only now deciding to post more publicly. I'm not a consistent poster these days, but I lurk a lot and occasionally I'll post about something, especially if it pisses me off. Stuff about my kids/family will be locked. 

Anyway, here's the basics: I'm an LA Chinese American mom of two still figuring out what I really want to do with my life. My hometown is Oakland, though, so I occasionally write about that and how weird it is to go back there these days. 

What I've been reading/watching lately: Narcos with my husband, Hidden Figures (loved the movie, currently reading the book), and Brooklyn 99, mainlining the Happier podcast (before that it was Savage Love but I can't deal with the political commentary right now).

Add me, don't add me; it's all good. 

My books are unpacked!

I am finally getting over my cold, though still a little sniffly.

We need to do the last of our packing and then Monday we leave. I am so excited about moving into our new place. It's going to be so awesome. I am going to learn to garden and take care of a house! It's in such a super-cute area, and it's in a neighborhood where I can actually walk around and explore a little bit. One of the first things I want to do is take my camera and take pictures of all the amazing houses in the neighborhood. They are so beautiful.

So when I tell people I'm moving to LA they always tell me they hate it. Mostly because they don't like driving. But that's SF people for you. People who hate LA haven't seen most of it or lived in it long enough to understand it. I love LA, even with the driving and the smog and the shallow pretty people. I like what's underneath - the most diverse, authentic food available, the hope that carries people for so long, and all the creative energy from so many talented, crazy people who would rather do what they do than get a "real" job.

Mark is going to turn off the Internet and TV today. Oh noes! The day before my last day at work, he surprised me with a little early Valentine's gift - a teddy bear dressed in wings and a shirt that says "Love Bug". It was so cute! I love surprises.

Someday I will write a real post.

Last week we went to the ER twice. Mark is fine now, and was diagnosed with a bacterial infection and given extra antibiotics. We weren't reassured by the doctor's "worst-case scenario - it might be Chrohn's disease or colitis". In fact, I'm sort of frustrated that we're in 2007 now and medicine is mostly guessing until you get it right. I'm not saying that our doctors sucked; they were doing the best with the information they had, but still. A little certainty would go a long way, is all I'm saying.

More aggravating was the fact that we actually bought groceries and planned to cook last week, but because of the above, didn't get to do much of it. My mom was sweet, though, and made me bring Mark some soup and "wife cookies". No, I have no idea why they're called that. I went home for dinner on Saturday and she practically kicked me out of the house right after, telling me I had to take care of him. (I bet Mark just looooves that.)

I've been working on my eHub articles and part of that is reviewing different sites. Doing this, as fun as it is, is still annoying sometimes, especially when I have to deal with a website that does stupid things - for example, instead of writing out their features in plain old text, advise you to watch a video, or linking to an "about" page that is non-existent, or my very biggest pet peeve - charge money for things that are now standard to give away for free. If I can get what you are offering for free somewhere else, why wouldn't I go somewhere else?

Today my train was delayed due to a person being struck by another train. According to what we heard, it was a probable suicide. Which is awful.

I will write about New York later. Still have to work on other stuff first. Some links of interest to me, and maybe to you:

Remember that tasering incident in UCLA? UCLA's campus police decided to taser some kid because he had no ID, and there was an internal investigation that found no fault with the campus police. However, there was another investigation and this time found that the officer violated "use of force" policies. via Metafilter.

Daniel Wu's blog is still going. This time he writes about the destruction of the Queen's Pier. I have a soft spot for him because he went to school in Oakland. I mean, true, it was Head-Royce, one of the best private schools around, but still. Oakland!

I am with John Scalzi on the creation of a union for bloggers - WTF? First, who are you going to bargain with? Actually in the comments it's noted that the original person who talked about it was actually trying to figure out ways for bloggers to get health insurance. But still, unless blogging is your sole source of income (in which case you need to start looking for another job) maybe you should just look at the stuff that's already out there.

New York's deliverymen sue their employers.

Someone I knew in childhood entered the Miss Hong Kong Beauty Sponsor pageant. Scroll down to #11. She won a small award for "Perfect Intelligence". It's so weird! I knew her when she and her family first immigrated here, and we helped them out for a bit. Over the years we lost touch. I don't even know that we'd have anything in common to talk about anymore.

In doing my search for her, I also discovered blogs for AsianPopNews, and TVB.

You are legally entitled to a free credit report Annual Credit Report from Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian every 12 months.

I had to buy another one because some items popped up on my credit report; for example, claiming that I was late on one payment to a bank account that was closed years ago, even though I always pay my bills on time. This item had not popped up on previous reports, and drove down my credit score. I disputed this online.

So annoying.

We were at a party last night for a friend who is moving to Portland. (It seems like all the geeks are moving there.) It was really, really nerdy and I'm kind of glad I did not wear my "I heart NERDS" shirt because that would have been just overkill. I actually didn't know anyone there, as this person was more Mark's friend. But I got to meet a lot of nerds, and girl geeks in particular - one owned a hosting company, one went to school at Harvey Mudd. One of them is currently working on a nonfiction book on women in science and engineering. We talked a lot about that, and also about writing and publishing in general. I felt kind of sad because I have not been writing anything in particular for years, and she seemed to have this commitment to her work that I just don't feel.

Of relevance: Zeldman commissioned a study for stats on women working in web design. Results: unsurprising. Comments on post: unsurprisingly annoying.

What was weird about this party was that we couldn't find people who watched tv. Not that this is a prerequisite for being our friends or anything, but Mark and I really like watching television, and love talking about certain shows. It was a pretty nice party overall.

I finally started reading an actual book again. I was in the middle of A History of God by Karen Armstrong, and then I stopped. For the past few weeks I've been doing crossword puzzles during my train ride, but now I'm back. The History of God is pretty fascinating, and I'm learning a lot, but Armstrong has some pretty strong tics that can get kind of repetitive and annoying.

I LOVE this time of year. Mark gets red envelopes, too, which always makes me happy. Anyway, I drove up to Oakland at eight in the morning for our vegetarian breakfast and we took the kids - nieces, nephew, and Kaitlin to the Oakland Museum, where they were having a celebration for the new year. There were taiko drums, lots of arts and crafts, and we all got free pens and water bottles. They all had a good time, and I really enjoyed hanging out with them. They are so freaking adorable, and they say the funniest stuff, too, like:

"Give me some sugar, Bubba!" (As far as I know, this kid has never watched Evil Dead or knows who Bruce Campbell is. I was informed by her sister that "she says it all the time at home.")

"My name is Butt-Butt."

I finished a few books last week. I'm so surprised, especially since it took me for-fucking-ever to finish Foucault's Pendulum, which I would describe to most people as the "most boring thriller ever with a really stupid ending". Anyway, the books I've been reading:

Go Ask Ogre, by Jolene Siana

Jolene Siana was a huge fan of Skinny Puppy growing up, and she decided to write to Ogre, one of the members in Skinny Puppy (an industrial band), over a period of a few years. She made art out of these envelopes and journals and used the art and writing as a way to work through her depression without even realizing it. At the end she says that she realizes that this act of writing probably saved her life. Ogre kept all her journals, letters and artwork, and gave it back to her after nine years. The work itself is really, really raw - it's almost painful getting through it because of how thoroughly honest and candid the work is. She writes about her dysfunctional family, trying to find a place in the world, and cutting herself. At the end, we see a change of voice as the older Jolene reflects on her experience of re-discovering her younger self, and it's fascinating to see how much she's changed, yet still the same person. I sort of recognize where she's coming from - it's really easy to see why she kept writing to Ogre, even though he only wrote back a few times, and why she kept writing things she didn't feel she could admit to her closest friends. It was a way of working out her confusion and depression - and it feels good to know that someone else knows what you're going through. I don't think I was ever depressed in the same way she was, but I used to write to Mark all the time and it was really cathartic, but I would freak him out sometimes with the intensity of what I wrote. And what's funny is that I wrote to forget - as soon as I committed those words to paper I had worked through whatever angst I was going through and I felt normal again, or sane enough, at least.

There's a new Skinny Puppy CD out if you're interested.

The Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong

This is the memoir of an ex-nun and her experiences after leaving the nunnery and trying to find her place in life. It's really funny, poignant, and interesting. She writes about how she goes into the nunnery in order to "find God", leaves, gets misdiagnosed by a psychiatrist, fails out of college, tries to get away from religion only to keep bumping into it. She writes in an engaging and careful way about religion, and finds herself getting angry with "God" and religion, and then eventually finding a way to meditate on "God" that is meaningful to her. She frequently compares the rituals and acts of religion with finding solace in art, and makes the point that the main monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, are not actually about "right belief", but about "right practice" - doing good imbues the divine in you. The idea of believing in God Himself is irrelevant. It's pretty fascinating, and gave me a lot of food for thought. I'm not really religious myself (I would call myself Buddhist if pressed), but I know that eventually we're going to have to deal with the question ourselves (since Mark is Christian and slightly more religious than me) - of what we want for our future, of how we want to raise our kids, etc.

I started Snow Crash, too, but I got bored. Maybe I'll go back to it later.