Blog of Magic Cheese

I did a rather teenaged thing last week: I snuck out.

I was raised by my father, but my mother, possibly because she didn´t see me grow up, is insanely, illogically overprotective. She flips out whenever I propose doing anything.

I once rented a moving van to help a friend move from CalTech to Northern CA. Massive fight. It ended with her in tears.

So as you can imagine, she wasn´t thrilled at the prospect of me going traveling alone. Which is why I didn´t tell anyone in the family I was going.

... greetings from Brasil!

Rio de Janeiro was pretty crazy. As soon as I´m home (my friend does not have ´net so I´m in a LAN house) I want to read about the economy of the place and the favelas (slums) now, because the city is a mix of gorgeous old buildings, the smell of sewage, and graffiti everywhere..

I´m staying with a friend I´ve known for years but finally got to meet for the first time (thank you Internets!) and we´ve been cooking together and trying out recipes and comparing customs. It´s fantastic. We´re in Cabo Frio and I went swimming in the ocean. Can you imagine trying an insane stunt like that in Northern CA?

Pictures and the like forthcoming when I return.

Yesterday I was having a good day.

I got my work done, some cleaning finished, chatted with some friends via the internets, and headed to my weekly crafting circle. I was ripping apart a cheap hoodie to make a jacket lining when my father called me.

He spoke to me for seventeen minutes.

I closed my phone and went back to what I was doing, and then I became aware that in those seventeen minutes I had lost the will to live, and that a Staind song was playing in my head.

'cause it's always raaaaaaiiinning in my head
forget all the things I should have saaaaaaaid

And that, in a hilarious (if you know my father, it really is. trust me.) and horrible nutshell, is the relationship between me and my father.

I have both wrinkles and adult acne, and have thus moved beyond the point of merely resenting life and am now declaring war on it.

A recent CostCo trip has proven to me that there are more horrifying things than having a face like a bullet-ridden leather wallet however, namely organic batter-inna-can.

Of course the main factor in the tragic Winnenden shootout was video games.

The Chronicle spells it out for us: "Teen in bloody spree a fan of video games." It's all the games. It always is. It wasn't that he was socially maladjusted, had a history of mental illness, had dropped out of counseling for depression, or that he had access to a pistol that his father kept lying about in the bedroom. The pivotal factor, and the only one worth repeatedly pointing out, is the video games.

Before evil capitalistic game companies started cranking out violent video games with no regard for society at large, young people never committed violent crimes. If this young man hadn't had access to video games that helped him plan and act out his violent urges, this never would have happened.

I'm naturally not a fan in general of violent games, but I do remember enjoying the fatalities in Mortal Kombat a lot when I was in high school. Giant pixelated gobs of blood flying across the screen? Woo hoo! Unfortunately the game made me arm myself with a large semi-circle of sharpened metal and filled me with violent urges to attack my classmates and random passers by at a Volkswagon dealership, so I had to stop going to the comic store and watching it.

I hope that we ban video games altogether so that violent crime can finally come to an end.

In my ongoing whoring of myself out to Facebook, I've discovered a handy RSS feed application that imports things like Flickr updates and MovableType entries

Unfortunately, all of my formatting vanished when imported to the Facebook, so now my attempts to update friends and uninterested acquaintances on the minutiae of my daily life are in vain. Trying out explicitly putting all of my formatting in html instead of being lazy and letting MovableType do it for me.

There needs to be a term for that awkward transition phase when one is going from one style of dress to another.

I'm in it now, because last year my brother pointed out that none of my clothes quite match or, as he put it, "I wonder if you'd grown up with Mom if you'd be more feminine. Right now it's more like you've accepted that you live in a woman's body." I realized I was still wearing the clothes I'd worn 10 years ago, so I bought some nice looking used clothes off of the eBay, and now I'm in Fashion Hell (hey, I may have just come up with the term I was looking for) because I picked up individual items because I liked how they looked and I have no idea how to arrange these items to form An Outfit.

I couldn't notice the difference between pairs of shoes and purses I see on the street if beaten. I hate impractical shoes like the ones with spiky heels and cardboard soles that have the same comfortable effect as stomping barefoot on stone with the balls of your feet, and I carry a little backpack because I think that having a one-handed bag will eventually mess with your alignment.

I also don't like the idea of purses because you have to change all of your stuff from bag to bag whenever you carry a different one, and I have tons of things in my bag and if I need one thing, such as sunglasses on a super bright day and it's not there, I will flip out and destroy the purse.

I am a giant, giant, uptight dork and nothing will likely ever change that. ): Unfortunately, nice shirt, pretty skirt, and extra wide New Balance running shoes do not An Outfit make.

I might be tempted to give up and live in my old comfortable monochromatic wardrobe, but the fashion industry is cruel and cunning, and they're out to get me. I know this because this year everything is "military cut." You know, military inspired. Clean lines, practical as well as nice looking, made for people with broad shoulders, narrow waists, and athletic builds? I LOVE military cut clothing. Make your trousers military cut with plenty of room in the thigh and you'll win the undying faith and adoration of athletes everywhere who can't find pants that fit.

So now I have some nice shirts and jackets, and for the last two weeks I have been trying, largely without success, to master "layering." Layering is where you wear more than one shirt and they look good on top of one another. Two great tastes, great together, etc. It probably started out as a way for stores to make you buy more than one goddamn shirt at a time, because trying to layer shirts that you got in different places is like trying to find a charger for your phone from a different brand. The ads make it look effortless and urban and faded and cool, and I hate them almost as much as I hate myself for still buying tank tops I can't wear and that I now can't layer. Hell.

My father ate 8 years expired almond butter. This is after he fished it out of the rubbish bin, where I had dropped it with a horrified shriek shortly after discovering it in his refrigerator. This is a new refrigerator, meaning he had moved the jar from the old fridge into the new one and not thrown it out then.

He is still alive.

It's good to be home.

I'm in Southern California for the week, visiting my mother and getting ready for the wedding of two of my best (and at this point, oldest- in September I'll have known the groom for a decade. Where did the years go?) friends.

Having been out of school a number of years and on my own for a while, every time I go back to one of my parents' places and pick through my old things in my former rooms, looking for anything that would be handy to take home, I always feel like I am looting. I guess it's like when you visit a parent, sleep in your old room, and feel like you're sleeping in somebody else's room. Somebody else with an unhealthy obsession with the X-Men.

U2's new single is out- you can listen to it on their site. Bono's voice sounds like it's in a great place this album. I think for a while he was smokin' it up, trying to make his voice gravelly and low, which sort of worked. With the Irish accent, his singing was kind of like being covered in warm gravel and cream. I really like it when his voice is clear though, and the new single at least features a very youthful-sounding set of vocals.

I'm also wondering if the U2 marketing machine has gotten too slick for its own good. I'm a huge U2 fan- I listened to them a lot when I was an undiagnosed adult ADHD headcase rattling around UC Irvine. (Zooropa, incidentally, is a great album if you want to get a feeling of the chaos and confusion that having sky-high brain waves can give you.) But I'm sort of pausing at the multiple CD packages that are offered. $66 for an album, booklet, book, and poster? Very cool stuff no doubt, but steep for somebody who's been working part time since October and whose laptop may well be cooking itself in its own kool-aid, necessitating the use of several hundred dollars for a new one.

Looking forward to the wedding, to the new experience of wearing the traditional Vietnamese costume the ao dai, and seeing old friends. And then, as awesome as seeing my mother and my old friends is, heading back to San Francisco, because I miss the MUNI, I miss my wushu schools, and I miss not getting flipped off by old ladies in expensive cars with handicapped plates because I stopped at a red instead of running it to make a right turn. Seriously. wtf?

Today I saw the only other person I've ever seen who also plugs his ears on the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train. The noise on the train can get incredibly painful. I don't understand how people can just sit there and listen to the howling and screeching of the rails.

Unfortunately my newfound brother in the fight against hearing loss spent the rest of the train ride having a conversation with somebody who was not there.

The evidence is piling up.

We're having one of the warmest Januaries on record in Northern California.

Intellectually, I understand how bad this is. We're in a drought, no rain means dire straits for farmers, and increased risk for wildfires.

It is so hard to step out into the sun and not be happy, though. A mere month ago I finally admitted to myself, after three years of living in San Francisco, that I was never going to wear my beloved tank tops from my school years in Orange County again, that I needed to stop buying tank tops, and that I needed to face up and remove them from my wardrobe.

Today I pulled the box of tank tops out of the corner of my closet and wore one. The dryer in my ghetto complex is broken, but I don't care because it's warm and sunny and beautiful and I can hang our laundry on the balcony. (We're actually not supposed to, but they can bite my ass and fix the damn dryer first.) I keep stepping outside to feel the sun and the warm breeze kiss my upper arms, and I'll keep hoping for rain to relieve the thirsty state, but if I can have this weather just one more day, I would really like to wear shorts for the first time in three years.