Blog of Magic Cheese

Was walking behind a group of construction workers on the way to the office today, and the urge to catcall and whistle at them was nearly irresistible.

Sorry, gentlemen. I respect you for your minds.

I love my brother and I love having a brother, but there are some basic differences between us. This can be summed up by our respective conversations with our aunt on Thanksgiving:

Jin: "Yeah, it's stressful being out of school and working. This whole "real life" thing isn't what it's cracked up to be."

Me: "... being back around UCI? Fuck that campus. Fuck school. I fucking hate school. I'm so glad I'm out. I'm never going back."

Our respective choices in the arts are defining the way we move, too. I noticed this last trip that while there's still a lot of cross over with between dance and martial arts with the stretches, co-ordination, muscle awareness, strong core + fluid limbs, etc. that our energy's very different. I think we were always this different, but the training has made that even more apparent.

I guess I need to put up videos of myself doing wushu on YouTube now, so that I can keep up with this guy.

Since working retail jobs while I was in school to keep the food coming, Christmas has always been a special holiday for me.

I'm not Christian, and my family doesn't really celebrate Christmas in any traditional sense. December 25th with my father was always a cold and depressing day, with no food in the house and nowhere to go because everything was closed.

Things changed when I worked my first winter and became acquainted with the wonders of the holiday mix tape - 3 hours of mandatory saccharine tired music voiced by the most recent lineup of talentless vapid pop stars, on endless repeat, starting in October.

This winter, I've been amusing myself by checking off the days until I would inevitably find myself humming a Christmas jingle.

I sing a lot to myself. Songs that I hear while walking around never consciously register, but I'll find them playing in my head and find that I'm singing them for hours afterward. It's never good music, either. It's horrible horrible shit like commercial jingles and pop tunes. Then I have to mentally backtrack through my day until I figure out the location where I got infected, tent that area of my memory, and spray it with radioactive toxins.

Today it struck. I was standing in the office kitchen behind Natalie, our office manager, when I found myself humming some jingle I'd heard playing on a PA strapped to a streetlight on the way to buy lemons. Luckily, Natalie's very cool and didn't bat an eye when the person behind her cut off mid-hum and dropped the f-bomb with an angry shriek.

In fact, she understood even before I explained. She used to work for Macy's before coming to work for us, and the materialistic holiday nonsense starts there even earlier than in my retail experience. It was so bad that she refused to celebrate for the five years she worked for that company. Ha!

So we traded stories, pulled in Adam for a conversation about where to buy tea in Paris, and once again I love my intelligent, well-traveled, frugal co-workers. Some days this little company of 30 people gives me faith that this country's going to be all right.

How does Snyder's of Hanover manage to be such delightfully junky snack food without any of the awful poisons I'm avoiding like high fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated oils that are in freaking everything?

I have no idea, but I love them.

I've been on a non-fiction kick for a while, and I don't remember when it started. One day I looked on my shelves and instead of science fiction and fantasy books it was stocked with documentaries, history books, and social sciences, heavy tomes with scary covers that could bludgeon a man to death.

The last fiction I recall reading was King Lear, and while it was fantastic, it was less what you would call light reading and more horrified entrancement with intermittent weeping. This is one of the signs that you should be an English or Theatre major, by the way.

The latest book I'm going through, Strangers From a Different Shore, is very good, but it's 500 pages and it's going to take me forever. It's a history of Asian American immigration to the United States and it's been a fascinating study in self as well as history as I turn the chapters and go from pride in the literacy rate and success of the Japanese American immigrants to horror when I read about the conditions that Korean Americans came to the U.S. to escape during the Japanese occupation. After that I've got another killer in the queue, Tulia, which will probably take me 6 months to a year to finish.

I'm not sure if I'm slowing down as I've grown up or if the books I read now are way denser than what I used to read. I do know that after I read 15-30 pages now I need to stop and put down the book and digest what I've read for the day, much in the way I know when I've hit the limit of new moves I can learn to a wushu form, or how I have to stop albums in the middle to back off and let what they're saying sink in.

Is this a common symptom of growing up, or is it encroaching senility?

I know the non-fiction's going to take a break when George releases his fifth book, so I'll be conducting a test then.

The Husband dismayed because we went into Green Apple for less than an hour and I walked back out with a stack of five books. Thinks I should get books that make me happier, as Sylvia Plath's brilliant poems awe me and make me want to wither like a dead leaf. I find people who are always happy insipid and creepy. The next time life gives me a lemon, I may wing it at his head.

Lately The Heavy Roommate and The Husband have been playing a lot of Rock Band. I tried the drums. They were fun.

Anyway, The Husband has since decided that one of the songs in the game, The Knack's My Sharona, is too creepy to sing as it's about an underaged groupie, so we've changed the song to Mike Shinoda so that we can argue endlessly over him. (I'm a fan of his work. The Husband, like all of my other bastard friends, cheerfully hates on him due to his association with Linkin Park.)

Sometimes I wonder if David Bowie and Iggy Pop get together to laugh at people who age like normal mortals. "Ancient Chinese secret, huh?"

Speaking of rocks, does Calgon = osteoporosis?

The Light Roommate and The Husband shared their theory regarding groups with a all-male lineups and numbers in their names: they tend to be emo and/or whiny. A quick list of ones we could come up with follows:

3 Doors Down
54/40
Ben Folds Five
Blink-182 (also see: +44)
Boyz II Men
Eve 6
Finger 11
Five for Fighting
Maroon 5
Matchbox Twenty
Sum 41
Third Eye Blind
Three Days' Grace

Bands who don't: Jurassic 5, U2

In contention: Nine Inch Nails, Powerman 5000

Removed when it was pointed out we were idiots and they had women in their lineup: B-52s. Added when I decided to heck with it, Bem agrees with me and they're goin' in: Boyz II Men