so many books, vol. 2

Yesterday, I threw down some book recommendations. Today, you get the rest! So sit back, relax, and try to steer clear of your plastic, cos nearly all of these are worth owning.

slow boat to china

my chinese consulate friend // san francisco

...and by "boat," I mean "very long flight(s)," but you get the idea.

At any rate, it's an announcement fairly long coming, and many (if not most (or maybe all)) of you are already aware of the news, but just to make it official: I'm moving to China for a year. Specifically, Shanghai. So yeah. Color me stoked.

you win this round, pearson...

Thanks to the persistence of one man (you may or may not know him by the name Juan Canadilla, but that's another story for another day), I'm posting again. It's one of two assignments I've completed for my online fiction class, but I'm too lazy to post both at the moment... not to mention tired. I've spent the better part of my post-9-to-5 day battling writer's block to beat a freelance PR project into submission... hopefully successfully, but there's no knowing that until tomorrow. And now I'm rambling (inarticulately at that), but I really just couldn't care less. So.

Yeah.

The assignment: Write 5 opening lines for the same story. The idea being that each should be a totally unique line, not just a variation or minor alteration of its predecessor.

the bold & the biographical

No matter how old I get, I don't think I'll ever get over the rush of excitement that accompanies the first day of school!

Well, ok... so I'm not technically matriculating anywhere, but my 10-week online fiction workshop started today, & I. Am. STOKED!!

First assignment: Submit a bio, 500 words or less. Given that we're immersed in a virtual classroom, it's a logical exercise to foster a sense of community (blah blah educational buzzword blah).

recession proof

Get it? :)

It's officially official: I've been laid off (although I volunteered to be (long story)). Friday 20 February is my last day, and then preparations for my long-awaited reverse roadtrip kick into high gear (yeah, it's only been about 18 months, but that's a long time for me to live anywhere, let alone on the wrong coast).

You didn't think that all that talk about a newly unemployed 20-something was hypothetical, did you?

housing hypotheticals

Just wrote a new blog post for work and thought at least the first half was worth sharing here.

This seems like it should hardly come as a shock, but newsflash! from Seeking Alpha: Home prices have increased more rapidly than rents, it's significantly cheaper to rent than to buy (not even taking into account the costs of taxes and insurance (albeit also not factoring in that mortgage interest is tax deductible, I'll give you that)). Conclusion: Financially, there is no motivation to buy a home aside from price appreciation. Thus, in a market where homes are depreciating in value (i.e. the current one (in fact, the Wall Street Journal reports that price declines accelerated in 4Q2008)), it is illogical to buy a home.

back in action, take 2

Well, I started the recent impromptu California trip post, I guess I might as well finish it, right?

So from SFO, where I was picked up by my sister, mom, and grandma, we went to P.F. Chang's in Pleasanton—across the street from where I used to work, incidentally—at which point I attempted to teach my mom and hers how to use chopsticks...

This endeavor would ultimately fail. No great surprise there.

back in action

It's weird to think that this was the start to my inaugural weekend: Cocktails at Halo, complete with red, white, and blue ambient lighting. Good friends, good drinks, followed by good food, followed by math jokes on chalkboards (integral of e to the power of x, anyone?)...

Sadly, the fun-filled weekend was destined to be short lived.

Actually, what I found while taking out trash pre-night-out-on-the-town should have clued me in to what was to eventually follow:

Yeah... Not a pretty picture by any stretch of the imagination. I only hope the little guy had expired before the gate closed (if that doesn't make sense, don't ask... trust me, you'll be better off).

At any rate, my fun night out on the town was on the happier side of a punctuating phone call I'd rather not go in to at the moment. Suffice it to say, that call led to a last-minute flight reservation, a 5 a.m. trek to the Dupont Circle Metro station...

...some quality reading time spent at a practically deserted gate...

...a window seat...

...which was awesome. The screaming baby sitting directly behind me? Not so much...

...some fantastic astronautically inspired artwork throughout SFO...

...complete with some bitching robots (I'm a sucker for robots (they're the new pirates, you know))...

...and that's all I really feel like getting in to at the moment. Maybe I'll talk about it more later on. Then again, maybe I won't.

Not like it really matters either way.

obey omnipresence

I think one of my favorite things about living in DC is the fact that Shepard Fairey's stuff is everywhere, sometimes tucked away on the back of a street sign on a cheap black & white sticker a la Kinkos, sometimes plastered as an urban alley mural, but always there just waiting for someone to stop and take notice.

Don't ask me what's up with the "Art Rat" squirrel in Mickey Mouse ears... Gotta love a mixed metaphor.

And it's not as if I didn't notice his stuff in the other places I've lived—the East Bay is more than a little fond of its Obey Giant stickers—but the comparative volume here is somewhat overwhelming. Kind of like how Berkeley is the only place I've found Trystero muted post-horn tags. I'm sure you can find them in just about every city if you look hard enough, but strongly doubt the frequency is really comparable.



Just finished reading Born Standing Up by Steve Martin yesterday, so this one jumped out at me. It was interesting to hear about the transition from the Summer of Love to the 1970s. Given the atrocities and horror of our first national conflict for the television age, combined with the failure death of Flower Power, is it any wonder that hippies gave way to the "Me" Decade?

But it's nice to see the imagery being appropriated for today's "unwinnable war(s)."

Speaking of appropriate...


After being inundated with depressing headline after depressing headline for so long it feels like the sky was always falling, this got a good laugh out of me—albeit a bittersweet one, but hey, these days I'll take what I can get. And the irony is oh-so-delicious ("no cents," read "sense").

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I hope to one day meet Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson...

...so's I can kick him in the crotch.

rearview mirrors

Steven asked for an example of how to handle flashbacks in a story, and since the Word doc I had in mind is saved on my dinosaur of a Dell that no longer boots up and I had to retype the thing anyway, I figured I might as well post it here.

So here goes:

Gray eyes slit through aviator glasses, staring down the sun. Top gun, fucking Maverick. Feeling the need, the need for speed. More so now than ever.

There had been a car, hadn't there? Twenty-five-hundred RPMs, downshifting to fourth to pass on the left of a two-lane highway, manicured nails tuning the radio dial, mariachis drifting through static

french-tip manicure. her favorite

Needle slanting, laying left. Coasting to the dusty shoulder, a chugging halt. Blood red bullseye as the needle buries itself below the E. Seems familiar, somehow... busted radiator hose

red. blood red lips or lipstick?

Could've been. Running on empty, moving, movies, the needle, volcanic steam, falling needles, the E, must be...

Reeling left, scanning the horizon for the cherry red Mustang he knows he'll find shimmering in the heat baking off the asphalt in the distance, not so distant, he can't have walked too far...

Nothing there but sand and a misfired synapse, blurred and fogged memory of a Sean Penn film.

He's been walking the desert so long he's forgotten anything else. He has his suspicions that there was something more once, the pins and needles of recollection, smell of rust and salt that's not quite carried by the breeze but is present nonetheless. A faint echo on the edges of perception, like the skipping track of an album whose notes and words you can't recall.

Fuck it. He's here now, has always been here. At least there's quiet. At least he's alone...

red rusted. iron.

Only he's not alone, not really. Like the eye of some prehistoric omen, the sun blazes overhead, an unceasing beacon. Muting the world, tinting reality, the aviator glasses aren't enough to block out his shadow. Its held his trail doggedly from the beginning...

Whenever the fuck that was.

rat in a cheeseless maze

Turning his back to his tracks and the shadow, he scans the horizon, searching for... what? Pavement, tire tread, signs of civilization, gas pump

mariachi music, tin warbling voice of the stereo

billboard, fucking something. There should be some goddamned thing, a sign...

Not that he honestly believes that. Small doses of comfort through larger tales of fiction, and the doses are getting smaller all the time. Not that that's any different from the way things were before.

Is it?

Distracted hand loosens the knot in his necktie as the eyes behind the shades drink in the expanse of sand, panoramic thirst.

A shadow passes over his face; he looks up to watch a bird circle past the sun. Hawk, maybe? Too soon to tell. Darkened wingspan flapping dustward...

Touchdown.

Not a hawk then. Not even a falcon

french manicure finger tips trailing down his thigh

Blood faced buzzard. No, something not quite right about that either. Frames from a Disney movie or National Geographic. Something about a prison

topped-off gas tank, flamenco guitar as petroleum splatters.
metronomic dripping keeping time

and keys... jangling keys on a metal ring. Doors slamming shut—

Turkey vulture.

well-thumbed pages of a Norton Anthology,
perfumed pout and Maybelline stains.
"quoth the raven"

Aww, fuck it.

The sun passes behind a pack of cumulo nimbi

they used to laugh together when she mispronounced "meteorology,"
but when had that been? and where (who?) the fuck is she now?

as he meets the stare of the vulture. His gray eyes burn inside its hollow black ones, staring at his own mirrored stare. Looking down, he notes that the vulture casts no shadow.

Neither does he.

Numbed fingers rub the crusted sand from swollen eyelids. Whether from sleep or the ground, he's unable to tell anymore. Not that it matters now.

Props himself up on an uncertain elbow, shifting his freight to rest on his ass he feels

her hand on his skin. groping, a caress, lingering...
skin meeting skin, his skin, not mine

a lump under the right cheek. Pulls from his pocket a weather-beaten wallet, the cracked brown of aging black leather. Windburn eyes watch as his fingers flip open the wrinkled flap, pull out a California driver's license, so there must have been a car. Or a road.

Or, at the very least, there must have been California.

Unless...

unbuttoned fly. 501s draped over the chair back.

male. 5'10". Hair: Brown. Eyes: Blue.

But his eyes are gray behind his Maverick shades. Mom and dad, their eyes were blue, but not mine. Some people called it hazel, but that's not right. It was the color of lack, it was no pigment, it was

she liked the fact that they changed to match her outfits

gray.

How much longer are you gonna leave me here? I've been out in the desert for... days? years? It's fucking hot, throw me a bone, man. Give me a gun, a knife, fucking something. A tool.

Help me end it.

god helps those who

Fuck you.

He's on his own.

Probably not exactly what he has in mind, but it's the best I could do on short notice.