Meditation2

Gone Daddy Gone

Just announced:
LIVE 105 presents Day On The Meadow 2006, Sunday July 2nd at Noon @ the Discovery Meadow in San Jose featuring: The Violent Femmes, Dresden Dolls, Thriving Ivory, Smash-Up Derby and DJ Aaron Axelsen plus more guests to be announced. Tickets are only $10.53 each. tickets go on-sale to the public on Friday June 2nd at 5:00 PM.

$10!?!? I will be buying tickets fo sho!

A certain... oh, je ne sais quoi

I'm going to go see French singer Camille pretty soon. She is amazingly talented and passionate and would probably be excellent live. Tickets are still available so check her out and let me know if you want to come to the show with me.

Sunday, June 11 at Bimbo's.
Camille
Doors at 7 p.m. Show at 8 p.m.
Tickets are $20
21 & over are welcome

Yelp... yeah... yeah...

Am I crazy or are people starting to copy my Yelp review style?

Exhibit A: Miette

My review:

If love could be found in a cupcake it would be in theirs.

"If love could be found in a cake it would be in theirs."
I lifted that ; )
The best cake in the neighborhood.
On the dry side of almost perfectly moist.
On the too sweet side of almost perfectly sweet.
Perfectly cute, and perfectly presentable.

Exhibit B: Shu Uemura

My review:

I'm scared of makeup sellers. I have nightmares about overly made-up ladies in lab coats and men with perfect eyebrows and glowing skin turning me into a clown. I'm serious. I don't want strangers attacking my face with pointy things that pinch and poke so they can sell me things I don't really want. Now, considering that my mother was a beautiful and quite elegant lady who wouldn't leave the house without a full face of makeup and almost always wore high heels you would think that I would be able to handle the makeup counters. I'm much more DIY. I go to Sephora where no one hassles me, I've never had a manicure done, and I tweeze my own eyebrows. Having other people do things like that for me is totally foreign.
Well, not until Shu Uemura that is.
I'm crazy for their eyelash curler and I had heard so many positive things about their makeup line that I decided to buck up and check out the store because Sephora doesn't carry their products anymore. If anything, it would be cool to just check out the Ai Yamaguchi mural. So, I go to the store on a weekday afternoon so I don't get scared by the Pac Heights customers and the shop is pretty quiet. I must have looked like a deer in headlights because this very friendly man came over and just hello without any hint of makeup pushing in his voice. He helped me pick out some Basic mascara (anything but basic, really) and a pretty pink Glow On blush. The girl at the cash register packaged up everything very nicely and I was on my way.
Even though it's a small thing to conquer my fear of makeup counters, I think it would make my mom happy to know that I finally did it and that maybe I might be ladylike enough for her.

I have nightmares about monochromatically dressed women who resemble the likes of Mimi from the Drew Carey Show, chasing me down the makeup aisle of a department store insistent that "this new shade of indigo will do wonders to your eyes." But I was in dire need for a new line of cosmetics...something fresh and suitable for my skintone. So I searched on the wonderful world of YELP and discovered that the lovely ladies of San Francisco were raving about Shu Uemura. I decided that I needed to overcome my fear and discovered that this beautiful store was the remedy. Mind you,I spent $100 on three items...but I guess that's the price we women pay along with other guilty pleasures (ie shoes,jeans). Friendly staff and an aesthetically pleasing space...I give this place four stars. (I would've given it five, but I spent the one star on taxes for my items.hehe)

My first game at AT&T Park

IMG_1949.JPG

A big group (we're talking like 50 people) of Yelpers gathered to sit together in section 139 at AT&T park for a Giant vs. Cardinals game on Tuesday night. It was my first game in years and although I didn't pay much attention to the game, I had a good time eating a veggie hotdog (I gotta support that shit!), $8.35 Anchor beers, peanuts, and garlic fries. I think the garlic fry smell stuck with me for way too long. Here are my five photos from the game.

And you/I thought it would never happen

I have a job interview set up for Tuesday. OMG. What the heck should I wear?

Wind me up

Playboy lists the top 25 sexiest novels and The Wind-Up Chronicles made the list. Hot. I think Murakami's erotic descriptions are pretty fucking hot.

My Bay to Breakers photos

Paul
Here's my photoset.

How I spent my first Bay to Breakers

IMG_4262
Riding in style with the Meetro crew in a rickshaw.

When my PowerBook breaks AGAIN...

I hope they give me a new MacBook so I can turn it into a light saber.

On my 4th trip to the Apple Genius Bar with my PowerBook they decided that all they needed to do was wipe it and reinstall. This thing better freaking work.

ed: I wanted a video of the MacSaber and I found one.

Horoscope

Keep focusing on alone time -- do not let social expectations drive you out into the world if you're not feeling it. Your charm doesn't react well to pressure, anyway. If you really want to have fun, make social decisions based on what would make you happiest. It sounds simple, of course -- but it's only simple if you remember to do it.

I was a smoker

I had a dream last night that I was smoking. If you don't know already I am crazily anti-smoking. Very strange.

In other news...
-- I survived a run in with someone I didn't feel like seeing. Hello, don't you people check the Evite?
-- Met a cute guy who got into a really bad snowboarding accident. Attention snowboarders: Trees always win.
-- Tasted Johnny Walker black, red, gold, green, and blue label. Red ain't bad mixed with ginger ale. It is delightfully trashy.
-- Revisited psytrance. Ah, the year 2000 raves... I have fond memories. Unfortunately, the scene is gone and if it's not, let me know.
-- Disappeared to a rather chill Mission bar.
-- Stayed up almost until the sun came up.
-- Ate the most buttery, fatty sandwich of my life. I could only manage to eat 1/3 of it. I also ate half of an amazing cheese puff.
-- Went to Stinson beach, laid in the sand, and shared the most delicious banana cream tart I have ever eaten in my entire life. I haven't felt so happy and relaxed in a long, long time.
-- Shared a homecooked meal with my new roommate.
-- Felt a new sense of comfort and longing.

All this happened in two days time.

A buddhist message about my liver (and, in turn, love)

From True Love by Thich Nhat Hanh

When you touch your liver with you mindfulness, you will perhaps begin to hear the SOS put out by your liver. The message sent by your liver is perhaps a very important message. But maybe, because you are not there, the message does not reach you. You have to be there for the person you love. Touching your liver with mindfulness reveals its precise situation, and it you get its message, you will stop drinking and stop eating fats.

Alright, then.

Hangar One photos

I took these with my Lomo.

Coachella photos

Spurned but that's okay

Yeah.

I'm taking a three day break from drinking then it's back to boozing at Voda and then sipping Johnnie Walker Blue Label on Wednesday.

I can't believe everything that happened yesterday happened in one day. I met up with our 18 person group at the Ferry Building early in the afternoon to take the ferry to Alameda. Once we got off the ferry we had to make a 20 minute (?) walk to the Hangar One distillery which is actually in an old airplane hangar. We ended up tasting about 12 different drinks from the company that produces Hangar One, St. George. We had a very smokey whiskey, grappa, raspberry and pear brandies, some other liquers, and a lot of vodka. They had one drink they called Qi Iced Tea which tasted like a Thai iced tea. Very tasty indeed. I loved their straight vodka, it's such a smooth sipping vodka it makes me wonder if it's really vodka at all. The distiller called it the world's most dangerous vodka. After we the tasting we walked back towards the ferry but we thought we had missed it so we took a detour and stopped by Rosenblum. We all chipped in $5 and bought a few bottles to drink while sitting outside and enjoying the incredibly beautiful weather.

At this point I was starting to get mopey watching a couple of lovebirds in our group making out and cuddling at every opportunity. Then someone mentioned that their boyfriend recently disappeared while she was at work and she hasn't heard from him since. Love sucks.

Later on, back in San Francisco, I had dinner with a couple friends before heading to a rooftop party to enjoy the KFOG Kaboom fireworks. We missed most of the fireworks because we were sitting in a cab trying to get to SOMA but I did see the last 5 minutes of it and even that was amazing. The party was relaxed and intimate. I got a chance to talk to a friend who told me that she had a very disturbing dream where I was yelling at her. I told about some of the things that have been going on and she was pretty freaked out by the synchroncity of events and her dream. I felt sad and more distant so I decided to leave the party but once I got outside I feel like going home anymore.

A couple friends and I ended up at 500 Club late into the night. We knew it was time to leave when this crazy, drunken girl tried to put a glow in the dark necklace on me. She had one flip flop on.

Despite it having been a long, full day, I wasn't tired at all. That combined with me having felt mopey the entire day I really didn't want to go home and be tempted to sit on my sofa and listen to sad music so a friend kept me company for a while before I decided I should go home to sleep.

I slept really well even though I didn't sleep for very long.

These are Steve's photos:

At Rosenblum Winery sipping on not so tasty wines. This is my fake smile. Pretty good huh?

Steve licking the sediment off the cork of dessert wine.

Hangar One distillery equipment. It's made of copper.

This is the post-distillery and post-winery photo. See? I'm doing fine! Go my heroic liver!

I am Monica's liver

And she says, "Three days in a row?!?!? Ouch!"

Today sucked... past tense

Once again I woke up from a shitty, shitty dream way too early in the morning. Before bed I had been reading this Buddhist book called True Love and it suggested breathing mediation to ease negative feelings. I tried saying, "I am angry" to myself to acknowledge the feeling and breathed deeply. I think it worked at least momentarily.

I had coffee in the afternoon with a friend to talk about things and that helped ease some of the negative feelings even more.

Afterwards, I walked down to Amoeba to pick up the Gnarls Barkley album that dropped on Tuesday. On my way there I walked by a couple laying on the corner of Haight and Ashbury cuddling. Yes, on the ground. On Haight Street. This skinny, very dark skinned man turned back to me and said something like, "Isn't that just great? He is cuddling with a woman. That is wonderful." He was walking with his shorter, beared pale friend who didn't say a single word. He went on, "It's a beautiful day, isn't life wonderful?" I looked at him and said, "I dunno, I'm feeling pretty pessemistic." He stops me and says, "But the sun is shining! Have you been to the drum circle near Hippie Hill?" I answered him and he said that I should come by and the he's there everyday. Then he asked me what I was up to. I said I was heading to Amoeba to pick up a CD because music cheers me up. He said, "Just like drumming for me." I learned that he's a photographer and a part time drummer, apparently. When I got to Amoeba he told me to come by and visit him in Hippie Hill in GG Park on the weekend. He promised to remember me. He shook my hand we went our separate ways.

These are definitely rules, not guidelines

86 Rules of Boozing

15. If you offer to buy a woman a drink and she accepts, she still might not like you.

16. If she buys you a drink, she likes you.

41. Anyone on stage or behind a bar is fifty percent better looking.

83. The bar clock moves twice as fast from midnight to last call.

I leave "celebrities" alone

Local beatboxer Kid Beyond wrote me a short message via Yelp. SWEEEEETTTTT!!! He was sitting next to me during dinner on Sunday night and I wrote about it in my NOPA Yelp review.

:end starstuck feeling:

Disaster averted. Kinda.

I've been reading and reading and reading and then talking and talking and talking.

Also, I was in the midst of IMing with a friend when I zoned out. When I floated back in I decided that I am sad. Not depressed, not angry, not anxious, just sad.

Today was not such a bad day. I had lunch out in the sunshine and meandered through a bookstore in the FiDi with a friend. I remembered a young friend's birthday. Apologized to telemarketers. Made a game plan for dealing with certain people. And now, suddenly, I have plans to meet up with a friend tonight.

My dad said that after my mom died it hurt him to know that the world would go on as normal despite that she was gone. For me, knowing that the world goes on is comforting.

After I finish the books I've started I'm going to read "A General Theory of Love." Here's a review from the NY Times.

In the Heart, or in the Head? Three psychiatrists explore the neurobiology of love.

What is it that makes a long-legged, lynx-eyed young editrix leave a dinner at midnight in New York on an evening when whipping winds take the temperature to 20 below zero to drag her lean, leather-clad frame to a bar where a man with bad intentions may or may not appear? It's neurons, willful neurons, which have programmed her body, heart and mind, in defiance of anything her logic would recommend, to propel her to a place where they can get the electrochemical fix they call love, which her intellect and her friends would call folly. Why do smart neurons make such foolish choices? Because, in the refrain of cads immemorial, it's beyond their control.

Three centuries ago, the French physicist Blaise Pascal wrote that ''the heart has reasons that reason cannot comprehend.'' And for 300 years all that scientists, in common with lust-maddened suitors and bereft jiltees, could do with that insight was to agree with it, embroider it on sofa cushions and write it in spidery script on Dear John letters. But after the introduction of Prozac in 1988, which proved that the brain's emotional chemistry could be swayed more reliably by serotonin than by Jack Daniels, psychoanalysis and the advice of despairing friends, three psychiatrists from the University of California, San Francisco, banded together to tackle the question of whether Pascal was right -- in other words, to see if it is true that the emotions obey different rules from the intellect. The doctors -- Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon, all of them male, as it happens -- suspected that it is; after all, everyone from their mothers to Hippocrates said so. But with new neurological and pharmacological data at their disposal, they decided to double-check. The result of their research is a book called ''A General Theory of Love,'' in which they declare at the outset, with some swagger, that they have the answer: ''Pascal was correct, although he could not have known why.'' As a scientific premise, this lacks gravitas; indeed, on first airing, their thesis seems to have less in common with the typical scrupulous, multiauthored report in The New England Journal of Medicine on, say, permissive hypercapnia, than with the typical whimsical, unanswerable Oxford Union debate on the topic of, say, ''All's Fair in Love and War.''

The opening chapter, ''The Heart's Castle,'' prolongs the playful mood; the doctors talk liltingly of love, meditate on heartbreak, invoke Greek myth and recite soupy poetry because ''the adventure itself demands it.'' But just as you begin to imagine them as spoiled New Age sages, forgathered in the courtyard of a rented Tuscan villa, spinning a modern Symposium as they dip biscotti in vinsanto -- they slug back double espressos and stride through the doors of the villa into a state-of-the-art love lab. Pascal was right, they explain, because ''the neural systems responsible for emotion and intellect are separate, creating the chasm between them in human minds and lives.'' You cannot choose who lures you any more than you can will yourself to speak Pashto or play flamenco guitar, because ''the requisite neural framework for performing these activities does not coalesce on command.'' Like it or not, all of us know only how to play the kind of love our brains have already practiced. In the manner of the best popularizers of science -- like Daniel Dennett, author of ''Darwin's Dangerous Idea,'' or Stephen Pinker, untangler of linguistic mysteries -- the authors break a path that lay readers can safely follow.

Neuroscience confirms what women have long believed: men have reptilian brains. Before anyone starts feeling insulted: so do women. The reptilian brain is the one that makes your heart beat and your blood flow, the brain that still lives when somebody is brain dead, the brain whose death guarantees yours. It is very important, but alone it will not make you a good dinner guest. Every human also has a neocortex, the showoffy portion of the brain that allows us to write, speak, scheme and, if we are very lucky, win a million dollars on a quiz show. A quasi adjunct of the neocortex is the hippocampus, which stores and facilitates explicit memory: numbers, dates, facts and names.

But there is yet another brain, the limbic brain, which lizards lack but all mammals share, which cuddles between the reptilian brain and the neocortex and is the repository of emotions, instincts and hormones, and of implicit memories of nurturance, grievance and deep preference. It is the limbic brain, with its attendant chemicals -- serotonin, opiates and oxytocin -- that make mothers rear their young and croon to them rather than deposit them in a sandbank and slither off. It is the limbic brain that makes children want puppies, and puppies want children, and allows mammals to form attachment bonds with one another. Diotima, the ''wise woman'' friend of Socrates to whom Plato gave star billing in his ''Symposium,'' explained more than 2,000 years ago that ''one part of love is separated off and receives the name of the whole,'' Today we can name all the parts; the neocortex does the thinking, the reptilian brain does the breathing, but love is definitely limbic.

This schema is known as the triune brain, and although it is somewhat controversial, as all theories that explain things too neatly tend to be, it is considered sound science. But the question of how, exactly, the three parts commingle is up for grabs. In the opinion of Lewis, Amini and Lannon, the tender emotions and impressions of the limbic system are besieged by the hard facts of the neocortex. In the mind's explicit memory banks, neurons constantly fire and forge connections. Over time, certain links are reinforced through repetition. This code-writing habit of the brain is so well established by now that it its patterns are imitated by computer search engines and by smart machines that can diagnose human health conditions and learn from their own mistakes. But the limbic brain does not diagnose, or self-correct; all it does is feel.

To illustrate: if you read the sentence, ''THE cht MEOWED AND PURRED,'' your mind will correct ''cht,'' both because the brain knows ''cht'' is anomalous and because it remembers that it has seen the word ''cat'' near the words ''meow'' and ''purr'' thousands of times. The implicit limbic memory of stroking a cat or having it twine between your ankles is awakened every time you read the word. By the same token, a woman (call her Lady X) who habitually indulges the memory of a certain dark and brooding man (call him Man X, whose glance was, to her, electric, who had crooked teeth, liked a certain kind of food and listened to Josh White) burns thousands of links to him into her brain. Long after he's gone, the neurons in her neocortex will forge a new connection every time she sees crooked teeth, hears ''Careless Love'' or smells Indian food -- and these neocortical facts will rain down on her limbic system, irrigating the trench of memory where Man X resides. Anyone she meets who resonates with Man X registers as warmly and familiarly as ''cat.'' Anyone else is ''cht,'' anomalous, a mistake -- depending on his context.

E. M. Forster beseeched his readers, ''Only connect.'' ''A General Theory of Love'' holds that in matters of the heart one has no other choice: ''No individual can think his way around his own attractors, since they are embedded in the structure of thought.'' That is why, when Lady X hooks up with someone blithe and cheery who has straight teeth and prefers bossa nova to blues, cheese steak to vindaloo, she generally finds she can't make her heart take note. The doctors explain that ''a relationship that strays from one's prototype is limbically equivalent to isolation'' and add: ''Most people will choose misery with a partner their limbic brain recognizes over the stagnant pleasure of a 'nice' relationship with someone their attachment mechanisms cannot detect.''

But there is still hope; the heart cannot be reasoned with, but it can be tricked, at least sometimes. Once Lady X tires of rejecting sincere suitors in favor of ne'er-do-wells at dive bars, she can retune her limbic resonance through prolonged contact with a caring, wise, responsive person who, over time, can implant a healthy neural network in her neocortex that will eventually light up her limbically challenged heart. Lewis, Amini and Lannon write: ''One mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision; the power to remodel the emotional parts of people we love.'' Where oh where can the limbically lovelorn go to get revised? Try the Yellow Pages, under ''Psychiatrists.'' And don't forget to take your Prozac.

Liesl Schillinger is on the staff of The New Yorker.

Posted by Monica at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)

If I don't blog within the next couple days...

It's because my head exploded.

Exhibit 1:
I took my old 35 mm camera to Coachella. It had film already loaded in it and had a few frames already exposed. I had no idea what they might be photos of. I got the roll developed today. Not only were there photos of one exboyfriend, there were photos of TWO exboyfriends. That would make those photos two years old.

:partial explosion:

Thoughts upon rising

When I woke up this morning I had this thought:
I want to pull out everyone I care about from their bad habits, mine included. Especially mine.

I'm starting to care more about myself but it's a long, slow process. I'm impatient about a lot of things but not so much about my positive growth because these days, everyday, I'm trying at least a little bit. Of course there have been a couple days in the past couple weeks where I have slipped up really badly but I've accepted that they've happened and that the slip ups are okay because I'm still moving along, albeit very slowly. I just needed a course correction but my general trajectory is moving me in the direction that feels right.

Friday morning I woke up from a dream; he called me and said, "Hey, how are you doing?" More likely than not, I'm just asking myself that.

Reading Notes

I've only read 8 pages of The Double Flame and it's already throwing beautiful prose at me. (This is written by a poet so it's supposed to be flowery.

Flame: "the most subtle part of the fire, moving upward and raising tiself about in the shape of a pyramid... The original, primordial fire, sexuality, raises the red flame of eroticism, and this in turn raises and feeds another flame, tremulous and blue: the flame of love."

"There is a question that all lovers ask each other, and in it the erotic mystery is epitomized: Who are you? A question without an answer..."

"Imagination turns sex into ceremony and rite, language into rhythm and metaphor."

Poety is to language as eroticism is to sexuality.

I feel so... puritanically American

Wow, I just spent several hours of my life reading a book by Dr. Phil. I'll say what my brother said to me, "You just gave Dr. Phil $30!" Shit, man. Well, at least it was funny, light reading for being a self-help book. Also, I feel that I can now "bag, tag, and take home" the "80% perfect man." Yuh huh.

Ultimately it comes down to the difference between the people who are serious about committment and the people who are out chasing a fantasy-- the former will glady overlook the imperfections of an 80% partner for the time being, whereas the latter will keep on searching until they figure out that a 100% match is about as real a $100 Rolex.

Next up on my Cinco De Mayo at home reading list: The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism by Octavio Paz. This book doesn't seem like light reading. After that I have lovely fiction, Never Let Me Go, to read but who knows when I'll get to that.

:sigh: Damn friend that cancelled on me tonight.

Seeing things makes me perceptive, not crazy

I can see things you can't. I feel things you don't even know exist in the world. I will not let my fears drive away goodness. I will keep doing what I know is right. It's only now that I know that I am really smarter than I think.

Horoscope
Discovering a few changes in your feelings doesn't mean you're a bad person -- on the contrary, it means you're fully human. Let your emotions progress without trying to put limits on them. Explore your range.

I will do that.

Effing finally!

My blog is back up and in the world. Finally. Fucking registrar changes...

Think Happy Thoughts.
Horoscope: Today will be full of signs and affirmations that you are on the right path -- despite what other people may say. Even if you feel unsure about the next steps, it's all part of the process. Doubting yourself is absolutely normal, and it has given you the healthy skepticism to recognize a solid thing when you see it. And don't be too rough on people who are putting pressure on you; they care about you and want your success -- they just haven't figured out how to show it yet.

Gnarls Barkley IS crazy... crazy good

Video for "Crazy"

The quality of this .mov video is much better.

Just go ahead

Rilo Kiley's "Go Ahead"

if you want to find yourself by travelling out west
or if you want to find somebody else that's better
go ahead
go ahead

if you want to buy a brand new fancy automobile
or if you want to build a place up in coldwater canyon
go ahead
go ahead
go ahead
i wish you would
go ahead

if you want to hold your own hand going up that cliff
or if you want to just hold back cause you ain't up to it
go ahead
go ahead
go ahead
be my guest
go ahead

if you want to hold on to the first girl that you meet
or if you want to settle down and plant roses at my feet
go ahead
go ahead
go ahead
i wish you would
go ahead

if you want to have your cake and eat it too
and if you want to have other people watch you while you eat it
go ahead
go ahead
go ahead
be my guest
go ahead

if you want better things
i want you to have them
if you want better things
then i want you to have them
go ahead
go ahead
go ahead
i wish you would
go ahead
go ahead
i wish you would
go ahead