hmmmm Quoi de neuf?

Sunday was shotgun wedding. I will be forever amused by Chinese/Vietnamese wedding traditions, but this weekend's particular rendition was equal parts heartbreaking and dead boring.

Bad enough my cousin had her baby before the wedding, but the look on her poor father's face during the reception as he had to watch his baby girl get tongued by the evil wretch what planted one in her was just hard to bear. When he came over from Vietnam four years ago or so he looked 40. Today he looks 60.

I'm not gonna go into judgements or whatever. Shit happens, and you gotta make the best of it, you know? But um. I guess I was raised the way I was raised. I couldn't do that to my parents.

Observation: Vietnamese people have this fascination with Latin music. They're always playing the cha cha or some samba or flamenco or something Ricky Martin at their weddings. They just love it. It's like no matter how many synthesized wonders you could come up with on the keyboards, the maracas keep comin' up.

Which I don't get because why, why oh why then do you guys hate Hispanics so damn much? Fuck.

To that end, there are still people who think that Spain is not a part of Europe, but located somewhere near Puerto Rico. I kid you not.

I mean, you learn that stuff in second grade. Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, found the West Indies in the Americas and then enslaved the indigenous peoples. Kk, he was Portugese, but Portugal's next to Spain and he received his commission in Espagne, and I mean fuck people should just know this shit.

Fuck.

Met up with Catherine for the first time in months. Had dandy old time, talked nonstop about everythings. Went to the Lab, then to H&M, and then to the pier, where we had ice cream (yeah it was freezing but it's the principle) and then went to Target. It was really nice. I haven't felt so delighted in a long time, and I've exhausted myself talking. But it's good. I'm glad I can be there for her to be open and free to talk and stuff.

And I mean, at least she understands what it means to feel helpless and apathetic, to feel like I've lost some inspiration, you know? Emmanuel just.. I dunno. He doesn't understand or want to understand. He wants me to get up and snap out of it.

And fuck knows so do I. But I just can't feel it anymore. I used to be so moved by the world, so pissed off, so incensed by others that I had to shout and breathe words in strings of glimmering poetry and nonsense and song and dialogue, you know? I just had to.

And now even creation has become fabrication, and nothing i do seems to hold merit. instead of shields i forge sieves, instead of swords i make believe.

But lately I have started to get pissed again, started to care again. It's slow, but I'm getting there, I think.

but sometimes, i'm scared that emmanuel doesn't see this, doesn't want to hear this. that i am getting better again. i'm scared that by the time i get it to him he'll be gone. i don't know.

sometimes i get too tired to cry, and when it comes to emmanuel either i'm tired or i'm crying. fuck we used to be so happy. how come when i look at him i feel so glad inside but there's always something we have to fight about, something he says that gets me quiet and sad and so perturbed i just have to start crying and making everything bad again?

either i'm tired or i'm crying. honestly.

Had unexciting day at college today. I have an acute fear that it's feeling more like high school with each passing class. Just more isolated. Calstate Long Beach is like the largest community college in the state of California. It feels as substandard, as exhaustive and lonesome. The traffic, the abnormal number of idiots on campus, all that stuff. Makes me sad. The few acquaintances I've made keep my day kind of bright, but I guess by the end of the day I find myself searching for excuses to leave.

I just feel alone, and when I'm with people I feel unable to connect with them. Ahhh fuck oh well. I had gyoza today. Yummy gyoza.

Am becoming unhealthily obsessed with American Apparel, that wondrous hipster empire with all the well-marketed clothing and stuff. I mean when you get down to it, they make excellent underwear and t-shirts, but everything else is ill-sewn and ill-made. The only good part is the models they use, and the fact that it's all sweatshop-free. But still. I'm as caught up as any liberal arts major with a taste for Arcade Fire and Interpol.

Am also loving how everytime I shop there I feel like a walrus. American Apparel realizes that hipsters come in different sizes and they try their best to accommodate them. Too bad real hipsters come in svelte, skinny, and stick-thin. I'm a large in everything.

It's like having tits and ass is now some kind of terrible burden. It's no longer beautiful, it's just... utilitarian. Like a camel's hump. Oh wonderful, you can feed babies. Oh, you can survive in the desert longer than I can. Like all a bra is good for now is for storing tissue and money and gumballs.

I think the idea is that women no longer look to fashion as a way to feel sensuous or to be inspired by ways to enhance and flaunt their bodies. In a world ruled by sterile European metropolises, fashion has become this cultureless, bodiless cycle of fads and "cultural nods" and constant spinoffs of the same shitty black leggings and tunics. It's a nod to the eighties, it's a nod to the 16th century, whatever.

Whatever happened to the woman's body? I'm not one to say I like a body all rolly-polly, but what happened to curves? I had a good friend who always criticized the way I drew women because all my girls had thighs and breasts and big butts. He thought they were too fat. "Women look like that," I urged. For centuries, they've looked like that. And I mean they've been corseted and padded and caged, but the woman, ungirdled, unclothed, set upon some chaise all naked and waxing like a full moon-- has always looked like the rolling landscape of heaven.

And if you're just Asian and super-thin and wear a 00 even if you eat eight happy meals a day, then fuckin' power to you, you magic wand, you shaft of silver yew. Power to ya.

But anyhow, starving models are an insult to starving babies all over the world. I'm just saying.

I miss Heroes.

Shit I suppose I should doll this up.

uh.

Fuck. It's like I made a kid and then abandoned him, only to return years later with a box of Cracker Jacks and a cheap nerf gun, hoping to make amends.

And I am greeted with silence.

Have been excited about Gogol Bordello again, and danced around the room in crazy sweaty Asian fashion while my cat looked on with all the sleepy acceptance of the Virgin Mary. I love you, Shelbycat, for loving me like you does.