Into the Madding Crowd

You are officially a travel blog. Dost thou compute?

In about 9 hours, I will be on my way to Hartsfield-Jackson, overstuffed suitcase, laptop and purse in tow. After a frantic search for my DVD set of It’s Always Sunny, I’ve finally finished packing. [Turns out, it somehow got shoved under a rug and regrettably stepped on. Luckily, only the box suffered topical-squashedness.]

Odd to think that by the time I get back, classes will be back in session. It seems that my Christmas vacation has barely begun and we’re already at the climax. Kind of premature, it feels like. Regardless, it’s always nice to return to the motherland. Gives me waves of Amy Tan-like inspiration. Perhaps I’ll be inspired to begin my book. Not my epic fantasy tale of derring-do and adventure, but my other one: a sentimental, culturally-significant collection of semi-fictional immigrant stories swirled in with East Asian mythology, written with a magical realism touch. Yeah, that one. So far, all I have is that one of my characters writes fortune cookie fortunes for a living.

My major objective this trip around is to take a lot of cool pictures, show off my white boyfriend to my extended family and document the trip in as many online mediums as possible. I’ve got a Twitter, Tumblr, blog, Facebook and print journal to keep up with. I am not to be trifled with, people. This Julie Abroad 2.0-style. I’ll probably spend more time documenting events than actually experiencing them.

When I say “show off my white boyfriend,” I mean, show him off like an alien specimen at a 5-cent freak show. I expect lots of hair-touching, oggling and overall awkwardness and uncomfortableness. It’s going to be awesome.

Look! Another video of Julie acting a fool!

For my new media capstone class, we have to develop a series of video shorts that can hypothetically be broadcasted to cell phones — Mobi-sodes if you will. The journalism school recently purchased a TV station and has commissioned us new media students to tinker away at developing Mobile TV. I volunteered to cover the concept of a reviews show and came up with the idea of a Soup-esque short that lampoons bad movie releases. I dummied up a mock episode of what that show would look like — a mock-sode if you will.

It went over well with my classmates, but I want to post it on my blog because a.) I’m pretty proud of it, considering I slapped it together over the course of 3 hours. b.) I want some feedback, would you watch something like this? does the format work? what other movies do you want to see critiqued in this manner? 

Oh, and please ignore my bad acting, oily face and lame humor.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_lb9GgUJHU]

In other news, can’t wait to go to China this Christmas! I will have Randy in tow. He’ll probably be the first white person ever to step in my dad’s village.

“It’s a red hearted vibration 
Pushing through the walls of dark imagination 
Finding no equation” 

- Idlewild

Of the grey surbanite house I’ve lived in until I was 5, I can only remember one thing. The ghost-woman that lived in my closet. She slept in the basket of my winter clothes and wrapped herself in Wal-Mart plastic bags. Stockily built, but guant, her eyes were inky black and her hair was long and white. She often held me close and whispered about a past I can only begin to unravel now. 

Only the women in my family knew about her. My mother knows her because she sated her with incense smoke and paper money. I know her because I saw her in these half-dreams. My grandmother knows her best because she was the one who brought her from China in a beige faux leather suitcase. She called her the White Lady.

In the 1940’s, when White Lady was twenty, she hid from the Japanese in the nearby hills and never came out. I imagine her crawling in the dark, sipping fetid rainwater and feeling around under rocks for moss. I think that my grandmother found her body and accidentally brought her spirit back to the village in a water bucket. Having no family to claim her body, she claimed us as her family. 

And no matter where we’ve moved, sometimes I think she follows us, casting long shadows into our lives.

Like a box of chocolates, pick and choose:

Coconut:

Fresh off a successful but unnecessarily extravagant Olympics, another fiasco over tainted products. Only this time it’s so much more…depraved. Here’s the CNN article that Audrey posted on the EB thread today. 

Maybe its my biological clock starting to wind up, but I really got pissed over this. I can’t imagine how it must feel, the realization that you have been slowing poisoning your child. I wanted to go into those pictures and pick up the babies and just cradle them.

It just goes to show, China is the real paper tiger. All show and empty inside.

Caramel:

I’m pretty sure I’ve founded a new breed of indie elitism. I am an Asian indie elitist. I find that I’m much more likely to enjoy an artist if he/she is Asian. Prime example: Priscilla Ahn, my new impulse album buy. I’ve had a “to buy” list going on for weeks. Today, I hear “Lullaby” on Pandora.com and I immediately threw my plans to the wind and got her entire album. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBNMdh6SeBA]

Raspberry:

Starting watching the new show “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” I enjoy it, but I’m not a fan…just yet. The humor is definitely my style: awkward, off-beat Arrested Development-esque. There were certainly laugh out loud moments. I think I just need time for it to grow on me. Arrested definitely had to grow on me, and now I’m in love with it. Angel took about two/three episodes to get me hooked, as did Outlaw Star. Firefly however, had me at hello. 

Chocolate: A memory came surfacing up like a corpse finally decayed enough to loosen from the concrete.

Let’s get drunk
You can drive us to the harbor
Wish upon a star but
Do you know what stars are?
Balls of fire, burning up the black space
Falling from the landscape
Exploding in the face of God

Let’s get crazy,
Talk about our big plans
Places that you’re going
Places that I haven’t been
Build my walls up
Concrete castle

Keep this kingdom free of hassle, yeah

- Something Corporate