Spring Cleaning at the Lu residence

Sometimes, when I feel like "a naked strand between two immensities," I ask myself, "What's worrying me right now?" After harvesting the oblong fruit of my anxieties, I lay them out in front of me and ask a second question: "How can I fix them?"

Three days ago, around 3 p.m., I realized the benevolent chaos that is my "Blog Writing" folder on my desktop was creating undue stress. So I sluiced my resolve from the eddies of my mind, found a room with solid internet connection, and began the spring cleaning: deleting ideas that weren't worth their salt, archiving items I'd already written, and finishing all the half-formed, sexy ideas languishing in my computer.

You'll notice – especially if you've subscribed to me – that there are 22 new posts up, about OKCupid, Taylor Swift, dessert, and Greyhound bus accidents. I hope you enjoy them. While there are 8 more topics still crying out for my editing eye, I am all burned out. So 22 posts for now will have to do.

My detox plan is imposing a moratorium on my internet access. An entire week – 168 hours – without Facebook, Quora, Gmail, OKCupid, Blogger, NYT, Yahoo Sports, WSJ, Spotify (maybe), YDN, ESPN, Grantland, and The Mercury News. I want to live simply, and I want to focus my energy on the 4 or 5 longer, publishable pieces I'm writing, to see if I can actually concentrate on longer horizons, even with the World Series in the background. I don't know if I can pull this off, but that's what's exciting: we'll see what happens.

I'll be back after a week, and I'll let you know how everything turned out.

The curse of having 1,000 unique visitors in one day

On June 15th, 2011, I decided the time had come to share my personal musings with an audience; that my percolating thoughts and unanswered questions deserved to be approached with a transparent intensity; and that the creative willpower governing my private journal entries would be re-purposed for the denizens of the Interwebz. I was the architect of a master plan to Internet relevance. I reasoned that, with an hour every day, a pithy, astute post could be drawn from a broth of ideas, and people (even those I didn't know) would sign up to hear what it was like, living the life of Peter Lu. That dream has ended.

The blogosphere is a dangerous beast. The accessibility of statistics -- page views, average time spent on site, location tracking -- quantifies popularity and clout. Maintaining a website becomes a game, and, as with every game, it's excessively tempting to snatch up unfair advantages when they present themselves. Solid content will always win over readers, but a few well-placed links improve the bottom-line all the same. During these four months maintaining this blog, I've spent an egregious amount of time playing by an "armchair work ethic" that served only to burnish my ego.

Here's an example. In the beginning of July, I followed the prescriptive formula for new bloggers: post my links to blog heavyweights; ask small-fish bloggers to connect; and set up Google Webmaster and Analytics to maximize SEO.

The strategy "paid off." On Wednesday, July 27th, and Thursday, July 28th, this blog received 1,018 unique visitors and 1,429 page views.

I was at work in New York when I found out baseball's biggest free agent, Carlos Beltran, with his ridiculous .280/.400/.900 split, was headed for my hometown San Francisco Giants. The San Jose Mercury New's Tim Kawakami, who writes original analysis of Bay Area sports teams on his blog, Talking Points, already had a blog post up insta-analyzing the trade. There were no comments yet.

The Talking Points comment system has no moderation and no membership. Every comment is splattered below Kawakami's original post. It's too crude a system for a blog that receives thousands of visitors a day, but newspaper websites are notorious for being behind the Internet adoption curve. So I took advantage. I wrote a post on the fly aggregating information about Zack Wheeler, the prospect traded for Beltran. Then I posted the link. It showed up as the 2nd comment.

For the next 2 hours, I furiously updated my blog post, transforming it from a barebones, 3-link collection of scouting reports to a content farm: I linked to every corner of the Internet, and added, at the end, a bit about my own experience as a fan. Every 10 minutes, I'd update and refresh the post, because I knew people were clicking through. It was piecemeal, and the cyclical refreshing was insane, but I was flowing. While alternating between adding new content and self-promotion, posting my link on Mets blogs, ESPN, and the Sports blog network, I threw in a few quick Google searches and confirmed that nobody on the Internet -- not even ESPN -- had done as thorough a job putting together this information, from interviews to obscure AAA game reports, as I had. Every time I checked my blog statistics, the page views would jump by 20.

The feeling of euphoria -- I'm an Internet celebrity! -- lasted ten minutes. Then I fell back to Earth. At the end of the workday, my blog, which had just crossed the 5,000 page view benchmark in the morning, hit 6,000 page views, ten days earlier than I expected. Instead of feeling happy, though, I felt empty. I was still at the office -- only now, everybody else was gone. I was hungry, and my eyes were tired. My life, from every relevant angle, hadn't changed at all, other than the gaudy 6,000 number bludgeoning my eyes every time I opened up peterjlu.com.

To fight the vacuity of my "accomplishment," I took a proactive measure to install AdSense, so I could commoditize my writing. After a week, Google's monetize tab showed that I had 843 page impressions, 27 clicks, a CTR of 3.2%, and earnings of $.20. I removed all my ads shortly after.

One month ago, my profile on Simple Pickup appeared in Salon. From my back of the envelope calculations, the article was viewed 50,000 times, was "liked" 293 times on Facebook, and spurred 163 comments. The blog link in my author biography was clicked 238 times; at its peak, this blog had 995 page views in one day. But those numbers barely registered with me. What mattered more were the real-world outcomes: the emails from people around the world, from authors to friends. And the blog, far from being noticed because of pure self-promotion, was there only to augment my existing legitimacy online.

That's when I resolved: I will no longer attempt to define myself with this blog. Now, what comes next is anyone's guess.

For the short-term future, I'm going offline for a week, starting 6 p.m. Tuesday PST. No nothing; it'll be a necessary "detox." After I come back online, I'm going to try something new: read as much as possible, and attempt to write between 2 to 5 hours every day, focused solely on improving my craft. The plan is still to post every day, as a means of accountability, but it'll be more for me: updates of previous entries (like this post right here) and less "new" material.

Chapter 1 in this blog experiment is now done. Looking forward to Chapter 2.

 

Lips too tight

Fiction. Nowhere near done.

"Expensive this, unfair that, people need to open their eyes," Hanna's father said. American eyes tended to stay narrow, slitted so only certain bandwidths of experience could be made out. It was a frequency of immediate, visceral pleasures, of profligate lifestyles; it was a crying shame. He yelled all this over the phone. Yelled: 30,000 CHILDREN WERE DYING EVERY DAY.

"Just think about that," he said, afterwards, calmly.

Hanna's father, Miles, was doing something about it. He was a social worker in Szechuan, China, had been there for 8 years and counting, had given up consumerism for dusty, spartan housing and a chance at Purpose. Before that, he had worked twenty years as an engineer for Boeing. What he called "a nihilistic endangerment of his soul," is what he told his boss when he quit.

"One-third of this world lives on less than $1 a day. So that sushi you bought for lunch, that's a week's worth of food," he reprimanded.

No matter that Hanna didn't actually eat sushi her mother ordered during the power outage. Hanna hated sushi, always had, couldn't stand the smell of raw fish, couldn't even look at the fish eggs, glistening and textured and too conscious for her queasy constitution.

Every Saturday night, she held the phone to her face while her dad called from halfway around the world. She listened while lazily examining her pores in the mirror, pulling out strands of fabric from her comforter, flipping her special wheathead penny up and down, up and down. Often, she wondered what would happen if she just left a voice recorder that went "uh huh," "right," and "I do that already" playing on repeat. Would her father, expounding on the virtues of Christ and the spartan life, hear the affected cadence?

She couldn't do that, though. Her dad would go ballistic. Besides, some weeks, he was on a mission to learn as much as possible: "How is school? Social Studies? Is that what they call it these days?"; "What are you reading right now for fun?"; "How is the 4-H club? Is Shadsky still there?" Of course, before Hanna could tell him she had tested out of social science, that she was reading Dostoevsky, and that she had forgotten to renew her 4-H membership years ago, he would burst into a tangent, spitting out a laundry list of nagging worries that he wanted her to be wary of.

"Remember to buy blueberries -- antioxidants galore."

"Is your mom talking to you about this new online hacking scheme? Nigerian princes? Don't open email from anyone you don't recognize!"

"I realized last night the importance of keeping your back flat when you sleep. You're not curling up every night, are you?"

"Dad," Hanna would say, her glasses dangling at the tip of her nose, sliding down millimeter by millimeter from the accumulating sweat in her non-air-conditioned house.

"Daddy," Hanna said. "I know."

"Was he always like this?"

Hanna's mother paused, it seemed, to digest the question, so she could analyze the subtext and prepare for an appropriate level of commiseration, before peeling off her answer.

"He loves you honey. He misses you so much."

"Right, which is why he never comes back, right?"

"You have to understand -- what he went through, it would be hard, maybe impossible, for anybody. China's treated him well. He'll be back as soon as he's ready."

"Humph."

"You know, when you were a baby, he would pick you flowers? Those clover that grow by Litchfield. He'd sneak off, spend an entire afternoon stringing together hundreds of stems into a crown, and then present it to you as if you were a princess. You giggled and curtsied everytime."

That was fine. He loved her before. Adored her, maybe. He might still. But problem was, Hanna had heard this story before. Her mom dusted it off the shelves every so often to curtail a premonition of anxiety, bitterness, injustice. Its adequateness as a big-picture repudiation of her small, human needs was unfair. It dug into her skin, pricked her. A flower crown? What kind of person had the patience to make something like that? If he was smart, he could have been watching his health, or working, or buying her real presents, or, god forbid, actually spending time with his family.

Hanna had decided: it wasn't a good idea to keep up a dialogue with her mom about this. Pointless. Boys and shoes she could do. Her father -- well, she was the one who had drawn up the deal herself: an hour every week, and she wasn't the kind of girl who broke her promises.

Aboard the Greyhound Express: Accident and an Audi

The inauspiciousness of the journey that lay ahead; e.g. almost being killed is not a good start

“They tried to speed up and cut us off, like this was Fast and the Furious. Ain’t no Fast and Furious,” the black man next to me said, to whomever would listen. I nodded. The damage looked terrible – the underside of the Audi had come loose, the tire had popped, and the side mirror, obviously, lay in shards. We – the other passengers and I – were loosely milling around the Greyhound bus, surveying the five cop cars and two scared 20-year-olds and our big-bellied bus driver.

“We got Miley Cyrus here whining and complaining and acting all scared; they probably hit two other people on the way there,” the European across the way exclaimed. The accident, as it were, happened 5 minutes after we left the Greyhound bus depot, on the corner of Market and Fernando Street in San Jose. We were supposed to arrive in LA at 6 a.m.; now, none of us had any idea when we would arrive.

“We didn’t want to be there on time anyway,” the bald man next to me says. We all laugh a little.

The details of said accident; or why I slept on Santa Monica pier for 4 hours the next morning

The accident sounded as bad as the damage. I was just falling asleep when what I was woken by a large aluminum can being crushed from both sides, the air hissing out while the crackle of metal sparked in the air. At that moment, our bus was making a right turn in the second-to-the-right lane; a black Audi was in the rightmost lane making the same turn. The big, wide berth we made apparently wasn’t enough, and the two cars squeezed together against each other. The Greyhound bus won, so vigorously that the Audi was literally lifted onto the curb.

Immediately after the accident, the driver walked down the aisle, passing out slips of paper. “Fill out these papers for claims adjustment, please.” I look at the paper: “It is required by law that Motor Bus Companies shall make reports to the US Department of Transportation and the State Public Utility Commission concerning all accidents. Your assistance to Our Driver in the performance of his duty will be appreciated. WE THANK YOU.” There are 10 questions:

1. 1.      Were you a passenger on the bus at the time of accident?
2. a.       Mark Seat Occupied on Reverse Side
3. 2.      Place of Departure?
4. 3.      Final Destination?
5. 4.      Where did the accident occur?
6. 5.      Time of Day?
7. 6.      Date accident occurred?
8. 7.      Were you injured in the accident?
9. 8.      Did you witness the accident?
10. 9.      How did the accident occur?
11. 10.  Was the bus stopped before the accident occurred?

I start to answer each when I look up at the man next to me, who has begun to shout. “I’m not doing anything until you tell me when we’re getting to LA.”

“I don’t know when we’re getting there,” the bus driver says, sighing.

“Well I’m not filling out crappy paperwork. I’m not going to help you with your problem, I have a plane to catch.”

There’s a rumble from the back of the bus. “Shut up. The sooner we get this done the sooner we can leave.”

“You might get something out of it,” the bus driver explains.

“I don’t need anything out of it. I’m not filling out anything.”

“We’ll probably be an hour late.”

“Let me out, I want to get some fresh air, just because we’re going to be here for a while.”

I wonder if anyone is going to sue Greyhound; or, if we would get a refund.

The humanity of the situation occurring through conversation with strangers

“Damn that’s a nice car,” my seat partner says as he steps off the bus. “They’re driving that? That’s 55, 60k right there.” The bus is damaged as well. There’s a dent where on the luggage compartment door; during the crash, there was a big bump that felt like the entire bus was falling down a step. We were literally a minute away from the highway ramp.

At this moment, the driver, who is 65 years old, with white glasses, a blue shirt with a starched collar, and a lick of white hair (he looks like a grouchy retired postal worker) is arguing with the 5 police officers (who came in 4 different cars) on the scene. He blames the twenty year olds: they tried to squeeze past the bus on the turn and failed to judge the gap accurately. The police officers aren’t buying the story. “You’re going to have to go to court to explain your case,” one of them tells the bus driver. “You should always be turning on right most lane.”

The rest of us are just watching. Most of the officers have their arms folded, and are looking around. There’s one bystander who is writing down her version of the events on a single sheet of paper. The bus driver is still gesticulating. “Last time got into an accident we were late for 4 hours,” someone mentions. Someone else visibly sighs. It’s going to be a long night.

The best thing to happen is the lowering of social barriers. Passengers who wouldn’t have exchanged one word during the ride are now joking with each other; there are two black guys riffing off each other, doing pull-ups on the traffic signal bar, asking the two girls driving the Audi what happened.

The accident occurred at 11:25 p.m. At 11:46 p.m., the hot dog vendors have smelt their pray and are out in full force, hawking their wares. My mouth watered. At 12:33 a.m., we file back onto the bus and continue our journey. “The midnight riders ride again!” someone yells. Everyone starts to clap.

I strike up a conversation with my seat neighbor until both of us, exhausted, fall asleep. We’re at LA by 6 a.m. 

the paisley dirt hole

the paisley dirt hole

A maroon rabbit, loose and
lumpy, cotton, fluff, on my
child's palm. Sits on top a
totem toke, squeezes
sky—
sky scraper scribes
circumscribe a yard sale,
the blanket wrapped in the
rabbit on the rack, ragged clothes
smooth: hop: hop: hop: at home it circled
our citrus, lime, pummelo, and burst,
in a bitter rain of house pets.

Tidbits from Yale

It’s a rainy night here at Yale University. On my left, Mike is reading a philosophy book. Tommy is lounging on a sofa, legs up, head buried in a Newsweek. Zach is on his bed, computer in his lap, having fallen asleep with a finger in his mouth. The other two suitemates, James and Wade, are in their rooms, already tucked in. A girl’s laughter floats inside through an open window, but it dissipates, soaked away by the pattering of the rain. Mozart’s piano concerto #23 is whispering its melody; after 3 minutes, iTunes abruptly switches to Divertimento in B-flat Major, the violin vivacious and arresting. It jars me. “Peter, we have to discover nuclear fusion,” Tommy says. “It will make us rich and solve all our problems.” I ignore the waggish comment and continue typing. But the comments keep pouring out: “San Francisco banned happy meals.” “You look like a waiter, Mike. Pretty sure you don’t need to wear a white shirt for waiter-ing jobs.” “I have 45 pages the week we get back.” “Does it actually require research?” His feet smell. His nose-blowing is perverse. His voice is grating. But then I look at him, and my exasperation melts away: he's Tommy, that's all. 

T-$: word why?

When you shower, do you bring speakers with you, so that you can engage your mind with music?

Oh, right: I cut myself with the razor. I put my entire thumb on the plastic tab and pulled down; it came off too easily and my thumb buried itself into the newly exposed razor. I didn't feel anything, it was so sharp. The cut, though, was half an inch deep, and as I waited for the blood to start seeping out of the cross-section of veins, I slathered Neosporin over the area, creating a messy seal. The rest of my time in Port St. Joe, I would gingerly use my left hand for most tasks, my right as good as a dummy prosthesis.

In the Dominican Republic, after two weeks of Ed and I serenading each other with the first two lines of Drake’s most popular songs, John D's computer computer came alive with Drake the first time he opened it.

We collected plates and cups from the entryways in Berkeley. There were utensils hidden everywhere —some suites had upwards of 7 cups in their rooms. We entered the rooms in the most cursory, perfunctory, and disingenuous manner possible, proceeded to look through the cupboards, refrigerators, and rooms of everyone living in the suite. The responses ranged from friendly (“This is a great idea!”) to extreme annoyance (glares of hatred and disbelief). In all, we collected 62 cups and 28 plates.

At Warren's beach house, one of the "hicks" who lived in town stumbled into my living room, drunk, and said to me, “I'm having a better time with people I’ve just fucking met then my fucking friends." 

I moved from Canada to California when I was 5 years old. The last thing I did before leaving was write a card to Katherine that said, "I'm going to come back and marry you," or something like that. I might also have called her the prettiest girl in the world -- I don't really remember (my mom does, though). She friended me on Facebook in college. I remember having a short Facebook message conversation, too, but every time I search for it, I can't find it, which makes me think the entire episode might have been a dream. 

For 10 of my 14 meals every week, I sit at the Berkeley senior table. Over the course of a year, that’s 400 hours sitting on the beat-up maroon chairs, revolving around the same topics—the Jacksonville Jaguars (thanks for wasting my life, John), hedge fund investment strategies, and Youtube videos (search: “Greg Jennings”). I’ve grown used to the routine, and don’t recognize the awe-inspiring features that first struck me when I walked in 4 years ago: the loping chandeliers, demure portraits of former Masters, that admonishing elk head directly above the trays, admonishing people to go trayless.

A ghost frequented our common-room at points. One day, as I was tying my shoes in preparation for a run, the glasses on the table started tinkling – all by themselves. This also happened one night…at 3:38am.

On a chilly Yale night senior year first semester, I sat with Sangay D. in shaded area of the School of Management in a settling twilight and talked about Bhutan. The country is what environmentalists in the US wish our country was. Every 2nd of June, their children engage in Social Forestry Day, where everyone plants one tree and takes care of it for the rest of their schooling. Sangay's tree was 8 inches high when he first planted it, and now it's 12 feet tall. Watching it grow up with him, he said, was an unbelievable experience. In high school, his class adopted an area, and tended to it once a week. The Bhutanese economy is also inherently tied to the environment: 40% of its GDP comes from hydropower and 10% to eco-tourism. 40% of the entire country is a protected area. 

In the Dominican Republic, I accomplished 2 important feats with Ed. The first was recalling 150 of 151 Pokemon over a four-hour hike on the tallest peak in the Dominican Republic. (We missed Paras -- but not Parasect?) The second was creating a MECE framework of all the different types of humor: whimsical, exaggeration, long-form (referring to a prior incident in a novel context later on), storytelling, ironic, non-verbal and sarcastic. For the rest of the trip, whenever someone laughed, we looked at each other and slotted it into one of the categories. 

Week 19: Bookstore magic and Quora inflation

This week, I spent 4 days in Dumaguete, Philippines, on a work-related assignment. The city straddles the seaside, and there are hardly any cars – most people get around via motorcycle or “trikes.” The city is not sleepy, but it is quaint. During the 4 days, I read Chekhov, discovered the most amazing cookies, bought bunches of ladyfinger bananas, and visited two rural communities. I’d tell you those stories – walking between the mud and through rice paddies and listening to mothers who had tumors the size of watermelons in their midsections because they couldn’t afford the bus fare to the free clinic in town – but I’d sound patronizing, just another ex-pat slogging through desolate conditions for a sense of benighted purpose. So I’ll tell you another story.

At the used bookstore in the middle of town, as I navigated through the aisles picking out books I wanted to read (blackjack, John Muir, sports writing), I frequently had to let three boisterous 15-year-olds walk past me, they too attempting to pin down their reading list for the week. They spoke perfect English, ragged each other on their book choices, debated the merits of Dan Brown – I’d never heard 15-year-olds speak like this before, let alone 15-year-olds in a rural city in the Philippines. I couldn’t help wondering why they weren’t playing Nintendo, or basketball, or wasting time walking around the city, instead of at a bookstore on a perfectly sunny Sunday morning. I tried to talk to them, but they were as irreverent and hare-brained as teenagers should be, and didn’t get much, other than the fact that they just liked reading.

As I paid for my books and walked out, I really hoped that they made it to a good University, and maybe even out of the Philippines.

As for online life: this week, I spent 9 hours, 48 minutes on Quora, and around an hour each on Facebook, New York Times, Yahoo Sports, TechCrunch, and WSJ. Everything else was under 30; email just 2 hours, 15 minutes. And writing -- 20 hours, 45 minutes! That's an average of 3 hours a day! Not too shabby.

Highlights from my Internet browsing this week.

I’m frankly inspired by this profile of George Clooney. His former girlfriend Sarah Larson, who figures prominently, totally didn’t see the break-up happening.

The New York Times have strong essays on the hazards of confidence, this Haruki Murakami fellow, and Herman Cain supporting alcohol and cigarettes. I also learned how Romney and Perry almost came to blows, which isn’t surprising given the history between them. And go California olive oil!

My tech digest: Hipmunk is the new Kayak; and there are a ton of people on planet Earth using Google+. The Google-Facebook-Amazon-Apple tech war, 2011 edition. If you need motivation to make your Facebook more private, take this lollipop. See how many times your name has been searched with Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Why Jeff Bezos is a baller. Online gift cards.

Here’s the evidence I’m spending way too much time online: I know the rules of Calvinball, learned a new way to pronounce “octopus” (Click on the audio), read half of the Duke University “F* list,” watched the most contentious handshake in NFL history, and know that Yale’s #4!

Finally, I’m debating whether I should become a writer. Here’s the flow chart I’m using to make my decision. (And here’s a little more on if writing is worth it.)

How to reverse myopia

Is there a way to reverse myopia? Traditional ophthalmology doesn’t seem to think so, but in China, there is lore of eye exercises that, if done daily, will slow or even reverse myopia over time. My parents have always encouraged me to do them – three times a day, 2 to 3 minutes every time, if not to improve my eyes then to simply give me a quick break from work. I’ve compiled the guide to doing Yan Bao Jian Cao here.

This will help your eyes relax, reduce stress, and stimulate blood flow. You want to aim for accuracy and consistency. Do these once in the afternoon and once at night. Every 2~3 hours, you should

also go outside to look at far distances.

Remember: no one else can improve your health but yourself. You are your own best doctor. It requires determination and persistence, and you may not show results in a week – or even a month – but positive results will happen after years.

Taken from: http://baike.baidu.com/view/66516.html?wtp=tt#4

Yi Ching Eye exercises: It exercises the muscles, blood vessels, nerves and meridian by expanding and contracting the surrounding tissues.

 
All of the exercises are done with eyes closed. Each step should be done 4x8 times.

1. Keep your eyes closed. Then open them as much as you can. 
2. Look to the rear left side - return to normal - look to the rear right side - return to normal 
3. Look up - return to normal - look down - return to normal 
4. Look to the upper left corner - return to normal - look to the lower right - return to normal 
5. Look to the upper right corner - return to normal - look to the lower left corner - return to normal 
6. Turn your eyes counter-clock wise up-left-down-right 
7. Turn your eyes clock wise up-right-down-left 
8. Relax and keep your hands on top of each other and put them on your belly button. 
9. Relax and look as far away as possible, with your back to the sun.

If you really don't have time, just close your eyes and rub your face until it's warm, and rub your hands until they’re hot, then put your hands on your eyes with the middle of your palms on the eyeballs.

Sunshine of the spotted mind: Notes on my phone

Notes that I’ve entered into my phone, from May 25^th to September 1^st, in chronological order.

it’s about how you say it

what’s the best way to develop resilience

oak hill

bartending

June

can you carry umbrellas on planes?

Tamar – the 3 incestuous sisters

don’t feel like doing anything song

are there redeeming factors to sadness 6/5

Do I actually—understand people?

what drives the decisions you make in life? habit?

what happens if you place a penny on a train track?

Clifton Fadiman

excel of ppl

NBA player should say I never flop always play hard

feeling of making it – 6/13

erick ring fire river hook – 6/15

write about 5 year old letter for blog like junot

unshakable confidence

rockland bike

types of humor

stand up comedy show

subway improv

taking on great persona b4 events mentally

not better just genes lucky

hester bowery Chinatown

art department senior dpt

kadinsky picture w an archer oil on canvas

karl Schmidt rottluff Pharisees 1912

piet Mondrian josef alberrs

supreme confidence getting things done

sweet potato eggplant broccoli

tuna and eggs

wasn’t worth attention I would give it

Panasonic rps7

9 10 on 4^th

what sells topic wise 0-5 6-9 10-16?

clyfford still

hans Hoffman

mark Rothko

donna orender – June 26^th

Take role models like tom cruise American pie to realize irrational self confidence works

Harvard speeches

comfort confidence not secure settling not equal

foosball whatever makes people happy: sad little existence fat Asian lady doing the circle –

are fashion models insecure

freshman year write drunk never happened to me

birds n fella

tiff w and terr ho

ukulele

river to river

American boy

just saw craigslist girl again. had forgotten till now need practice when it happens

Japanese art society on the right

irrational confidence unrelenting positivity jon eng belief that I’m worth it

just mad nobody say hi on the street – 7/13

no community in ny – itinerant so only friends shuttle to events

books are not like shoes cleanness

visitors most willing to hang. habit kills

scared poster. funny way of walking. west 4^th street? assumptive. confidence. liquid confidence.

cake shop living room piano

polar bear weigh?

good hurt

v capabkty

new york isn’t perfect city and when do I let things do w the flow vs. getting out of comfort zone? what’s the balance? happy v. ca

I like you. is that general like or domain specific? 7/19

understanding rap – abrams

happiness ceiling no floor

happiness bank. average?

best travel advice Philippines no rob. lie or no? native or travel?

marimekko

what argument do holocaust deniers have about it not happening?

what is a hipster? least likely to go to?

building any new subway lines?

short story nightclub that gets buried in so people deal w relationships day after like lost tv show

friend v money comfort vobligation hookup v no hookup promise v selfish healthy v fun

girl w short skirt looked at totally uncomfortable those w real confidence come out

eating wasabi and choking on it

best personal bloggers?

about.me

yale asc

top professions – want to be nba movie star baseball ceo tim ferris pickup

with you

how to undo a fold?

spend a day reading on the subway

even if you have played a song for a long time really feel its soul. that’s my adv.

turza as article – 7/28

soup books

what things put me in a confident mood? singing interaction

yale why is the best – real interaction w new haven people some don’t take adv but other schools loathe to do so

don’t be a boring azn

blk kids sitting in the back of the bus

wes paparazzi song make it all visceral visual

magic ghosts the world is big the world is small

is it ever more efficient to eat with chopsticks than a fork?

don’t know nething about Philippines and writing back to roots

buy a flip and record myself in convo

why are shells not as cool when you take them back home?

spin the bottle

furthest a stone has been skipped – 7/30

paul c hoops tape

does it use less energy to slouch

chicken run

stuart davis roy litchenstein

coucou bazar

fashion illustration now

excelsior

herry donenfield

nietzche superman phil

why we buy

epiphone electrical phone

stratus prep

17 best rom coms

setting expectations to live up to them assume the best. Goethe quote. – britta 8/4

naturalist draw blood

action vs. thought when situations do it in

stuart davis

paul klee al loving untitled ellsworth Kelly terry winters light source direction

hans Hoffman veluti

cy twombly

franz kline untitled joan Mitchell sunflowers

8/7

Arthur segal strassa auf 1924

tokuda masahiko plate

kim whan ki heaven n earth

lee ufan

most underrated urban planning tic – water fountains

first world suffering hn not load fast enough

how to fight air sickness

baby girl whats your name how you look en them jeans

gum throw push coach bad traffic 8/9 - rucker

what r the economics behind supersizing? more efficient deplaning

omg worst place ever if we land etc

how does airline seat pricing work?

how to play jazz on guitar keep it fresh

inner game return and irrational confidence

what’s with the crude cartoons in new Yorker?

20 day inner confidence challenge – how to make it stick?!

what’s the best way to train a belief into fact?

what would south have thought of Asian people?

Conspiratorial grin as lowered the heading over.

Check the featherballs

1,2,3,4

put everything in order, lined up, take the umbrella after starting to walk back, it’s all so measured and cute, and can tell love to work on this.

wave the baton around of the cup afterwards walking back into the house

create a new Yorker magazine all written and drawn and done by me.

Things that have changed in a year at home:

Dream: choosing between 2 different things, but that was the interlude to the real dream, which was…

if one of my keys are stuck, what do I do?

“How’s the stock market doing?”

“I don’t have internet.

“But it’s probably down 1,000 points.”

“Yea, it’s probably in the toilet.”

Sam: white girls are overrated

Chicken fried; catch your wave;

How do I increase my laptop’s battery life? Dell

Put my eng 120 essays online

Judd Yale record stuff

Astounding words, phrases, and sentences

Sometimes, when I’m reading, I come across astounding words, phrases, and sentences. I always try to write them down. Much of my writing at this point in my career is imitation – I take a paragraph that particularly strikes me, deconstruct how the sentences flow, and try to copy its structure for my own topic. This is what I’ve accumulated over the last few months. (~10% are my own orphaned phrases.) (And Derrick – yes, I had a list like this during poetry class and threw them in like ingredients in ratatoulle.) (Warned: there's a ton of Italo Calvino.)

Words:

solipsist

brio

pestiferous

patzer

machievelli codicils

bric-a-brac

Pretorian guard
feckless
bespoke (a suit)
argot
milt

loucheness

pithy aperçus

winsome

puckishly

hoariest

sibilant

denatured

Troskyite

inveterate

sound-carpet

planisphere

propinquous

palimpsest

afflatus

interstices       

adenoidal,

agate

catoptric

pied-à-terres

mythomane

sidereal

bildungsroman

redolent

amoebically 

Akrasia

abecedarian

gilgamesh

brilliantine

bitumen

lazaretto

rectilinear

aleatory

aubergine

arabequed

Phrases:

rendered in chiaroscuro, with thick, bristling cross-hatching all around

her calves were short but her legs were strong

the inflexible grip of unhappiness

building a relationship from the pebbles of our mutual longing

finally, at 8am, fed up with the nitty table and the molasses fish, I just left.

in a blink, baseball's Ahab's found Clemens in the Seine

green tea hips

hands pierced like halberds

in the vain attempt to turn them back, move backward over the cemetery of spent hours

incongruous quires

last one there farts in a milk bottle

fleshy flowers

it's a game where the person scores, not the ball. And you always come home

fomenting the crisis

pre-Copernican belief that the cosmos revolves around his ego

noble nullity

limn my exquisite teenage angst

tastes like wet chalk

pebbly skinned

shiny chicken wings

clausal filigree upon clausal filigree to create a baroque edifice of seething irony

the wax of years

russeting on the blossom end

salty blisters

the visit of a Singhalese

who wants to sell me a litter of newborn crocodiles in a zinc tub

skinny-limb spruce trees

sugar-rush novelty

bulldozed nuance

jejune synthetics

glossy coexistence

a strange new dance of give-and-take

the giant fingers of gravity holding him in place

bug-eyed sylph

Barbadian patois

15 million years and even the sun wrinkles into embers

daily nothing-much.
the judgment is true -- but only by half.

effusions of a graphomane

“This vehicle has been checked for sleeping children.”

“I have a question I mustache, but I’ll shave it for later.”

Sentence Structures:

"And every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells."

“The Giants are a team of low-wattage eccentrics: hirsute relievers, a thong-wearing first baseman and a manager who always looks as if he rolled out of bed at noon.”

“She was the winner, it was her always curious, always insatiable reading that managed to uncover truths hidden in the most barefaced fake, and falsity with no attenuating circumstances in words claiming to be the most truthful.”

"The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear."

"I think I love her."

“The novel I would most like to read at this moment," Ludmilla explains, "should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves..."

“Campaigns are like an MRI for the soul — whoever you are, eventually people find out.”

“Where else would you find that information other than from your closest most disgusting friends?”

“Looking back, he didn’t quite know what to make of his decision: he had saw the window, saw the streaming light, and figured she was safer outside than inside. An educated guess, he reasoned afterwards. Not luck.”

"They solemnly bowed their heads to the music."

“More lonely, more isolating, under the looming cloud of a prescribed emotion floating down from on high.”

“Canny, well-educated yet perpetually failing furtive Internet onanists, the dark, half- crippled, doughnut-gobbling man-apes of the literary world, who cast their lumpen shadows across the rest of us.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, pimps and playas

Half ass rappers, true rhyme sayers

This is the carter, so hold on to your teenage daughter.”

“I’ve got real pushups, power pushups, clap pushups.”

“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.”

“I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn't be good old Earth."