vacation week, you were awesome.

oh, ilan hall and ted allen. my two great culinary-world loves in my life. i think i’m going to print out this picture and hang it over my bed.

what a lovely weekend. for the first time, i was coming off a fairly decent week and decided to celebrate. having a 5-day-long stretch where i wasn’t moody, depressed, or dumpy-feeling was something to celebrate. after going to the natural history museum to see a packed exhibition hall for the mountain goats, we jetted toward:

yes! with okonomiyaki! we held off our normal firewater-fridays for gaja restaurant, where you get to cook your own okonomiyaki in front of the giant grill on your table. we haven’t gone to gaja in something close to a year and a half, since we decided it was detrimental to fitting into tuxes and dresses. but now that there are no more public-affair events we actually need to look good for, CALORIES AHOY! after we overstayed our welcome, we drove to san pedro to see the last day of the grunion run.

on saturday, we returned every dress i bought and didn’t wear to the wedding, netting around $300 back into my bank account, had dinner with my sister, and went to the japan-la anniversary party at hollywood & highland. the party coincided with their regular saturday-clubbing-night at the complex, so we saw our share of whores and ripped-up-tshirt fights on our way into the place. once there, it was fairly underwhelming, with fewer people in cosplay outfits than i imagined, and more douchey looking albino guys with sideways caps. we left to catch the last subway back into downtown, and then got back in the car to get strawberry donuts from the donut man.

promptly after eating half a donut, i passed out on the couch, and there was most of my weekend in a nutshell.

i’m counting down the week i have here, planning things to do while theoretically free. oh, i can’t wait.

so it finally happened. this past tuesday, after coming back from new jersey (for b’s brother’s gigantic, elaborate crazy-time wedding), i handed in my resignation notice at my job.

basically, it took what happened in the past few weeks at work combined with the offensive amounts of contemplating i did about my life over the weekend to really make me come to the decision. and i wasn’t even sure about the decision really until i walked into the office on tuesday. i could’ve gone either way. but it’s done. over the weekend, i kind of felt like there were a lot of things i needed to be changing in my life. this became the first order, so to speak.

it’s practically been three years that i’ve been here, and there has been so much that’s changed and evolved about it. simply put, it’s not really the same place i was really excited to come work at back in october of ‘05. i mean, gone were the days of this:

and in came the days where i wasn’t even sure what i was doing for myself anymore. but since tuesday, things have seemed slightly rosier. oh, and i haven’t had a drink since then. viva!

also, now since i don’t have a wedding-fancy dress to have to fit into (oh, thank you spanx), i’ve been in food-celebratory mode. mushroom okonomiyaki, squash enchiladas, TOAST! oh god, how i’ve missed all of you. i swear, by the end of june, i’ll be living in a giant tarp in my apartment, jobless, obscenely obese, but happy.

it’s been practically 17 years (17?!) since i discovered the kids in the hall, and considering how i’ve seemingly (seemingly?!) grown up since then, i’ll be honest in admitting that it feels a little weird to be going to yet another one of their reunion shows tonight. you would think that after a certain amount of time, you grow out of stuff. i’ve most certainly grown out of my dave foley crush, especially after knowing some of the stuff i’ve heard from my canadian coworker/dave foley ex. weird, no?

of course, the mitigating factor in my going to this show is mainly that it’s about 5 blocks from my apartment and i can walk there as inebriated as i please. since it’s friday, and since i’ve been in a work-depression-funk, i’ve taken up after-work drinking. i look forward to it a lot, which is kind of sad but the only way i’ve been able to sanely deal with work and other troubles. once i’m out of work, b and i pretty much immediately hit up the izakaya places and basically greedily eat up all the happy hour deals we can. one good thing that’s come of it is my newfound tolerance for sake.

so the show. i think i’m riding this weird “holy shit, my high school reunion is next year” kind of nostalgic wave. i found most of the people i’d really rather avoid on facebook this morning in between fire drills for work, and debated whether i wanted to say hi or burrow my face my chair and hope i’m not found. but then again, what makes me think that they’d want to say hi either, considering the lengths i went to sever ties with certain people.

my coworker is going to his high school reunion later this year and said it wasn’t too big a deal since he’d visit most of his high school friends during the christmas season anyway. so what’s my deal?

i meant to update you, website, a few weeks ago, but i ended up forgetting my wordpress admin username/password. so, instead of completely abolishing my website, it finally came to me in the middle of a flurry of work-tasks. oh, what have my work days come to where i’m too busy to work to update this piece of junk.

i’ve been really quite busy lately, and it has its ups and downs. apparently i’ve taken up drinking again and have gotten back at least half of the tolerance i had when i was a peak alcoholic, at age 24.  all this work makes me either want to drink more or eat more, so i try to balance it out by not eating and covering up my hunger with more liquor. worked for courtney love! i’ve been helping out people do little freelance projects here and there and i’ve never been more happy with working. it’s not the kind of design stuff i do at work where i want to gouge out my eye, but rather, fun things that reaffirm why i want to do what i’m doing. combine that with actually making a point to wake up early one out of the two weekend days. and for once (once!), it’s nice not having to fret about affording things.

the next month is going to be wacky. i’m back to two bags of tea in my morning tea now, and my headaches have come back with a vengeance. oh lazy days, where’d you go?

link: stuff white people like - asian girls

so i love this blog. it’s my new favorite website. and of course, going through some of the old posts, i found this one - the “asian girls” entry.

i kind of agree with the fact that sandra oh is some sort of animal. she’s not necessarily unattractive, but she’s definitely not particularly attractive. she’s just there. but she’s some sort of figure that a lot of guys, especially the non-asian kind, find attractive.

even better than the entry are the comments, one being:

“My girlfriend and I (we both live in Los Feliz/Silver Lake, the Wiliamsburg of LA) were just talking about this the other day. It seems that one of every three hipster douches has an Asian girlfriend. I don’t have any problem with it per se (my girl is hapa, so I may be falling halfway into this pit myself), but it seems as though Asian arm candy is a status symbol for the goateed, cardigan-wearing, trust-fund set.”

i admit, b and i will end up sitting at some restaurant, noticing some similarly categorized couples in the restaurant. our usual response is to size them up and wonder if we could theoretically take them in a fight. most of the time, i figure i’d probably be able to take both the girl and the guy, so it’s really not an issue there. we don’t have a problem with seeing these couples, but we do notice them. these couples, for the most part, look well-to-do, well-dressed, and are kind of hipster looking. i don’t look like one of those stylin’ asian girls with the cute clothes and b doesn’t look like a long-haired, blazer-wearing hipster. but it’s not that i didn’t have any reservations about him in the beginning: his weird love of crappy chinese food, his ability to use chopsticks, the fact that he doesn’t mind stinky tofu. sure, it was all suspect.

c: so what do you think of sandra oh?

b: sandra oh is not attractive. but she was funny on arli$$.. although she was ok in sideways.

b: did i pass?

c: no.

oh well. he puts up with my horrible “rock of love 2″ addiction. that’s good enough for me.

i’ve actually felt like i’ve been creative the past few days, as opposed to being a pathetically housewares-obsessed lump that gets paid to be lumpy on a daily basis. i’ve been trying to organize my life better, and in doing so, have discovered a few things.

1) i really, really like lists. i’ve been using tadalist.com for practically everything from shopping lists to “things i can do with spaghetti squash” (my new favorite food!).. it’s a lot better than fitting a list of things onto the back of my hand, which was my old way of keeping track of things.

2) going along with the theme of forgetfulness, i’ve also been using futureme.org for those reminders like birthdays or goal days when i need to have a certain project done by. i currently have about 4 projects i’m working on (furnishing the apartment, finding a new fancy dress, etc etc.). reading this, i’m realizing just how anal-retentive i am. and realizing that, i want to die.

i’ve even been organizing my television schedule, since i now have a dvr. it’s really made my life about 20% more ridiculous. and lazy.

but really, the goal of my organizing and all the ridiculous shopping lists? i’m saving money for a new computer. i’ve realized that with everything i need to be doing now for my career and all, i can’t be stuck working on a computer that lags so slowly. oh apple, why do you make your computers so outdated so fast? and why do i still continue to want to buy from you?

i’m hoping that my tax refund will fund this, or i’ll need to start turning tricks again.

so i decided to completely abandon my old nucleus client in favor of something that wasn’t quite 1997 in terms of text publishing.

a lot of things have changed in the past few months. i’ve been going through a long, rough period at work. it’s been really trying, depressing, and all sorts of words that basically mean i give up. i want to not go through work like it’s such a chore again. i don’t know what i want to be doing, but i know i want to be doing something. i really haven’t recovered from the blow my ego took back in early november, from an ex-boss/scourge-of-the-earth. i’m still kind of learning how to get back to when i felt like i could handle and do things. i guess i should also learn to curb the slight ADD i’ve seemingly been dabbling in.

aside from work, i’ve gone crazy and moved in with b. we done shacked up. actually, he moved into my apartment because i refused to leave my lovely, lovely apartment home in the middle of shantytown (with a stunning view of the new police department! stalking ahoy!). we have painfully cute things like his-and-her plush initials hung up on the wall. we also have a fridge that is packed to capacity. i’m not used to making room for all this food. i’m hoping it’s just some kind of learning curb so that i don’t balloon into a 450-pound chinese woman who poops babies into airplane toilets without knowing it.

i’ve been trying to decompress from all that’s happened and it’s slowly getting there. recovering from 5-hours-of-sleep-for-an-entire-weekend weekends are not really something i’m used to at my old age. but alas, crazy accent wall painting marathons take precedence over little ol’ sleep.

i really hope the next few months are good for me. i’ve finally been trying to properly balance out my finances and for the first time in a handful of years, i don’t feel like i’m in a total rut.

i might’ve started the new year with a raging case of the death flu, but i really do think this year is starting out quite promising.