January 2009
7:15 am.
And the sun finally decides to grace us with its presence.
My mother just woke up. Made her a smoked salmon sandwich on a toasted brioche with greek styled honey yoghurt, thinly sliced avocados, English cucumbers and lemons. I love being home, if just for the food.
Small bites.
I’m always on a search for bite-sized confections that look good when small. Interning over the summer, I found myself with excesses of free time, insomnia, and a list of recipes bookmarked that I wanted to try. Starting with a craving to make blueberry crumb bars, I went through SK, finding recipes that were simple, and could be handed out throughout the firm, pre-sliced and pretty. Though...
Grammar is always defendable.
[B]: Hopefully with less creepy men.
A: fewer.
[B]: less. They're uncountable to me.
A: ...that works.
“Care also for yourselves. Have fun, enjoy pleasure, love and be loved, swim into...”
– Bill Smoot, Baccalaureate address, 2007.
I’ve returned to this speech so many times, and still, it pulls at my heart and reminds me to live, and to live right.
Home, home, home.
(I’ll shut up about being home after this, I promise. It’s starting to get old for me too.)
I took a walk around the neighborhood yesterday, breathing in the ridiculously clean air. Reaching the top of the hill, I looked down beyond Eucalyptus trees, where cars rush by on 280, their sound muffled by foliage. In the other direction, past thousands of homes and treetops, I can see the...
“Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the...”
– Benjamin Disraeli.
Playboy will survive the recession for a reason.
--: she's insane
--: literally
[B]: is she
--: yeah
--: but she has huge boobs
[B]: which, of course, makes up for the insanity.
(Name withheld to protect the ...innocent.)
“As you’ve just written me a letter promised to me a year ago, I surmise...”
– Letter from Katherine, in response to the letter I (finally) sent her from Chengdu promising I’d visit her in NY. I do love snail mail, which means I should get better at it.
No words describe the feeling
of coming home.
Not Taiwan or Hong Kong, though those make good almosts, but real, clean air blue sky Californian home. I did not realized I missed this so much. But I did. And it feels so, so good. [Probably less so for my sister who skipped out on the coming home part and went straight to her apartment in Berkeley. Or daddy, who went straight to work.] But even though I’m left with...
Minor Pet Peeve #3:
Bite marks in food.
That’s why I tear bread instead of biting it, cut fruit into small pieces (even bananas - banana bite marks are the worst), break off pieces of chocolate, cut sandwiches into eight triangles, etc.
“A guy and a girl can be just friends but at one point or another, they will fall...”
– Dave Matthews.
[The same thing some wise person told me three years ago as I sat, red-eyed, on the floor of Narita airport. I didn’t believe her. I do now.]
(via my sister).
Language barriers.
Me: My Cantonese is abysmal.
Michael: Your Cantonese is Mandarin.
In SFO
Sister: Why is there no Internet connection here. There's internet connection in Hong Kong airport. And Singapore. And Taiwan.
Dad: Those are first world countries.
... yeah.
As weird as this sounds,
I am worried for Steve Jobs’ health. :\
“The point of dating is to test-drive as many models as possible before selecting...”
– via http://thechicktionary.com/. Oh, Lena Chen. One of my best friends in high school, in a completely serious conversation in which we weighed our college prospects, told me to go to said IvyLeague Cambridge bastion of choice because (and I paraphrase): “I hope you’ll become like...
Happy (belated) New Year (:
I started the new year spending a day in the Taipei Railway Station. Not traveling anywhere, or waiting for a train - just talking. It seems fitting. This year, afterall, is a pause of breath - very long, thoughtful, breath - before continuing my high-speed travels through life.
The past few days have been long - I’m trying to learn to stay calm in a face of ups and downs, but I’ve...