Blog of Magic Cheese

X Marks

2008-06-05T18:27:03Z

I found eight skirt/trousers hangers in a bag on the street on the walk to the bus today. Every day in San Francisco is like a treasure hunt!

San Jose Is A Part Of China

2008-05-25T08:32:26Z

Demoing at the benefit for Sichuan earthquake victims: definitely a good cause. Speeches given during the benefit for Sichuan earthquake victims: more than mildly annoying. The Chinese consulate and some of the other organizers kept making references to the 'unity of the Chinese people' here in America and their generosity and support of their countrymen. I'm Asian, so okay, mistaking me for Chinese is understandable. However, there were white people aplenty in the demonstration, and entire group of black/Latino Capoeira artists, and very obviously non-Chinese people out in the audience. How about not ignoring them entirely? If a person with no ancestral ties to China donated to come and perform and benefit people out of fellow human feeling, does that not deserve some kind of shout-out? How about not excluding those people systematically in every one of your long, boring speeches? What fucking country do you think you're in? (Hint: it's not Minichina.) Man, talk about reinforcing the negative stereotypes, guys. Yo quiero my soul back.

Read all about it

2008-05-13T20:47:59Z

I was an extra in a movie! Pictures taken with an awesome expensive lens can be seen here. Mostly my part was standing, staring, and punching. Exciting! (Li Jing and the other ladies in the army were awesome.) We shot in the sun for several hours, so now my face is tan. Unfortunately it was too blasted cold for me to expose any other part of my body, so the color ends there. Somewhat off topic, stereotypes say that Asians are polite and more well-mannered than their Western counterparts, but ethnically, which group of friends do you figure never batted an eye at me being sensitive to spicy foods and which group was like, "HAHAHA you can't eat spicy foods?! You wimp! Now we can't take you any place fun!" that had me drinking hot chili oil inside of a year? Which group do you figure said, "Haha, awesome!" when I uploaded the best photo of me evar, 'Guns!' and which group do you think was all, "Dude, you need a fuckin' tan." Yeah, I thought so. :D I hope it warms up this week. I am San Francisco complexioned. )=

Spring Biddy

2008-05-09T19:28:01Z

I've been in a feminine type of mood lately, so I've been trying to buy a few skirts and pretty shirts I can wear now that it's spring time and merely freezing cold and tumultuously windy in beautiful San Francisco. As I don't see myself ever making the type of income where I can cheerfully drop $200-$600 on a single article of clothing, and because I often suffer from the dreaded "walk into a store and hate everything in season, walk back out and resent the 5 minutes of my life I'll never get back" syndrome, I have turned to that great flea market to us all, eBay. eBay is fascinating in that it's one of the few sites on the net that never really changed. If you want to see what ugly personal websites looked like in 1995, you can find them a-plenty on eBay. Unfortunately this also means that those hideous habits that you saw when the internet was new and shiny are also still in abundance. "L@@K STUNNING GORGOUS CLOTHING COVRD IN SEQUENCE IN ALL CAPS *WHISTLES*" titles abound, making me wish for that ability to call down a rain of white hot meteor fire from the heavens upon the auctioneer to cleanse the earth. Also, having sold something on eBay once, I can tell you there's a character limit to what you can put in that little blurb about your item. I have no idea how people have found room to put their entire horrible life stories in there, but there you have them, "cheating husband" auctions where all items are going to support a woman and her autistic children because she was just left with no child support by her husband who ran off with another woman, or "support my handicapped spouse and children" auctions by a woman who needs to care for her crippled and bedridden family 24 hours a day. I don't know how you fit those stories in there folks, but now I feel terrible, simply terrible that your item is not in my size.

En Route

2008-04-17T20:00:24Z

OH MY GOD, the JAL Sakura lounge is awesome. There's free snacks, free booze and free tea and free wireless access. Who cares about being 3 hours early for your flight when you're stuffing your face with cheese & crackers and rice balls and swilling it down with cans of oolong and snifters of Baileys? Pictures to follow when I arrive at my destination. I hear the West Coast -> connecting flight at Japan -> Taiwan trip is a killer.

Whirled goes beta

2008-03-31T22:38:46Z

Hooray! I haven't had as much time to go through and play with all of the cool things being added as I like, and I'm still waiting for an avatar/easy tool to make stuff of my own, but it's really cool. Come in and say hi! You don't need to register or anything to play games and interact with stuff in the rooms. (The little spheres in the background play beats when you bounce them. I'm saving up for more to make my own beats.)

Goodwill

2008-03-05T21:13:20Z

I encountered the most awesome ambassador to the ethnicities of San Francisco in the elevator at the doctor's office the other week. I get on the elevator with two other guys, and one of the fellows turns to me and says, in a heavy accent, "Ni hao ma." I smiled and said "Ni hao" back to him, and he asks, in that same Spanish-speaking accent, "You speak Chinese?" "No sir, I'm a Japanese American." I reply. "Oh. Sayonara!" he bids me as I exit the elevator. As I am rounding the corner, he turns to the other fellow in the elevator, a white guy, and just before the doors close, I hear him say, "What's up, man." Isn't that fantastic? I'll admit at first I was a bit on guard because I've been hit on too many times by creepy older men in Japanese book stores, but I love the idea of somebody taking time to learn greetings in different languages, then taking time out of his day to try to greet and connect with people in (hopefully) their native languages. It's such a friendly gesture, even if my native language is English.

Giving the double deuce to One Rincon

2008-02-15T22:00:34Z

I fucking hate this building. It's a huge glass high rise that's apparently going to be filled with overpriced condominiums and every time I drive out of the city, it rises like a middle finger out of the skyline, completely blocking my view of the Bay Bridge and the East Bay. It's also become something of a driving hazard because now whenever I see it, I use my middle finger to block it out and squeeze one eye shut so I can keep it out of my sights and start swearing at it, all while driving in traffic and trying to merge onto the bridge.

Rhodion's Demise

2008-01-23T20:12:46Z

Heath Ledger is a sad story, but why is he two of the headlines in Asian news on the BBC? It's ASIA. It's huge! There's got to be something going on all of those countries that is worth reporting. I believe this is punishment for me plotting to turn Omaha, Nebraska into a smoking crater when I found out that Coheed and Cambria are opening a concert for Linkin Park on February 12th. I actually like Mike Shinoda and Linkin Park, but I'm willing to suck it up for the good of humanity if it means taking out those Dadaist destroyers of music for good. (If you don't know who Coheed and Cambria are, good for you! Articles that sum them up better than I could can be found here and here.)

Bluster

2008-01-04T20:13:36Z

Ze world, eet is endink. Sheets of water coming from the sky! Gusts of wind around 60 miles per hour! Rain drops and leaves being blown into me so hard that they sting! Goals for today have rapidly changed from "read and disseminate world news, read more books" to "figure out how to dry out pants/shoes after long wade to work because MUNI exploded." In the plus, I have now figured out another reason why nature gave me these stubby, tree trunk-like legs. In addition to squatting in the rice paddies all day, I was built to withstand wind.

Assault a Battery

2008-01-03T20:20:15Z

On the topic of music, the sound went really wonky on my free iPod, and in the firm belief that a free mp3 player is the best kind of mp3 player that one can possibly have, I took the damn thing apart in an attempt to figure out what is wrong. It was an odd problem. The background music would play fine, but all vocals were muted/unintelligible. As my goal whenever I have passengers in the car is to laugh derisively at their polite and gentle attempts to get me to play their The Bobs or The Police CDs and to generally be as much of an ass as possible when I have a captive audience, this was not acceptable in any form. (My philosophy here is that I am the driver, and therefore I am the jerkface poopyhead.) Any instructions online that tell you the assembly and motherboard "slide out easily" from the metal case is a fat, filthy lie. I won't go into details save to tell you that getting it apart and putting it back together involved a lot of swearing and a hammer. Works fine now, though. And my assault on passenger eardrums with my choice of music continues.

NE 1 4 rock?

2007-12-31T22:31:37Z

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

Rocks

2007-12-30T08:31:31Z

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?

My Kshinoda

2007-12-27T17:19:28Z

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.)

Dismay day in December

2007-12-16T10:18:33Z

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.