inside the wonderful world of vee

march 26th to april 2nd, 2007 (nippon!)

11:32 pm — before i start, some conclusions:

1) japanese women cannot walk with heels on.
2) japanese people don’t fucking eat vegetables other than regular salad (which, nutrition-wise, doesn’t really count).
3) japanese food you can think of off the top of your head (teppanyaki, sushi, yakisoba, tonkatsu, ramen, etc.) pretty much is japanese food, period.
4) japanese women say “gozaimasu” as a kind of formality meaning thank you or whatever, and say it SUPER nasally. amuse.

i’m not really all that impressed by tokyo, actually… although it is a great place to hang out when you’re young and robust, i imagine it’d be kind of boring when you’re older. and… there really isn’t that much to do anyhow. i think we only had fun cause yuki was there and his friends were there and miko’s friends were there… had we not known any japanese people there, it’d probably have been a helluva lot lamer…

now for recaps… oh my god i am so tired. this will probably have to be finished later since there’s so much shit to say.

monday, march 26th
lingo picked me up in the morning… i basically stayed up all night. slept like 3 hours. maybe. this pattern will soon be repeated, as you will find out soon. we headed over to tony’s house in issaquah and tony had JUST woken up basically and was not at all ready lol. nor had he really planned anything for us to do… lol. so we left in a hurry to go to the airport. got on the plane. “the fountain” was on as well as “stranger than fiction”… i was super excited to watch “the fountain” but unfortunately the audio on lingo and i’s consoles were not working. motherfuckers. united gave us some form we can fill out to maybe get some miles. but yea.

taking pics in the seatac airport… why not!?

sleeping in the seatac airport… why not?!

sleeping on the plane!!!

gag…

wednesday, march 28th — akasuka


got off the plane at like, i dunno, 3pm or something, and we had slept a lot of the plane ride and were mostly rested up. took the overground train to our place in asakusa… khaosan tokyo akasuka annex hostel. it was kind of hard to find at first but was then okay. the overground train seemed like the longest ride ever. seemed almost longer than the plane ride to japan lol. also, like, i kept sleeping with my head resting against the window behind me, and unfortunately, every time the train from the opposite direction passed by it’d scare the shit out of me and wake me up heh, cause it’d make the window rattle. anyway, we got to the hostel, put our shit down, and decided to go cash in on one free drink that our hostel offered daily at the location of their other akasuka hostel (khaosan tokyo smile). i got a white russian or whatever. it was good, as there was like no alcohol in it. lol. we were like the only people in there at first, although some people showed up later!

afterwards, went to eat some ramen at a corner shop in akasuka. had to cross a bridge to get there, and saw lot of dinner boats that people ate on. ramen was okay. we were the only tourists in there. tonkatsu ramen — i had miso-flavored one, and mine was the best. everyone else just got plain meat ones… and mine had like veggies and corn and stuff, so it was automatically better :0

after we ate it was like eight and we just walked around akasuka at night and looked at all the temples that were lit up by lights. looked good. yeahp. then we went back to the hostel and went to bed essentially. cool place. note: these photos are a culmination of everyone’s photos, so… yeah. i cannot take credit for most of these.

everyone else got a kick out of this. i actually didn’t even get it at first. lol?

our roommates for that night were a couple from australia and they were both graphic designers who had huge packs that were like, as big as me. they were going to india afterwards, and the girl had just come from china. lucky.

thurday, march 29th — akasuka, ueno, and akihabara



the next day, we all woke up at like 5am and decided to go rent bikes at 7am. had a difficult time finding the bike rental place at first, because we found a bike parking garage and assumed it was NOT in there even though it was. the bikes you could rent cost only 200 yen to rent a day (like, $1.50), and had these cool ass locks. if your key wasn’t in, you couldn’t rotate the bike tires. it was neat… the tourist map we had also had this giant pagoda logo which was an “information center” so we were looking for a big ass pagoda building — in reality, it was this little tiny thing that was like 10 feet tall only. lol. godamn tourist maps…

got our bikes and biked around the area cause lingo and i were super fucking rusty. scary man… very scary… to bike in the city cause there is just so much fucking shit around all over the place.

it was still early and nothing was open yet.

porn movie theatre in asakusa!!!!

anyway, ate lunch at yoshinoya, which is a cheap chain store type place that sells basically beef dishes with cooked onions over rice. pretty good and definitely cheap. everyone says shit in japan is sooo expensive, but it’s not really — maybe if you compare it to like, china, but compared to the u.s., not really.

after eating there, i had a massive nosebleed in their bathroom and was in there for fucking ever, bleeding all over the chair and floor and crap like that. after that day my nose pretty much hurt like a bitch :/ like, up in the nose cavity, not on the surface…

went to an arcade we found and allllmost beat “time crisis 4″, because i had exchanged $10 USD for 1,000 yen. unfortunately, though… i lent tony a couple hundred yen to play, and he died real fast, and so i was halfway through killing the final boss when i fucking died. godamnit. and no more money to beat it. UGHHHHH.

after that, we got our bikes which we parked on the side street and biked over the ueno. about a… 30 minute bike ride or something. it was kind of scary because of the huge amount of people X___X massive dodging required… almost killed myself and a few pedestrians um, a couple of times.

walked over the land bridge in ueno and went to this six story anime store (unfortunately, it had no naruto stuff — tony and lingo were looking for it, and i was looking for a rock lee to buy lenny since he looks like rock lee — or any katamari stuff, which was super sad!). yeah.

ueno

walked over to ueno park afterwards where there were a lot of cherry blossoms and stuff, but we were a week early for the cherry blossoms to be completely bloomed… lots of people and lots of of stairs, and i was quite sore the entire trip.

saw some kids being attacked and swarmed by pigeons and all that good stuff…!! lingo and miko got some good pics of that shit. lol.

after that, it was about, like 4pm and we had to meet yuki and miko’s friend tetsu at akihabara at 5pm, so we rode over there. took forever to meet up with both of them cause it was a crowded station and yuki was late and stuff, but yeah. this chick in this photo up here was promoting for a maid cafe!!!

went to eat at some nice restaurant and tetsu treated us. the place was nijumaru, and was a izukaya, which serves drinking food and snacks…)

walked around and went to don quixote, which at the upstairs of it (well, 5th floor or so) had a maid cafe, where girls dress up and talk to lonely guys. you pay them to talk to you. pretty fucking stupid. anyway. 6th floor had some weird thing where you can dress up and they take pics of you. i have no idea. japan is fucking weird, man.

random girl singing. not sure where!!!

after that, went to tully’s and met up with yuki/lingo’s friends from the united states. tetsu treated us yet again to ice cream and coffee. their ice cream had hot coffee on the bottom of it. kind of interesting…

it was interesting to see the shift between customs for the japanese dudes who had lived in the u.s. — they lived there for like 5 years so they had like really good english and not even their accents were too bad, but like… they would be talking to us and it’d just be like, what’s up, yoyoyo… and then they’d introduce themselves to tetsu and would all of a sudden be super formal, with like bowing and giving him their business card with two hands and stuff… lol. most amusing.

one of the guys who was there drove the jr transit trains. lol. he’s not a conductor, though! apparently conductors do the announcements over the intercom. hm, that’s news to me!

headed back to asakusa in a hurry so that we could return the bikes by 12am. got stopped by the police. they started off by asking me if i was okay or something and i obviously didn’t understand, so they talked to tony. and said some shit. and they looked at our passports and stuff. and we barely made it back in time.

went to bed after we got back to the hostel. i bought some towels from 7-11 prior to coming home and FINALLY took a shower for the first time in three days. it was a nice push-button shower that saved water and shit. wee!

attempted to sleep and COULD NOT SLEEP. AT ALL. the new roommate that night was from singapore and he slept right next to me in an upper bunk and was SO LOUD. it was INSANELY loud.

went downstairs for a while cause tony was down there and looked at some pics of tokyo, but then tony wanted to go to bed so i went too. there was this super fucking annoying guy downstairs who was talking about fucking his girlfriend in the hostel beds, in the shower stalls, in the toilet stalls, etc… when she came to town, and the same guy like, hit on every fucking girl around. he was annoying as SHIT. anyways.

went back to sleep at some point, and i spent the whole night up wishing to die or wishing it was morning so it would all just fucking end lol. at some point, tony started snoring too, and would basically snore at the intervals the other guy was not snoring. there was quite a pattern going on, and i remember thinking that compared to this guy’s snoring, tony’s was hella soothing, lol, cause it was like 1/3 the loudness.

i usually clap loudly to make people wake up from snoring, but with this guy, it was unpossible. lol. he would not even fucking stir. asshole.

woke up at 5am after a night of NO SLEEP AT FUCKING ALL. wee!

friday, march 30th — tsukiji, ginza, shibuya
once again, got up at 5am and got ready to leave to the tsukiji fish market sometime soon. a guy from the hostel, sarub, went with us. he had gone to the fish market the day before (wednesday), but the fish market was closed on wednesdays, so pwn the noob!!!!!

anyway, took most of my pics at the fish market because i’m weird, and SQUID ARE SO CUTE!!! there was lots of cutting of giant tunas.

we had lunch at a sushi place, and looked around for a place that had a line with japanese people, but not a HUGE line like some places had. i had whale nigiri, aji, anago, amaebi… anago was OK, not as good as unagi, and aji was kind of good… amaebi was eh, okay… whale was fucking nasty… kujira, it’s called. anyways. i also had a cooked tuna shioyaki that was pretty not good and looked nothing like its respective photo.

afterwards, we walked to ginza and looked at buildings there, in an attempt to find a citibank. sarub had a book which detailed where all the citibanks were, which was helpful, as citibank was like, the only bank in japan that allowed atm withdrawals from mastercard and visa.

lingo and i were in desperate need of a toilet, so we walked into one tower and happened to explore it. downstairs had some genmaicha soft-serve ice cream there, MMMM! tried toilet with ass spray action, and it was okay i guess, but couldn’t figure out how to FLUSH the toilet, rofls. lingo loved the ass spray cleaner and got addicted to it, rofls.

ginza sucks. these statues were the only fucking good thing about it.

okay fine this clocktower is KINDA cool but all these things are situated in the mall so that makes them lamer.

anyways. went to shibuya to meet up with yuki and he took us to a korean-influenced restaurant with small dishes again. sarub came with us, and then left to go meet up with other people afterwards (from some website called sofacrashers or something, which basically allowed people in foreign countries to go online and say, hey, i’m alone in this city for a week, who wants to show me around?). interesting.

afterwards we went to some department store or something and came across these weird exercise machines that were supposed to simulate horseback riding when really they were nothing like that… didn’t feel like a workout at all, really. interesting. lingo got addicted to these too. rofls.

then we went to karaoke at big one — two hours of karaoke at 1,000 yen an hour each for all you can drink. i was drunk after three. lol.

after singing, we went out to the hallway where lingo was talking to people, and joined in, kind of. lots of random shit was talked about, like…

- fat girls and pussies.
- homo! homo! homo!
- miko’s bus announcer voice.
- “funniest shit ever…”
- took lotsa videos…

videos sum it all up better, though, so yeah. no need to write about all this, as it is quite difficult to capture the greatness with just writing.

we had to hurry to leave to catch the subway, since it closes @ 12:30 or whatever. this is soon to be a pattern.

at this point, lingo was like a walking zombie… lol. ALSO soon to be repeated.

got back and hung in the hostel living room lounge for some hours, talking to some swedish people and stuff. they were watching south park. and they looked super old but were only like 20 and 22 — one guy had been there for like a year. tony was like, “don’t swedish people make awesome watches and stuff?” and i was like, “dude, that’s swiss not swedish!” and a bunch of european dudes had a real big laugh about it. lol. but apparently it is a common mistake lol…

we went on a midnight 7-11 run so miko and tony could get more beer. lingo passed out early and before we left tony went up and threw a tripod at lingo LOL in an attempt to wake him up. then threw everything in his pockets at lingo trying to accomplish the same. rofls. i bought a hentai mag at 7-11. tony and miko didn’t even remember going to 7-11 in the morning. lol.

went to bed and got about three hours of sleep. the roommate was still snoring loudly, but this time it was somewhat tolerable.

thursday, march 29th — mizue, shinjuku, akasaka
woke up at like, 8 or something ridiculous. i woulda slept more, but tony had told me to keep my key outside the door so they could pick it up before they came to bed, but they weren’t in bed in the morning, so i figured they never got the key. so… i kind of freaked out in my head because i was wondering if it was lost or not, so i had to wake up… turns out tony was passed out on the sofa downstairs and he HAD picked up the key — lingo and i spent two hours watching bad music videos on tv instead.

it was raining this morning really heavily and we were like super bummed, because we had to check out this morning. rain would have gotten us and our luggage soaked. luckily for us, however, when we were ready to leave, the rain stopped. we subway’d over to our new hotel in mizue (which is between the airport and asakusa… and btw, NO ONE knows were mizue is)… and we couldn’t check in until 3 because they were cleaning, so we walked around and explored the area.

went to eat italian food at some restaurant because italian food there is different — like, they put seaweed or salmon roe or random stuff on some dishes to make them more japanese. all italian restaurants have tabasco sauce readily available as well. i got doria. it was good. this restaurant had a cool self-service drink area and a buzzer that you could press when you were ready to order.

afterwards went to a ghetto ass fucking arcade to play the lamest fighting game ever (forget the name). mostly, we went there to kill time. it worked, i guess!

then we went to eat dessert at some cafe, and it was good times.

then we checked in, some people took showers after not taking them for so many days, and then we went to shinjuku to like, go clubbing. met up with yuki and walked around for a while — miko and i were going to fob it out on sunday, so we bought some socks, but no luck, cause there was no time to buy any other clothes :/

we went to eat teppanyaki / okonomiyaki and stuff…

then went to don quixote to buy lingo a sweatshirt since he was freezing his ass off. lol. he bought one and then takeo showed up. they all bought some sake at the store and drank it up in the street. drank up A LOT.

then we went to 747 karaoke to pre-funk it up for an hour. they sucked. didn’t give us more than three rounds of drinks. they were stingy! left quick since they no like us, and everyone else bought more sake for more prefunk. BAD IDEA.

we went to mcdonald’s to eat some food and drink. everyone was okay at this time. yuki treated us all. sat downstairs in a corner, and got soooo many looks! takeo sang happy birthday a few times to tony, and that was the start of having people stare at us. then we like, poured sake in a mcdonald’s pudding cup and made chairs fall over, and were loud and english-speaking, etc. got ready to leave and people were STILL staring.

but then tony started talking to some autistic-type girl and we stayed longer. she had pics she took from turkey or something. while waiting, we met a guy who had won a million dollars (USD, i think), and had given it all away to charity. he showed us photos of him next to the money.

he kept talking to me and i didn’t understand. made yuki/takeo translate. the dude drank 20 cups of coffee daily and he was droolmaster flex :0

lingo left after going to mcdonald’s since he was like, a zombie… lol. we met with raver richie around 11:30pm to go to ageha, and when we got out of the first subway train, yuki puked when we were coming up. he started not walking very well. lol. and it took forever to get from train to train since takeo and tony had to carry him!!

then yuki got on a train and puked all over the place (it was HUGE) and fell in his own puke :/

then at some point we ended up somewhere weird, and all the subways were closed. we talked about taking a cab, but yuki could not be moved, and the place we were standing just so happened to be a place that made it “illegal” to hail a cab.

first yuki passed out, then as tony was having some heart-to-heart with me, he passed out.

and then takeo passed out. lol. before that, though, takeo was trying to hail a cab while half asleep and it was quite scary. his eyes were like, closed as he was trying to hail the cab. lol.

then like… we tried to get tony and takeo up at the same time, and they were both like hella out of it, and just both were like, “okay! let’s get up!” although they had been like passed out, and both stood up all of a sudden together and ended up stumbling all over the place. but they were like, excited to get up, although they seemed not to know what to do with themselves after getting up, lol. eh, hard to explain. had to have seen it!

miko, richie, and i stayed there for forever, til like 4am. then we moved the three of them to a different corner where we attempted to hail a cab. sat for a while cuz it was hard to hail cabs, and yeah. takeo woke up at some point but was like a zombie! he kept saying, “samui! samui! samui!” then would go inside the store to get some food. then would come back out, eat the food, and keep saying, “samui! samui! samui!” then go back in the store. he tried paying for two empty bags of food at some point. HAHAHAHHAHA.

at 4am, some security guard dude helped us hail a couple cabs. the first said that he could only seat 2 people and that no one could sit in front. i think he was lying. then we got 2 other cars, and tony, takeo, and yuki took one to yuki’s apartment, and me, miko, and richie took the other to “shinohashi” (#4 bridge or something, where yuki lived, across from the iranian embassy, lol). suddenly, when we got out, yuki and tony were both all full of energy, lol. wth. we went to yuki’s and it cost about 2,000 yen, and everyone was confused. it was cheaper than we had expected.

tony and yuki had thought it was still like 12am and had no idea why we didn’t go to the club. lol. motherfuckers. yuki had a mean anti-social cat that hissed at epople. anyway, some people played on the computer but i went to bed pretty early and slept on yuki’s bed… there was some down blanket and i wrapped myself in it. at some point tony woke me up and carried me to sleep on the couch for some reason, and the down blanket was still wrapped around me (above and below). when i woke up, i was sweating like hell. lol. hot as balls. went to bed at 6am, woke up at 9am. gg.

saturday, march 31st — shibuya, mizue
called lingo when we woke up in the morning and said we were almost leaving. what a lie. lol. we were watching tv for like, ever, and basically left in like, an hour and a half. lol. takeo came with us. we got back to mizue and showered, got ready, and ate lunch at some french-influenced restaurant, then left to meet yuki in shibuya at hachiko. also met up with miko’s friend, yuji!

tony’s finger was rotting off from infection!

i had to go to citibank in shibuya to pick up some cash for miko and tony, since none of them had any money.

yuki took a lot of long exposure pics with all of us in that shibuya intersection (the busiest intersection in the world?) and it was quite boring…

then we all went to eat at a restaurant, kinda americanized again… i had some spicy chicken, miscellaneous asian stuff. kind of good.

after that, went karaoke yet again, at a new place… for 1,000 yen an hour. we stayed an hour and a half. again, there were limits to drinks, but it was better than yesterday. probably cause there was no crazy drinking today — it was fairly reserved.

it started raining when we left, and there was a guy pissing in the corner near hachiko. yeah. we waited for there a little bit. met up with richie and had to take a shuttle bus to go to ageha. takeo went home because he had to dj in the morning.

loud guy on the bus was screaming about being a gai-jin and a teacher in japan, but i guess he had pretty good japanese.

got to ageha. tony lost his wallet and found it. 35,000 yen cover. hi-tech lights, sound, and good music… reggae room — first time i’ve seen such a thing in a club!! it started out good then turned super bad. all the “hot girls” were there, i guess. tony almost got beaten up i think, cause he was freaking some guy’s girl.

richie kept saying something about how since we candywalked, we danced like we weren’t from japan. i don’t see why it matters, though — not everyone needs to look the same.

yuki lost his locker key cause he was breakdancing for a little while, but he found it because someone turned it in. karma, i say, because tony had found someone’s lost wallet and was trying to find a credit card in there to use it. grrrr.

also, ageha had like, a side room that had food vendors!! nice touch! yuki bought some stuff that was like jambalaya. it was kinda good i think. we fell asleep outside for a little while, waiting for the club to close at what we thought was 5… turns out it closed at 6… we ended up leaving at 5:30 because tony wanted to dance for a little longer. haven’t seen tony dance like that in, like, forever?

walked to some convenience store where some african dude offered to carry my food, saying that i was too small to carry it all. and one reached for my money, but i was like, “that’s my money!” i don’t know what that was all about, but then they bid me good day and left…?!

then we went to eat at some place where you pay first in a vending machine… had some curry stuff and some lady who worked there was incomprehensible. spoke in mumbles and crap. even japanese people didn’t understand her!

after that we went home because the trains were open, and slept in for the FIRST TIME! til 1:30pm.

there were so many people getting on the trains at 5:30am… asked yuji where they were going / coming from, and even he had no idea! and he is japanese!

sunday, april 1st — harajuku



went to harajuku and met with nanako. went to park, and there were some guys there with “free hugs” signs. one of the guys with the sign was talking to someone, so i hugged him from behind. lol. he was super surprised, and in america, people with that sign probably would have been like! hi! and hugged me back even though it was surprising… but this guy didn’t, lol. yeah. he was just kind of awkward about it.

soo… i made up a sign that said, “hugs, 1 yen,” and lingo held up a sign above me saying, “and herpes.” i got two people willing to pay one yen each, and two who didn’t have money so lingo “loaned them money”, and one which was tony, and two who were two cheap to pay one yen (which is 1/100th of a penny!!) bitches!

harajuku was kinda disappointing because i expected it to be a helluva lot bigger, but it was actually kind of small and restricted to just one small park section. some girls with costumes and what not.

afterwards, went to eat tonkatsu ramen. lingo and tony got spicy ramen and put a whole bunch of garlic in it. sounds good.

went shopping afterwards — there were some places with cool punk/goth clothes, but they were expensive. and there was one that was cheap, but it was for skinny people only :/

after that, we walked over to shibuya because tokyo tower was closed (yuki had wanted to take us there). we met up with yuki halfway and then went to the same ol’ familiar area in shibuya where we decided to go karaoke. takeo showed up too. some place where they filmed the karaoke scene in “lost in translation” tried to rip us off, so we went to big one — the same place as the first night we went karaoke. it was 25,000 yen a person for all-night karaoke, til 5am!!! same cost as 2 and a half hours lol. awesome!!!

only richie, lingo, and i stayed up the ENTIRE night. miko stayed up most of the night. takeo passed out first, then yuki, then tony. same ol, same ol. as we were leaving, i rubbed yuki’s head to try and wake him up, and he hated it, apparently — i didn’t see his face, but miko said he looked pissed lol. then i rubbed takeo’s head to wake him up, and his reaction was funny because instead of doing nothing like yuki, he started slapping the chair next to him hahaha. lol…

anyway, at 5am we walked to the place by hachiko and the busiest intersection in the world or whatever was now basically deserted!! everyone went home and took naps and left individually.

monday, april 2nd
left to go to the airport. thought our flight was at 5pm, but really, it was at fucking 1pm. so we sat in the airport forever. since we never really had time to go shopping, we talked about going shopping at the airport, but there really wasn’t anything to buy. had risotto at the airport. tried massage chairs with lingo at the airport. they were mostly fun but made me kind of sick afterwards. watched part of “stranger than fiction” on the plane, and it seems pretty good but i didn’t get to finish it — did, however, watch parts of “the good german” with george clooney and it seems dumb… and watched the whole of “curse of the golden flower,” which VISUALLY is AWESOME but everything else about it is fucking terrible. ick. ICKKKKKK.

i’m feeling… cool.
i’m listening to… rocky votolato - she was only in it for the rain, ted leo and the pharmacists - where have all the rude boys gone, ted leo and the pharmacists - the high life, the blood brothers - red-blooded american girls, bright eyes - touch, bright eyes - haligh, haligh, a lie, a lie, against me! - miami.

12:24 am — what a day!!!

woke up at 8:30am and went to meet aaron and sandy @ 10 at the san ramon marriott. went to denny’s. it was gross. sandy told us stories about how he broke a guy’s kneecap playing soccer. and it was the THIRD TIME HE HAD DONE IT. holy moses. he also told us about how he was eating dinner at his brother’s house, and his fiance made lasagna and it had way too much cheese and his dad kept making fun of her and she ended up crying AHAHA. terrible sandy that high-maintenance hoe! i write this knowing he will be reading it. so hi, sandy. he made me retake his photo 3 times cause it wasn’t good enough for his tastes, and then here is a sample convo:

sandy: don’t drop me off!
me: then come to berkeley!
sandy: i cannnn’t. let’s go to a lan center!
aaron: okay, look one up at the marriott.
sandy: no wait, i can’t. i shouldn’t.
aaron and i: okay. *go to drop off sandy
sandy: noooo! don’t drop me off!!!!

and so it goes. rofls. eventually we had to let him off and it was a heart-breaking, tear-dripping goodbye.

—

onwards to berkeley. aaron and i WERE planning to go to sf, but because berkeley was the closer (and less tasty) alternative, we went to berkeley instead. it started off slow, but ended up pretty well worth the interestingness.

where to begin. rofls. i guess i will begin with some stats. these are not at ALL accurate. they do not take into account at all the number of people who passed by. i did have tallies for IGNORE, but i think those are way too high and inaccurate to take into account, so i’m not even going to bother.

[NEGATIVE RESPONSES: ANGRY LOOKS OR WHATEVER]
05: white males
02: white females
02: hispanic males
01: hispanic females
01: asian males
01: asian females

[HALF RESPONSES: WAVES, SMILES, HEAD NODS]
22: white males
11: white females
06: black males
05: asian females
02: asian males

[FULL RESPONSES]
08: white males
02: black females
01: white females
01: black males
01: hispanic males
01: asian females

[OTHER NOTABLE RESPONSES]
- one guy who said, “that sure is a desperate cry for attention.” asshole.
- indian dad who walked by a few times but would not acknowledge me waving at him. he did, however, keep pointing at us to his son. wonder what he was saying.

[PROGRESSION OF OUR SIGNS]
- “come tell us a story or talk to us about stuff.” (this failed greatly)
- “talk to us.”
- “talk to us (for more than 3 words).”
- “talk to us (for more than 13 words).”
- “talk to us (for more than 137 words).”
- “talk to and enlighten us.”

—

“COME TELL US A STORY OR TALK TO US ABOUT STUFF”
BEAD LADY
no real responses. first person to give us even close to a positive response was a lady who was bringing out some signs. she ran a bead shop, and she claims she would have talked to us but she had to go back to manage her shop. maybe when her worker came, she said, but she didn’t ever come back (although at some point she passed by and asked if we had talked to anyone, and we said yep, cause jason was talking to us.)

THE HISPANIC DUDE WITH SUNGLASSES
this guy stopped by and his friend was next to him but didn’t talk to us. he was going somewhere. but he basically just asked us why we were doing this and he was surprised he was the first one to really actively engage in conversation with us. yup. he left, but wished us good luck. was friendly! we didn’t talk much of anything of substance, but there seemed to be too short of time for that.

THE BREATHING DUDE
this guy and his friend walked by and they seemed like they wanted to talk MAYBE but had nothing to say. college student age. the taller guy said, i’ll tell you something — “breath is the bridge between the mind and the body.” and kind of left it at that. he seemed a LITTLE antagonistic, like he couldn’t understand why we were doing what we were doing, but yeah.

“TALK TO US (FOR MORE THAN 3 WORDS)”
THE MR. JASON FROM ALABAMA
jason was probably the highlight of our conversations, actually. being that… he was the one who connected us on the most realistic level. it was kinda like talking to an old friend, as opposed to being interrogated or having just one layer removed from. jason… is from alabama. had just moved to san francisco because he had gotten a job at a game company in emeryville. he was a video game environment designer. working on a shooter that is to come out for xbox 360 and computer. he didn’t know much about what he was working on, asides from the fact that the game had squad-based play. what else. he was 24. had just graduated from school. double major in cs and art. he almost lived in seattle, but he got the offer from a place in cali before he got an offer from a place in seattle, so he felt bad not taking the offer in cali. so he took it, and there he was. he liked the pacific northwest, though. he was pretty liberal, especially for being in alabama. he said that he really just needed to get away and that his parents were still there but he wanted to eventually have his brother come out to live with him. he said that he did abstract type painting when he lived in alabama because no one was really doing that kind of thing. everyone was just doing same ol same ol crap. landscapes, and face portraits. and he said they were really good, but that’s all they knew and everything just kind of looked the same. he also said that people there were really nice and stuff, but they were all just kind of the same and cookie cutter — they wouldn’t know bands or art or anything until it became super popular, like they wouldn’t know the postal service until people heard it on tv commercials and then suddenly everyone liked it. but he kept saying and making sure we knew that they weren’t bad people, it just had no culture. and he said atlanta was ghetto and to never go there. and that there was music there, but it was mostly solo artists playing piano or guitar by themselves. he said the street he lived on had like, 20 churches, in that 3 mile section, and that that was scary. lol. it’s funny cause he kept saying, “not to offend you, but…” yeah. oh by the way, he had passed us by when he first saw our sign, but then came back and talked to us because he honestly felt bad for passing us up. that’s pretty fucking awesome if i do say so myself. i asked him about people’s opinions about bush there, and he said that they were obviously pro-bush, but he felt like a lot of people were confused… like they worked on military bases cause a lot of those jobs were military jobs, yet working for a military base doesn’t necessarily mean you’re pro-bush or pro-war… you don’t have to always agree. he also didn’t really know that the west coast wasn’t ALL liberal. (btw, he eventually sat on the ground with us, and thank god, because it was getting painful to look up to him and talk!) he had the notion that the berkeley area and seattle area were liberal, so all of california and all of washington were liberal. we told him that wasn’t true, especially when you get to more suburban areas, and that definitely surprised him, and he said it was scary that people’s opinions about things change with the amount of money they make. it’s true, and it’s kind of fucked he wanted to know what i thought about microsoft, and i said i’d never work there because of all the bureaucracy, and he said he’d heard about that. and then we discussed how bill gates donates a lot but he makes so much so he kind of HAS to because what are you going to do with all of that money? he also talked about some conferences like e3, but more geeky, so that there are yachts rented out by companies and all that jazz, but essentially everyone there just geeks the fuck out and talks about geeky software and game shit lol. amusing. yeah. that’s the gist of it, even though we talked to him for like, an hour. it was cool. a good way to start us off, that’s for sure, cause he was def one of the coolest people we talked to there. i pimped redefine to him, so let’s see if he e-mails! he was pretty cute. and i don’t even like facial hair.

after jason was leaving, aaron and i decided to switch spots. it seemed like a good time. we got some bubble tea (i got a red bean bubble tea which was made TERRIBLY!! it was more like green bean soup than red bean milkshake. the beans were still like, whole basically. fucking nasty, man. so depressing!)… and then headed more towards campus. went pee. the campus internet center was funny cause it was dominated by homeless. why not, i guess. there was some fashion show going on too. anyhow. we sat down on a space near the main entrance to the campus, under some tree. let the adventures re-begin.

THE GUITAR GUY WHO WAS SCOTTISH
this guy was half incomprehendable, but oh well. he said a lot of things about scottishness. we were sitting on the corner with no sun, talking to jason, and he said we should sit somewhere with more sun. i said i don’t like sun. i said i live in seattle. he said, “you like scottish sun then — it’s not hot.” i said, “exactly.” and then he talked about how he liked portland and had been kicked out of tons of bars in portland, and how he almost got in a fight with some scottish person in portland, but then he mentioned something about being from scotland, and the people couldn’t tell, so they were like, “holy shit, maybe he is scottish,” and for some reason left him alone (?!) hahaha oh yeah this guy totally said i was like, ugly, cause i was saying i don’t like sun and he was saying, some people purposely don’t get tans to make themselves ugly so that guys won’t like them or they won’t get attention or something. HAHA. amusing.

“TALK TO US (FOR MORE THAN 3 WORDS)”
THE PEOPLE WHO THOUGHT THEY WERE WITTY
aaron and i had to make a seperate category for people who thought they were witty. there were just too godamn many of them. they would say, “how are you doing?” and laugh to themselves, run away, and never care what you had to say. in this category there was one asian woman and one little white kid. they were both retarded.

THE YOUTH GROUP LADY
this lady was the leader of a youth group. her kids were these asian girls and boys. yep. she talked about how she thought it was interesting because her task for her kids was finding random acts of kindness and basically doing them. and she was thinking that on her way towards where we were (which was away from where her kids were) — that perhaps the key to being kind was just establishing interconnected relationships with one another. and the fact that we were sitting there kind of… went together wtih her thoughts on that. she had lived in palestine for a year and mentioned that people there seemed a lot happier because they just lived life in close proximity to one anther, interacted with each other a lot, and really knew each other. it felt like one big community. yup. so eventually, she was going to ‘test’ her girls to see if they’d talk to us. so, she watched us from a little far away and would just see if her girls would stop and talk to us as they were going back to meet her. they failed the test, as they said no more than just “hello”. haha it was funny, cause she was basically kind of yelling over to us, saying, “THEY FAILED THE TEST!!!!” it woulda been better had she literally jumped out of a tree, but yeah.

THE FOUR ASIAN GIRLS FROM YOUTH GROUP
four high school girls from youth group, who were being led by that lady. i don’t know her name. anyway, they came over to talk to us after she said they failed. only one seemed super engaged. two didn’t really talk at all. one to the right seemed like the gang leader of the two in the middle, rofls. she did all the talking and would barely address me. every time i would say something she would basically be like, “what?” and then go back to talking to aaron. it was quite interesting. didn’t really look at anyone else, as she was doing all the talking. one girl to the left who was shorter and a lot less um, high-maintenance looking… was a lot more friendly although she seemed kind of shy too. her random act of kindness (and, she was the ONLY one out of the 4 who revealed her random act of kindness) was talking to street vendors about how long they had been doing what they did and what not. que interesante. she seemed cool. said she was thinking about going to UW and stuff, so yeah. yup.

THE LADY HAILING FROM ATLANTA
black lady from atlanta who had a lot of kids with her. she was there for her sister, because her sister was in the aforementioned fashion show. she was friendly. just made very simple, polite conversation with us, but it was definitely nice.

“TALK TO US (FOR MORE THAN 13 WORDS)”
THE CONTACT JUGGLING DUDES
there were some dudes dressed in a top hat and a trench coat of fur kind of thing, and one just wearing other black clothes. the one without the top hat had a ball, and he was just kind of rolling it around on his hands. i asked him what it was for, and he said, “contact juggling.” i dunno. but the ball looked heavy even though it was super duper light. anyway, the guy in the top hat was commenting on how it was hot and i said he was wearing a lot of clothes, and he mentioned something about the shade we were sitting under. i think he woulda probably talked to us for a long time had it been just himself, cause he definitely looked willing to talk. his friend was one of those who was counting to see how many words he had said. yup. but yeah, i touched their ball to see if it was heavy and then the friend got kinda testy and was really abruptly just saying they had to go and they kind of sped off.

THE LANGUAGE GUY
he asked us what we were to talk to him about, and we said, anything, and he said, in what language? and we said, whatever… and he’s like, you won’t understand it! and then went away laughing really super loudly like HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!! some light-skinned black dude i think.

“TALK TO US (FOR MORE THAN 137 WORDS)”
THE COUPLE NAMED JAMIE AND JANE OF THE JUNGLE
jamie and jane. jane didn’t really talk much. jamie was just basically making small talk until he thought he got to 137 words. not much exciting there. polisci student. had some mediterranean food. boring.

THE HIP-HOP DUDE
didn’t think this guy would talk, at least not at length… particularly cause had headphones on, but he took them off and everything. young black guy — looked really quite young, but i think he was def older than he looked. was wearing headphones and a hat with interesting shiny sequiny shit on it and was really friendly. LOOKED really nice. you know, how some people just have that look. unfortunately, i forgot this guy’s name because he introduced himself towards the end of our convo. hopefully aaron remembers. this guy was one of my faves… him, jason, and linguistics guy. and maybe old jewish guy. anyway, he was going to his friend’s house to return a dvd called “the secret”… he had borrowed the movie from his friend’s mom and mailed it back, but she’d never received it, so he had to buy another copy to bring to her. i tried looking this movie up on imdb — it’s some documentary, he said — but i couldn’t find it. he was cool because he directed questions at both aaron and i, and from guys, that’s quite appreciated. he mentioned how he used to be big into music and how he used to go to davis to drink with his friends and did some crazy shit there. i think i like his attitude. i mentioned how not that many people are friendly, so thanks for talking to us, and he said, “it is what it is.” interesting. why interesting, i’m not so sure.

THE GUITAR HERO GUY
this guy was a bit awkward. wearing sunglasses, pretty tall. grew up in albany. he was a little bothered by the fact that his house was 6 miles away and that berkeley was cool standalone, but he wanted to go somewhere else to live for college. maybe for grad school. he was a cs major, i think. he said he was going to go to his friend’s house to play guitar. i asked him how long he’d been playing guitar, and then he said, “guitar hero. it’s a game like dance dance revolution,” and i’m like, “yeah, i know that guitar hero is.” sucka. but yeah, that was a little awkward, def, but it was nice that he stopped to talk. for sheez. didn’t really catch on right away why 137 words, but he got over it.

THE BELLIGERENT NICE GUY
this guy was quite the interesting. he was like, belligerent, but nice. first thing he asked was, “do you guys want money or something?” we said no. “you want to sell something?” we said no — do you see any money on the sign? then he tried to make some small talk but he seemed like, angry, but then not. he was double majoring in polisci and law or something. future lawyer i guess? but yeah, interesting to talk to, albeit a bit strange. this guy didn’t really catch on for the longest time why 137… seems like that number catches people off guard. people see a number and become instantly infatuated with it?

THE LINGUIST MAN
oh man this guy was interesting. one of my faves too. kind of nerdy looking guy from santa cruz. glasses. black shirt. super motherfucking spazzy. like crazy spazzy. like, i dunno what’s wrong with you spazzy, but i really kind of enjoy your excitement spazzy. he asked us why 137 words. we said, dunno, and explained the gradual progression — how when we wrote 3, people would say 4 words… how when we wrote 13, people would say 14, and so we picked a larger number. he said, “but how will you know when they reach 137? that number is so specific…” so i said, “then give us 1,000, and we’ll know for sure.” he seemed to like that answer. he told us he was at a conference in berkeley for linguistics. i said i wanted to do linguistics at some point but it was too hard. he said it can get there but it soon envelops you and you enjoy studying all the little quirks of language. interesting. so i asked him what he thought the most interesting thing, from a linguistics standpoint. he cited some german guy’s study where he was talking about the meaning of numbers, and how people use numbers like 100 and 50 and whatever to describe things usually, because that’s what we’re used to. we’re used to that from looking at scales or measures or whatever. and he said, a number like 137 implies specificity, and it makes people think there is some greater importance. so i asked him, had the number been 100 and not 137, would you have thought twice about talking to us? and he said, DEFINITELY. so fucking fascinating… the little changes that took place with our sign seemed to make large changes overall. but maybe what he said kind of explained why people were so fucking obsessed with a NUMBER on our sign. it was, like aaron said, as though the number were italicized and bolded, and nothing else on our sign was (which is only the case figuratively).

THE JEWISH ASSHOLE
this guy was really interesting. he was 65. he paid no attention to the 137 number. thank god. he basically said he really really liked our idea and appreciated that we were doing it, because he took classes at berkeley (degree from stanford) and found that people didn’t really talk to one another. evreyone was so closed off with phones and ipods that it was easy to ignore one another and not talk to each other at all. he asked me what i wanted to get out of doing this. i said, i liked to do it because i like seeing who talks and what they have to say… and it makes me think that people are not complete assholes if they come and stop and talk to you. and he said, “the unfortunate part about that is that i can stop and talk to you but i might be a complete asshole in other parts of my life,” and that’s pretty damn interesting. true, but i still don’t think complete assholes would not stop and talk to you. but i dunno, what do i know. he also hypothesized that younger people wuold be more willing to talk to people because life had not burdened them down and stuff. he was super interested — and he made pardons for saying this because he was from a small town in the midwest — that aaron’s this blonde haired kid and i’m asian, and as he would say, “we draw from vastly different genetic pools,” and yet we were together doing this and i guess, breaking those boundaries? and he thought that was really cool, i guess. i liked him. interesting.

“TALK TO US”
THE UNITARIAN MAN
i had a smiley face that kind of looked like a U with two dots in the middle on my sign. this guy didn’t have much to say except that i should change that smiley face around, because it kind of looks like a symbol for SOMETHING that wasn’t a smliey face… and that maybe people would think it was universalist or unitarian or something. heh. so i changed it. and before he left, he was like, “did i talk to you?” and we said, yeah, thanks.

“TALK TO AND ENLIGHTEN US”
THE HARE KRISHNA GUY
this guy came over and wanted us to chant some chants with him. he had some bells — they’re not bells, but i dunno what they’re called… they’re like castanets but make sounds more similar to bells (although not really). he said they were donated by some friends since his bag got stolen. i think it’s very very fucking interesting that he came by after we added “enlighten” to our sign. suddenly, i just saw him come out of the woodwork. it’s like, where did he come from? i dunno, but that’s awfully strange! anyway, he wanted us to chant with him. i still have the card. the chant is… “hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna hare hare hare rama hare rama hare rama rama rama hare hare.” he said some verses in sanskrit that were pretty dope once he translated them. one was about how… basically, as the body passes from young to middle-age to old age… the transition is similar to how an enlightened person passes on after death to their soul… they don’t even notice or are surprised by the change. that is pretty godamn interesting of a thought. i know nothing about hare krishna, but i guess they believe in reincarnation, vegetarianism, and lots about gathering together in love to worship god. i dunno, that’s cool, i’m down with that. he was interesting — he held aaron’s gaze very intensely for a very long tme. not like, staring, but it was just a strong gaze. he went off on some tangents too. but it was interesting — he seemed like he was preaching to us, but not really. it was more like, just informing us about his religion. it was more like he had not found it all that long ago himself. but i’m not sure if that’s true or not. but it didn’t feel pushy — and just informative (a little TOO informative, i’d say, as he never truly asked us questions and more just ranted). so it was interesting, i guess. more about him to come.

THE SOLE HOMELESS GUY
so, this guy… he was kind of crazy. very long white hair. very deep forehead wrinkles (like, 4 rows of them), and very white beard and mustache. really kind of crazy. he started saying some negative things to mr. hare krishna, so mr. hare krishna asked if we could move. he said he wanted to respect this guy from far away but didn’t really want to talk to us in an environment of negativity. we didn’t really move. the homeless guy wanted to talk, so while he was talking to aaron about lord knows what, i talked to the hare krishna guy. he said he was taking lessons on counseling and learning how to listen better because he wasn’t much of a listener. he was taking classes from one of his friends who was a convert as well but also a very big advocate for homeless people, and his friend was helping work with the mayor and large people on homelessness and trying to find housing or living arrangements for those people. interesting. at some point mr. homeless got a bit too belligerent and was practically screaming at aaron. so i tried to butt in, and at this point…

THE BLACK LADY WHO COULD LAY THE SMACKDOWN ON MR. HOMELESS
truly this is a terrible title for her, but unfortunately, i didn’t get too much a chance to talk to her because the homeless guy was too busy wreaking havok. so she came over to ask us what we were doing, and aaron kind of answered her, so mr. homeless got mad and was screaming at him, saying aaron wouldn’t talk to him. and aaron said he was talking to him… but i guess halfway through aaron talking to him the guy just trailed off and never finished what he was saying. and then he got mad that aaron didn’t keep talking to him even though he was incapable of keeping conversation. he was saying things like, “you just want to throw me away?!” and “oh talk to her but don’t talk to me!” and stuff… it was kind of creepy. so i tried to intersect and he wouldn’t talk to me and was like, “i wasn’t talking to you! i was talking to him!” and he’d be like to aaron, “what, i can’t touch you?” and aaron’s like, “no,” and he’s like, “then why are you touching me?!” and aaron’s like, “i’m not!’ it was quite strange. ahahah so while this guy was ranting, lay the smack down lady was like, “where are the doctors? where are the medical professionals?” lol. she was funny. anyway, then i managed to get mr. homeless to talk to me briefly, and he’s like, “what do you want to talk about?” and i’m like, “anything. you tell me,” and he’d get all impatient and be like, “well, what do you want to talk about?” and i’d be like, “what’s your name,” and he’d say, “what’s yours?” and then i’d be like, ‘vivian,” and then he like, started using my name against me, rofls. saying, “what do you DO, vivian,” and i’d be like, “uhhhhhhhh… i’m from seattle. visiting here,” and he said, “how did you get here?” and i said, “uhhhh… plane,” and he was like, “UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH…” and i was like, “why are you making fun of me,” and he’s like, “do you practice that?” and i said, “yeah, i practice that in the mirror every day.” what a freak! he said to me, “you are a piece of shit,” and aaron said something to him about how he shouldn’t say that and then he got belligerent with aaron, and then the lay the smackdown lady was so funny man she was like, “hey, hey hold up excuse me, i have to ask my classmate a question here, we go to the same school.” and she’s like, “what grade are you in?” to aaron, and he said soph, and she said her too, and then he was like, “er, actually, i go to davis,” (which totally blew that lie but that other guy was too crazy to know the difference anyway), and she hated davis for some reason i didn’t catch. but man, funny. eventually, we decided we should go elsewhere, and ms. smackdown got our e-mail addresses cause she was interested in finding out our results (she will probably read this? rofls)… but yeah, she left after that, and homeless guy gave me a bag, and he told me to give it to some homeless person, and i said, “what’s this?” and he got mad and was like, “you ain’t ever been homeless, have you?” and screamed that for a good 80,000 years (more like 5 minutes) after we had left and gone back to bathroom toilet central. before we left he also re-started ranting about hoe we weren’t talking to him, and i said, purposely in a really whiny voice, “but you called me a piece of shit. that wasn’t nice.” and for a second he did kind of soften, or so it seemed, and he was like, “i didn’t say that.” and i said, “yeah, you didm” and he said, “well you ARE a piece of shit.” rofls.

back to mr. hare krishna. he talked to us a bit more before we left. basically saying that he respected people like that homeless guy, but like, he couldn’t help them anymore. all he could do was associate with people who shared similar beliefs, such as vegetarianism, and try to come together with a common belief. he’d been a vegetarian for 40 years, i guess. insert some other stuff. he mentioned some speaker who was coming to town and gave us a flyer, saying that speaker was super famous and had enlightened a lot of people during the 60s and 70s (the dude was dead now), and that last time he talked to someone, that someone knew the “enlightening dude”. i dunno. i’m super confusing myself. uh yeah. interesting. but he talked a bit about reincarnation again — oh yeah he also said yoga means to like, be in congregation with your god or something — not the meditation exercise crap it is now. but yeah. aaron said he “super had to go to the bathroom,” and that guy said, “you super better go then,” and he was elsewhere by the time he got out, talking to someone else, so we kind of sneaked away and went back to our car to pay 18 MOTHERFUCKING DOLLARS for parking 4 1/2 hours. WHAT THE HELLHOLE.

interesting note… there weren’t really many homeless people who talked to us. only that solitary insane one. VERY STRANGE. berkeley has so many homeless. where are they?

AARON’S VERSION (in a conversation with joe tran)
this hare krishna guy came and talked to usand rambled on about spiritual stuff and then this bum came and he was really crazy. he’d tell you something and then say he didn’t say it and then get super belligerent about how you weren’t talking to him. and then you’d talk to him and he’d be like, “don’t talk to me. you fucking asshole. what the fuck,” and stuff like that. he was sitting next to me for like 10 min while the hare krishna dude was there. and the hare krishna guy kept trying to get us to go and talk in a quiet place so he could convert us. and we’re like, “nahhhh, it’s cool, we like this bum guy who was totally annoying.” and i kept having to tell him to stop telling vee to shut up, yeah they kinda fought a little — not physically, but w/ words, cuz the guy would be like, “VIVIAN, YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE,” and i’d be like, “dude don’t say that,” and i’d have to like calm him down. the rest of the time it was pretty normal. that was just at the end. we sat on this corner on telegraph for a while and no one talked to us. we’d be like, “heyyy, hows it gion, where are you off to,” and try to talk topeople and shit but they’d just say hi or ignore us, and finally this one dude came back and felt bad for not talking to us, and he ended up sitting down and chatting for like 1 hour. his name was jason; he was from alabama, and he just moved out here for a job. just out of college and all. video game designer. but it was his like 2nd day here and he didn’t have a place to live or anything. he was just rooming w/ someone at the company and didn’t know anything about the area and all. he was a really interesting guy. he was the most interesting. yeh, it was tight… if you (joe) ever do it, make sure you have at least 3 people (2 preferrably girls), make 2 signs, go during afternoon (not morning), and make sure your signs ask like specific questions that will get people involved but they shouldn’t be questions on like an Issue. but irecommend it. esp if you’re with vee cuz shes coo. plus when people ignore you, you can just talk about it and how its funny. its tight.

kure’s response: lol maybe, but i dont think i’m the kind of person to just go out and talk to people, shrug

aaron’s response: see, i’m not either, but it’s not hard. i really am not; i was totally scared going in. it helps to have someone who’s kinda outgoing, plus vivian had done it before but i mean i started talking a lot or i felt like i was anyway cuz it doesn’t really matter and you just say hi to everyone and laugh at them if they ignore you or smile awkwardly and some people actually have some interesting things to say… not a whole lot but a few. you should make fun of vee though cuz she likes red bean boba. it tasted horrible. my passion fruit icee was much better. i kinda wish she lived close so we could hang out more; shes pretty interesting. i’m always surprised about how equal opportunity she is, if you get what i mean. for the most part she’s very non-judgmental of people. i mean no one is completely non-judgmental but she’s very accepting of most stuff… just how she talks about stuff, she’s never like anti something and she’s not really negative about anything… i mean she might say oh that was messed up of some person or blah blah but she doesn’t take offense. i dunno. i mean 10:00:35 PM someone you meet online and hang out w/ for like 6 hours w/o being super awkward must be pretty cool. i was way nervous about that. sandy kept asking us to go to a lan center like after breakfast. well he had to go drive home at like 1 or something so he’d be like lets go do something and then change his mind and be like well…. i can’t tho. he always does that. whenever anyone would ask how we met i’d say something about mutual friend which is you. you would have done fine cuz i’m crazy shy. i don’t ever talk to anyone. this one old jewish dude with a moustache and hat talked to us about how no one talks to people anymore. he was saying how he took a bunch of lcasses at berkeley and everyone’s always on their phone or listening to their ipod and he never really talked to people taht much and talked about human interaction for about a million years but he seemed cool and nice

(jason’s response on my blog:)
Sounds like you guys had a blast for the most part of the day. I’m glad I stopped by to talk to you both. Made for a great 2nd day in California.
-Jason

i’m listening to… brandtson, “celebrity fit club” on vh1.

3:13 am - a couple days ago me, lenny, and liz hit the streets of downtown seattle with a sign saying, “TALK TO US about anything and everything. we’re here to listen.”

it was fun times. it’s always fun times. i didn’t take a racial tally this time around because people were much more engaged than they were in san francisco… but i will give an idea about what kind of thing went on… as best i can remember, anyways.

we started off on the pier downtown waterfront area but couldn’t really find anyone interesting to talk to, and blahblahblehbleh. so we moved, and walked up to pike place. up lots of stairs. :X

as soon as we were setting up on some streetcorner, some guy came to talk to us right away. his name was randall w. stack. he showed me his veteran’s card. he was a veteran from the vietnam war. looked homeless, but was loaded. told lenny to buy him a beer, and then told him to buy us drinks also. we said we didn’t want any, and he said, “you know women. they always say no when they mean yes.” how true! just kidding. anyway, he kept telling me to take notes, even though he could barely finish a sentence, lmao. anyway, right before he told lenny to go buy drinks, he was telling us that he wanted to tell us a story. but right when lenny left, some ther guy name timothy showed up. he kind of looked like indian, with really long curlyish black hair and just normal clothes. he was from the UK, on his way to dinner. when he heard that randall was going to tell a story about the vietnam war, he stuck around, because he grew up in a military family and his dad died in that war, but they never really got the chance to talk about it, so basically, he was pretty repressed his whole life… when timothy first came, we started asking him questions, and randall was just like all freaking out, saying, “oh, you ask him questions but you didn’t ask me any!” like he was jealous that he wasn’t the center of attention anymore, lol.

but lenny took too long to come back with the beer, and randall wouldn’t start telling the story without him there. another guy showed up. his name was shawn. white dude with headphones, just a regular shirt… just a typical working guy. he was working at a law firm, and he didn’t really want to do that for a living, but it was just a job. he had just read a thing on MPR??? about a lady in france who sat in a park with a sign saying “talk to me” in french and english, and she just talked to people. her point was that it’d be hard for young ladies to do the same thing, because people wouldn’t be comfortable talking to young ladies. he found it interesting that this didn’t seem to be true. meanwhile, timothy from the UK had to leave because he had to go to dinner and didn’t have time to hear the story.

fast-forward. shawn left also. lenny came back without a beer, and so randall left to go buy one on his own. he really needed that beer! a guy named rod, a clean-cut african-american dude stopped by. he had a bunch of bags of stuff from pottery barn and some winnie the pooh towels and kid stuff… he was from bellevue. he was like, “i’m bored, so i came down here to buy some stuff.” he had a son that was 12, born in canada. dropped out of tech school that his parents were paying for to join the navy, and they were quite pissed. his son had dual citizenship, and i asked if he got free health care, and he’s like, “hell yeah, that’s part of the reason for having him be born in canada.” ruckyyyy. he was a cool guy. enjoyed his laugh. he’d been in jail for marijuana posession. lame.

randall came back halfway through and gave rod some weird-ass looks. rod left, and randall was about to tell us the story when a security guard lady came and said we couldn’t be in pike’s place market because all the stores were closed. we were going to walk to westlake, but randall told us to go to the park with him. he told us there would be people we could talk to there. didn’t know there was a park in pike’s place for one, but we got there and no one talked to us. he did try to tell us a story, though. haha TRY.

he told us about how when he was young, he was greedy and self-serving, and didn’t believe in religions. he had an apartment on the beach, sold drugs, and knew a lot of girls. he was listening to a ted nugent song which said, “i got news - you never got to go,” and when he was listening, a voice said in his head, “i am the alpha, and i am the omega,” and he thought it was god… uhh so i asked him, “are you christian now?” and he just gave up telling the story altogether, and was just like, “you’re way ahead of me,” but never finished anything. you have to realize that this guy had the absolutely most fascinating teeth. he was missing most of his front teeth except for two on the right side of his mouth, and they were like, yellowed and double the length of my teeth. it was… fascinating. he was like the dirty mad hatter or something.

anyway, we decided to leave because he wasn’t entertaining us, and decided to walk to westlake. the whole way, we held the sign up, and it was probably like a three-block walk. on the way there, this lady was like, “talk to us about anything and everything? get those crackheads off our streets! you see that street right there? a famous musician died there because of crack! get the crackheads off our streets before your kids have to deal with it!” and that was all.

another lady just saw the sign and asked what it was for. she said, “our social experiment is going out ith a group of ladies for this lady’s 39th birthday. just to celebrate that we’re still alive.” lol., like 39 is that old WTF.

then we sat down on these stairs outside of westlake center… and we couldn’t find a place that was that great, but one dude stopped by to talk, and another guy was like, “hey, talk to me,” and we were like, “come over here,” but he said, “i only talk to people here,” so we went to sit by him. his name was savalas. it is greek for “leader of leaders.” smart dude man. but… he sits there everyday talking to people. he told us how he knows everyone and talks to all sorts of people, and people come talk to him… and he told us all about the different kinds of solicitors in the area… people for women’s rights, money for africa, etc. he was a theology major. he really thought the name of my magazine, redefine, was sooo awesome because it is challenging pre-made definitions that were put in place by people of power, etc. etc. blahblahblah. he asked us a lot about what we were studying. i asked him what he was doing with his life, what his dreams and aspirations were. know his responses? he says, “that’s a very personal thing. do you have kids? do you have sex?” and i was answered those questions, but he was like, “see? it’s very personal.” i don’t really think that dreams and aspirations are nearly as personal, but to each his own, i guess.

a large black lady passed by and was like, “i’m so glad you’re talking to them,” to savalas.

a couple more people i don’t remember. this one guy stopped by and he kind of looked crazy to begin with. we asked him where he was going, and he said, “i’m going to canada. i’m from los angeles.” wtf? he said it took him 28 hours to get from seattle to the canadian border, and when he got there, they wouldn’t let him in because he didn’t know where he was going. he said that he needed to get there before his girlfriend stopped being his girlfriend. LMAO. wtf? he’s crazy.

another guy was a musician named nick. he had a guitar and was on his way to a coffee shop. he was from the bay area, as were many people… like rod, and some other people. yeah, i didn’t really talk to him because at the time i was talking to savalas about redefine.

at some point a group of skaters walked by, and savalas told them to talk to us. savalas asked one of them if he could do tricks, and he’s like, “of course. i’m a professional.” savalas was like, “bullshit.” and the guy was like, “yeah okay, i can’t do anything. professional people would probably say, ‘i’m alright.’” and i was like, “dude, you’re wearing sandals,” and another guy who was with him was like, “yeah, that totally gives it away.”

savalas left us with a couple of quotes:
“i freed a thousand slaves. i could have freed a thousand more, if only they knew they were slaves.” - harriet tubman.
&
“we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - albert einstein.

werd.

i’m listening to… a wilhelm scream and hong kong six. whatevers.

9:08 am — woke up in the morning and then drove to brett [buchholtz] [pwn]’s place in ellensburg. got lost there as usual but somehow managed to find his house. FUCK MAPQUEST. they always give me fucked up directions to his house. -__-

crammed myself into matt [buchholtz] [stretch]’s car, and we had to pile sleeping bags and stuff on top of ourselves hah. then we met up with the rest of the hoes @ rite-aid, and i got into brett [murphy] [weezy] & lindsey’s car. la la la. drove to the gorge and there was like no one there yet. this was around 11:30 to 12. i thought it had started @ 12, but we actually had perfect timing. as usual, the parking people told us to park somewhere, so we’d say OK and then wait a minute (or in this case 20 seconds) and then drive to another campsite, and proceed to take up about four-cars-worth of space to set up our tent in and shit.

then we went to the show just in time for the first acts, pretty much.

senses fail was the opening act on the main stage. the lead singer was like, “so everyone went out and got all punked out for warped tour, right? i know i did!!” and we were all like, “my god, what an idiot…”

there was honestly no one really worth mentioning except for armor for sleep. they were GREAT. i happened to see josh and cynthia (who flaked on going with me in the morning) @ armor, and that was cool. ARMOR IS SO GOOD. they’re so much better live than i had thought.

who else… this providence was kind of disappointing. the singer is SO very fruity. he’s a good-looking guy, but he’s like 17 (even though he’s like 20, 21). he’s… so fruity. my god. too fruity for me = fruity as fuck. i’ll bet most of their fans are girls. they’re a good-looking bunch of guys.

me and trask interviewed riley and teppei of thrice… it was kind of a last minute thing because their interview was going on when i found the press tent (wewps, they had different directions this year). they are alright guys, but you can tell they kind of think their music is the shit.

reggie & the full effect was pretty freakin great. james is a funny old man. they were wearing matching american eagle shirts. yeahhh.

my chemical romance’s lead singer gerard looks like a girl… however awesome he is. it’s not talking shit; it’s talking truths. when i went back to the press tent, i saw frank from mcr (who i interviewed last year), and he kept staring at me and smiling while he was talking to this other dude… so i should have waved or something! but i didn’t cause i’m stupid and shy. :[ and i didn’t want to ‘interupt’ his conversation, although he obviously wasn’t that engaged. nOoOoooOo!! i’m so mad at myself lol. -__- that bugged me for the rest of the day (i was going to talk to him when i went back, but he wasn’t around anymore T__T)… and now it’s bothering me again since i brought it up, grr.

interviewed two other guys from MCR with a lady from AMP magazine at around 7, and it was a weird group interview, and there were like 4 people in the room who were just there to watch and had nothing to do with the interview at all. i’m sure they were disappointed because the two people who came weren’t gerard and frank lol. mcr is too big now, it’s good and all but damnit, i wanted gerard and frank! redefine will get some credit in AMP for this, though, so that is fucking AWESOME.

night time was umm crazay! a lot of stuff happened, a lot of probably which i have forgotten, but i will try to remember. we had to wait around in the freezing cold for a long time because stretch (who had car keys) stayed around til the end (around 1030) and we left around 8-ish. to my stupidity, though, my stuff was actually in weezy’s car lol. so i froze for two hours for nothing!! anyway. shit. uhh. got drunk. lots of people asked for weed. weezy kept saying, “my wrist is broken. it’s limp. my hand is broken, it’s limp. my finger is broken, it’s limp. my arm is broken, it’s limp.” i forget why, though. crowd management services (CMS) kept walking around too, and they were being all stealthy and shit. some people were setting off fireworks, and they totally were like hiding behind cars and running out of nowhere to catch the people haha. their fault for setting off like eight fireworks in broad daylight. they also took all of the alcohol of some underage kids, and later caught us smoking weed with a random group of people (but luckily they didn’t care because no one had any on them, and they were just like, “we don’t care what you do in your tents, but try not to do anything out here.”) anyway, so the whole night everyone in our group kept shouting out, “CMS!!” or at some points, “INS!!!”

went to walk around a bunch of times. with different people. first time was with zach, pwn, weezy, and trask. we climbed up on this trailer and weezy jumped off and owned his heel LMAO.

so we were walkng back, and somehow we lost zach but he found his way back later. weezy was like, “my heel is broken.” lol. and then he just left after that. then me, zach, pwny, and matt [zach’s friend, i don’t know his last name] went out… and that was fun!!! met some dudes who smoked us out and one of us made us listen to his music… we totally could have stayed around for longer but zach wanted to go back because the weed + alcohol was not doing him good lol. pwny smoked out for the first time. it was my first time in like, god, at least a year and a half or something. but it was good, cause weed is always good with other things - usually OK by itself. met some kids who kept saying they needed some coke because they were too trashed and couldn’t stay up otherwise. the one who was relatively sober was like a giant drag queen or something, but whatever. more power.

went back and then went out again with lindsey and pwny. i had this random idea to go up to random people and be like, “WOW ____, I HAVEN’T SEEN YOU IN SO LONG!!!” and it’s funny, cause people are like, “oh yeah! i know!!! how are you doing!?” hahaha it’s fuckin funny. me and lindsey went, so pwny went up to this girl and was like, “HI AMY!!” and she didn’t even turn around lol >__< me and lindsey were like dying of laughter on the floor. went back to the potheads, and they had lost their keys and gotten their alcohol stolen. i guess a lot of people had their alcohol stolen. which sucks.

umm don’t remember what else happened. went back again and went back out with pwny… and uhh. met more random bitches. these people were trying to get everyone to sit down in the middle of the road, but that pretty much failed. some girl in the group was on shrooms. lol. and then some guy came to harass her, and she ran away. lucky spokane people! so easy to get shrooms!!!! >__<

when we were going to sleep some guy was threatening to kill himself because his girlfriend cheated on him or his girlfriend thought he cheated on her or something. and his friend was saying, “dont do it,” blahblahblah. cept later his girlfriend came by and was like, “i don’t care, kill yourself, you’re better off that way.” it was weird. the guy was bawling.

weezy passed out on the ground the whole night and i guess pwny had an escapade in a basketball court til 6am or something (when i was the only one awake, arrrrrghhhh). i woke up mad early and sat around for like half an hour talking to random neighbors and hoping someone would wake up. talked with the guy who was telling his friend not to commit suicide and that was um interesting. and some guy who said he drank a whole bottle of jack daniel’s. lol. man i dunno. then i went back to sleep cause there was no sign of anyone waking up.

we left and weezy’s sister whitney has FUCKED UP friends. she got dropped off at warped and then her friends took her car back to the show, and drove it to a campsite adn shit, leaving her behind. fucked up shit. friends like that, jeez. so we spent like a half hour trying to find her car and shit, so i was put into zach’s car while they looked for it some more (it wasn’t at the campgrounds we looked in initially, and her phone was dead, so she couldn’t call people), and so that weezy could yell @ her.

ate lunch at a restaurant like we did last year, and the combination between warped tour people and sunday parishoners was funry.

god, i’m sick of writing in journals. i’m sure i’ll think of plenty more.

i’m listening to… nothing.
i’m feeling… odd.

1:49 am — today was probably one of the oddest days that i’ve had in a long ass freaking time. okay, so i woke up, and had my brother take me to the bart station (which is like a above-ground-subway thing) so i could pick up my car because my dad drives it to the bart station in the morning. unfortunately, i grabbed the wrong set of keys and had to wait almost a half hour for him to return and give me his keys -__-; what a n00b i am.

anyway, so i picked up claire and we went to berkeley to sherry’s place, and then sherry drove me, claire, herself, and jeanette up to union square in sf. we picked a spot across the street from old navy and sat down… in the little doorway between gap and anthropologie i think. actually, i’m too lazy to finish this right now, so i’ll finish it tomorrow.

(four days later, i have decided to finally finishing updating this):
so, on our excursion in the middle of the street, we met many an interesting person. here are some statistics, cause i’m a sociology geek.

[ TOTAL RESPONSES ]
48: HALF RESPONSE (WAVE, SMILE, “HI”)
35: NEGATIVE RESPONSES (IGNORED, LOOKED AWAY)
26: POSITIVE RESPONSES (CONVERSED WITH US)
—
[ HALF RESPONSES ]
01: ASIAN MALES
02: ASIAN FEMALES
03: WINKS
03: PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN OF US
—
[ POSITIVE RESPONSES ]
01: HOMELESS BLACK MALES
02: HOMELESS WHITE MALES
02: BLACK FEMALES
06: BLACK MALES
07: WHITE FEMALES
09: WHITE MALES

i actually wish i could have categorized them better, but because they were done in the spur of the moment, they were very inaccurate and hurried. responses only include people who we actually made an attempt to greet.

[ CONCLUSIONS ]
- asian people are mean.

the first two people we got were homeless people and jeanette and claire were scared to death of them. one homeless white guy pulled up his shirt to reveal his stomach and he had all these needle marks and stuff… or something… that’s what everyone else said anyway; i had no idea what it was ;( i thought he was sick ;X

so then this black guy comes along… who ended up sticking next to us the whole time we were there. the first second he saw us he gave us job descriptions… i was public relations (because i had the sign), sherry was sargeant in arms (who was in charge of security), jeanette was the leader, and claire was security. he then pronounced himself to be the ceo of our newfound company and i made him a little sign that said “ceo” which he displayed on the rim of his hat ^__^ he sang a little song for us too… which he later sang for another girl. i don’t remember much of it, but i remember lines from it that said stuff like “you smell so sweet; you could be perfume” and “you make me so rich; you could be cash”. lol. he didn’t sing bad though. while he was singing, he was saying how he was “on stage” because it was a black man singing to four asian girls… and then he kept saying how people must be thinking “why is this black man talking to four asian girls”? he talked about how him and his wife were separated because he had a ‘temper problem’… O__o; and how he worked for the government for like eleven years or something. it was neat.

next along we had this guy who worked at puma who became our buddy… he was on his lunch break and he went to go get chinese food and on the way there he started talking to us and saying that it would be easy for four attractive asian girls sitting on the side of street to get people to talk to them. so he went, got his food, came back, talked to us a little, went to eat his food, and came back again later… and he was trying to get jeanette’s number to find out about clubs and crap… supposedly, but yeah, that didn’t work. oh for a while we were saying no girls would talk to us and so he was holding up our neon sign and trying to get girls to talk to us, but that didn’t work =(

then a well-dressed black man came up and he told us he was a tapdancer, and we convinced him to do a little tapdance for us. he started talking to the other people about how some girl was sueing him and how messed up it was, but i wasn’t paying attention because i was listening to these two other people talk =(

i wasn’t listening partly because i was listening to this little brat who thought we were hella weird for sitting there and he told me that, basically. and then he was like “okay, so people are just supposed to talk to you about anything?” and i said yeah, and he was like “then do you know anything about carpet-munching?” i’m like “omg, okay, i can’t help you out there, sorry. ask one of these guys.” and then he got all pissy and was like “you should change your sign to ‘talk to me, but i won’t be able to help you with anything’.” i mean, stfu you little brat! how would i know anything about CARPET-MUNCHING! i mean really!

a gay-but-not-so-gay homeless guy also showed up asking us if we wanted some beer, heh. he had a bunch of food he got from some funeral and he was going to give it to his friends because he had been “blessed” with the food. i thought that was cute, but then he got all weird… ;X he asked us all, “so, who here has gotten an orgasm?” and he guessed that i might have, claire hasn’t, and that sherry and jeanette have. haha. then he was asking me, “have you ever dated a homeless man?” and i said “no”, and then he said, “do you want to?” and i thought he said something else, so i said, “yes” and he’s like “really? then give me your number and address.” and i’m like “oh uhhh i think you’re a little too old for me… yeah.” haha. but yes… i concluded a couple days ago that’s what i need… a gay guy who doesn’t know he’s gay (he was soooooooo gay). i started ignoring him because he kept saying how i had a nice smile and nice eyes, so i just talked to our black ceo… and then i guess everyone else said he said something about how he had to leave because he couldn’t continue sitting there and not being able to do anything about his [boner]… and i guess he got up and left with a BONER. blech. queer eye for a straight man.

we also got like two groups of two middle-aged white, female teachers… they were all very nice and thought we had a terrific idea.

two other white female students appeared and took pictures of us for us… and they were really nice… they were doing surveys or something. *shrug.

but yeah… asian people are REALLY mean. we passed SO many and only three even acknowledged us at ALL… and two of the people who did acknowledge us were fobs, which gives the others no excuses. two others took pictures of us but didn’t say a word to us… stupid tourists. xP

later that night we just got some boba in berkeley at sweetheart’s… and met up with richard and dottie and co… and so me and claire decided to go back to room with a cue and play pool to end the day. voila.

* songs of the moment * — “wasting my time” bai default [rock] and now a cd of goodass trance shiet that i got back when i liked trance but knew nothing about elektronik music -__- i made the mistake of throwing away the song listing… godammit, so stupid!
* mood * — eyeball hurts. oh wait, that’s not a mood… -__-;

11:12 pm — so this morning i was sleeping and my door opened right? and for some reason i thought that it was my roommate coming back really early in the morning or something (retarded). and so i went back to sleep. and later, my roommate’s alarm clock went off so naturally i went to look at the clock to check what time it was. i thought that perhaps she had an 8:30 class or something and that her alarm was going off because she needed to go to class. little did i know, that she had already come back from class, was waking up from taking a nap, and that i was THREE IN THE FUCKING AFTERNOON! i’ve never slept through all my classes accidentally before!! -__- what a disgrace. oh well. -__- i had a quiz in chinese today too! i was supposed to get up early and study! rawr… grr… arrr… oh well -__-;; nothing i can do about it now… anyways, i have to go back to studying economics, but you know what was cool? tonight i went down to eat dinner and we randomly got into conversations about strange stuff with the people in front of us in line. it’s fun. i love talking to random people. people are so freaking interesting. that is the only perk about working at a bubble tea place - you get to meet all sorts of interesting people. oh well. anyways, back to studying, but i thought i’d leave you with a couple of things. the first is quiz results… whee…

i guess if the quiz says so, it must be true? -__- since we all know how accurate these online quizzes are!second would be a portion of a conversation i had with miss tin-win liu yesterday. i had one of these with phil [hsieh] and seungbum too… and phil’s was fairly interesting as well (but too personal to post), and seung’s was mostly stating that if i didn’t stop typing intellectually, he would came and shake me next time he saw me (huk… only a few people would understand this -__-)

vee (1:44:46 AM): i feel like typing extremely correctly today.
vee (1:44:51 AM): so i am. minus the capitalizations.
missgem (1:44:56 AM): hahah
missgem (1:44:58 AM): why is that?
missgem (1:45:02 AM): jes in the mood?
vee (1:45:16 AM): yes. i don’t know why.
vee (1:45:17 AM): haha.
vee (1:45:29 AM): i feel as though this is the most effective way in which i can squander away my time.
missgem (1:45:38 AM): hahaha
vee (1:46:06 AM): and this is also a sorry attempt to improve my english language skills which i have discovered have slowly been deteriorating.
missgem (1:46:16 AM): what? this is quality AIM time with tinwin!!… u arent squandering ur time!
missgem (1:46:19 AM): hahhaha
missgem (1:46:24 AM): yesh yesh
vee (1:46:30 AM): in fact, my accent problem is so prominent that another day this guy asked me if i was from somewhere else because i had an accent.
missgem (1:46:40 AM): wha??/
vee (1:46:41 AM): i said, “i was born here,” because i thought he was implying that i was born somewhere in asia.
missgem (1:46:41 AM): hahhaha
missgem (1:46:47 AM): LOL
vee (1:46:48 AM): however, he said, “yes, you have an italian accent.”
missgem (1:46:49 AM): !!
vee (1:46:53 AM): dare i say, “what the fuck?!”
missgem (1:46:54 AM): WHAT???!
vee (1:46:56 AM): yes.
vee (1:46:58 AM): that is what i am saying.
missgem (1:47:13 AM): wtf?! hahhaa that is pretty hilarious tho
vee (1:47:16 AM): so now i shall add italian to my extensive collection of japanese, hawaiian, chinese, and various other fob accents.
missgem (1:47:25 AM): LOL
vee (1:47:27 AM): i think this man was thoroughly confused because he himself had an accent.
missgem (1:47:51 AM): hahhahaha
missgem (1:47:53 AM): omg
missgem (1:47:55 AM): u crack me up
missgem (1:47:56 AM):
vee (1:47:58 AM): do you like my typing? i like it.
missgem (1:47:59 AM): too funny
missgem (1:48:04 AM): lurv it
missgem (1:48:06 AM): i do i do
vee (1:48:41 AM): i would advise you to enjoy this because this is a once-in-a-lifetime deal.
vee (1:48:55 AM): in a few moments i may feel as though i am wasting too much time and brain power typing like this.
missgem (1:49:41 AM): hahaha… ok, i’ll savethis AIm convo in my archive of “important AIM convos”
missgem (1:49:53 AM): this will be the first one actually
vee (1:49:54 AM): you have an archive of important aim conversations?
vee (1:50:00 AM): wow! i feel very honored.
missgem (1:50:08 AM): wahhaha
missgem (1:50:11 AM): u should
missgem (1:50:21 AM): u get your very own folder
missgem (1:50:40 AM): entitled: “very important aim convos, by vivian hua”
missgem (1:50:48 AM): wahaha
vee (1:50:49 AM): i believe that i now must save this conversation because it is proof that i now have my own folder in tin-win’s computer.
vee (1:50:51 AM): what an exciting day!
missgem (1:51:30 AM): hahhaa… it tis it tis!
vee (1:51:49 AM): it has come to my attention that you have met philip nho’s friend janet
vee (1:51:50 AM): .
missgem (1:51:56 AM): haha o yah i have
missgem (1:51:59 AM): how do u kno?
vee (1:52:00 AM): i find this quite interesting because janet is fontaine’s old friend from irvine.
missgem (1:52:06 AM): i kno!
missgem (1:52:22 AM): she told me she talked to u i believe on AIM? is that correct?
vee (1:52:29 AM): furthermore, this is interesting because i talked to janet online a long time ago and the other day i was reading philip nho’s so-called “blog” and i saw that her screename was on there.
missgem (1:52:46 AM): hahhaha
vee (1:52:48 AM): yes, i do believe i have spoken to her on america online instant messenger a few times.
vee (1:52:56 AM): it is really quite a small world.
missgem (1:53:01 AM): and u actually remembered her sn?
missgem (1:53:02 AM): wah
missgem (1:53:04 AM): yes it is
vee (1:53:06 AM): you know what else is evidence that the world is quite small?
missgem (1:53:16 AM): what is that my friend?
vee (1:53:31 AM): i met quite a few individuals online back when i was still residing in the sunny land of california.
vee (1:53:45 AM): some of these individuals i met through my webpage or asianavenue, and i never dreamt that i would someday meet them face-to-face.
missgem (1:53:48 AM): WAHAHHAHA…. sunny land of california??!?!
missgem (1:54:02 AM): o yah! strange indeed
vee (1:54:10 AM): however, upon coming to this rainy land of seattle where the sun dost not shine very often, i have discovered i have come to meet many of these individuals face-to-face.
vee (1:54:18 AM): and, get this, i did not even plan on meeting them!
vee (1:54:24 AM): it is really quite a joyous event.
missgem (1:54:35 AM): oh yes, quite
missgem (1:55:05 AM): lol… how did u kno i met janet?
vee (1:55:34 AM): yesterday janet randomly instant messaged me online because apparently mr. philip nho told her that i knew her.
vee (1:55:39 AM): naturally, i asked her if she had met you yet.
vee (1:55:42 AM): and she said she has.
missgem (1:56:36 AM): ahh that would explain it
missgem (1:56:37 AM): haha
vee (1:56:50 AM): yes, it would, my friend.
vee (1:56:59 AM): so how are things doing with you in the strange land of berkeley?
missgem (1:57:05 AM): LOL
missgem (1:57:36 AM): not bad not bad
missgem (1:58:09 AM): haha
missgem (1:58:16 AM): r u typing like this to everyone??
vee (1:58:44 AM): certainly.
vee (1:58:52 AM): however, i am only speaking with you and mr. philip hsieh.
missgem (1:59:22 AM): yes he has informed me
missgem (1:59:46 AM): he has stated that you are typing in a strange manner
vee (2:00:05 AM): did he inform you that he is also responding in the same strange manner?
missgem (2:00:16 AM): no he has not!
vee (2:00:43 AM): i must inform you that he is.
missgem (2:01:04 AM): why i did not know of that!
missgem (2:01:19 AM): what an oddling!
vee (2:01:26 AM): certainly, an oddling indeed.
vee (2:01:33 AM): so, tell me about the new happenings in your life.
missgem (2:02:29 AM): well i am sorry to dissapoint you, but nothing of substantial value has occured in the present
missgem (2:02:47 AM): this coming thrusday i am attending a semi-formal dance, however
missgem (2:03:04 AM): it is to be held on a boat in the san francisco bay
missgem (2:03:10 AM): it should be a grand event, indeed
vee (2:03:25 AM): may i ask if you will be attending this event with a partner?
missgem (2:04:08 AM): oh i am afraid not, i am attending with some of my female friends
vee (2:04:43 AM): i am quite disappointed in your lack of supplying me with new gossip.
missgem (2:04:56 AM): many of the men in our city are too, dare i say, stingy, to afford such an event as this
vee (2:05:05 AM): is it a very expensive event?
missgem (2:06:33 AM): well, the event does cost a sum of thirty dollars and zero cents
vee (2:06:54 AM): that is certainly not a very high cost.
vee (2:07:06 AM): this leads me to believe that the boys you are hanging around are “bungholes”.
vee (2:07:10 AM): i am just kidding.
missgem (2:07:32 AM): haha… well i do believe you are correct in that statement
vee (2:08:09 AM): that is quite alright because i have discovered many of my male friends lack monetary funds as well.
missgem (2:08:37 AM): yes that seems to be a severe dilemma in the male society today
vee (2:08:45 AM): my friend from washington is threatening to kill my “weirdass” because he does not like the manner in which i am typing.
vee (2:08:53 AM): this strikes me as odd because he is quite the “weirdo” himself.
vee (2:09:03 AM): yes, i do believe this is a major problem in our society these days.
missgem (2:10:17 AM): yes, why we must attempt to solve this problem!
missgem (2:10:24 AM): but alas, my time has come
missgem (2:10:28 AM): i have yet to retire
missgem (2:10:38 AM): for the night
missgem (2:10:42 AM): i am quite exhausted
vee (2:10:43 AM): i am disappointeed in your early sleeping patterns, but i am thinking i should take after your footsteps.
vee (2:10:46 AM): have a pleasant sleep my dear!
missgem (2:11:04 AM): yes and the same to you as well!
missgem (2:11:06 AM): ta ta!
vee (2:12:06 AM): ta ta!
vee (2:12:13 AM): do keep that folder well kept!
missgem (2:13:05 AM): why certainly!
missgem (2:13:33 AM): good night my dear!
vee (2:13:38 AM): good night!

I went to Berkeley today. I have now concluded I WANT TO GO TO UC BERKELEY SOOOOOOOO BAD.

I hope I freekishly get into Berkeley somehow! I hope, I hope, I hope!!!!!!

People in Berkeley are sOoOoOo freeking nice. I had to go waste film today… for a photo project. It was a portrait project; I basically had to take pictures of random people. Anyways, they’re nice cuz I asked eight people and none of them said no… and every single person who saw mee taking a picture waited until I was done with the picture to walk past… also, one guy even OFFERED to be a model for mee… hahaha. Cuz he saw mee asking random people. It was kewl. He did a handstand for mee… and I felt kinda bad cuz I made him do it three times since mai camera was being whack. -_-

About three other people. The first two were these kyOot guys… and I was mad cuz I couldn’t get a pic of them!!!!! Mai camera was once again whack and I felt bad making them stand in the middle of the street for so long and so I jes told them “sorry” and