tomorrow or the next life

added some photos to flickr from my time in san diego last month

the view from my balcony is really hard to beat. on the downside, the storm caused jake's flight to be rerouted to dc, where they sat on the runway for five hours before being cleared to finally fly to nyc. he's on the subway now, making his way to my place.

on the train to the airport earlier (where i tried and failed to meet jake) - the e train on the way there, through midtown and queens, and the a train on the way back, through brooklyn and lower manhattan - there were a whole bunch of kids coing back from a field trip (asian and black kids, but not together. all the asian kids and their asian teachers got off in jackson heights, and the black kids and their black teacher stayed on the train until jamaica), and i got teary looking at their young faces, alternately exuberant and pensive, kids who at 7 or 8 or 9 already do the blank on-the-subway stare. teary because i was moved, in some way... because i felt weirdly tender toward them, and because they were black and asian kids intersecting in the same spaces, but not interacting at all. like oil and water? not quite. two substances which mingle but then pull apart effortlessly without having really changed each other. but they must, in some small ways, that might later become big ways (the sneaked glance of curiosity, interest, one day sprouting into conversation, or settling deep down as affinity...)?

so much proximity to so much humanity. i've had more conversations with strangers (almost all pleasant) within the past several days than i would have in la in the same number of months.

anyway, going to sign off on this rambling post 'cause i have to go meet jake at the subway stop soon, but the short summary is that, after a very strange first few days, life in nyc is looking up. i can feel the first stirrings of the city working on and in me.

just posted an assortment of random photos from the past couple of weeks (click on photo to see). one of the best parts was that i got to spend about 36 hours with my dear friend hitomi in sf. miss her already.

came across these menu offerings in k-town today... fried hog! it's so fun to say.

have to say that i'm getting a little scattered with posting photos to flickr, and sometimes to facebook... too many output options, too little time. i like this lj format, but it seems like hardly anyone reads here anymore (except for my dad? hi dad).

the majority of my belongings are currently stashed in a 50-foot (?) orange allied moving van along with the belongings of six other households, being driven across the country to new york city (with stops in north carolina, dc, and jersey, i think). it feels good, simplified in a way, to have very little stuff right now, but i have to admit that i was completely freaked out the past couple days. the move, logistically, was more convenient than any move i have ever participated in before. the packers arrived at 7:30am yesterday, the driver and two assistant loaders around 9:30, and by 11:30 everything was packed and gone. emotionally, though, i am very unsettled. i felt awful, to be honest. the main question: what am i doing? is this decision going to be worth having changed my whole life?

but as jesucio pointed out, my life here as i knew it is over. grad student days are behind me. the only way is forward.

tonight, after returning from a lovely evening at the hollywood bowl with jp (lang lang and herbie hancock playing together, of all things), i felt the first stirrings of excitement about what's to come. i got an email from a good friend saying that he has unexpectedly moved to nyc as well, and started to think about how i want to move forward with my internment camps photo project. hopefully now that things are finally in motion, the weight i have felt pressing down on me all year will lift and i will be able to float up and find my equilibrium.

the next several days will be hard, though. how do i say goodbye to the friends who have changed my life and been my family and community over the past five years? we will still see each other now and then, of course, and some of us might even live in the same places at various points in the future, but... a chapter has reached its conclusion.

with peter and jinah's help, we finally made it to a kogi taco truck today. jake and i split a kimchi quesadilla, i had a tofu taco, and he had a short rib taco. i thought i took pictures of the tacos but for some reason they are not in my phone. you can see a picture of the kimchi quesadilla here.

we all thought the tacos and quesadillas were quite tasty. i didn't love the kimchi quesadilla as much as the others. 'cause i thought i could taste some anchovy paste in the kimchi (i have gotten more sensitive to fish flavor in my years of vegetarianness), but all in all it was very good. highly recommended.

added a few more photos to the "landscapes of black and brown la" set on flickr, starting with this view of the la county jail. with special thanks to luz for giving me some tips on where to go in her neighborhood...

just posted some photos to flickr that i've been working on for a forthcoming reader edited by laura pulido and josh kun. (click on the photo to see the whole set)

 

i think my brother looks like a monkey. but maybe he's more like a seal in this picture...