Sick

I feel like shit. Actually...I feel much better than I did over the weekend. It all started last week when I was having crazy insomnia. Tossing and turning, thoughts running through my head. Getting 1 to 2 hours of sleep a night probably caused the headaches. Then around wednesday came the coughing. Which added to the insomnia and kept me from sleeping at all. Then, finally the weekend came. I was too poor to leave the house so I planned on catching up on some sleep finally. But nooOOOooo. The coughing got worse. I tried to overcome to no avail and ended up feeling like I was perpetually hungover all weekend. Headachy and coughy and too weak to move. Guh...

So finally today I took off from school early, spent 6 of my last 10 bucks on some damn medicine and took a 4 hour nap. I feel a little better. I thought I was going to kill myself if I stayed home all weekend but it actually wasn't too terrible. Here's some of the things that have kept me sane.

(1.) Replaying Final Fantasy 8:


I haven't played a videogame in about 3 years so I thought i'd pick up one of my old favorites. It didn't really keep me as enthralled as it used to. I don't really understand videogame culture. I mean, I understand that their fun and all, but who the fuck has the thousands of dollars and neverending free time to play them nowadays??

(2.) Watching Current TV:
Have you seen this shit?! It's really a revolution in television, I think. The channel was co-founded by Al Gore and they run little mini episodes, Or "Pods" of news and art and culture from aroud the world. It's super informative and interesting and has none of the bias or stupidity of mainstream news. They take little local stories that you would never even hear about and show them to you in a really smart and funny way. Like this look at China trying to improve it's image for the olympics...


(3.) Scrabulous:
Could this be a little more addictive please? Thanks to facebook, I am now a scrabble champion! I find myself simultaneously playing against 5 or 6 strangers from all over the world and having to fight the temptation to cheat online when i'm losing. (Even though my opponents probably do! Those bastards!) When I actually played real life scrabble for the first time in about a year at a chicken and waffles dinner party last weekend I found myself bustin' out 2 letter words and bingos left and right. Amazing how sitting on your ass in front of the computer can translate to real world skills sometime.

But yeah, the real thing that's keeping me going nowadays is my mental clock counting down 3 weeks till' spring break and 3 months till' summer. I wish I could just find a hole to crawl into until then with some booze and a pillow.

Reasons why you shouldn't have surgery

I was at the hospital yesterday working with a tech when we were told to head to the operating room. We have to x-ray periodically in surgeries to make sure screws are being put in the correct place and whatnot. I've only done this once before during an ankle surgery and it's pretty much the reason I want to work in a small, private clinic when I graduate.

We got into our sterile scrubs and headed down. Not knowing what to expect. Before even getting into the room, i'm greeted by really nasty, rude nurses and doctors who all think of us lowly x-ray techs as second class citizens. (Fuck you!) Oh, and being a student i'm definetely lowest on the totem pole. Anyway, we get our sterile scrubs on and head into the operating room.
Turned out it was a "Lumbar fusion" which was being done to repair scoliosis.


Gross. This kids entire back was spread open with you know, some kinda' back spreading pliers. And basically his whole spine was exposed. Bloody and white. From my vantage point I could get a pretty clear shot of the doctors hammering and chiseling and burning and screwing. I had to force myself to look away. Meanwhile the tech i was with is nonchalant as ever telling me about his ability to make any girl that he's with, and I quote, "Squirt their juice like crazy when I'm fuckin' them" *ahem* Yeah, sorry, his words not mine :)

Anyway, on to the real reason I would NEVER have surgery if it was for something non life threatening like scoliosis. The doctors were clowning around too. Cracking jokes and making fun of each other for screwing up. One guy was casually wiping discarded bits of spine onto his scrubs which fell to the floor. They also had their I-pod blasting. Which was fine, I guess. But it happened to be a room full of white doctors in their 40's and they were playing stuff like, Wu-tang's "Shame on a ni**a" and that stupid "My ni**as don't dance, they just pull up their pants" song by that one shitty guy.



And they were shufflin' and shakin' it and singin' along as if there wasn't a risk of ending this little kid's ability to walk and talk laying 1 inch away from their razor sharp tools.

And then the worst part....one of the male nurses busts out a little digital camera, tip-toes over the doctors shoulders and snaps a pic of the whole grisly scene. For some sick, underground myspace for doctors profile pic, no doubt. Ugh. The whole thing just felt really unprofessional and disrespectful. And seeing how they manhandle you when you're unconscious and just keep pumping you with anesthesia was pretty rough. No thanks, yo. Keep ya' spine straight, homey!

St. Pat's in Boston. Day Three

On day three, Casey and I were left to fend for ourself as Leile had to return to work and Kuau and his wife were headed up to Cape Cod to visit other friends. I had been invited to partake in free drinks by my friend Ami at her bar downtown. And being the thirsty little monkeys we are, we quickly headed down to State street in Boston.

It was a beautiful day and our heads were clearing from all the salvia and brewskies. Naturally it was time for a re-clouding. We found Ami's bar and bellied up but sadly I was informed that she had injured herself the night prior and took the day off :( She later told me that she got drunk, fell and hurt her ass bone (or, Coccyx, if you will) So me and Casey went ahead and had a couple overpriced drinks and appetizers before moving on into the cold and sunny coldiness...
We journied around the financial district a bit until Casey couldn't feel her hands anymore. Now you wouldn't expect a glove purchase in Boston in 35 degree weather to be difficult. But after a trip to TJ Maxx, CVS and street vendors we were still hella gloveless and like, "Whuu..?!?"

The lady at TJ Maxx (more like TJ minimum. Hah!) had the nerve to tell us without cracking a smile that the winter clothing season had ended and that there would be NOWHERE to buy gloves anymore....

Reeeeal smart, Boston. It's winter there 8 months out of the year but you'd better fuckin' get ready for it by March 1st! Anyways, long story short, it gave us the chance to wander into Chinatown where there were gloves aplenty. And clean, quiet streets that you wouldn't even dream of finding in SF or NY's C-towns.


After a bit more tourism we headed to the MIT/sciency nerd district to meet Leile at his dreary office job as a professors assistant. Casey had to help him figure out some ridiculous request his boss had given him for a word document with no lines seperating tables or something. *Yawn*
We couldn't get outta' there fast enough. Leile had told me about a secret MIT bar called the "Muddy river" inside one of the classroom halls. Apparently some construction workers and homeless people had taken a liking to the cheap ass beer also and began going there to mingle with the computer programmer crowd. Sounded like fun to me!

It was a nice little place actually. It was super strange walking through this giant old dormitory building to get to it though. We ordered up some pitchers of Bud for $6each and were loving it. That is...until we noticed that some people around us had not just regular old pitchers of Bud....but GREEN pitchers of Bud!! Wtf?! Where was this coming from?! We had asked around the days prior but it seemed that most places had ended this grand tradition for fear of altering the taste of the beer and for the general unhealthiness of drinking that much food coloring. We asked the bartender to hook us up and he said, "Welp. That's not up t'me ya' see. You gotta' ask ol' scrappy over yonder."

Okay, that's not really how he talked. But that's secretly how I wish all bartenders sounded. But anyway, yeah, fuckin' creepy. The food coloring was just coming out of the pocket of some old irish dude sitting at the bar by himself. Leile asked if he could score off of him and he graced us with a couple squirts. Hooray!


By then we were getting hungry and Leile, being the plan master for the day, had found out that one of his favorite bar/restaurant/bowling alleys was doing free "candlepin" bowling at 9. Now...if you've never heard of candlepin bowling, consider yourself lucky. It's a New England bastardization of real bowling. They use super tiny, handheld balls and you basically just huck them at suuuper skinny little pins as hard as you can with no hope of aiming. But it was free and the place sounded fun so we headed off to Jamaica Plains.

Upon arrival, we were met by Ami (sore butt and all) and Leile's GF. We sat down to dinner and a round of "Brubakers" which is a dirty old bottle of beer that is apparently the Boston hipster version of Pabst. The food at this place, (the Milky Way), was really fucking good. It was funny, the rest of the place was a dirty old bar but the dining area was all trendy and fancy looking. We drank, we talked, we laughed, we ate. It was a grand ol' time. A DJ spinning "real vinyl" as his advertisement had touted began playing old Dub 45's when Grifto, the hipster clown prince of Ireland proceeded to lose his mind on the dancefloor!


Hahahaha!! So funny...anyways. We played a few rounds of CP bowling and got properly smashed. I almost got into a fight with a couple townies at the bar when I remarked out loud to them that I was mad at not being able to get irish carbombs anywhere and they retorted with a big shit-eating grin that perhaps it was because of "my attitude". We got into a little back and forth about where I was from and how it was insulting to order carbombs. Oh man, I was steamed. Me and Leile actually went back to look for them after I delivered the beers but they had taken off. Fearing my unholy wrath :)

We a-l-m-o-s-t missed the last train back to Leile's which would have been pure balls. But thankfully we made it home in one piece. One DRUNK piece. But that wasn't the end, goddamnit! We were set on drinking at least one freaking carbomb before leaving this state. So Leilers rounded up some bootleg fixin's and we had our final drink in Boston while laughing in the face of irish history and all the idiots who complained about us calling them carbombers.


Dumbasses. The next morning Casey and I met up with my brother who had just returned from Italy and had some Cuban sandwiches. He saw us off to the Fung-Wah and we rode off into the sunset like Seamus O' Toolahan at the battle of Crossberry, whippin' dynamite at housewives and children with a bottle of whiskey at the ready.

THE END

St. Pat's in Boston. Day Two

Well, seeing as how our gang was already in the hub of drunken irish america, we figured that it would just be criminal not to attend the St. Patrick's day parade and witness the madness firsthand. Some of Ellie's friends were in town for it also so we had to get down there to meet them around noon. We hit the red line and made our way to the Broadway station.



The parade was in the "Southy" neighborhood which is famous for being drunk and white and dangerous; a la "The Departed". We saw the bad signs from the very beginning. The subway was so crowded that we couldn't even reach the platform. We were waiting a minute here, a minute there until we finally packed in, all 6 of us. Hungover and surly. My annoyance level was already high.

We got off and were greeted by total madness. I had never seen a street that crowded. First thing we saw was a horse drawn Budweiser carriage followed closely by a very out of place Star Wars contingency that left everyone scratching their heads. (However, it was by far the neatest thing in the parade.)



We pushed our way through and found a decent vantage point to watch the activities from where we could listen to all the racist honkies call people "faggots" and "chinamen". It felt like whatever historical purpose this holiday ever had was long since lost on the lowest common denominator of society in Boston who just live for loud confrontations and public puking. It made me sad to be half Irish! Thankfully, our group didn't get hit with any of this racist nonsense firsthand, but we definetely heard it around us. Not alot but enough to be noticeable.

We had to escape. We attempted to hide out in a decent looking restaurant/bar sort of away from the crowd, but everywhere you went was charging $10 to $15 just to get inside. Presumably just to avoid getting lynched or beaten on the street. We couldn't find Ellie's friends and assumed it was best just to get the hell out of there. We walked a bit more and then escaped to the least rowdy part of Boston we could possibly think of...

...Harvard! The mecca of trust fund nerds and dudes that we could probably beat up!

We were all starving and grumpy and found a sweet little bar on the outskirts of Harvard square that served up some mean double cheeseburgers and lobster melts. A couple beers and irish coffees later and we were all back on track :) After that we toured around the area a bit more, hitting up the John Harvard bar where Leile's roomate Cheryl and her boyfriend came to meet us. We all got fairly fucked up there over the next few hours. It was grand. A pretty good local microbrewery. Kuau, Leile and I reminisced on the old days and filled everyone in on some of our wackier old stories.

To follow that up we had a delicious (except for the homemade pickles), indian dinner. And shit man, by the end of that, I was properly wasted. Ready for bed time. Leile's girlfriend drove us home thank Zeus, and being the smart guy that I am, upon reaching the comfort of home away from home, I proceeded to just drink, and drink and drink until my cramped little airbed became the most wonderful little slice of heaven imaginable. I was done. We had been up for about 16 hours and had been drinking steadily for about, 12 of those. Good times overall. I'm glad we experienced a classic american shitstorm like the St. Patty's parade in Boston firsthand. We survived and now we know that it just wasn't meant for queers and chi-nee like us.

Oh boy...Day 3 update soon to come!! You can't even wait, can you?!?

St. Pat's in Boston. Day One

The adventure started Saturday afternoon with Casey and I taking a relatively short Fung-Wah bus ride from Manhattan to Boston. For those who don't know, this bus will take you from NY chinatown to Boston chinatown in under 4 hours for only $15!!! Amazing...


I met up with my 2 best friends and their wife and girlfriend at the Park street station.(The oldest subway stop in America by the way) After a nice stroll through the richy rich neighborhood of Newbury we settled down for our first round of drinks and some primo burgers from Charlie's.

We decided to take the first night sort of easy and headed back to Leile's neighborhood in Malden to take in some small town bars. Malden has about 6 bars in walking distance of each other and we hit about 4 of them. I always enjoy getting the hell out of NY and coming to stay here. It feels like i'm out in the country or something. Even downtown Boston stays fairly calm and quiet compared to NY. Subways stop running at midnight. Bars close at 2. And some towns can't even sell beer! Ever! Those things may suck but it's also cleaner, nicer and easier to navigate.

The first and best stop had to be "Pearl street station". An old renovated subway stop that's now a bar with pizza and karaoke. Really bad karaoke! Except for the little old chinese man who Leile claims is famous there for being a real over the top showman and walking through the crowd caressing cheeks and making the ladies swoon. It was really fuckin' funny.


After stumbling back to the house things took a turn for the wacky. I was reminded that one of our friends had brought with him a giant bag of salvia divinorum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum

I had heard about this stuff before and watched youtube videos of teenagers getting completely zonked out on it. I didn't imagine it could be that intense seeing as how it's legal and sold online. My friends who had tried it claimed otherwise. Apparently it's the most intense, hallucinogenic high you'll ever experience for about 5 minutes and then you snap right out of it...

I had to find out for myself :)

And holy fuck...words almost cannot describe the vivid and unnatural feeling of being high on salvia. After taking an initial hit I was sure that I had everything under control. I felt lucid but not really fucked up. So what did my smart ass do? Take another giant hit of course! I proceeded to melt into the floor whereupon I was taken on such an unbelievable mental journey that I can't even fully comprehend it to this moment. I was apparently walked out to the porch by Kuau but in my head I was being dragged by some unseen force through walls and what felt like another fuckin' dimension. It felt like everything around me was staged like a play and that I was seeing beyond it into some reality looking into our own. I recall Kuau asking me if I was okay and leading me by the hand until I ended up back on the couch and s-l-o-w-l-y felt myself returning to normal until I was able to snap back and jump into the conversation.

SO CRAZY!! I've done almost every drug there is at least once in my life and i've NEVER felt anything like this. Thank god the peak of it was only 5 or 10 minutes. I couldn't take a second more. I wasn't the only one affected so strongly. Casey said that it was like, "my body was split in half by a razor and my tongue became the center of my whole weight" or as Leile put it.."my legs were made of paper" as he proceeded to tug on his pant legs furiously. Hahaha! Kuau's wife remarked that, "nowhere that you sit is yours, you're just borrowing the space. My body isn't my own."

To take quotes from Wikipedia, I would most accurately say that the effects were like sensations of motion, or being pulled or twisted by forces. And overlapping realities, such as the perception of being in several locations at once. It was the wildest thing i've ever done and I would highly suggest you try it at least once :)

After coming off of that, Casey and I smashed into a freezing cold airbed and tried to rest up for the next day's parade...I don't think any amount of resting could have prepared us for it...

Day two's blog soon to come.

holyshitholyshitHOLYSHIT!!

OHHHH MAAAN! It's friday (almost)! I'm only one nights sleep, one horrible 6:45 wake-up and 2 poorly studied for tests away from 4 days in Boston with my 2 best friends, their significant others and my most amazingest adventure companion, Casey. (That's alot of numbers!) She just got back from Puerto Rico and is already ready for the next party.

It will be quite the booze fest, lemme' tell ya'. We're planning a day in Jamaica Plains checking out some paddle boats and an arboretum. The St. Patty's parade in Southy, enjoying some of Bostons amazing indian food (for reals), going to my friend Ami's bar and generally being shitty drunk for the entire time :) There's also talk of experimenting with some salvia. ...hmm..i'm not sure though. I think I gave up hallucinogens back in high school...

Anyways, it's needless to say that i'm as happy as an amazingly coordinated brown bear in Japan who just learned how to twirl and twiddle his favorite stick...

...don't expect any updates until I get back ;)

Tuesday

Days go by quick and I don't even notice them. I'm in a daze. Half awake at best. I'm glad I don't notice the days going by. I don't like them...


These tedious, tired days are my mortal enemy. All i'm doing is fighting through them for another year and a half. A year and a half until I get to see what the fuck being an "adult" with a "career" is like. Sure I enjoy a pint or two on the weekends with my chums but the ever present dread of quizzes and labs and half dead patients hangs over my head like some cursed mistletoe, with SATAN just waiting to french kiss me!! (hahah!).

The cold, dark mornings, the never ending need to study. Not studying and then panicking. Falling asleep on the subway. Rain and snow bursting out of nowhere as I walk through Manhattan. Realizing slowly that I might be dyslexic, that I don't know 8th grade math and that my job will one day give me cancer. Ahhhh... soak it all in. I'm going to look back on this fondly someday, that's the crazy part. I'll tell people how I travelled to NY to become a radiographic technologist and of course, to broaden my cultural horizons, and they'll say "ooh! If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere!"

And i'll say, "Eh, ya' know...no biggie. That shit was over before I even realized it." And then i'll go pound a 40 from out my fridge which will contain nothing but 40's. (Like the Nothin' but a G' thang video! My dreeeeam!!)

Unfinished business

Back when I was 16 I had the crazy notion that I was going to be a famous hip-hop DJ. I was inspired by my friend Petur's big brother Luke aka DJ Platurn...


http://www.myspace.com/djplaturn

I learned how to scratch and mix with some success and I finally decided to release some mix-tapes to local record stores when I was 18 or 19. It was amazing to get paid for something that I put together myself. Music that I had created by reworking and re-imagining songs that I loved. I was playing with new genres and discovering the science and the skill that it took to make these sounds work together.

My friend Kim, http://www.keempoo.com/klog/ has always been a big supporter of my musical endeavors and has decided to host a couple of my old mixes on her website. The first one, titled "semi-tuff" is actually my most recent unfinished attempt at making a CD, from about 5 years ago. The second one. "turnstile" is the very first thing I thought was good enough to transfer to CD back in 2001 (which was a huge ordeal back then!) So go check em' out! Their free and about half an hour each. Tell me what you think.

http://www.keempoo.com/hello/aquafresh/

I'm fairly pleased with how these were starting to sound. I always wanted to make something that sounded different. I din't just want a "party mix" of one popular song after the other. I wanted to take some weird old samples and crazy breakbeats and 80's and funk and jazz and scratches and mix it all into a big gumbo pot. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't :)

After releasing these mixes I went on to work with my old friend Leile, aka Mr. Salty to make a full length hip-hop album. And then just a year or so ago I was DJ'ing back home at a local dive bar called the Missouri Lounge. So yeah, thankfully I was able to keep music in my life to some degree. Even if i'm not world famous...yet. I hope after all this school baloney to one day get back to doing what I really love.

Life Savin'

As of today, i'm certified in blood born pathology clean up and CPR. Wow, big whoop! The first thing they told us is that it's never actually our responsibility to initiate either of these so I guess there's really no need to know how to do them, now is there?

Unless I want to try and be the hero when someone passes out in a restaurant someday. In which case i'll probably just end up cracking their xiphoid process, puncturing their lung and killing them!

Kunoichi!

Damn, i've been sitting here watching the female ninja warrior (aka Kunoichi) marathon on G4 and it is fuckin' STRESSFUL!



I have to mute the tv every time they fall in to avoid the embarassing sounds of the dissapointed audience. The worst is when they interview a loser to rub it in. But this girl, Ayako Miyake, makes up for it all by winning the whole thing almost every year....


She's my hero.



It's really disheartening when people fail so miserably and quickly when they've literally dedicated years of their life to this one thing. I think that's why it makes me so uncomfortable. It puts the reality of sudden defeat right smack in my face. Haha! Or maybe i'm just overanalyzing a silly game show!

This brand new year of ours

Some ruminations thus far...

on SCHOOL:
When I came back to New York from the bay it felt like someone scooped my heart out with a garden trowel. I don't think I was that sad even when I first moved here. I guess I knew what to expect this time so I was dreading it even more.
I've had about 12 written and lab tests since getting back. I'm in the phase at school where when we go to a hospital we're expected to know how to do pretty much everything on our own and it's really stressful.

For instance...a couple of us were left in the room to take x-rays of both legs of a 40 something year old woman on a stretcher. She had big gaping sores covering her legs and they were stuffed with gauze. As we were positioning her the stuffing began to come out of her deep leg holes and we had to stuff them back in...she was in serious pain and wanted her meds but we had to keep going. She also had to piss. So I stepped out as my female co-student took her diaper off and placed the basin between her legs as she tried to aim into it. When I came back in she had pissed all over the stretcher and it was pretty hard to avoid. There wasn't a tech in site to help us so we were forced to (illegally) take the shots by ourselves. That shit happens all the time...
Thank god I have friends to spend time with on the weekends. Bay, Brent, Mia, Casey, Anna, ect... I love you.

on NEW YORK:
It is goddamn FILTHY. Every corner in my neighborhood looks like a garbage truck was just suicide bombed. How did this happen?
It's been a surprisingly mild winter. A couple days got down into the teens, but i'm enjoying a mild 38 degrees at the moment. Hopefully I won't get bombarded in February like Kuau hopes I do. (He wants me to have the true NY winter experience...thanks)
The buses are enough to turn a good day to shit. From the horribly unpredictable schedule to the sardine can atmosphere to the inability of drivers to stop without lunging everyone forward 5 feet. It's truly hellish. Subways are okay unless it's 4am in Williamsburg on a friday night and you know you have a half an hour wait and an hour ride ahead of you.

I've gotten in the dangerous habit of falling asleep one or two stops before mine and then waking up at the end of the line. Then waiting another 20 minutes to backtrack to Ave. U. Another bad yet necessary habit is me climbing down into the tracks to find a creepy nook to pee in. What the hell do they expect!? I Can't hold it 2 hours when i'm drunk!!

on PEOPLE:
I don't think cops are allowed to sit down on the subway. It would make them look lazy and unalert. They also look very willing to beat you with nightsticks at the drop of a hat.

My neighborhood is 50% chinese. 30% Russian and 20% Hassidic jew. I'm starting to think that goes for ALL of New York.

One drunken night after hanging out with my friend Lakhena at a bar I was exceptionally drunk and made my way to the subway. I had no cash and none of the machines were taking cards. I was kind of in the middle of nowhere bank-wise and even if I found one I didn't have $20 to take out in the first place! I was just so damn tired and upset. The idea of walking a mile or more to find the next station was impossible and I basically wanted to cry.
As I was standing there, watching a flood of people pass by after having just gotten off a train, I was lightly pounding my fist on the metal grated door that could be used by the people on the other side as an emergency exit. I was defeated...people passed and were having fun and heading home and I felt like freezing the earth solid and smashing it with an axe...
And then...as all hope was lost...a man, a little older than me, well dressed, african-american...creeps up to the gate, gives a look around, smiles at me, and opens the emergency gate for me, setting off the relatively quiet alarm and hurries off down to his train.

Humanity! Kindness! The brotherhood of man! I felt it that night, my friends! Not a word was spoken between us. But he knew, and I knew that maybe society would make it after all.