Random thoughts from my day off

In our new apartment there's like 4 keys and a gate opener. There's a apartment key, a building key, a mail key and a gate key (or what I like to call the key to the gate that leads me to Tapioca Express. The TapEx key, if you will.) I now really hate keys. I usually just really dislike them. You'd think they'd be archaic by now. I know there are key cards in hotes and fingerprint recognition things to get into doors but that's only if you work for the CIA and places like that. But like how come old fashioned keys are still around? They're like metal-ly and uncool looking and just blah. I think people need to redesign the key. Everything's getting redesigned now, John showed me a pic online of a knife and fork that you can punch out of a credit card shaped card thing. I'm too lazy to look it up and link it so for now I'll leave you with a quick, dare I say stylish, fix to the key dilemma. Although I'm pretty sure that this particular crisis is something that only I would overthink. Dead sure, actually.




I'm watching Unwrapped on Food Network and they're making Sterno canned heat (isn't that a band name?) and how they make fake food. If you go to an asian restaurant, mostly a japanese one, you might see food in the window that looks appetizing enough but it's actually fake food and looks a little "glazed". Cool stuff.

'New family member' 'I'm so excited I can harbdly blog' ... I just can't find a fitting headline for this one

More surprising than my return to blogging is the fact that, after a good solid year of torturous deliberation - emotionally and financially related deliberation about whether i should get one or not - I am now blogging from my new MacBook!!! Two words: Fuckin' sexy. I can't contain myself, i'm so excited and thrilled and overwhelmed with all the stuff I can do with this thing. First of all, I haven't had my own computer for like a few years now. Sharing a computer (Thanks John. Thanks A-Rome.) has its downsides and now that I'm an adult I can buy my own computer dammit! Kidding. Kind of.

I bought the smallest, lowest priced MacBook - mostly cuz 95% of my comping time will be spent in the void of the world wide web, blogging, AIM and editing pictures of my dog. Garage band, and all those other cool iLife progs that came with my MacBook can wait. I'm just excited about finding crystall-y hello kitty stickers and neo-anarchist bumper stickers to put on the front of my comp - to keep the light up Apple sign company.

One of the most amazing things that I have found on this thing is - not iMovie or PhotoBooth, cuz those type of progs are the reason I got a Mac instead of a shitty Dell in the first place - the Oxford Dictionary!!! OMG. So neato! You usually have to pay for that shit! Just for an online membership, it's 30 bucks a month. I looked it up. I'm not joking (well, if you know me well, then you wouldn't be surprised that I totally looked it up.) Sure, the Oxford English Dictionary (known affectionately as the OED) app on my MacBook is probably a truncation of the full OED (which is like, literally, 50 volumes) but it's still terrific and gives linguistical, historical information after definitions. I'm excited all over again. brb. Gonna look something up. Cuz I can. By using like 3 keyboard shortcuts, I can.

bearberry |ˈbe(ə)rˌberē| noun ( pl. -ries) a creeping dwarf shrub of the heath family, with pinkish flowers and bright red berries.
• Genus Arctostaphylos, family Ericaceae: several species, in particular A. uva-ursi, found esp. in circumpolar regions

Again, if you know me pretty well, you'll know why I looked up bearberry. hehe.

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Honestly, though. I don't wanna seem completely shallow and easily swayed by a good looking interface or anything else new and shiny. Or anything with the iconic face of a mouthless cat, for that matter. For the sake of balance (the main concept by which I live my life), I wanted to show you something that I found while surfing the net. As powerful images go, this one - at least for me - is very memorable, and one that brought an instant, throat tightening, tear duct overloading feeling. I saw every hard-working, self-sacrificing Filipino man that I know (which would be all of them) in the face of these men. I saw every one of my uncles, I saw my Lolos, I saw my father. I saw them bent double in asparagus fields, paid way too little, working while being yelled at with racia slurs, being called inferior dumb monkeymen. A time when the U.S. was new(er) and being built by immigrant labor (not a dissimilar situation from today's). I saw Chinese men dying (literally) to create America's railroads. I saw today's Mexicans picking strawberries in Central California (and also, even, across the street from where I grew up in suburban Cerritos). I saw my people. And when I say that I don't mean Filipinos, or even Filipino-Americans. I guess I mean everyone with a "hyphen", everyone who knows what it means to work harder for the same opportunities because they are not a member of the majority. What I saw - in this singular image - is the awesomeness of the strong, dynamic Filipino that obviously occurs today, but evidently, unmistakenly has always been there.

NOTE/UPDATE: I cannot feaking find that picture that I'm talking about in the above paragraph. I'm really determined though. Give me a few days. I'm pretty mad. But to describe it, it was a flyer for a Veterans Day march last year that went down in Historic Filipinotown in LA. It was a bunch of older, bordering on elderly Filipino men carrying picket signs and stuff demanding Veteran rights long overdue. You probably know that many Pinoy immigrants are nurses and engineers. It's very true, because it was an "easier" way to get into the States. But some don't realize - because they were segregated and treated inferior and, ofcourse, weren't written in the textbooks - that much of the World Wars were fought by Filipinos. The US still had the Philippines as a territory of sorts, so they welcomed Pinoy soldiers. It didn't mean that they got fair benefits though - and it never meant that they were treated as true US military, by the American and often, not even by fellow soldiers.