inside the wonderful world of vee

lot of weird coincidences lately. i forget the name of the phenomenon, but this shit is kinda freaky:

1) one day, alex and i went to jack in the box in greenwood. we decided to eat outside because it was a nice day. some guy came by and asked us if we knew where denny’s was. we told him we didn’t. he was a black guy with really light-colored eyes. extremely distinct in his dress and physical appearance. the next day, alex, lenny, and i went exploring the downtown chinatown area, and we just went on a walk with no real objective in mind. he was sitting on a streetcorner, taking notes while watching a dvd on a portable dvd player. the day after that, eddie, alex, and i went to northgate mall and i saw him walking towards the mall as we were leaving. the day after that, i went to trabant chai lounge in the u-district to meet some people up. he came in!! i could scarcely believe my eyes! i meant to stay and talk to him afterwards but i was having a meeting and when i was done, he was gone i think he was in the bathroom for like 80 hours. but i don’t know for sure. and i waited a little but then decided to leave.

2) i read about something about guinea pigs that people brought from south america to america, and the next day there was a peru special and they showed the guinea pigs being roasted — they were called cuy or something. anyway. next couple days there were more mentions of cuy. odd.

3) yesterday, in vancouver, we were listening to the radio. after flipping through it, lenny settled on a station that was playing “georgia on my mind.” i look up at some point when we are stopped at a stoplight and the car in front of us has a georgia license plate. the song must have been playing for less than 30 seconds. when we turn left, the car goes straight. there was only that tiny window where we could have possibly been behind that car while the song was on. and then guess what street we turned onto? GEORGIA. fucking weird!!!!!!  BLAWRRGH!

i’m watching the travel china. it’s china week. china is a fucking fascinating place, so this is GREAT. i <3 china week. i also love love love monkeys. most people know this. this monkey, shown on the travel channel’s “wild america,” is one freaky ass bitch. sorry monkey. you just are.

(yunnan snub-nosed monkey. that’s right. he has no fucking nose.)

speaking of monkeys… random story:
jenny, my ex-co-worker… her husband and his friends had a monkey!!! four of them had one. before the monkey, it was two people each in two rooms. after the monkey, it was monkey in one room and four people in the other room. AWESOME.

this show is blowing my mind, and here are some of the reasons why:
1) bamboo can grow up to three feet a day. WTF.
2) every, oh i don’t know, million years or so a bamboo jungle will flower, and when they flower, that entire forest will die. WTF.
3) there are crabs in the forest. WTF.
4) chinese villagers use a dead grasshopper on a stick to lure a hornet, and then tie a feather to the hornet, and then the villagers follow the hornet to its nest, and then they burn the nest and eat the dead grubs. WTF.
5) chinese fishermen use birds (i think herrings) to fish for them, by tying a loose noose around the birds’ necks so that the fish can’t swallow, and then remove the fish the birds have caught from the birds’ mouthes. WTF.

in other random news… GOJI BERRY?
you know that new fad that is “goji berry”?!!!!!!!!!!! i have just come to the realization that goji berry is GO JI ZI. HOLY SHITE. GROSS.

uhhhh i just got a google alert for redefinemag.com and this is what our site showed up on:

http://walk2web.com/site/www.redefinemag.com or you can see the main site at http://walk2web.com/ (make sure you go to the main site, not the redefinemag.com site, for maximum WTFness…)

seriously, though? this is like… the weirdest website i have ever seen in my life. make sure to keep your sound on. wtf?

lately i’ve been in a bit of a funk so i haven’t written much. usually after the redefine print deadline push i pretty much want to die and therefore do not do much except for veg out. been playing a lot of ninja gaiden II with alex (and eddie the other day), watching a lotta siff movies reviews here, and working a lot on sushimonsters.com and other projects — new sushimonsters blog, too! wewt wewt. but yeah, if the last (current… spring…) issue of redefine doesn’t sell well… like 50%+, i think i’m done with printing. we’ll see………………………… it’s just………… too hard. yo. i wonder if i should try to hire someone one last time, though, to sell ads… i think i will try that maybe and see how effective they are… :/ but really it seems pointless. hmm. weighing the options here.

but yeah, if the last (current… spring…) issue of redefine doesn’t sell well… like 50%+, i think i’m done with printing. we’ll see………………………… it’s just………… too hard. yo. i wonder if i should try to hire someone one last time, though, to sell ads… i think i will try that maybe and see how effective they are… :/ but really it seems pointless. hmm. weighing the options here. oh yeah, amanda, the boston terrier i used to live with, had like a heart attack earlier this week. maybe she will die soon T__T must visit.

cali tomorrow. james’ wedding. too bad i’m missing a fuckload of events this weekend in seattle. GODAMMIT. if i had known i woulda just stayed here.

anyway, last friday we had a really interesting conversation at work. i wish i’d written about it earlier cause i can’t much remember now but yeah… here’s an attempt.

we got started talking about catastrophes somehow… natural disasters, and then went into some schpiel about how we needed to protect ourselves from natural disasters. first up, earthquakes and how seattle is long overdue for one. we assess our building and think that it should probably be okay since it’s brick and we’re on the top floor. there’s also the olympic sculpture park right next to us.

“triangle of life,” i told them. “not duck and cover.” there were visions of perplexion until i described to them the triangle of life routine and then they understood.

we decide that we’ll take a computer tower — probably mine, since it’s closest to the window and most bulky — to smash our single-paned windows (would be quite a feat really since there are wood bars in between). then we would jump to safety — or wait… we would take one of our ikea tabletops (which is basically just a flat sheet of wood) and use it to lower people… although sucks for the last person, who we’d have to catch on the bottom.

then we’d run to the olympic sculpture park and hide under this black squarish sculpture they have, since its underside is large triangles and it wouldn’t be smushed or anything. after all, there’s a lot of high skyscrapers all around us even though our building is not.

since we’re near the water, kristoph mentions that he has read that seattle’s ports are a top place to potentially smuggle nuclear weapons. what’re we going to do about that?

summer brings up indy’s using a lead-lined oldschool refrigerator to escape from nuclear holocaust in the new indiana jones movie, and we decide we need some of those in our office in case of nuclear war. and who knows, maybe it’ll work in other events, too. someone brings up that we probably won’t even notice that the nuclear radiation is coming until it’s too late, but kristoph says we can see the mushroom cloud before effects. i suggest that with every and any small move, we’ll just jump in the fridge. doesn’t matter what it is — we can find out later. summer says the problem is that we won’t know when to come out. good point. kristoph says that we’ll probably end up in there when the ups guy comes and freak him out.

but then we think… in the event of an earthquake or something, a tsunami is a big deal. what’re we going to do about that? we decide that we should put our lead-lined fridges outside the building and use little chutes to go into them (after all, the islands will feel the wrath of the tsunami before we do)… and we’ll have little drills inside the fridge so that we can drill a hole to eventually open the door of the fridge. and oxygen tanks for when we get out of the fridge. i mention that the fridge has to be IN the water for maximum safety (since sherry’s ex-roommate was in thailand during their last tsunami and she was in the water scuba diving and was safe, but when she got up, the boat they had come in — and all the people from that boat — were gone). hell while we’re at it, why don’t we just build a lead lined submarine so that we can all get to safety? custom-made. with persicope.

then comes talk of the fact that if seattle has a really long earthquake, the ground will liquify (solid liquifaction) and that buildings will sink into the ground. scurry.

that’s the gist of the convo. i’m sure i left some shit out but man, was it amusing.

really, though, living here is scurry.

as i was getting off work today at 3:30pm so i could go to microsoft campus to meet with a guy from the xbox team about an upcoming redefine article, i saw a guy across the street from the spaghetti factory, waving around fucking nunchucks like a baton. he had obviously practiced for a while and looked totally sweet. i was in a rush to leave but i could not pry my eyes away. i considered photographing him with my camera but felt too self-conscious to do so. so, all the while with nunchuck man on my mind, i made my way back to my car. to get to my car, every day, i have to cross this metal rope.

i tripped this time — for the first time ever — and did the worst kind of faceplant ever.

the kind of faceplant that gets your black pants all brown and dirty.

the kind of faceplant that plants your laptop into the pavement with a horrifying crunch.

the kind of faceplant that slams your camera into the ground and makes its lens cap fly off.

good stuff. wait. no.

listening to… canoe’s places album.

my new cellphone allows me to program bithdays into it. so of course, i do it (tell my your birthdays! btw!).

this morning my alarm went off at 7:30 and said, “alex bennett’s birthday, 05/14″. in my deliriosity i figured today was the 14th and wrote alex a “happy birthday” message on a scrap of paper i found in my room and left it outside his door.

i got into work and left allen ma a message saying, “happy belated birthday! i meant to tell you that 3 days ago!” cause allen’s birthday is may 11th.

well today is not the 14th; it is the 7th. NEWB. seriously. muddled brain!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

in other news… i got a bed frame for $40 off of craig’s list. first time in three years that i’ve had a bed frame. i mean, comfort-wise, it feels *about* the same, but the good part is that i can now cram more shit underneath my bed, effectively rendering my room automatically cleaner. YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.

hoorah for 4th blog post of the day…

so i’m not exactly supposed to be staying at my current apartment, i guess, because becky’s lease only lets me stay for two weeks and it’s been longer than that. and so, today (since i work from home on mondays), i’ve had to hide out from the landlord. it’s kinda scary, because i picture that they’ll be busting in my door via key entry and being like, “WASSAP.” earlier today, someone knocked on the door but i’m not sure if it was them or the mailman. i went to the kitchen to throw out a string cheez wrapper about five minutes ago and saw the landlord man and was like, “fuck, shit (only in my head, though)!” the guy was looking at another apartment, luckily, and had his peripheral vision been slightly more keen he would have seen me. good thing he is old and apparently lacking in the periperal vision department :0 i ninja-ducked my way back from the trash can to the living room. LOL.

astrological signs are a weird thing. they are often so accurate that i wonder if it can be sheer coincidence. but then again, i don’t know if i believe in them either, since human beings came up with the rubric and human beings suck and are frequently wrong.

yesterday, at barnes and nobles, i decided to look up the compatibility rating of lenny and i, relationship-wise. he is a cancer… the crab… and i am a sag… the fool who is half a horse. the description could not have been more spot on. everything that it wrote as problematic was pretty much what is problematic. everything it wrote as benefits was pretty much what are benefits. compatibility rating? 4/10.

the general gist of it was that cancers are content with hiding out and doing the same, relaxed things, whereas sag’s are constantly looking for adventure. it concluded that because cancer’s are ready to settle down and sag’s are not, sag’s eventual difficulty to settle down would hurt the cancer. it also mentioned that what cancer likes about sag is that sag is adventurous and pushes him/her to do new things, and what sag likes about cancer is that cancer is a “calm” to a life that is a busy storm. quite, quite interesting, and quite, quite accurate.

i mentioned this to alex, and he mentioned there are actually three signs per individual, and he looked mine (and his) up on some website. here they is. but before we get into that, here is a summary of the three signs:

“if you were to think of your sun sign as your soul — your inner personality and potential — and your moon sign as your heart — your emotional core — then you could say that your rising sign is your physical self or the face you present to the world.”

my moon: cancer
you respond very much to the emotional tone and atmosphere around you, and can be dominated by your fluctuating and unpredictable moods. you often appear irrational to others because you cannot always explain the reason or source of your feelings. anyone who lives with you must accept your ups and downs and appreciate your need for times of withdrawal. you are also very sympathetic and understand the unspoken feelings and needs of others. you take slights and rebuffs very personally and though you may forgive a transgression by a friend or loved one, you never forget it.

my rising sign: scorpio
if your rising sign is scorpio, don’t be hurt if people keep their distance. it’s not out of disgust, but out of reverent intimidation. you seem so intense — it could be your penetrating gaze or the way you seductively lean against the wall — whether you mean to or not! you’re dynamically alluring, and people are inexplicably drawn to you. all this perceived sexiness is fun, but there’s a downside to looking like a scorpio — you may seem moody and even a little dangerous. enjoy the mystery factor — it can be fun to be an enigma!

think these are true? i think the rising sign is more accurate than the moon, only primarily because of the fact that people have told me i come off as intimidating (which i found laughable) and “coy”… as far as the moon sign, though, it is largely true, i suppose, but doesn’t strike home in the same kind of “definitely!” way.

so a year or two ago i had this really uncomfortable portion of time where my right eyeball would keep me up at night cause it felt like it was rolling around in my head. well, thank god it doesn’t feel like that anymore. i got catscans and other kinds of shit done but supposedly there was nothing wrong with me. now, though, it still feels like shit. not quite as shitty as before but still definitely shitty.

another thing that’s really godamn annoying is that i cannot breath out of my left nostril like at all. even worse now that it’s allergy season (as i now cannot breathe too well out of either nostril). the only time the left nostril clears up is briefly after one of my many left nostril-only nosebleeds. bah. i think i permanently hurt my left nostril when i decided to blow my nose when i had a nosebleed like 4 years ago. i remember it clearly. i was getting this huge unstoppable nosebleed in the women’s bathroom in terry, and as it was about to stop, i for some reason decided to blow out of my nose. a giant hunk of blood vessel or vein (like seriously spongey in consistency) came out of my left nostril and since then i get chronic nosebleeds that are very hard to stop from that nostril, and that nostril only. i never get nosebleeds from the other side. and now i can’t breathe either. blech. T__T

oh yeah i forgot to mention this but i had thought it was a big deal so i have to write it down… before but before i left for germany i was driving to lenny’s place and some lady threw this giant sleeping bag-sized macy’s bag out of her window. for starters, that was really fucking weird. people are usually shameless about littering. i mean, most people do it, but most people are not that obvious about it — nor do they do it so carelessly.

but… as if it wasn’t bad enough that she pushed a sleeping bag-sized bag outside of her window, she got OUT of her car and then pulled the bag deeper into the brush. HOW SHADY IS THAT??

i was really quite mad… i couldn’t believe it. i rolled down the window and screamed out, “WHAT THE FUCK?!” but she didn’t hear me because there was another car between us. shady ass biatch. i wrote down her liscense plate number and stuff but never really did anything with it. by now, it’s probably too late. d’oh. :[