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Thursday, 19 November 2009

UCLA Protest

I spent my day today marching around the UCLA campus. For any of you that haven’t heard, the UC system had proposed a 32% tuition hike. Sadly, this vote passed shortly after I left the campus, although currently, several of my fellow protesters are blockading the regents inside the building.

This was my first ‘protest’, as in, the first time I was a member of a pulsing and throbbing mass organism that wasn’t inside a concert venue. I met up with one of my best friends who is currently attending UCSC (I haven’t seen her in two years, it was exciting!) and we got started. Somehow, some of the students knew which room the regents were in, so we moved our 100+ crowd of people under their window and proceeded to shout our little hearts out. “No cuts! No fees! Education should be free!” hollered a young man as he scrambled up a light post.
“Whose university? OUR UNIVERSITY!” rejoined our mob, cheering and raising our signs. There were several policemen occupying the entryways to the building the regents were in. They were holding very large guns. (Notice the cop centered in the first picture. I couldn't zoom in with my cell phone but GOD! That motherfucker had a huge ass gun.)

Someone pointed out that our group was not very large. “SO LET’S GO GET SOME PEOPLE!!!!” someone screamed into a bullhorn. With that, we were off, on our three-hour march around the campus. Many buildings were already shut down- ‘occupied’ by angry students.

We walked down the streets, none of us using the sidewalk. ("Whose streets? Our streets!")

There were people filming us everywhere. There were probably at least fifteen news crews, and also every civilian that didn't participate in our march stood on the sidewalk taking pictures.

We continued down the streets, our numbers growing steadily as we passed by classrooms and cafes. People would stop at the classrooms and yell, "Walkout!" until a handful of students would come out and join. Cheering, we kept going.

We reached a wide intersection, and people began to sit down. However, to avoid being annoying to the Big Blue Buses trying to navigate their way through our massive population, we only sat for about five minutes. Cars on the street were honking to show their support, and when we impeded the flow of traffic, they would reach out and high five us.

Afterward, we headed back over to Covel Commons, where the regents were voting. People were making speeches, including some of the individuals who had been arrested the day before. Students were no longer allowed in the meeting, because apparently, they had not been allowed any speaking time, even though the regents had no problem giving themselves a healthy lunch break. To correct this, the students had taken to chanting after their attempts at speaking had been repeatedly ignored.

Sadly, I hadn't had much to drink throughout the entire deal, so I was feeling very dehydrated. I said goodbye to my friend earlier than I had hoped, and stumbled through the crowd to find something to drink. However, much to my surprise, I had walked no further than ten feet when suddenly, my eyes stopped working. All I could see was blinding flashes of light, and my ears felt like they were five hundred feet below the sea. I could hear my blood pounding inside my head and my stomach twisted into an ugly knot. I tried to play it cool by refusing to stop walking, even though I was entirely blinded. This achieved little, although I managed to walk right into a wall. I felt my way down the ground and sat there until my eyes could see again. Unfortunately, I did the exact same thing five minutes later, except instead of walking into a wall, I walked into a much needed beverage cooler.

Anyways, I'm still alive. I managed to survive both the infamous LAPD, and an interesting bout of dehydration, just to tell the tale to you.

Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Currently
Iris
By Goo Goo Dolls
see related
25 Facts About Me (Because You Really Wanted To Know)

In case you weren't made aware by emails gushing into your inbox saying "You've been tagged!", there's been an circulatory weblog of facts about you. Twenty-five of them, in fact.

So. Here they are. Enjoy.

1. When I eat pizza, and I'm in the comfort and privacy of my own home, I will chew off all the toppings, lick the sauce off, and then eat the plain, wet crust, right to left.

2. I have dyed my hair blonde, brown, red and black. Unfortunately, most people thought that the black was blue. I kept telling myself it was just bringing out my eyes.

3. I have blue eyes.

4. My working vocabulary has been noted to be considerably larger than that of the average American- a trait that consistently pisses people off. Weirdos.

5. I lived on an island for seven months.

6. On said island, I once accompanied my father on a rabbit hunting expedition. We successfully shot and killed sixteen rabbits. I was six.

7. I knew an elderly couple on the island. She was a retired stage actress. He was a crusty old sailor. They had a daschund. Her name was Tasha, and she walked off a cliff one day and died. There was a lot of death on that island.

8. I can't draw. Everything I attempt to recreate on paper either ends up looking like a bowl of oatmeal, or a wigged out game of Taipei.

9. I love music, and I almost always have some playing around me somewhere.

10. I believe in ghosts, and this is because I am continually plagued by them.

11. I love chocolate with a passion that can be labeled as casually orgasmic.

12. I have a kitten, and her name is Emo Bojangles. She has a proclivity to go for the nipples. She has curbed my nudist tendencies.

13. I prefer to sleep with no less than three blankets on my bed, no matter the time of year.

14. I also prefer small spaces. When I am upset, it is not strange to find me under the bed or in the closet.

15. My favorite TV show is Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. I have both seasons, and have watched all of the episodes at least three times.

16. I have a shoulder bag that I carry everywhere. I got it from my favorite store in Bellingham, "Passionfly". Passionfly has a huge mural of a girl with a chick dick painted on the side wall.

17. My grandmother once told me that her father was offered a position in a major baseball team. However, back then, in the thirties, an office job paid more. He turned their offer down.

18. I named one of our plants "Matilda" shortly after moving to Burbank. Thus far, Matilda is the only plant that does not seem to be suffering from my lack of tender loving care.

19. My favorite song off of Weezer's new album "Raditude", is "I'm Your Daddy". I'm not sure why.

20. I love thrift stores, and I am heartbroken that I cannot find any good, cheap ones within a reasonable distance, here in SoCal.

21. I am very good at solving Sudoku puzzles. I think this may be because in my sophomore year of high school, I was home schooled, and the only thing to get me through the long hours I spent in my bedroom was my handheld electronic Sudoku game.

22. I had my first Filipino fast food dish on Sunday. The chain is called "Jollibee". Their mascot is a jolly bee. The jolly bee freaks the hell out of me.

23. I am getting married sometime next year. We haven't decided exactly when. We're impulsive that way.

24. Within the states, I have been to Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Florida. Other than that, I breached the border of Mexico and made it as far south as Tijuana, and I frequently crossed the Canadian border to get into B.C. God bless Beautiful British Columbia.

25. I hope to eventually be able to scrape up enough money and math skills to be able to attend a university. I would like to major in Psychology and go on to become a psychotherapist. We'll see if I'm stable enough to handle a career like that when the time comes.

And folks, there you have it.

Thursday, 12 November 2009

Currently
Girls and Boys
By Ingrid Michaelson
see related
Tattoos

I am currently in Orlando. Yes, Florida. I never thought I’d see the day where I would be on the East Coast, soaking in the summer sun… er, November rain. Our exit off of the plane on Tuesday night was a humid and rainy one, and while there was a brief patch of humid warmth yesterday afternoon, today has been nothing but cold and windy.
I’m surrounded by hundreds of optometrists, proudly displaying their name badges (there’s an exclusive conference going on at this hotel). We’re having a ball with the outfits- at dinner we see the guy in the yellow polo shirt, tucked into khaki shorts, with tennis shoes and socks rolled halfway up to his calf. During the day, all the doctors either have a nice suit or a fancy dress with a classy cardigan.
Strangely enough, they all look the same. The men are either white or Asian. They’re mostly old, and none are attractive. The women are either white or Asian, all between 30 and 40, all plain. The white women have the awkward in-between stage haircut, where they can’t decide if they should just go all fifties perm style, or if they should keep their youthful long locks. The Asian women are just kind of ugly.

I got the last attractive optometrist!

The hotel we’re staying at is beautiful. It has a tennis, volleyball and basketball court, and a hundred acre golf course. There are about five different pools, some indoor, some out, with cascading waterfalls, and spas. The bottom level of the hotel is mainly shops and food (aaah, hotels, place of the $1.60 Krispy Kreme donut). Needless to say, I’ve spent a lot of money that I don’t have while trolling around here.

I’m alone most of the day, as the purpose of this trip was so that el boyfriendo could spend time learning. Much to my chagrin, however, I soon discovered that Orlando could have more aptly been named “The City of No Sidewalks or Free Wi-Fi” rather than “The City Beautiful”. The hotel was very clever, very clever indeed. They shuttle us fools into the city of Orlando, drop us off at a motel, charge us $15/day for wi-fi, so we can’t afford to map our position, and then say, “Sorry, there’s no sidewalks, I think you’ll have to take one of our concierge cars if you want to get to CVS”.

Well, said I, “Fuck that shit!” Bored out of my mind, I decided that it was high time for me to permanently ink myself. So, to spite the corporate greed of the Marriott World Center, I called a cab instead of the concierge car, and asked him to take me to the nearest tattoo studio. It turned out to be exactly fourteen dollars and seventy-five cents away, on a seedy highway. I thanked the cab driver, who was Haitian, and thoroughly delighted to hear that I had two brothers from Port-au-Prince, and handed over some more of my hard earned money, and watched as he drove away. I wished myself luck on figuring out how to get back to the hotel, and wandered into the tattoo shop.

The man that greeted me looked fairly normal, unlike his shop-mate. He only had tattoos up and down his arms, and some on his knuckles. His counterpart had tattoos for eyebrows, piercings to show where his eyebrows should have been, nose plugs, ear plugs, and no remaining visible skin except for his ears. Thankfully, it was the first guy took me back into his little room. I showed him what I wanted done (a word that my boyfriend assures me means “God” in an ancient Tagalog script), and he seemed completely baffled.

“What the hell is this?” he asked.

“Some old Filipino word,” I answered.

The other guy came waltzing by and stopped and studied it for a minute. “It means, ‘I hate Florida’,” he said with a grand air.

Glad he cleared that up for me.

I showed him where I wanted it- centered on my neck. Sadly, he ended up extending it a little bit further, (eliciting a “OH MY GOD, THAT’S BIGGER THAN MINE!” comment from my ever supportive fiancé after I returned to the hotel, but GODDAMNIT I like it!). He said, “Ok, let’s do thi- fuck who keeps talking to me!” (Facebook was open on his laptop.)

Sitting me down, he applied his initial sketch, I said it looked great, and let’s do this shit already. I was getting kind of nervous, and I just wanted to be done with it. He took out his needle gun thing and started it up. As it drilled away behind my ear I realized tattoos don’t really hurt at all. While it didn’t make me want to scream “Oh, yes! OH GOD, GIVE ME MORE!” it certainly didn’t hurt like how people had told me it would (especially since it was on my spine). But while the fear of the pain quickly dissipated, my fear of suddenly sneezing only continued to increase until the tattoo was finished. He had started the procedure with a stern warning of “Whatever you do, DON’T MOVE. I’m resting on you- you move, I move, the tattoo sucks for the rest of your life.”

So there we were, him etching away, and me terrified of accidentally inhaling anything that would make me sneeze. But before I could muster up a sympathetic sneeze, he wiped the last trickle of blood from my neck and said,
“Ok, all done.”

And with that, I was finished.

Here’s a photo for anyone who’s interested:

And yes, I'm aware I have the neck of a giraffe. Ah well.

Friday, 06 November 2009

Help Me Decide! Hair Color Edition

So, I had dyed my hair black a year ago, as a tribute to winter. When spring rolled around, I dyed my hair red, (I felt it was fitting), and much to my surprise, everyone around me breathed a huge sigh of relief. "FINALLY!" they said. "I was getting SO tired of the black hair!"

However, since these people were primarily my grandmother and one of my friends that says whatever he wants to whenever he wants to, I wasn't sure how seriously to take them. My boyfriend loved it, but since he's colorblind, and he never saw it on me in person, I'm leery of taking his advice. (Plus, black is a real bitch to get out.) I'm currently as close to my natural color as I've been since I was fourteen, (a mousy brown), as depicted in the second picture.

So, please, ignore the poor lighting, ugly face, fat arms etc, and advise me on if I should stick with the brown hair or go back to black (cause once you go black, you'll never go back).

Thanks!

OR