On Saturday I saw Poor Things with Brendan and Faith, and it was fucking amazing. Yorgos Lanthimos gets better and better with each film, and this one was so enjoyable. This is Emma Stone’s best performance, bar none.
There was a bad part of the movie: at the very beginning it showed that Searchlight is the distributor. I instinctively blurted out, “Fuck Disney.” (Disney dropped the “Fox” from Searchlight when they bought Fox.)
Yes, I am bitter. On the very day I got back from my European vacation last year, I was told by my bosses that due to “job realignment” I was getting a 20% pay cut starting at the new year. So because their AP department did a fucked up job with the “accounting consolidation” with Hulu, I got sent off to their Procurement Department.
Fine. So I started my job search at the beginning of the year. That itself was an up and down saga, but eventually I got my current job which makes me happy.
But I do hold bitterness to Disney. It turned what was a fine job at Hulu into fucking misery. It’s true that the accounting team at Hulu weren’t a bed of roses either, but the Disney team? I’ll just say that if I tried to act like Disney AP while at Hulu, we would have all been fired.
Disney gave me nothing but misery. It was miserable working for them, they cut my pay which fucked my finances this year. So now when I see something that is related to Disney, I cringe.
The saying “Friends don’t let friends work at Disney” exists for a reason.
But do watch Poor Things. It’s real good and should win all the awards.
I didn’t read as many books as I wanted to this year. I always have this illusion that I will be that pretentious motherfucker who just reads and reads and reads and will be really fucking insufferable about it. But no. For the most part it was me trying to hide myself from the world while watching stupid Youtube videos. As always. Yup.
But I did manage to complete two books I had always wanted to finish.
I was so happy to finish Gogol’s Dead Souls. It was funny, riveting and irritating in all the best ways. The satire was very biting and made me realize that people have always been fucking idiots. Although it didn’t have that goth sensibilities I fantasized about during my adolescence having the same title of a Joy Division album, it was quite good.
Too bad Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow didn’t leave me as satisfied. While I did enjoy Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, for most of its 777 pages GR was absolute torture. I understood what the words meant, but when they were put together in the form of sentences, paragraphs, chapters, all meaning was lost. I was happy that I finished it, but for the most part I did not like it. Maybe I’ll have to reread it? (Yeah, let’s hold off on that idea for a while.)
And I don’t know if reading GR killed my enjoyment of reading because I quit the next two books I tried to read midway: Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe and New Millennium Boyz by Alex Kazemi. I found the Fuccboi unbearable and even though I am about five years older than the kids of NMB I didn’t identify with any of the kids. I didn’t even identify with some of the older kids. To be honest, I had borrowed NMB as an ebook from the library and let the loan lapse. Even though I didn’t identify with the kids, I did enjoy it more than I did Fuccboi.
I think I just need a big wasabi palate cleanser to my brain, CTRL+ALT+DELETE, whatever.
I also listened to my first audiobook: Britney Spears’s memoir The Woman in Me. I did like listening to the book, but don’t get me wrong: listening to an audiobook IS NOT READING. But this is a sad story, and listening to Michelle Williams narrate, especially during the head-shaving era, it was just fucking tragic. It put me back during that period, and I remember thinking that Britney was going punk because she had no other options. And with all of the shit people have been saying over the last few months, I guess people still haven’t learn to leave Britney the fuck alone. (butit’sstillnotreading)
I liked Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel The Shards especially for the nostalgia of 1981 LA, and I didn’t really like Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger. I now understand The Meaning of Mariah Carey (my birthday twin) and really want to hear her “grunge” album with her vocals. I dipped my toes into the “feminist retelling of Greek mythology” with Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra which was all right, meh, and fucking loved Ernst Junger’s WWI memoir of the battlefields in Storm of Steel.
Oh! I almost forgot. I also finally read Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye! Jesus fucking Christ how subliminally perverse! I need more perversion in my life. (I really think everyone does.)
I watched Anatomy of a Fall last weekend, and it was marvelous. Both Sandra Huller and the kid Milo Machado Graner were riveting. But the thing that got to me had nothing to do with the movie at all.
After the movie, I started watching the press that director Justine Triet did all through the film festival season. In Toronto she was asked about the younger generation directors, and she talked about how she worried about the kids having access to funds to make their films.
Here’s the thing. Justine is a couple of years younger than me, and she has already realized that the new directors coming up are a different generation. That she is not a part of that group.
Me?
Well, I still think I’m a young’un. Even though my hair is turning white, my bones creak, I only have partial feeling in my left foot, that I need to be on medication to not die, I can’t stay out past 10pm if I even have any desire to go out, my brain still thinks it’s in its 20s. I mean, I like discovering new music. Like, I liked the new Lana del Rabies album. The new Danny Brown, and his collaboration with JPEGMAFIA. The new Moris Blak.
But then I realize I do some old man shit. Like I’ve slowly gotten rid of social media. I am not on Instagram anymore, and I have never been on Tik Tok. I still keep up a blog. I try not to perpetually have my phone in front of my face. I don’t listen to Taylor Swift or Beyonce or any of the pop stuff that are a snooze. I just don’t have that sensibility.
It’s sort of like that Britney song from her movie Crossroads: I’m not a girl, not yet a woman. I’m not a kid, not yet an old man.
I had a dream last week. I was on my honeymoon with R at a hotel in Bratislava, and for some reason we hadn’t consummated the marriage yet. The horniness was consuming me. We were in a jacuzzi, and I ripped my shorts off. “You need to fuck me right now,” I yelled. And I needed that dick in my ass right then and there. My dick was so hard it had grown an extra two inches and dripped like a fountain. Since my dick was right there in front of his face, he started sucking me off. But I needed his dick in my ass. I got my dick out of his mouth, got into the jacuzzi and sat on his lap. That dick needed to be inside of me.
It’s been a long time since I felt that level of horniness. Like even when I was at my horniness right after I got off of Lexapro, it wasn’t that ravenous. Every cell in me needed that dick to penetrate me, to feel that moment of breath-taking pain, that moment when your eyes roll backwards when his dick hits your prostate. Every cell in my body needed it at that point.
What ended up happening is I woke up and took a piss, got back into bed and slept til morning where the daily routine recommenced. It’s odd because I although I don’t feel that level of need, I can remember the feeling of it. And I haven’t decided if it makes me depressed or not.
What I did do yesterday was go along the Backbone Trail in the Santa Monica Mountains by Malibu. It was very pretty and all. And if that wasn’t tiring enough I decided it would be a great time to get my smog check, go to the Korean market and do laundry. I’m tired.
Succinctly put, I am thankful that I no longer work for the Rodent. That was a soul-sucking two years, and what pisses me off the most was that there was nothing I could steal from the office on my way out. Fuckers. Hell, I might even be rooting for DeSantis in his war against Disney just because.
Since my family is getting together on Saturday, I figured I would drag my fat ass to Griffith Park. It was a nice day, and while walking along the Riverside Trail I realized this was the first time I went on the trails here at home since my first date with E back when I lived in Pedro. We went over to the Forrestal Reserve, and he gave me a hand job until we heard some people coming through on the trail. I’ve been out hiking when I travelled in Montana, Minnesota, Michigan, wherever. But it had been a while I’ve done it here at home.
I was by myself today, so no handjobs, and even if I went with someone there was a healthy amount of people on the trail. And Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar helped me not to be completely bored.
A Thanksgiving selfie at Griffith Park with Downtown LA in the background.Looking down on the Downtown LA skyline from Griffith Park.The Griffith Observatory with the Greek Theater peeking out from underneath.
While I was at Borealis Basecamp, I finally finished Gravity’s Rainbow. Now, I have to figure out if I liked the damned thing.
776 pages of what seemed to be at times a word salad. The journey of Tyrone Slothrop and about 1,000 other characters before and after the very end of World War II in Europe. That seemed to meander like the Jews in the desert for 40 years. Sometimes clear and direct but at most times convoluted and punch drunk.
The first 150 pages were dense and incomprehensible. The next 200 or 300 pages were a fucking masterpiece. Then the final half of the book? I’ll admit that I didn’t absorb any of it. I had no idea what was happening. I was riding the wave of absurdism and mainly just wanting to get through it so I could read other books.
I think we witnessed the end of the world at the end. But I don’t know.
Did I like the book? Maybe because I am told that this is A Very Important Book™ I liked it? Again, I don’t know.
Being a warm-weather person, it makes perfect sense that I would go up to sub-freezing Alaska to see green lights in the sky. But ever since I found the Borealis Basecamp randomly on Google Maps a couple of years ago, I knew I had to make it up there in the middle of winter to see the aurora.
In a very rare moment for me, I actually did go with someone for this trip. Earlier this year Natalie came over, and I talked about this place. Just like that she agreed to go, and we made the reservation. We were going to be in the middle of nowhere Alaska just north of Fairbanks on a November.
This geodesic dome was going to be our home for the next three nights and four days. One thing I learned was that as much as I think I’m reptilian and need warm weather and sun to survive, my fat ass does adapt well to 15-degree (-10C) weather. Let’s just make sure there is no wind. Natalie on the other hand, with no meat. Well she might as well be dressed in a burqa.
Borealis Basecamp is essentially a bed and breakfast — breakfast is included every morning as are the daily activities. On the first day, they picked us up from our Fairbanks hotel (since fucking Delta has only one flight in and out of Fairbanks daily which comes in at 12:30 am) and shuttled us to the camp about an hour away. Unfortunately the domes are not equipped with a kitchenette (only a kettle), so the only option for dinner which is non-inclusive was their on-site restaurant. The food was excellent there, but the prices were a bit steep.
Day one activity was a six-hour snowmobiling tour through the forest. I think I found my new calling. At one point, I did go 40 mph down a hill and going airborne on the bumps. It was so much fun, but damn I didn’t realize how sore my body would get. Another byproduct of being in the cold was the snot flowing like a faucet down my nose which ended up freezing on the inside of my helmet. I’m sure they had fun cleaning that up.
We did have a lunch break halfway through, but being the good Korean boy I am, I did bring Shin Ramen since we did have the kettle. The only thing missing here was rice and kimchi.
The second day was an hour-long dog sledding experience. One thing that surprised me was how effortless the dogs made it look. They just trotted down the path, knew exactly where to go, all the while pulling us on this rickety-ass sled.
But what about the raison d’être, the actual aurora? Another feature of Borealis Basecamp is they have someone who stays up through the night and calls each room to alert us about the aurora. Now, for those of you who are observant, you will notice that in these photos and videos there are a lot of clouds. And putting two and two together, you will realize that clouds do not make for the best conditions to see the aurora.
And while it was cloudy for 95% of our stay, at around 1:30 am Saturday night/Sunday morning, the second night of our stay, we got the phone call. The motherfucking aurora!
I’ve seen so many of these photos and videos of the aurora and thinking that the brightness of it all was basically equipment manipulation, that in reality it really wasn’t that bright. And I’ll admit, since the shutter speed on these photos up here range from 25 to 30 seconds, it does show up brighter than what I actually saw. But they were still pretty bright. Here is a shitty, blurry cell phone video that pretty accurately represents how bright it appeared:
After an hour the light show ended, and the clouds blanketed us again for the rest of our stay. But we got it!
I would love to say that things like this and the total solar eclipse were reality-changing experiences, but they really aren’t unless you want them to be. But they are awe-inspiring nonetheless, and I am glad to have seen both.
I’m going to try and forget the journey home which involved me waiting in the Fairbanks airport for 13 hours since they have no lockers and because of the one-daily-flight-out-of-Fairbanks-for-Delta, I couldn’t check in my luggage. But I Alan Cumming was on my SEA-LAX flight, so I guess there is some consolation?
I know I have to make it back up to Alaska because there is so much that I need to see. But for now, I am perfectly content.
Just for shits, I decided to see if I could find my first concert on YouTube. Since it was back in 1995, I didn’t think chances were that high that it was on there. Sure, people were taping shows for the bootleg market, but did they do it for every show? And if so, would they upload them to YouTube?
It took me all of 5 seconds, and there I was just a few people away from stage right on the floor:
Yup. This was my first show. Smells like Children hadn’t been released yet, so the masses hadn’t heard their cover of “Sweet Dreams” yet. In the last year I had picked up the soundtrack for the Stephen Dorff/Reese Witherspoon movie SFW where Marilyn Manson had their song “Get Your Gunn” used. Then during the summer of 95 while I was going to SAT classes, during break I went to the Wherehouse in Palos Verdes that had Marilyn Manson’s first album Portrait of an American Family on tape. And that fucking hooked me. After the demented Willy Wonka introduction, the first words were “I am the god of fuck.” That’s what I needed to hear when I was 16.
I think I went to this concert with my friend Fernando who was the only other person I knew at school who had heard of them. I know we definitely went to see Ministry the next spring during their Sphinctour stop at the Palladium since he gave me my first cigarette — I was going through not only AP tests but also had to deal with the sudden medical issues of my dad who was half a country away. But I remember as we were in line getting into the show, I saw this girl Moro from my Korean school there. It was at this point where we became best friends throughout the rest of high school.
The show was fucking great. As creepy and ugly as Marilyn Manson made himself especially at this time, I was fucking engrossed with Twiggy. I had the biggest fucking crush at the time. Maybe it was the dreads. Although I did catch my breath at the very beginning when he walked on stage on stilts.
I had to take my SATs the next morning at 9. So was it really the best thing for me to go to this show the night before? I don’t know. I ended up getting a 1400 on them, so I think I did a good enough job. And I never saw them again. While I did like Antichrist Superstar, I really did not like the explicit flirtation with fascism. I understood it, but it just left a bad taste in my mouth. And after that I had moved on to other things.
But for that one night in 1995, it was just perfect.
Yup, there I was, 5 years ago, late Friday night/early Saturday morning in the emergency room at the Little Company of Mary hospital in San Pedro. It was then and there when I almost died.
As that Friday progressed at work, I started get a dry cough. I didn’t think too much about it. It was probably because I was out the night before at the Bonaventure for Brendan’s birthday. That was a lot of talking which probably made me raspy.
As the night wore on, the cough kept getting worse. If only I could get whatever is clogging up my airways out, it would be better. I tried going to bed at 11 and put on old episodes of Sex in the City to lull me to sleep. But I could not get comfortable since I was coughing more and more.
I then figured a hot shower might loosen up the phlegm in my chest, and I can finally get some rest. As I was scrubbing down, I realized that there was no clog per se that I needed to cough out. No. I, in fact, could not breathe.
I tried to calm down so I could dry myself off, clothes myself and get myself to the hospital – since I lived alone, there was no way I was going to die and have my body be found days later in the bathtub completely naked. At the very least I should be a lot skinnier if my body is found naked. That really is a horror.
Thankfully I was able to clothe myself, and somehow I managed to drive myself to the emergency room as I kept gasping for air. I did have to run a red light because it was on a fucking timer and not a sensor. Fuck it. It was almost midnight, and there was no one on the San Pedro streets. Aside from that, I managed to get to the hospital in one piece.
To show how far my condition had deteriorated in the 45 minutes or so from when I started to go to bed to being at the check-in desk at the ER, I had gone from an annoying cough every minute or so to barely able to get the words, “I. CAN’T. BREATHE,” in between gasps as I tried to stay as calm as I could but finding it impossible because oxygen was not getting in. They took my vitals at the desk and the only thing I remember was my blood pressure being 212-over-something.
They got me in right away and gave me the oxygen-through-nostrils thingee (which I have learned is called a nasal cannula,) gave me tons of antibiotics and blood pressure meds and took about half of my blood supply for tests. I did an EKG, chest x-rays, a couple of breathing treatments and all, and they gave me an initial diagnosis of pneumonia. All in all I was in the ER for about five hours before they got me a bed in intensive care.
All day Saturday in the ICU, I was constantly complaining about how hot it was. I was sweating through the bedsheets like no one’s business. And since I was hooked up to monitors, I couldn’t get up to pee, so they gave me a bucket. It’s a good thing I’m a fucking pig and will piss in front of anyone. The breathing treatments continued that day, and I was progressing well enough to get a room on Sunday. Between the breathing treatments and the endless hours of nothing, they couldn’t tell me definitively what was wrong with me. They stuck with the pneumonia story even though there was no illness that led up to this. But whatever. By Monday I was well enough to be released.
A couple of things that kept running through my mind:
I need to get out of here ASAP so I don’t go broke. The daytime ICU nurse, a middle-aged Filipina lady, kept telling me not to worry, that insurance would take care of it. Did she think I was fucking stupid? This is the fucking United States of America. That’s why I drove myself to the fucking hospital. While insurance covered most of the $40,000 bill for my weekend, my share ended up being just over $3,000.
I’m really bad at selling my illness. So aside from Sammy stopping by 10 minutes to get me a phone charger and moving my car from the emergency room parking lot to the normal hospital parking lot, and my cousin Gina and her mom staying a while on both Saturday and Sunday, no one came. Not my mom, aunts other cousins or anything. I mean, I told them that I couldn’t breathe but I got myself to the ER so I’m feeling better but I didn’t know when they would release me, but no. No visitors. I guess I better make sure my dying actually has me sound like I’m actually dying.
A couple of days after I was released, I went to the doctor to follow up on all of this. Well because my high blood pressure was out of control, it caused my heart to say fuck it. I had heart failure. Stupid me. I thought that if my blood pressure would kill me, it would give me an aneurysm, that I’d feel dizzy, have headaches and all of that good stuff. But I had none of that. I felt perfectly fine. Until that Friday when fluid started collecting in my lungs because my heart was enlarging. Fuck.
So even though I didn’t feel like I was actually dying while I was in the hospital, I guess I could have died. Serves me right for joking that I would be dead by 40. Prophecy almost self-fulfilled. But really, it was all underwhelming. I felt like I was in a Peggy Lee song.
