Tuesday, 15 April 2003
11:59pm

S

ince the Angry Turtle Cam has been pretty much useless during this time that the turtle has had to be out of the tank, I decided that it would be better to turn the camera around on ourselves. I'm gonna warn you that most of the time, you're either gonna see an empty room, or the back of my head as I (or cami, or both of us) watch TV. But at least it's showing SOMETHING. So I present to you the Apartment 26 Cam. But don't say I didn't warn you that it would be pretty boring!
And another link I bring to you today: Check out the photo credit on this story. They must have gotten the photo from Jeanette cuz I didn't know anything about it until she emailed me today. Weeeee. Pretty old picture though... like, about 2 years old or so.

Friday, 18 April 2003
11:59pm

I

  had a few hours to kill this afternoon, so I went down to check out Better Luck Tomorrow which had just been released in San Diego today. I was talking to evil earlier this week about the movie, saying how I was more interested in it now knowing that it was specifically about southern california asian american life, because the descriptions I had read made it sound very, very similar to the conditions I experienced in high school in my area back in those days.
I had a very strange experience just before the "Pre-Show Countdown" (aka the commercials before the previews before the movie which was $7 for a matinee!!). I chose a seat right in the middle of the row, about half way up, and I pretty much had the entire row to myself, except for one guy sitting at the aisle on one side, and two guys sitting at the aisle on the other side. This cute Asian girl comes up to me and says, "are these seats taken?", motioning to the seats to my right.
Being there alone, I said "no". She then shuffled around for a bit as if trying to decide which seat she wants to sit in... and settles on sitting down *RIGHT* next to me when the entire rest of the row is practically empty. I mean, I'm pretty sure that she's coming on to me, but at the same time I was very weirded out by the fact that a complete stranger decided to sit in the seat right next to mine when they had the entire row to choose from. I figured a friend must have put her up to it or something because this was highly unnatural behavior especially since there were still plenty of empty rows with plenty of good seats around.
She takes some time to get settled in, putting her cell phone in the cupholder and whatnot, and after a couple of seconds she turns to me and asks, "are you here alone?" to which I replied, "Yes, are you?" and she says "no" then about two seconds after that, she stands up abruptly and takes off nearly running out to the aisle, and out of the theater. About a minute later she reappeared with a guy who appeared to be her date. They sat down in the row right in front of me. Very strange. Very, very strange.
Anyway. Watching the movie, it was like being transported back to my high school years. Fortunately for me, the high school I went to was not like the one in the movie, but the ones a lot of my friends went to (and indeed, a couple of high school girlfriends as well) were exactly like the ones in the movie, full of overachieving asian kids whose only motivation for doing anything was "will this look good on my college applications?".
Sunny Hills High School, Whitney High School (whose mascot is curiously the "wildcats"... same as the school in the movie)... Asian parents would move, or use the addresses of relatives or do whatever they had to do to get their kids into these schools thinking that it would give them a better chance at succeeding in life, or at least, getting into a good college. All kinds of useless clubs and junk, and again, kids doing stuff just because it will "look good" on their college applications.
I look back on those kids and I feel bad for them, mainly because of how much stress they were under due to pressure from their parents and competition from the other students, and just how little all of that shit actually ends up mattering in the real world. But yeah, the depiction of the academically overachieving Orange County Asian American high school life was totally 100% dead on. So if you watched that movie and thought that those kids were totally crazy, know that there really are people who live like that. And I sure as hell am glad that I wasn't one of them, even if all my friends were :)
The movie overall, was OK. Not the best I'd ever seen, but not the worst either. The brief trip to Vegas was kind of disappointing to me (as I love watching movies that have Vegas in them), but I did find it humorous that this group of Asian students went down to the California Hotel/Casino... which is usually packed with Asians from Hawaii.
Would I recommend this movie to everyone? Well, if you're looking for something upbeat, definitely not. If you've got nothing better to do, it's worth a shot, and if you are interested to see what life is like for a lot of asian american kids in southern california (well, except for all the crimes committed), definitely check it out.
One other thing of personal note about this movie... the movie's website has a section with the personal websites of the characters in the movie. Curiously, the rides section of Virgil's web page features backgrounds and photos that were all ripped straight off of my riceboypage.com. All but two of the images on that section of the page are straight from my site. Hrm.

Saturday, 19 April 2003
11:59pm

F

rom a fortune cookie I got today: "Behind an able man, there are always other able men."

...in bed.