fashion find

My 100th Post!

i know this makes 2 posts in one day, but i wanted to share! while i was blatantly and purposefully ignoring the fact that i should have been reading the tons of research i've gathered in support of my final paper in law school, i stumbled upon a really cute blog, ironically entitled: academichic

some of you who are into fashion like i am, and who are still wading your way through academia like i am, may just fall in love. you're welcome.

and in regards to my 100th post, i think i'll celebrate with a "100 favorite things" list in my next post!

(p.s. i made the 4 posts i'd promised i'd do this week in apology for being so absent lately! who knew i had so much to say?!)

is it wrong to find this funny?

i've been going back and forth on whether or not to post this. i decided to do it by first asking, what would you consider "your kind of humor"? do you like slapstick, satire, sarcastic (and why do they all start with "s"?), or some other type?

for me, my humor is sort of all over the place. most times i'd say i prefer sarcasm and self-deprecation. i don't always get satire, which would probably be why (and don't hate me) i usually don't care for the daily show with jon stewart (though, oddly enough, i've starting really loving the colbert report). i'm definitely not a slapstick humor kind of person. "dumb and dumber" went straight over my head.

i bring this up because a few weeks ago, B. and i were browsing around borders, killing time before our afternoon class, and we stumbled upon tucker max's "i hope they serve beer in hell". we paged through it, and i swear to God, i never wanted to laugh so hard at something so horrible in my life.

i mean, it's terrible. truly, honest-to-God terrible. he's out there having what seems to be both highly discriminating and altogether indiscriminate sex with women, and then writing about his most craziest ventures. he's drinking and talking inordinate amounts of crap about people. the book seems almost certainly degrading towards women, it's vulgar, it would never be something you bring up in polite conversation, it begs the question of whether all of these out of control stories could possibly be true...but it's hilarious.

and i've been trying to work out why this sort of humor has so uncharacteristically appealed to me. i think i've realized that it's just so unapologetic, and like it or not, the guy can write and entertaining narrative.

he is also a law school graduate, and i find that even more funny. here's some of what he's said (which can be found in his FAQ section) about that whole experience:

Question: What is your job? Do you work as a lawyer?

I am a best-selling author, which makes me a writer. I also wrote and produced a movie, which makes me a screenwriter and a movie producer. Of course I don't work as a lawyer, I don't hate myself.

Question: If you aren't working as a lawyer, why did you get your JD?

I made a mistake going to law school. There was a time in my life that I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, but I was terribly mistaken. I didn't know that you had to give up your soul to work in that field.

that being said, i was wondering what others who may have read his stuff have thought. did it make you laugh, or did it just disgust you? could you see past the utter insult and humiliation, or was it just too much? if you're a woman and found it funny, how did that make you feel?

if you haven't it yet, i guess i'll do my civic duty and warn you. it will not meaningfully enrich you life, i can almost promise you that. and it may make you think less of me as well. to answer my own questions: yes, it made me laugh (a lot), but it was that sort of embarrassed, i-shouldn't-find-this-funny laugh, and it disgusted me as well. no, i couldn't see past the insult and humiliation, but apparently that didn't stop me from being completely curious as to what he got up to next. and as a woman, i was outraged at first, until i realized that these women he's sleeping with are consenting adults (most of the time...there's a story where he doesn't tell the girl he's filming them, and that's sort of wrong...which he realizes), and these stories are as much his as they is theirs.

for those who aren't going to heed the warning, and are just curious, he's posted some of his stories on his blog, which can be found here.

The Beach Day

Some creative writing fluff I began on the plane ride back from Hawaii last week.

I’m more comfortable waking up in my grandparents home than I am waking up anywhere else in the world. This is where I feel most safe, most loved, most free to be who I am. In the house I grew up in, the house that will probably remain in my family for generations to come.

This is what I’m thinking as my heavy eyes start to slowly flutter open one morning.

It’s still dark. That’s my second, not-so-coherent thought. It’s still dark, and there’s a storm passing over the island. I can hear the rain on the iron roof, another comfort. It’s loud, sounding more like nails than water, and I can hear the periodic Splat! Splat! every other second as those drops hit the ti leaves outside of the bedroom window.

I fix my bleary eyes on the new alarm clock my grandmother purchased and put on the bedside table before I arrived a few days earlier. I have to squint to see numbers rather than just a bright fluorescent green glow; I don’t have my contacts on and am too lazy to reach for my glasses. Once I focus, I can see that it reads 4:07 A.M. No wonder it’s still dark.

I was hoping this would be a beach day, and it would seem that this storm had other ideas, but I know better than to make this call based on the fact that it’s raining at 4 a.m. on this particular side of the island. After all, when is it not raining at 4 a.m. on this side of the island? Comforted by this thought, and by the rhythm of the falling rain, I snuggle back down into blankets I don’t really need, and doze off.

I know it’s light out before I open my eyes again.

My first thought is that the rain has stopped. I can hear the mynah birds hanging out in the coconut trees in the back of the house, the new puppy my aunt got is digging and sniffing at something outside of my window, and the cars are already going up and down the street with quiet regularity.

I don’t open my eyes yet, it always takes me a while. Instead, I bring my arms over my head and yawn. That’s when I feel the bed depress at the footboard under some new weight. I feel that same weight move across the bottom of the bed and settle, slowly, between my calves. Testing, I stretch my legs out, bring my feet together, and come up against something warm and immovable. I nudge it, and am greeted with the familiar soft Meow of my blue calico sweetheart, my Mija. I open my eyes and she’s staring back at me from her curled position, waiting. Obligingly, I move my legs aside towards the edge of the bed and give her more room. Satisfied, she yawns, puts her head down, brings her paw up to cover her face, and falls asleep, exhausted, no doubt, after her evening of playing Queen of the Castle while the rest of the household slept.

Quietly, so as not to disturb Her Majesty, I slip out of bed and clear my fuzzy brain. I can hear the sounds of life on the other side of the bedroom door, and I mentally place my family. My mother is at work, she’d have left a little after 7:00 this morning to make it to the Pet Hospital in town half an hour away. My older sister and her son couldn’t make it to Hilo this weekend, so they’re not here. My brother in law, is in Iraq for his second tour. Little Sister, who’s home for vacation as well, is more than likely still asleep, sprawled across her bed in the next room. I look at the clock again: 8:45 A.M. She won’t be up for another hour, at the earliest. I can hear the laundry going, so my grandmother is probably out in the garage hanging clothes on the line to dry. On the other hand, I can’t here Papa walking around their bedroom, or watching TV, so he’s mostly likely sitting in his chair out on the deck. That’s everyone, all accounted for.

Turning around to find my contact lens case, I remember that I wanted to head to the beach today. Thinking this, I look toward the window and smile. There, visible above the banana trees and the roof of our neighbor Miss Kat’s garage, is the slice of blue I’m looking for. The sky hasn’t yet turned that bright, bold, legendary blue of Hawaiian fantasies, but the pale blue of the morning holds promise. I step to the window and glance out through the screen. Not a cloud in the sky. The 4 a.m. rainstorm has blown out to journey across the Pacific.

By mid-morning, I’m antsy. I sit outside with my grandfather, play cards with my grandmother, watch the old men of the village sit outside of the General Store across the street and sip their coffees, take note of the number of tourists in shiny cars heading up the street to start their mornings off with a hike around Akaka Falls, and wait for my sister to wake up. I’ve decided that it is, after all, a beach day. The sky has become a crisp, deep blue, and the sun is already drying the wet left over on the grass and the pavement. There’s a nice, cool, clean breeze coming down from the Hamakua Coast, and it doesn’t smell of the rain. Now, on most days I wouldn’t think much of these signs; what the weather is like on the Windward side of the island says pitifully little of what the weather will be like on the Leeward side. But I feel it today, a prickling on my skin, a knowing in my bones: it’s a beach day.

It’s nearly 10 a.m. when Little Sister finally peeks her head out of the screen door and I can tell her that I’ve committed her to laying around on the sand with me at Hapuna all day. She agrees with a smile and disappears inside to, I assume, choose which bathing suit she’ll use. She has the best bathing suit body, and it never ceases to annoy me. We head out for the hour-long drive before 11:00, armed with a cooler of sodas, some musubi, and a plan to pick up some fried chicken from KTA in Waimea on the way over.

The drive from Honomu to Waikaloa seemed horribly long when I was a kid. Anything after Kolekole Beach Park, which is three minutes from Honomu, seemed like it took forever to get to. My sisters and I found ways of amusing ourselves on those long drives, and we still use those methods today. We wait for the passing of the three horseshoes – Maulua, Laupahoehoe, and Kawili gulches – we stop off at Tex Drive-in for some of their famous malasadas, we take a spin down to the Waipio Valley look out, we count cows in the pasture lands leading into Waimea, attempt to pick out paniolo amongst them, we stop at KTA for any last-minute necessities, then we hold our breath and hope that, once we get to dry-side Waimea, the weather is clear and warm.

On this particular day, we’re not disappointed. As green, grassy fields give way to the yellow-brown dryness of mountain slopes, and then the dramatic black and sapphire of sand-dotted coastline, the weather drastically changes from cool to blistering. The ocean is still today, thankfully. There are no white-caps, no thick bands of white wash along the beaches. The breeze that’s been blowing through the driver’s side window of my grandfather’s Dodge grows warmer and, in complete sync, Little Sister and I roll both cab windows the rest of the way down. She leans over to turn up the radio. Content with this ritual, I reach my arm out of the window, bring my fingers together, and let it rest on the wind creating wave forms as we drive.

The popularity of Hapuna’s fine white sand and wide expanse of sunbathing space, as well as the upscale resort sitting on its edge, mean that, as usual, the parking lot is busy and difficult to maneuver. Because we’re in the monstrosity known as the Dodge, we decide to save ourselves the grief of waiting for a closer space and just park in the far lot, where the rest of the oversized trucks have found homes. Climbing out, my feet hit the pavement and I immediately feel the heat of the black tarmac through my slippers. We grab the cooler, shopping bag, and our beach bags and head down the trail to the beach, passing bathrooms, pavilions, and frying tourists on the way. As usual, we lay down our towels on the left side of the beach, closest to the rock cliff bordering Hapuna cove, and farthest from the resort on the opposite end. Here, we may get a shot at some shade, should the heat become too much to handle. The only risk is that there are ants that live under the keawe growing nears that rock cliff, so we keep a slight distance to be safe.

It’s hard to explain what happens when my body hits the towel, when I dig my fingers into the sand, when I close my eyes and feel the muscles in my body relax one by one. I often say this when I step off of planes in Honolulu, but it rings more true here: it really is like my skin recognizes Hawai‘i. It’s the tingle I was talking about earlier. When the familiar heat warms my shoulders and cheeks, I feel most at home. There’s only a slight wind here today, and it carries on it the coconut of sunblock my sister is massaging into her arms, the deliciousness of grilled chicken and hot dogs from the pavilions near the showers, and that unique smell of the ocean I’ve learned I can’t live without.

The day passes in a relaxing haze. Little Sister and I leave our towels periodically to jump into the gentle surf and swim out until we can barely touch the sandy bottom with the tips of our toes. We come back in and collapse again, then enjoy the way the sun dries droplets of salt water on our backs. We eat our musubi, chicken and malasadas, and take a short walk down half of the beach, making sure we don’t crush anyone’s sand castles along the way. I fall asleep for a few minutes to the sound of the restless waves, the chatter of sunbathers, and the happy sound of families enjoying a beach day. We spend hours of this lazy Saturday this way, and sooner than it seems it should be, it’s time to go.

We trace our path home and pull into our long driveway a little after 4:30 that afternoon. My mother isn’t home from work yet, but my grandparents wave and greet us from the front deck where they’ve been listening to music and calling out Hello’s to other village members throughout the day. We step out of the truck and head into the house. My body is slightly achy in the places where I neglected to reapply sunscreen after making my way out of the surf. By the time I go to bed tonight, those areas have turned a slight pink which will last for exactly two days before fading into the brown that is my Native Hawaiian heritage. I shower gently, being sure not to aggravate my skin any more than it may already be, but the cool/warm water washing the salt out of my hair feels almost as good as it felt getting the salt into my hair. Replacing the smell of sunblock with the smell of my lavender shampoo is bittersweet, and I’m already calculating when is the next time I’ll be able to head out to Hapuna again. Before dressing, like any self-respecting local girl, I check out my tan lines. Then, in deference to my sunburnt skin, I dress in the loosest pair of shorts and a tank I own, and rub Aloe gel all over my back and shoulders. The cooling sensation feels like heaven.

It is much later, at 11:00 when I’m finally getting ready for bed, that I hear it: Splat! Splat!

I pause for a second in the act of throwing throw pillows on the floor. There it is, that Splat! Splat! again, followed by the soft sound of water falling on the iron roof, growing louder and louder as the minutes pass.

I smile as I fall asleep to the rhythm of the falling rain, with Mija curled at the foot of my bed. It was a great beach day.

hackers

so this week has been a little rough. not only was i coming back from hawaii, but i was also getting back to school after spring break, i've been trying to complete my moral character application for the bar exam, and i was a victim of identity theft.

this last one really pissed me off.

so on tuesday, i wake up and my phone is blinking as usual, signifying that i have new email. i don't check it right away because, again, as usual, i'm running late and have about 15 minutes before i have to head to the BART in order to get to my 9:30 class on time.

at some point, while i'm bored on MUNI, i remember the blinking light. i get my phone out and check my email. imagine my surprise when i have not one, not two, not three, but four emails from itunes giving me my receipts for the purchases i apparently made the day before. $200 worth of purchases.

i flip out.

this is the second time in 2 months i've had an account hacked into. last month it was my ebay account, where some idiot hacked in, bid on 2 video games from the UK, and won. thing was that ebay will email me to let me know that i won these items, and when i got those emails i quickly contacted the sellers and told them it was some sort of mistake (a word of advice: ebay sellers are not sympathetic to the fact that your account has been broken into), disconnected my paypal, and closed my ebay account altogether. after this happened, i changed the passwords for as many accounts as i could remember, but apparently forgot to do so for my itunes.

back to tuesday morning. i get to campus after reading these emails and am a mess. i'm a mess because i've been working really hard to save money lately. like, really hard. and the fact that someone could just come in and screw me out of $200 sucked. and THEN i realized that, if this person has my passwords, chances are he has all my other stuff too (i suspect that when i used limewire to download some music, i got a virus or someone put some spyware on my computer or something), including my social security number, etc. it just made me feel really...exposed and violated.

so i contacted itunes. (can we just pause for a second to discuss how hard it is to actually contact itunes? why don't they have a simple number you can call?) i ended up "chatting" with some customer service guy who was all in all really friendly and helpful. he told me to contact my bank and file and claim, and itunes would cooperate with the bank in any way they could. so i contacted my bank, filed my claim, got the $200 credited to my account, and closed the card that was used. then i called the credit bureaus to put a fraud alert on my credit reports. then i sat there for an hour and thought of every single vendor i used to buy things online (amazon, target, jcrew, gap, old navy, victoria's secret, audible, anthropologie, urban outfitters, t-mobile, you name it, i thought of it) and changed all of my passwords.

it's been such a colossal pain in the ass, i can't even tell you.

and now i'm freaking out over every tiny thing i do on the internet. so, as a parting thought, here are a few tips my computer savvy friends offered me:

1. close your email every single time you're done looking at your messages. don't just let you email stay open when you're on your computer.
2. get a good antivirus. go ahead and spend the money on it, it's worth it. and scan your computer regularly.
   
3. do not download music from limewire.
4. try as much as possible not to do online banking.
5. don't leave your web browsers on and/or open unless you're actively on the internet. like your email, this just widens the window high-tech jerks can use to "see" your stuff.
6. check your credit report regularly if you do a lot of buying/selling online.
7. don't save your credit/debit card information to any of your online accounts. it doesn't really take a whole lot of time to plug that information in each time you purchase something. and think about it, if my debit card info wasn't saved to my itunes account (though i think for itunes you actually need to have a card on file), it may not have been so easy for those thieving bastards to steal my money.
   

back from paradise

this video always makes me miss hawaii. listened to this song a few times on the flight back.

20sw: a history of writing

following up with a previous post about a new writing community, i'd like to happily announce that twenty something writers has officially launched! i'm so excited to take part in this, and for those of you who love to write, or want to start loving it, go over and check it out!

for this particular post, 20sw suggested a prompt that we answer in our blogs. here goes!

The Prompt

We’d like to get the ball rolling by hearing your responses to the prompt: Tell us about your writing history. Have you always enjoyed writing? Did you hate grammar lessons in school? Who have been your greatest influences? What kind of writing do you enjoy most? Take any creative spin you want. Post your response on your blog and leave the link in the comments below. Check out the responses of others as well.

i think i officially remember starting to write, i mean really write, in the fifth grade. prior to that, i was never really much of a reader, and so writing for me was just something i needed to do. it wasn't until my best childhood friend, S., shared with me some books she was reading at the moment (r.l. stine's "goosebumps: return of the mummy," if you're curious) that i learned how great writing could be.

now, there was always an unspoken competition between S.and i. where she was first in the class, i was second. where she could speak two languages, i could speak one. where she was cute and small and asian (a badge of honor in hawaii), i was...well, not. so when she offered me these books i of course took them. i'd do anything to make myself just a bit smarter, a bit more like her. (in case anyone's wondering, she moved away at the end of our fifth grade year, eventually went on to go to columbia for college, and we're still great friends). those books, as odd as it may seem, opened a whole new world for me. i began recognizing what writing could do. it could introduce you to people who will never really exist, but whose lives you're completely invested in. it could show you places you may never go to. it could totally capture your imagination and run wild with it. i think that's why i firmly believe that, when people say they don't like to read, it's because they haven't found The book that's gonna change their lives. and when N. tells me about kids he teaches who can't really write, it's almost always because they hate to read.

so my love affair with writing began when i was ten. i immediately saw my writing ability sky-rocket. in fact, i remember this one time when i had just finished reading r.l. stine's "fear street saga: the betrayal" (you know, the first book when savannah goode gets burned at the stake in the salem witch trials?), and i chose to write a book report on it. writing the book report wasn't very hard, didn't take me very long, and in the end i remember thinking that it would probably get a decent grade. two days later, my teacher calls me up to her desk and asks if i had copied my summary off the back cover of the book. and i was shocked. not only was that the first (and only) time i'd ever been accused of cheating, but i didn't even think what i wrote was that good. so i showed her the book cover, and i ended up getting the highest grade on the book report. i think that was the first time i realized that writing was something i was okay at, and it wasn't going to take much of an effort.

so from then on i wrote. my friends and i started a slam book that eventually progressed into a straight out poetry book. i think i still have it somewhere. we'd pass the book from person to person throughout a class period and each of us would write a poem a day. childish poetry. teenage poetry. why doesn't this boy like me? what will it be like when i'm an adult? i hate this teacher because this teacher hates me. simple stuff. but it got me writing almost daily, and critiquing the writing of others.

a few years later, when i was in high school, my friends and i began writing fan fiction. i don't think i even knew what fan fiction was. just, one day, my best friend decided to write a story involving our circle of friends (ten years older than we were), and the celebrities we had crushes on at the time. i picked up on it and away we went. i'd sit in english class, finish my assignments (which still did not require me to work very hard for good grades) ahead of time, and start jotting down scenarios and dialogue for the next chapter of whatever fan fic i was currently working on. i also began the infamous "incomplete novel" that my friends (the quints) still ask me about. i took each of us, created characters which embodied the extreme characteristic of each of our personalities, and wrote a story about growing up and remaining friends through the changes that our lives throw our way (interestingly enough, the character that embodied me was a fiction writer. lol.). a few years later, when i looked back at the pages i'd written, and when i was in one of my moods where nothing i produced seemed good enough, i deleted it. i still regret that.

i was also journaling heavily during this time. heavily. i think in my sophomore year of high school, i must have gone through about three or four composition note books worth of journaling. i don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that writing, at that point, during that time, saved my life. it was my only outlet, the only place where i could say things and not have to censor myself. the only "person" i could tell my secrets/fears/angers/worries/sorrows to and not worry that i would lose them because of it. for a while after that, years really, i wondered if those months where writing was all i did somehow purged me of the need for it. because prior to that writing really was a need i had. and since then until right about three years ago, i haven't been able to write much, and i haven't been able to write any fiction.

even now, my writing is different than what it used to be. i'm not just talking about my skills (though, JEEZ, that's changed. thank God.), but more so my style. i write academic articles now. that's what i know how to do. i research, analyze, and suggest policy changes. i got published for the first time this year (still doing a happy dance over that!), and will be published again in a few months (woo-hoo!). and i think i'm good at it. i would never say that if i didn't really, really believe it, because i'm not the kind of person to toot my own horn. ever. but writing has always been the one thing i'm good at. i'm not great. but i'm good.

so recently, i've tried to pick up the torch again when it comes to writing for fun, which for me means writing fiction (romance/fantasy/paranormal/take your pick). i mean, i blog, but i don't write fiction anymore. and i've got ideas (a composition book full of them!), i just never seem to have the time. i can make the time, i think. i just haven't yet. hopefully, 20sw will get me moving in a good direction!