Tattoos are awesome.

I don't know if you know this, but I have a tattoo. It's on my left arm and I got it with Aubrey and Will who are the best people ever, and we went to this amazing place in West Hollywood called the Velvet Grip where we were tattooed by this gentleman.

Yes he has tattoos on his face, and YES I want to marry him. He was the nicest ever. Can you imagine how my mom would react if I brought him home? The same mom who has started harassing me about finding a nice Korean husband? Well, you probably don't know but she would have a heart attack and stroke at the same time, and would most likely completely detach from reality. I actually think she would be really nice to him and welcome him, but only because she'd go crazy and convinced herself that the Todd is actually Daniel Dae Kim or something.

Anyway, as soon as I got it (it says "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" in case you were wondering), I wanted another one right away. I'd wanted it since I was in high school and made myself wait 5 years so I'd be sure I'd want it forever. So now I've been brainstorming some ideas for a new one, and I think I've come up with two great possibilities:

1. "O to die advancing on!"
This is from the poem Pioneers Oh Pioneers by Walt Whitman, made famous to the current masses in a Levi's commercial:


2. "It's a funny thing, Alice..."
Richard Strauss composed Death and Transfiguration when he was 25 and it depicts the death of an artist. Apparently, when he was actually dying many years later, he said "It's a funny thing Alice, dying is just the way I composed it in Tod und Verklärung." I like this because there's an interesting story that incorporates my weird fascination with death (that's a story for another day) and my heart of classical music.

So we'll see. I refuse to get a tattoo anywhere other than with the Todd, so I'll have to wait until a) I'm in LA and b) I have money. HAHA I laugh to keep from crying. Maybe I'll just give myself a prison tattoo with a ballpoint pen or burnt plastic and the motor from a discman (#recessionista). Don't worry, I've seen Lockup: Raw--I'm practically an expert on illegal prison tattoos.

Winning the lottery is easy, right?

I recently got into a conversation with Claire and her bf about what we would do if we won the mega millions lottery. I'm talking at least $75 million here. Not chump change like $1.2 mill or something. PLEASE, stop wasting my time. Loki (that's the bf's name) said he would go to space, which I think would be AMAZING. So now my list (after the boring stuff like paying off my student loans and stuff) is:

1. Listen to the Fear of Tigers Into the Clouds remix in space. Preferably while doing something like this:

I assume the space shuttle has a KILLER sound system. Space dance party!

2. Buy a castle in the middle of nowhere that has a pond/lake/moat-type thing that I can float in while listening to a song like this:

(I wanted to save this song for a post all on its own, but it's just too good to save for later.) In my head, it's not sunny out, but has been overcast all day but it's that time when you can tell the sun is setting. Does that make sense? I'm from Seattle so the idea of knowing when the sun sets when it's cloudy makes PERFECT sense to me. This idea was inspired by the scene in Ever After (don't judge) where Drew Barrymore is tired and goes and floats in the river. This picture captures the sentiment nicely:

(From 1947 Harper's Bazaar)

And obviously, I would also get myself and my friends Louboutins (you're WELCOME, Aubrey), lifetime season tickets to Nebraska Cornhuskers football, and the biggest TV ever with the most disgustingly over-the-top cable package and DVD collection. I want my cable to break records and maybe make weirdos protest my rampant consumerism outside my CASTLE. (Don't worry, my private security force will deal with them.)

Requiem for a fucking NIGHTMARE.

So I was watching Olympics pairs figure skating, and one of the pairs, I think it was the Canadian team, used the song from Requiem for a Dream, which I had never seen before. I thought the song was hauntingly beautiful, so I watched the movie. BIG MISTAKE. I thought it was going to be one of those drug movies where it is realistic but a little hopeful at the end. I don't know WHY I thought that. Seriously, it is so depressing I wanted to end my life, and I know I joke about that all the time but I was kind of serious. I knew it was a bad idea when I didn't run it by Aubrey first. Here is the last scene, if you care to shoot your brains out. (This isn't even the worst parts. Seriously, don't watch the movie.) I don't know what's worse: when Ellen Burstyn's friends come and visit her at the mental institution and she looks like a corpse, or the look on Jennifer Connelly's face when she curls up on the couch clutching her drugs/money after her "perverted show for heroin and cash" (Wikipedia's words, not mine). The song just makes it SO much worse.

ANYWAY. So the Olympics kind of started this fiasco, so I figured they owed me. I cried my eyes out a few Olympics commercials like this one and this one, but I still felt like shit. Then I watched Shen and Zhao skate and it was amazing. Check their short program here. I heart the Olympics so hard.

I leave you with this super cute kitten to wash the taste of heroin and crazy pills (from Requiem, not the Olympics, silly) from your mouth. I even used a pink border on the clip. You're WELCOME.



ps. I was going to try to find a screenshot or something from Requiem bc I like when blog posts have pictures but no way. I started getting stressed and depressed as soon as I did the google image search. No THANK you.

Like Girl Talk, but BETTER

I recently discovered the White Panda, a mashup group based out of LA and Chi-town. SO GOOD. They remind me of Girl Talk in the amazingness of their mashups, but BETTER because each track is focused on only one mashup. Girl Talk's problem is that there are too many songs in one track and so if there is a great remix between Flashing Lights and No Diggity, FOR EXAMPLE (I also made a ringtone of just the awesome part here), it only lasts for 30 seconds! (A complaint that Aubrey first articulated to me.) But the White Panda's album ("Versus") is AMAZING (you can download it here) and is chockablock full of mind-blowing jams like this:

PS T.I. is HOT. Claire and I watched every single episode of TI's Road to Redemption last fall, and Will saw him at the Grove. I would have been arrested for sexually assaulting him--a cost I am WILLING to pay.

Sidebar: at trivia tonight the category was Keanu Reeves movies and the questions were hard! I am his most dedicated and obsessive fan (to the point where when the grader was making snide comments about Keanu I told him to shut his trap) and I still only got 5/10. FAIL. People were making fun of me for claiming he is my fave actor. Whatever, the heart wants what it wants!

Also, Oscar movie update: I have watched 8/10 noms, and am prob going to watch Inglourious Basterds tomorrow. WOOO!

I heart movies

I saw a SHIT TON of movies this weekend (When in Rome, Hurt Locker, An Education, Precious, Up in the Air, Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging, ETC.), but want to tell you about only one of them. The Oscar ones will be part of my epic Oscar Best Picture noms post once I finish watching all of them. So keep your eyes metaphorically peeled for that.

I wanted to see When in Rome as soon as I saw the trailer. I mean, what’s not to like? Kristen Bell is as cute as a button, Will Arnett, Jon Heder, Dax Shepard (who KB is engaged to BTW) and Danny DeVito are hysterical, and Josh Duhamel is attractive enough to make me hot for the military (see Transformers). I thought I was going to like it, and I WAS RIGHT. It has everything I need in a movie: a plucky and sassy protagonist (who I TOTALLY identified with) who is career-oriented and can’t stand to be away from her Blackberry for more than 12 seconds, a hot guy who played football but is still in super good shape and has a crush (omg.) on said protagonist, and, of course, comedy in the form of these guys:


People probably think that the whole “taking coins from a magic fountain makes the person who threw it in fall in love with you” thing is ridiculous, and they’d be right. But they need to get over it. That’s the whole point! If we didn’t have ridiculous plot devices, we’d literally watch the same movie over and over again. How is the coin device more ridiculous than the plot of Twelfth Night (“Duke has a crush on Olivia who likes Sebastian who is really Viola whose brother is dating Monique so she hates Olivia who’s with Duke to make Sebastian jealous who is really Viola who’s crushing on Duke who thinks she’s a guy…”)?

I watched it with Claire and we had such a good time. We were two of about six people total in the theater, and we were loving life. We were the only ones laughing hysterically at the scene where Kristen Bell tries to break the vase, even though I’d seen pretty much the entire thing in the trailer. The movie also included this song which we love and used to have dance parties 1L year where we BLASTED the song and danced around like crazy people instead of studying. Per the yoozh.

Sidebar: I first heard How Far We’ve Come when I was at the gym and was watching music videos (I know RIGHT) while on the elliptical and saw the one for the song and I may have cried a little bit. No big deal. I mean it shows all the great human achievements and stuff like Tienanmen square?! How can you NOT cry? Sidesidebar: I also kind of cried at the Google Superbowl commercial, and just cried a little bit watching it again.

ANYWAY, watch When in Rome for a laugh and an awwww. Maybe not worth $10 to you, but it was to me, and will prob still be worth a $3 rental in a few months.

Misc.

Want to hear a tragic story? I had a pretty solid blog post going, and then BAM I accidentally deleted the entire thing. Moral of the story is that I'm now going to type out everything on a handy Google doc and then just copy and paste at the end. YAY for autosaving. If anyone is reading over my shoulder (unlikely since my back is to a bookshelf but still always possible) they prob think I'm retarded or insane. Or the weird old guy on the office. Anyway, Priya (HI PRIYA) is an awesome lady I go to school with, and I recently forced her to read my blog. She immediately turned to me with her "serious" face and said, "You need to keep this up. Lots of people start and then give up later." Whoa whoa WHOA, let's pump the brakes. You sound just like my mom about me practicing piano when I was 6. (If you're wondering, YES I'm Asian.)

Anyway, Priya also brought up the fact that it has been three days since my last post. SORRY. I've been so busy "doing work" and "studying" that I couldn't bring myself to post. Also, I didn't really have anything that I felt was blog-worthy. Until I did my Korean midterm project, that is. Title: "KOREANS WHO ROCK THE OLYMPICS." Not really, but pretty much. I talked about the guy who was the first Korean to win a swimming medal at the Olympics ever.

If all Koreans looked like that, I would have no problem marrying a "nice Korean boy" like my mom keeps harping on about. True story.

Tangent: ever since I turned 23 my mom has been slyly insulting me to my face. Literally the day after my 23rd birthday, she called me to say happy birthday again, and then said "So, do you have a boyfriend?...[long pause]...I was engaged by the time I was 23." WHY THE FACE, mom. Endtangent.

The Winter Olympics are coming up SO SOON! Did you know that South Koreans rock super hard at short track speed skating? Well, THEY DO. Fuck you, Apolo Ohno. (JK...sort of) I also included a slide about Yuna Kim (pronounced "Yuhn-ah" not "Yoona"), who is like a baby angel that ice skates. She is the first woman to get over 200 points under the new rules! Watch a performance HERE. As I was looking for pictures of her for my slide, I found a picture of her and Johnny Weir together, which led to me investigating youtube, and ultimately discovering THIS:

Sidebar: my bestie Aubrey is OBSESSED with Johnny Weir. As if we needed more reason to know in our heart of hearts that we are one (#CASABLANCA). Would Johnny and Yuna be the best pairs skating couple in the history of the universe? YES. Is it too much to ask that this happens? I don't think so. They're both so cute it makes me cry a little.

Adult skating

This past weekend, I journeyed to Iowa City, IA to watch my friend Mary skate in the 2010 Midwest & Pacific Synchronized Team Skating Sectional Championships! To be fair, we were also there to hang out with Sarah's friends from home. (Sarah is from Iowa.) We drove over Friday and hung out the pool for a while where we met two guys who were super into wrestling. One of them had no neck (or maybe too much neck?) to the point where he looked like Bruce the Shark from Finding Nemo. He also had a lot of weird tattoos.

After sushi and sake bombs at the restaurant in the lobby of the hotel for dinner, we went out to a few places and ended up at Joe's Place, which is apparently famous for "egg bombs." Sarah's friend Austin INSISTED we do them, so we did. In case the name isn't clear, an egg bomb is a glass of pbr with a pickled egg at the bottom. So you chug the beer, which gets really vinegary towards the bottom, and then you put the entire egg in your mouth and eat it.

I finished the beer first (because I'm awesome), but I rarely eat even hard boiled eggs sober, much less whole and pickled, so I finished that part last (because I'm a pussy). I had to close my eyes and envision myself at a lovely brunch, eating deviled eggs. It was pretty bad. Eh, I'm now richer for the experience (cue Stewie's voice here).

The skating was precious, even though it was adult ladies skating. (Sidebar: the term "adult skating", which it is actually called, makes me think of both the porn industry AND adult diapers. What an odd dichotomy.) Sometimes the skaters look beautiful and graceful like this:

but apparently they can also look like this:

We didn't see anyone like that, but the spectators were often pretty frightening. It was like People of Walmart and US Figure Skating had a baby. I saw a fan wearing the crazy clown makeup the skaters have to wear (teal and silver glitter) with a tiara and normal people clothes. It was...unforch.

Mary, on the other hand, looked like an angel from the heavens, not unlike one Johnny Weir. I may have gushed "Oh em gee Mary looks BEAUTIFUL" when I first saw her on the ice. And maybe cried a little bit. NO BIG DEAL. The grocery store that we stopped at on the way didn't have a flower section (it was in Cedar Rapids), so we got her a Toblerone bar that had a rose on it. It's like she's in the Olympics!