I'm only happy when I'm eating

The simple yet beautiful steps to a gorgeous pasta primavera that my sister made last week - delicate furls of parmesan cheese rapidly melting away into cream; throwing the previously sauteed veggies (just slightly cooked so they're still crisp, not overcooked and mushy!) into the cream sauce; tossing the sauce all together with multigrain pasta.

I think I could eat this pasta primavera every week no joke. mm!

moving on

This is a basil chiffonade. Basically a bunch of basil leaves stacked on top of one another then sliced into beautiful fragrant ribbons. (I didn't roll them as one should, but instead just folded it in half and then sliced).

This past weekend was incredibly frustrating and grueling, to the point that I don't want to talk about it with anybody. I hadn't expressed so much true, real rage in so long, I think I was physically drained yesterday (that or it was allergies). I hate being forced to do anything, especially growing up. I know as a youngish twenty-something I'm closer and closer to adulthood but I'm not an idiot - what makes me want to jump into adulthood when I feel like I've barely lived?! But anyway, it is time to move on and let go of things. I watched Top Gun again for the first time in 15 years and it was life-changing! Burning homemade sage incense (a family friend recently brought me a Trader Joe's-bagful of it!) calms me down as much as a small helping of honey whiskey before bed. Haha, these are a 'few of my favorite things.'

sage

I've been hiking a lot with my sister and on these hikes I've been gathering white sage (Salvia apiana) to bring back home to enjoy their scent. But after doing some research on these California natives I'm thinking I ought to grow more myself (we have one plant growing in the front yard) or harvest some from a friend of the family who is a California native-growing fiend. I only picked one spring per plant but now will be more mindful of what I take from nature - much of California's white sage population has dwindled due to overzealous and greedy people in the smudge stick business...which apparently leaves the bumblebees to gather nectar and pollen from weeds rather than that sage! I'll burn my smudge sticks keeping this in mind...

soup with jon-i

This was a week after I graduated. Got dinner with Jon-I in Monterey Park! I forget the name of this place, but we got a beef noodle soup with handmade noodles, and one of those delicious onion pancake things that the Chinese/Koreans seem to make sooo well. We were originally going to go to get shabu-shabu but the place we were heading for had a health rating of 62%! D: So this place saved dinner...!

un-prioritized

I am pretty tired, physically and mentally but I cannot fall asleep. I have a handful of e-mails I need to reply to, a slew of thank-you notes to write, my projects & portfolios to retouch, and not to mention, jobs to look for and apply to. My excuse for unwinding after graduating feels thin... although today I got out of my apartment at school for good (at least until August when I go back to round up the last few things...) and I'm hoping that since that has been a huge source of my negative energy I'll neutralize soon enough.

I have one of the poopies sleeping at the foot of my bed right now, and I just watched his ears flutter like butterflies for a moment while a mockingbird sang outside. Happy cuteness! Here's to hoping I have a productive and mellower two days off...

$1 frozen yogurt

I think after every trip to IKEA I get a frozen yogurt cone... because for a dollar it's practically free!

tiny treasures

I've taken on the annual, monumental task of clearing out, dusting and organizing my behemoth of a room. The room itself is not large, but with all my earthly possessions in tow I curiously seem to take on the personality of a hoarder. It is a bit troubling but also a source of slight amusement to my mom and sister, who come up and check on my progress every day. Having accumulated so much stuff, it is a welcome challenge to sift through what can be thrown out and donated and kept. I found a small linen bag filled with the above - (clockwise from top spiraling to the middle) a carved cedar frog, a red cat's eye operculum seashell, an acorn I found in Spokane, a beach stone with a perfect hole for a string, and a ceramic pendant my mom made & glazed a few years ago. With close-ups of the operculum, which is that little door that snails use to close up when the tide is low! And now you see why I'm so slow to getting my important things done...

10 hours

The sky and some roses from last Friday.

Just got back from breakfast and walking my dogs with my mom. Yesterday I slept for 10 hours but when I awoke I was more tired than ever. Stupid turnarounds... I got something like 5 hours last night but feel excellent. Still on school mode it appears. I need to start getting things done this week!

collapse/the end of the world

[blurb from my other blog] November 2006. This is a 'memory map' I doodled for my very first design studio five years ago. It is certainly unfinished, inaccurate and unfairly skewed toward Hollywood - the LA that all outsiders seem to envision when thinking of Los Angeles, but I find it fitting that I see all of its flaws after five years of architecture school and can still appreciate it at face value, regardless.

After a turnaround shift from 7pm - 3am then 10:30am - 6pm I'm in a state where nothing is really bothering me. I was going to list the things that are potentially bothersome, but I'm not even feeling inclined to do that. Huh. Cryptic/mysterious? How unlike me. How very Livejournal 2004. Yikes, overt self-awareness is so off-putting. Okay, I'm out.

work til you die.

Charrette, week 1.

Working with Isaac & Danah at Isaac's pad. I know it's only been a week but I'm going to miss the work sessions. But I know being done with school doesn't mean I won't ever have times like these again...

good morning

I have a million-and-one things, important things I need to have finished in the next week or so, yet here I find myself blogging while moving back home & cleaning & sorting everything out. I think my current state of existence justifies my current, seemingly idle life. I have e-mails to respond to, a portfolio to sort out, firms to apply to, thank-you notes to write & send and architecture thoughts to sort out...I will get to these in due time. Anyhow, these are some snapshots of our back porch that I took while my mom rushed back inside to get her list of all the errands we ran this morning. A stone-and-metal bird guards the little herb garden but I suspect she also takes a peck or two of said green things (as she should).

the many textures of carwash clean

I took my car to a drive-through car wash last week. It's so dusty around USC, and plus I park under a tree that insists on dripping sap and tiny twigs and even tinier leaves onto my poor car, so after two weeks it's usually in need of a wash, and well, I neglected cleaning it for a month so it was filthy. I happened to have my camera with me as I sat through the motions of the car wash and snapped away while enjoying the drenching, rumbling, whupping, whooshing and whirring of the car wash.

korean bbq

The day before graduation Eddie's family treated me and Danah to Korean BBQ! It was so kind of them and we were all so happy to stuff ourselves after a long semester that ended with three hell weeks. The place we ate at is called the Corner I think and it was so so so delicious! I feel like I am only in tune with my Korean roots when I am eating the food, yikes. Oh well...

gems & minerals

We probably spent an hour in the Hall of Gems and Minerals at the Natural History Museum. It was tough not to put up every photo I snapped there! The craziest thought I had all the while was how back then digital cameras weren't as advanced and widespread as they have been in recent years, and back then I didn't know how to wrangle an old film camera so I didn't have the means of recording any of this. The world has changed so much...! Anyway, my favorite thing in there was the last photo - a meteorite (I forget which one this is) that looks like it's been etched! Insane. I want to go to outer space!

The Hall of African Mammals

After my final, final turn-in last Wednesday (which involved a 30-mile drive there-and-back at 10 am plus 1.5 hours of waiting to get my portfolio printed & bound to narrowly meet the noon turn-in) I was exhausted. While driving back to my place the radio was playing 'A Day in the Life' by the Beatles, which was pretty amazing what with that crazy buildup that explodes cathartically at the end. It concluded five years of architecture school so perfectly.

My goal for the day was to go to the Natural History Museum because it is just across the street from campus, and I hadn't gone in thirteen years or so. I ended up sleeping for about four hours and then lazing around and watching Gangs of New York instead. I mentioned to two of my friends that I wanted to go, and they were eager to join up too. So on Thursday we went and were pleasantly surprised to discover that USC students get in for free!

The Hall of African Mammals always awed me as a child. The meticulously crafted dioramas looked like frozen frames of real life in the savannah, and being young I could only comprehend it as such, with the most powerful suspension of disbelief in action. And even then, stepping into the hall I got a flashback (think of Anton Ego's flashback in Ratatouille when he takes his first bite of Remy's cooking) and I walked past each frame with the same sense of wonder I'd had as a child. Almost. Now with a more discerning eye I was able to notice the curved wall behind each scene giving the view more depth - a simple yet masterful illusion that really tricks you into thinking you're viewing a vast stretch of landscape. I let myself get whisked away, I pretended I was eight years old again, forgetting about graduation, about looking for a job, wondering if I still have a job. I watched the animals and wondered if they were real, worried about the giraffes being hauled down by the lions on the other end, half-expecting the oryxes to leap away at a moment's notice. I pretended I was in Africa, and for a few minutes nothing else was real.

graduated!

I'm finished with undergrad! Thanks USC, it has been a long & arduous journey. I learned a lot, despite my reluctance to adhere to the culture of higher education, matured through trial and error, ventured slightly out of my comfort zone, and started some life-long friendships. Oh and steeped myself in architecture lore and studio culture along the way. And now, I suppose, I'll keep fighting on.

This weekend was insane, what with the extended bouts of staying awake without sleeping to frantically finish projects, getting kicked out of home back to school because I lashed out at my sister for an offhanded comment, and it having it all snowball into further craziness. I exaggerate slightly, due to sleep-deprivation. Last night (Saturday) I told two other studio mates we should cut & mount our presentation boards that night (it was already 3 am) so we could avoid the frenzy later in the day (Sunday). So we spent hours painstakingly arranging, cutting, spray-mounting and re-cutting our boards until the wee hours of the morning. I went back to my apartment, showered, passed out for an hour and went back to studio to help people cut and mount their boards... pure insanity. Hours felt like days. We finally cut everything, got our models and boards together and took them to the Shrine.

Once there, we had to mount the already cut-and-mounted boards onto the larger 4'x8' presentation boards, which took even longer to coordinate. I still haven't done mine, and will tomorrow after my final. In the midst of everything I got a phone call, one I couldn't ignore, and ended up wandering out of the Shrine to campus, back towards my apartment all while talking to my friend. There was a breeze today, and amidst the stress of having to finish up a billion things, the dull throbbing pain in my body and delirious state of mind, he told me "I'm proud of you" for having finished 5 years of architecture school, and that made things a little better for a second.