Tip-Tapping

fantasyecho — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 02:41:38 GMT

What the hell has been going on lately? Feels like every other friend I've encountered online and off has been struck by depression, all at once. I've been hella depressed too, and it's a fucking miracle to be able to write just a measly 400 words a fucking day. I can't get out of bed earlier than 10am, I get to campus around noon, and I stay until maybe 6pm, come home, eat, and then I have no idea what happens to my brain.

I've taken to sleep aid pills, which IDK, I don't think I've had this problem with the liquid version? I'll go back to the liquid version and see if that's any different. But really, shit like ZZZquil is meant for occasional use, not regular use. Blargh. And then there's the fact that I can sleep 8 hours and still wake up feeling under-rested and like hot garbage. I'm going to the fucking doctor. It's time for my yearly physical anyway. I just feel terrified because I've been devouring so much shitty food I'm pretty sure I'm pre-diabetic
by now =(

I thought I finished editing my first chapter, but now that I think about it, after having sent it off, it's not really done and needs a concluding paragraph that pulls the argument together. Argh. I'm gonna try to look it over again tomorrow and see what I can do. They said the editing stage was easier, it was the first draft that was the hardest, but I think that's a god damn fucking lie!

I'm trying to walk more too, for Pokemon Go, but ugh, IDK, IDK.

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Strange Magic (2015)

fantasyecho — Sun, 02 Apr 2017 08:08:59 GMT

I fell into the Youtube rabbithole last night and encountered this horrifically ridiculous earwormy video clip from a movie I'd never even heard of before, but which appears to be recent. Which meant I had to read up and watch all clips related to it. After trying to find it on Netflix streaming (which it is NOT, btw; it's DVD only), I poneyed up $4 to stream it on Youtube. I have to say.... that trailer really does not give this plot away.

I can see why people hated the movie. It got a lot of bad reviews, it was called unimaginative, the graphics are supposedly good but the story is supposedly terrible.

None of these reviews matter, because they are all wrong, and they remind me very much of the vitriol Jupiter Ascending got--beautiful visually, but bad story. When in fact there's nothing wrong with the story, really, aside from some minor editing issues. Same deal with Strange Magic. In fact, I have to say, it's actually REALLY refreshing, both in its humour (which works on several levels: worldbuilding, meta-knowledge, comedic beats, and genuinely quirky characters), and the way it uses tropes (beauty and the beast, but where the beast doesn't change! beauty who isn't exactly valued by the antagonist for her beauty! nagging parents! sisters! BFFs who fall in love! grumpy people who have been burned falling for each other! the villain becomes the love interest! it saves us a lot of time trying to justifying our ships by making them canon in the first place). I also love how the binary of Fairy Kingdom vs. Dark Forest isn't a versus so much as it presented as two sides of a whole, and the fairy princess learns to appreciate the Dark Forest, which she has an initially very bad experience with.

DID I MENTION THAT IT'S A JUKEBOX MUSICAL? And that the songs, which play at seemingly random times, ACTUALLY SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE SCENE/CHARACTERS? There are DUETS that demonstrate the relationships/connections between the characters singing! SUGAR PIE HONEY BUUUUNNNNCCCHHHH!

The ultimate moral lesson of the film--that love is built on common ground and good chemistry, not on infatuation with the other person's looks (and that you don't get rewarded with love for doing certain things)--is possibly a bit too subtle, but I REALLY love the alternative masculinity presented in this film, contrasted against the toxic masculinity of the antagonist, who manages to pass as a good guy to most of the people within the film through manipulation. Get you a man who: can sing; has a DAD LOOK; knows how to be gentle; is given consequences when he does stupid things like lock away the fairy who made him the love potion he requested without giving her a chance to explain how he fucked up; learns from his mistakes. I know it's kind of a low bar but I was kind of impressed he remembered that he has to rescue his mother.

There are a couple of moments re: expectations which are also surprising to me, worked in as jokes, but somehow are also taken seriously that yes, this is a thing in this universe! it's not just a joke this is real life for them! It's all weirdly heteronormative, but I feel there are some characters you could imagine to be queer, and one character who I think reads as asexual.

I've already read complaints that there were too many subplots, but everyone's plans and arcs weave together really well. Marianne and Bog King's romance doesn't work without Sunny's crush on Dawn which doesn't get acted on without Roland's power hungry attempt to get Marianne. Most of the side characters are also delightful: Griselda as the Bog King's nagging mom who keeps trying to set him up; the Sugar Plum Fairy is HILARIOUS; Stuff and Thang as the incompetent lackeys. They add something to the script, and the script might have been poorer without them. (Although, I'm... still kind of shocked at the role the pixies play in helping Marianne train. Like, oh my god, is she really... batting at them... with her sword???)

There are a few things that I thought could have been improved on, such as the Sameface Syndrome that it has going on, but I still think there are some very slight differences between Marianne and Dawn's facial structure. They also missed the opportunity to make Marianne a truly plain girl, which would make Roland's philandering more plausible. The use of the kaleidoscope effects at the end are also pretty hideous, even though I KNOW, theoretically, it's supposed to refer to the fact that butterflies are referred to sa a kaleidoscope of butterflies. The voiceacting was a little off at times--Alan Cumming has this weird brogue slipped sometimes, and a couple of the characters have a couple of moments where they sound weirdly British. Still, the animation was quite top-notch--OH GOD THE WINGFIC! And how WELL DONE the WINGFIC!--and the body language of the characters was really great--at some point I said out loud, "well they're gonna have fairytale sex tonight."

My point is, Strange Magic is REALLY FUCKING GIRLY, and I suspect that reviewers panned it because, like Jupiter Ascending, Strange Magic is REALLY GIRLY and some people hate GIRLY FUN. George Lucas conceived of it as something for 12-yo girls to match Star Wars, but honestly, I think it's a VERY ADULT movie, like it's family-friendly in the way that there's humour and layers specifically for adults. And so much of the male characters' masculinity is in service or subordinate to the women of the film (like, gosh, while there isn't exactly gender parity, it's still more speaking female characters than the average film), and the one white-looking dude in the film is the antagonist who never gets a redemption arc. WHICH IS SO GREAT. So the only way you could pan this movie is if you missed or refused to acknowledge the ways it DOESN'T cleave to cishet bro sensibilities.

Anyways, someone tell me they also saw Strange Magic, because I don't want to suffer this earworm alone.

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fantasyecho — Fri, 17 Mar 2017 16:01:08 GMT

Busy busy week!

- Sunday: last minute went with a friend to the Anza-Borrego Desert to check out the superbloom there. I had suggested leaving at 6, getting there at 8, returning at 10, before the highway traffic set in. But it's too early for him, so we moved it back 2 hours. What happened was we left at 8, got there at 10.30, got back on the road around 12.30, and got home around 4 or so. There was a LONG time spent on a SINGLE road that was jammed up.

- Monday spent working on a cover letter. YL is having a difficult time so been doing a lot of emotional labour there.

- Tuesday I led a couple of events for the Grad Day of Action. Turns out "Courtyard outside the Physics Hall" gets read as "meet in the Physics Hall" *rolls eyes* So only one person showed up for the lunch in the courtyard, and another one for the hike into the Gardens. But the Gardens are beautiful right now, so I can't complain. Hung out the rest of the time with other grads in the Grad Lounge.

- Wednesday, had a very brief SSFAC meeting! And then did the SFRG, and went out to dinner with Lindsay and Eun-Joo. My Clarion classmate, Alan, got in around 10pm :D

- Thursday, Alan visited! We wandered the campus first thing in the morning, then I left him in the Creative Writing department. He came by mid-afternoon, so we went to the Eaton Collection to check out some stuff, like an artbook of Flatland, the original edition of Ted Chiang's STORIES OF YOUR LIFE, the original hardcover of Ellen Kushner's SWORDSPOINT.

We had dinner at Tio's, and at night, I found I had to walk back to campus so I could get the file for the final exam I'm giving students.

Right now, I'm staring at a giant pile of final essays to grade, feeling super thankful I made them go through a gamut of three workshops (much of this pile = previous drafts that I made them attach). They're feeling pretty good about this final essay, confident about the final exam, and I'm going to miss a bunch of them.

Losses of teaching this class:
- Sank in a LOT of energy talking to students that took away from writing my dissertation
- Felt woefully under-prepped most of the time to teach some of the more theoretical texts, like there were problems I feel I should have anticipated #impostersyndrome
- Still can't save some students. A student emailed me at 1am, 6 hours before the essay was due, being apologetic for not coming to workshop and asking to hand in his essay on Saturday. SATURRDAY? I assigned this essay A MONTH AGO to give you ample time to prep, PLUS had three workshops for each stage of writing! Maybe if you weren't gallivanting off to LA two hours away half the quarter you'd be doing better work. I understand some folks gotta hustle, but come on.
- I thought I was a morning person, but apparently teaching at 7am is way too morning for me.

Wins in teaching this class:
- Watching the Engineering students glow as they talked about going through Special Collection archives and handling papers directly about the founding of their college
- Freshman student going from strength to strength with each essay, and being able to teach her directly some database tricks
- One of my students may have scored an internship with a professor to help with linguistics research (his major) as a result of the final essay project.

Not bad for a class I was recommended for simply because I was out of a job.

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fantasyecho — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 04:57:52 GMT

Apparently people don't remember blog carnivals were a thing =(

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fantasyecho — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 18:04:48 GMT

Students' Outline Workshop had a brief hitch in the beginning as the students couldn't remember which groups they were in (because for some reason checking on ilearn for their groups doesn't seem to occur to them) and one student moved from one side of the class to the other only to find that her group had moved to her side of the class. A couple of students who had been in business are changing their majors so they moved groups too.

I gave them a sheet with instructions (things like, take turns introducing yourselves, your topics and your arguments), opened by introducing to them what the concept of "active listening" means, and let them have at it. They could do the thing where they take turns talking about their outlines and their current problems with it, or exchange outlines (passing outlines one direction, so everyone gets a shot at looking at it). That way they're exchanging ideas and making suggestions as thoroughly as they can.

As usual, there's a range of finished outlines and unfinished outlines, so I had prepped some questions they could ask each other, depending on how done the outline is.

One group was the general social science group, and I think only two students had the same major, and they told me how interesting it was to listen to everyone else's major. There was a group of psych students, having spirited debate on their various topics. The engineering students were diligently passing their laptops and outlines to their right, and the bio group were split between people talking more (because they had unfinished outlines) versus people very quietly going over outlines. And there was a group of Humanities (English and Creative Writing) who were slightly awkward but visibly very earnestly discussing their majors.

For Wednesday I have them bringing in their past essays and reflecting on things they need to keep and improve for this essay, which will hopefully keep them informed on what to do for the paper (which they'll inevitably write on Thursday). On Friday they have to have a full first draft by then, and they'll be doing a workshop on essay structures next. I'll prep another worksheet for them to think through.

When I teach this class again, I'll have all these materials again and I think I'll definitely re-use them, because they seem to work out really well. I feel I can focus on my own work a lot better right now because of it.

Anyway I downloaded Nanaca Crash yesterday and there was no work done on my dissertation as a result. Whoops.

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fantasyecho — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 05:43:12 GMT

Today I did manage to get up at 5.30am with Alarmy... it's am alarm app which forces you to do a thing in order for you to turn it off. Options include doing math problems. I chose an option where I would have to get up, turn on the light, stumble to my closet, and take a picture of my organizer. And since I'm there, aaaand that's where the underwear is, I might as well keep on going and get dressed.

I have not managed to stay awake despite this exercise, of course. This morning I got as far as washing up and getting dressed, doing some exercise (sets of 10, squats, push-ups from the knee, crunches, Russian crunches; it hurt), getting breakfast and morning drink, while checking the Internet, and afterwards, around 7am, I went back to bed and got up around 8.30. Well... baby steps, I guess. Tomorrow I'll see a friend for the first time in almost five years, so once I have done morning libations, I'll hie to the nearby Starbucks, do some reading, and refill my Pokemon bag, until he gets to Riverside. I also need to get books for the class I'm teaching this quarter?

Which brings me to the productive things I have done in the new year: I have drafted a syllabus that actually looks rather good (I think). It has some holes in it, because I don't actually know what the text I'm supposed to teach is. We're supposed to get a list of books and pick one, and the St. Martin's Guide to Writing, and we get to choose exercises from that book. The essays escalate from 2 - 3 pages to a 6 pager, although I wonder if the final project might be too much (I'm teaching them how to do an annotated bibliography, and I would like at least three items in the Works Cited page).

The class is Intermediate Composition. It is part of a remedial freshman series to equip students with the writing skills needed at university level. The first course, they're apparently still learning how to put sentences together into paragraphs. The third course is critical thinking. This leaves the second course as a bridge between the two, where the students move from personal writing to more public writing "for multicultural contexts" which is kind of a meaningless description. I do know they have to write at least four essays, so I'm teaching them, basically, how to write about media, and how to read and edit. And cite. You can never teach kids how to cite too early. I'm pondering a library visit, but... the class is at 7am. I'm pretty sure the library only opens at 8am.

(The class at 7am is because the Chancellor has decided to aggressively expand the university and up enrollment without considering whether we have the actual capacity for it. We don't. That's why there are now 7am classes. I have a MWF schedule, which I don't mind, but all at 7am. I am not sure why I volunteered to teach at heinous o'clock.)

I'm wondering if I need to email the professor who's supposed to oversee us... apparently we get very little supervision, but IDK.

Today, rather than faff over my syllabus, I decided to submit some stuff. I was originally only going to do one, but in the end I've sent out four submissions.

Sometime this week, while I have brainspace, I'm going to get Interfolio and my Vitae account into order.

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Year in Review

fantasyecho — Sat, 31 Dec 2016 07:26:57 GMT

So not a lot happened this year per se but I thought I'd give it a shot:

Jan - Mar: After an embarrassing start writing a first chapter, Tempest pulled together an incredible writing group, with whom I busted out two chapters of my dissertation. I finished the second chapter literally the day it was due (last day of the quarter), while I was at ICFA.

March: OK quite a few things happened this month!

1) I was accepted to Clarion! I wasn't really allowed to tell anybody about it but I told a few people, plus Marianne Kirby and I were in a Hangout together when I got the news so she got to witness, eyebrows raised, my high-pitched noise-making.

2) The SEA Is Ours was published by GerakBudaya, a leftist bookstore in Malaysia, for Southeast Asian distribution! This means it's cheaper for people in the region, and it's hitting the audience it was meant for!

3) Joyce came to ICFA! It was so good to hang out with her outside of Singapore. I arrived Tuesday night (which is to say, Wednesday morning stupid o'clock, and slept in the lobby) and was there to meet Joyce and check her in and it was YAYNESS. It was the first time both of us got to do a reading at ICFA, hopefully not Joyce's last time!!

4) The weekend after ICFA, I was at AnomalyCon, which paid for airfare and hotel and worked me to the goddamn bone with SEVEN panels over the weekend. Like, damn!

April: I was working on my third chapter, and I was interviewed by Uma Ampikaipakan for his BFM radio segment Invisible Cities on steampunk: http://www.bfm.my/invisible-cities-07-southeast-asian-steampunk.html

I also wrote a paper on editing The SEA Is Ours and presented it at UC Berkeley's Center for Southeast Asian Studies Conference "Making Southeast Asian Culture: From Region to World"! I got to roadtrip up to Berkeley with Dr. Mariam Lam and Dr. Henk Maier, which was *really entertaining*.

May: Timmi Duchamp asked me to edit the WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 11!!!!! I have themed it "Trials By Whiteness". (If anybody wants to slip something in last minute, something small like poetry, let me know.)

And I booked it to the East Coast for Diana and Ashley's steampunk wedding! What a wonderful day.

The SEA Is Ours also came out in Czech!

June: I don't remember what else happened but I know I handed in my third chapter. Clarion also began this month! I arranged for a subletter to take my apartment, and Lisa Bolekaja came and got me out to La Jolla, and we stayed in a hotel overnight and she took me around campus.

July: Clarion Clarion Clarion. I wrote a story per week. I also did my first collaboration with S. Qiouyi Lu, who was at Clarion West... while collaborations between classmates have happened, this was also the first inter-Clarion collaboration, so we made a bit of history there! I cooked a lot for my classmates. We got to go to San Diego Comic Con, and I spent most of the day with Indrapramit Das, who is way hotter in real life than he needs to be. Cecilia Tan was in town for the Romance Writers Association Conference and she also came to visit, which was cool! My roommates were Jen Julian and Kathleen Kayembe: we're all queer women, and Jen and I spent several topless days down at Black Beach (which is a "clothing optional" beach... so I learned how to swim in the sea finally! and with no clothes). I didn't get the Octavia Butler Scholarship, but Kathleen did, and I might have shed tears when Lisa gave her her owl. Ellen gave me a chapstick as a "Den Mother award" which lol I guess.

Also, VINTAGE TOMORROWS was released on Netflix, which is a thing that has my mug in it.

August: I went home to Malaysia. I let my mom buy me clothes. I also bought my first ever smartphone, a Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, because Dad started playing Pokemon Go and I just.... didn't want him to be cooler than me in that way. I went to Singapore (and caught some cool stuff there) and hung with Joyce and Christopher Hwang and SEAsteampunk writer Timothy Dimacali. (There is an Ivysaur in my collection called Joyce&Chris.) I went to the Peranakan Museum with delfinuum! It was a good time.

September: I don't remember what happened this month, honestly. I... turned 32. Uhm, I had a houseguest over who managed to push past many of my boundaries. Eric, Maurisa, and Javier bought me a cake! Maurisa and I went to see Nisi read!

October: Sunil Patel, my Clarion classmate, was outed as an abuser, so I spent a LOT of time doing emotional work with my cohort. I fostered a stray puppy for about a week. I'm still in love with the puppy. I also start sending out job applications. This shit managed to suck a lot of mental energy that I should have saved for my dissertation.

November: I sink into the worst depression I've had in years. Also, the election happened, which, what the actual fuck. The nice thing is I got to go to San Diego with Nalo, to watch a special screening of ARRIVAL. There was a special reception before the screening where I got to hang with some other Clarion folks. I snuck some posters home. I.... should send those out.

December: I went to China! For a conference in utopian and science fiction studies. That was really neat. I got to meet the first SF Studies academic in China, Wu Yan, and Chinese SF author Xia Jia (who is not just talented creatively, but terrifyingly intelligent, AND really hot to boot). I got to go out to the Lama Temple, too. But otherwise I spent most of it sinking into depression and feeling terrible that my dissertation is no further along.

I also got my first rejection for an academic job. Which, well, shit happens.

2017 Goals:
- Establish a morning exercise routine that doesn't depend on a gym
- Ask a doctor for a prescription for depression. Folks have been telling me to go to therapy but I honestly don't feel that's right for me.
- Send out more work.
- Revise more stories.
- Write more, period.
- Write a new goddamn novel, omg. I just realized I have a quartet, a trilogy, and three standalone novels that really want to be written, ARGH, not to mention the novella that wants to be re-written, AND the short story collection that I've got ideas for but no time nor inspiration.
- Try for some visiting assistant professorships. If not, try for some actual jobs. If not, go home, and write.

I hope you all have a blessed 2017 ahead!

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Publications of 2016

fantasyecho — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 19:12:58 GMT

So I guess this is the time of year that we tally up what we have published over the year. And, despite how rotten the year has been going, I think this is my personal best in terms of what I managed to get published! Now if only that translated into academic publishing, too.

Poetry:

"Sweetness and Light" was published in the inaugral issue of recompose magazine! It is a poem about a young woman who literally spews forth sweetness and light when she speaks, and her sense of degradation when other people feel entitled to her. It is 50 lines, so eligible for Best Long Poem Rhysling.

Short fiction:

"Anak Sungai" was published in Truancy, a little story about a river meeting various forest animals as she goes out to sea. There is one animal she wants to find but he is a tricky one.

"Crocodile Tears" was published in Lightspeed Magazine, a retelling of two Malaysian folktales: one of Si Tenggang, the faithless son, and the other tale explaining why a river is free of crocodiles. This was my second pro sale!

"Mana Langkah Pelangi Terakhir? (Where is the Rainbow's Last Step?)" was published in Interfictions, thanks to guest editors Sam J. Miller ande Carmen Machado. A journalist following a lede for the miraculous things that happen finds a long-lost local celebrity. This was my third pro sale and I am now SFWA-eligible as a result!

"A Name to Ashes" is in the anthology Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. It draws on the coolie trade in Cuba for inspiration. It was possibly the hardest to research and write, emotionally. If you want to consider this for something, try to buy the anthology! But if you can't for whatever reason, email me and I'll get the story to you.

Non-fiction:

I reviewed Everfair by Nisi Shawl for Strange Horizons! Most of my non-fiction energy has been going towards my academic writing, though.

I presented a paper on feminist utopias at the Inaugral Utopian and Science Fiction Studies Conference organized out of Beijing Normal University.

Editing:

The Sea Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia is now available in Southeast Asia, courtesy of Gerakbudaya who bought the rights to publish and distribute it in the region! I'm very happy about this. jolantru and I really should try to do something with them in the future.

Ongoing:

Writing-wise, in the first few months of the year, I re-wrote a dissertation chapter and a new chapter in a single quarter, and a third chapter in the spring quarter. I am now currently struggling to write the last chapter, so I can be on schedule to graduate in spring 2017. It is very hard, because it is a departure from the critique I've been making throughout the rest of the dissertation into something optimistic, and I've not really been in the mood for optimism.

I also attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop in summer this year, in which I produced six short story drafts. I've already sold one, and have another one I'm fairly happy with. Clarion gave me a chance to be in a writing-intensive space for several weeks, bouncing off ideas from incredible people. It was also my first opportunity in collaboration.

I am editing the WisCon Chronicles Vol. 11. I might have bounced out of my skin when Timmi Duchamp asked me! I've themed it "Trials by Whiteness" and I'm hoping to present a range of pieces that'll provoke conversations about the different viewpoints in the community. (Also, I think I still have space to spare, in case you wanted to get something in suuuuuuper last-minute.)

I'll make a more general post later.

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fantasyecho — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 05:18:05 GMT

Spent most of today sore and aching from last night's fever, which was pretty rough. I caught it because I was underdressed and walking home after dark. Followed by getting into a heated room. Could feel the heaty-ness rising over the evening, and by 7pm, it was full blown. Around 9pm, I think I went out into the hallway and I was shivering so much from the temp drop.

What followed was a miserable night of consistent waking up because I kept on sweating so much, so I had to wipe my face a lot. I was much better by morning, but still aching a lot.

I feel much better now, my forehead has cooled down significantly, my butt is still sore, but I went out to get cornflakes.

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fantasyecho — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 05:52:59 GMT

For whatever reason, LiveJournal loads really easily in China! I have not been able to access any social networks or email. Which is nice on one hand. On the other, the only app on my phone that works is WhatsApp. And considering that I don't remember any of my passwords, using a VPN has not been useful. (Also Gmail rightfully doesn't trust my VPN log-in attempts but it keeps trying to send me a text message to my American number, which I can't access anyway because I don't have roaming.) Plus, trying to tweet through VPN doesn't work. Just, ugh.

I landed at 6.40, about an hour after I should have arrived, and got a shuttle bus (paid twice more than I should have, probably) and got to the hotel like twenty minutes before my panel. YL has been great in introducing me to people. Most of the papers have been in Chinese but the powerpoints are bilingual, so it hasn't been totally lost. Then again, most of what I'm getting is that there is some hella exciting scholarship in Chinese SF which I have zero access to, haha. I did sit through all the panels and meals even though I was really tired, because damn if I wanted to miss the day after missing an entire day yesterday.

The plan today was to grade all day but I managed to meet some folks at breakfast who were interested in taking a walk out to the Lama Temple nearby, so I got to go sightseeing a bit. Folks have been really nice to me and talking to me as much as they can in English, which makes me feel bad because there's no way for me to do the favour and try to speak in Chinese in any limited fashion, either, since my vocabulary is so nonexistent.

But now I'm back in the hotel, with no internet, so I might as well try to do as much grading as possible. Maybe even a bit of writing.

fantasyecho — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 17:03:50 GMT

- I have an interview this morning with the University Writing Program, since I don't have a TAship for next quarter.

- Went to Los Angeles yesterday. Took the Lyft for the first time to the Metrolink, which was good, and again to the Consulate's visa office. I expected a long line but nope, I was first in line. I can go get back my passport on Friday but since I won't have time, I'll just go again next Tuesday.

I found the Metro train just a block away and went back to Union Station, after fretting about getting bus money which led to the purchase of some baked goods. So when I went to the temple in Chinatown, I left the baked goods at the last altar (it's a shabby altar for forgotten souls). I burned some paper money. I sat and meditated for a while. People were still visiting it as tourists, like any other normal day.

Then I went to Homegirl Cafe where I bought a baked good for myself, went to lunch at Union Station, played some Pokemon Go, caught the train home. Decided that if the #16 bus came to the Metrolink first, I'd go to campus and do my GSA office hours. If not, I'll go home and nap. The #16 came.

I graded on the train and the rest of the day. The first batch of 30 papers will be done by this afternoon. They're pretty terrible papers (a lot of students trying to coast by on not having read the Iliad) so it's a bit easy to grade since I don't have to parse what's wrong and what's accurate.

- Besides the interview today, I have two more meetings.

- Yesterday, I called the Mayor's office to ask about whether the International Student Friendly Taskforce is going to issue a statement on the election. The person in charge of it isn't in town so I'll call back next week, but the official DID tell me that it's usually not the Mayor's habit to comment on national issues. To which I said, "oh, hm," because I was really just experimenting on how easy it is to call the Mayor's office.

- I spent the weekend crying a lot.

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fantasyecho — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 20:10:18 GMT

Well, as one might say, there goes the neighbourhood.

I hope you guys are okay.

Open thread if anybody wants to talk.

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fantasyecho — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 20:23:19 GMT

- I join the ranks of WisCon Chronicle editors who have to chase down submissions! If you want to submit to the WisCon Chronicles but needed more time, let me know! Or if you have an interesting post or essay you wrote a long time ago that you think would work for the theme (Trials by Whiteness) then feel free to forward that to me, too. I'm hoping to have essays, poetry, fiction about conditional whiteness, the change in atmosphere at WisCon, and the use of the safer spaces (of which we now have THREE!!!).

- I submitted two job apps, and just heard back from one... they want more materials. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. I'm also working on another job application for another creative writing position. I am a lot less qualified for that one, but it's in Oregon!

- I'm writing a postdoc app right now and it's due today and I have no idea what I'm doing but oh well.

- I'm strangely stymied for this last chapter. There's a lot I want to say! But what order and how to best make my argument coherent? Argh!

- My department doesn't have enough TAships to offer me one, so I'm out of a job for next quarter. Put myself into the interdisciplinary and University Writing Program pools, and we'll see what happens.

- The new movie based on Ted Chiang's novella, ARRIVAL, is playing tonight at UC San Diego. I have, of course, idiotically double-booked myself. Oh well. I'm still going but I'll have to do some legwork for the other event I organized tonight. Bah!

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Foster pup

fantasyecho — Sun, 23 Oct 2016 06:39:58 GMT

I have been fostering a puppy! My friend Xio found him in her yard, scared and skittish but still tame enough to lure into her apartment. She was too frazzled to keep him around, so I offered to take him in, since I have some limited experience with handling dogs. Also because he is so dreadfully adorable. I bathed him the first night I got him, he pooped on my carpet. He's had a couple of accidents peeing in the house since but not in the last couple of days! Not only that but he's gone from being super scared of all the things to being relatively calm, and he's even a little playful now. He really just needed a stable place with regular food and walks.

The first morning after I took him in he snuck past me out the door and his idea of playing was goading someone to catch him, which is annoying because this also freaks him out!!! I had to follow him a bit and we went around and around a laundry room. He wouldn't let me get close and I couldn't tell how close he would let me get until too late. Finally I went around the other way and he saw me coming from the direction he was NOT expecting so he froze and let me pick him up. Since then I've been more careful about him being near the door. He is otherwise really good about being left home, as long as I've given him a really long walk beforehand.

I took him with me to the bank on Friday afternoon, and he just walked and walked and walked, even though it was incredibly hot out. This dog has got some kinda stamina. I'm tempted to walk him some 5km just to see how long he'll go. He was avoiding grass for a time, preferring pavement, but now he's enjoying being on the grass and gambols a little, even. I'm very pleased with the progress he's made in the couple short days I've had him. He finds himself a little place to sleep whenever I'm in the room (a shelf of mine, usually, or a crowded corner) but when I get up to leave the room he has to follow to investigate. Even so, he won't come when called, and he doesn't really bond well. He doesn't mind being cuddled but he hasn't instigated it.

He's also not great with big crowds of people--we came across one today while walking on campus and he froze on the middle of the pavement and wouldn't walk some more. I had to nudge him to the side before he was comfortable walking past them. But he is much better than before with strangers. We've also had encounters with other dogs and he at least shows some requisite curiousity about them instead of just running away!

A professor Xio knows is interested in taking him, so we're waiting to hear back from her to see if her family's into the adoption. Xio's also put up Craigslist ads looking for the original owner. Our theories are that the pup either ran away or was abandoned. I'm leaning towards abandoned, considering that Xio found him in her yard and she lives in a house right by the foothills around here which have COYOTES. I'm pretty impressed by how he's survived. But we do think he was owned before: he's good with a leash on, and he's really tame, and he knows how to climb staircases. He's also been relatively easy to housetrain, and I suspect it's because he HAS been housetrained before, once upon a time.

And he is, all told, really adorable! He's really small, with wiry hair on his back. I think he's part dachshund, at the very least. I'm super tempted to adopt him myself, but as long as my schedule is such a see-saw, I don't really have the wherewithal to take on a puppy as young as he is (he's supposed to be about 7 months) and train him the way he ought to be trained. So if there's someone who wants him and has experience with difficult dogs, he should go with them! I'm just glad I got to foster him and help him settle down and come out of his shell a little. The professor was very impressed by him. Fingers crossed puppy gets a home soon! She'll let us know by tomorrow night what the verdict is, and if so, she'll get him on Thursday.

(Xio has been calling him Simon... I just call him "pup pup." I'm very creative.)

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blergh

fantasyecho — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 06:35:37 GMT

SIGH, forgot to pay rent and got an ALARMING notice that was all "PERFORM YOUR COVENANT OR PAY" and I'm liks t????? what is this legalese for? So I checked my checkbook and found I forgot to pay October rent, and rather than just, idk, give me a call, they left me a note with big words. I've been on campus from 9am to usually 9pm every day for the last few days, I'm not gonna process this and I probably would have come home sooner and paid rent immediately in the afternoon!!! If I had just been called!!! WTF. I've never had this with a landlord before--in everywhere I've lived previously, even property managers have called me to check in and reminded me about rent rather than just roll a note on my door (not even sticking it on! Just rolled up by the door knob. UGH).

So, I'm never fucking baking cookies for the ladies of the office again, because fuck this culture where one can put in all this emotional labour and still get treated like a disposable client after all these years. (Since 2012!!! They know me by name and face! They know my unit number and everything! Fuck this, and fuck California.)

Anyway for the last few days I've either been working on my Utopian Studies paper, or revising my job applications. One's due in like a week?? And another two on Nov 1. So I'd like to get them all out of my hair ASAP so I can focus on my dissertation chapter. And I've been having concentration problems which doesn't really help.

On the bright side I've been socializing quite a bit. Exec council stuff, and I went to the open house of International Affairs. I feel this might be my most effective year yet, if I can keep it together.

I've also dedicated a little bit of time, usually every other evening, to letting myself play Pokemon Go across campus. Lots of stops, and quite a few gyms. I'll find a place where I can sit down and pick a fight for a while. A Pokemon Go buddy, My, from Environmental Toxicology, has been coming along and sometimes we take down gyms together. We have a plan to wake up early one weekend morning and try to cruise campus when no one's around to claim all the gyms.

I'm also pretty sure I can ID a player as I pass. I saw a dude today who I'm sure was training the gym I wanted to pick a fight with, so I tried to look for a place to be comfy (he was standing by the staircase, and I think he lives there). Finally settled down to a fight and took down all 4 levels of the gym. It's pretty satisfying to do that, especially with higher-level opponents. There's a church behind me that has a gym and a Valor crew there pretty much all the time, and the lowest Defender is around 1600 CP. You don't get to knock off prestige points if you beat only like, a few at a time, so I've had to leave it alone. But someday I shall find someone to work with me and we'll take it down!!!

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fantasyecho — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 19:19:44 GMT

I had a good birthday day! I intend to stretch the birthdayness out the whole week. It was nice and cloudy in the morning so I put on makeup even! And dressed nice. I had popcorn chicken for lunch, and hung with some of the new internationals a bit. Then I chilled in my office doing emails, and at 3 met with a couple of people to check out the new library exhibit on utopian fiction. It didn't take long and so I went to the Botanic Gardens with one of the new students, and we then went to a 4pm reception of the exhibit. Then Maurisa, Javi, Eric and I went to dinner at Tio's, and Javi suggested we go get some cake and he bought me a huge tres leche cake. Maurisa had baked me some brownies so we went to get it, and Javi's dog, and back to my complex where the dog could run around and we could eat at one of the picnic tables.

People apparently dig my voice when it is broken by a severe cough which is weird.

Also while I like dressing up and all, turns out I am so much more comfortable in t-shirt and shorts and sneakers. I started with a nice blouse and beautiful long skirt, and finished with my Azn Trek shirt, shorts, my new running shoes (which I have described as my "young, scrappy and hungry Pokemon trainers") and my Blak Trek sweater.

My dad got me a little vacuum robot thing! It's an iRova K6L and while it's not as clever as a Roomba, it does the job. It keeps coming into the small corridor of the bedroom doorways and sometimes wants to get onto the carpet of my bedroom because I have my door open, and sometimes I have to pick it up and move it elsewhere like an intractable turtle. It's great, it is doing better than I expected. It's supposed to come with its own wiping cloth but there are only 3 of them, now 2, because I've used it to death, and I'm testing it out with one of the Swiffer dry cloths to see if that works as well.

My sick is still abiding, so I'm going to have a lot of fruit smoothie and rice porridge (I figure I should get all the Vitamin C) until it goes away.

Hopefully I get to LA tonight to see Nisi read from EVERFAIR!

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fantasyecho — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 01:38:23 GMT

Dammit.

I don't want to apply for jobs in the States because frankly I have no interest in remaining in the States, but a TT asst prof job in science fiction studies just opened up in Florida and argh.

I should at least try?

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some professional updates

fantasyecho — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 14:00:14 GMT

MY FAIS IS ON LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE AS AN AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT *KERMIT FLAIL*

ALSO the roundtable I did with Justine Ireland on "Writing Characters of Color When You Are White" is LIVE!!!!

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Singapore and Pokemon Go

fantasyecho — Mon, 29 Aug 2016 05:14:20 GMT

So I'm using a Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, which uses Android v5.1.1. I'm still trying to get the hang of it and I have to look up how to organize folders and stuff. The phone is a bit too wide for my liking, alas, at 2.99inches. Still getting used to the touchscreen, which I'm not crazy about. I have a longer post coming about shopping for smartphones versus shopping for phones brewing in me, because I have many shopping-for-phone feels. Still, it should allow me to roam around in the States without having to switch my SIM card... I'm hoping this will still hold when I change my plan from a GoPhone account to something else which will allow me data usage.

I have totally progressed in Pokemon Go! Around Level 10 I did the Lucky Egg + Mass Evolution combo and went up to Level 13.

When I went to Singapore last weekend, I was expressly forbidden to play by my dad but I used mall wifi here and there. A friend also generously let me hop onto his hotspot (he has more data per month than he could ever use) at some point, and I felt bad when Pokemon starting spawning on my phone and not his. Good haul, though. I added a lot more to my Pokedex, and yesterday when I went to the Marina Bay Sands Shoppes, I finally caught a Pikachu. There was one more Pokemon which I wanted to add to the Pokedex but I was already late for lunch with my hostess so I skedaddled home instead.

It was a really marvelous weekend! My hostess is a friend and former worker of my dad's, and her daughter just got back from Australia doing an English degree, so we had lots to talk about. They're very churchy people tho so we didn't spend much time together. (Also their apartment was right between two Pokestops, so I spent a lot of time harvesting.)

On Saturday I went to have brunch with jolantru, and two others came to join us, Christopher Hwang and SEAsteampunk contributor Timothy Dimacali!! Chris had to leave us after lunch, but Timothy joined us at the fish spa :D

I went back to my hostess' place at Red Hill for a rest, and then went to have dinner with delfinuum (she is so smol!), and we played Pokemon Go in Raffles City for a while until I ran out of Wifi usage time. So we went to the Singapore Night Fest since it was nearby and ended up marveling at Nyonya embroidery and beadwork in the Peranakan Museum.

Yesterday I woke early and had breakfast with my hostess, and they were going to be at church until noon which left me two hours on my lonesome. I was feeling kinda tired so I only left at 11am and wandered to Marina Bay Sands to find out how to get to the Observation Deck. Took some pictures (oh, I have an Instagram now, because of the smartphone; I aim to be one of those insufferable selfie-takers) and went to the shopping mall side where I proceeded to catch Pokemon, just because I could.

The GPS is really wonky in Singapore, though. I wandered further than I actually was unless I was on the move. Kinda interesting, and I don't really want to complain too much because it means my 10km egg hatched earlier than expected (Electabuzz!).

I have to say that highway Pokestops are very interesting and fruitful places! I caught a Clefable on the way home :D Also it's fascinating what random things Ingress agents have decided should be portals... most of them don't actually take pictures of the stops themselves but random crap around it like... water towers. My bus was also caught in a traffic jam and I figured opening up Pokemon Go would make the jam go quicker.

This morning I decided to see how Map My Walk would interact with Pokemon Go! Because I wanted to hatch a buncha eggs all at once. (Three!) Turns out it doesn't work well... I think the GPS is suspended a little whenever catching a pokemon, and it doesn't register on the Walk app. So I had a few straight lines where there shouldn't have been because of the pause in GPS data. And if I'm not flicking between the two regularly the route doesn't quite register on the Walk app. I'm gonna try to experiment a bit more with this though, because I would really like to record my Pokemon hunts.

My dad's traveling until tomorrow night and I really want to go Poketrawling with him at least someplace further than the nearby lake or shops once before I leave for the States, so hopefully this will be a thing.

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fantasyecho — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 02:34:39 GMT

Mum wanted to go shopping yesterday and I agreed. We went to the World of Sports and then to Parkson. She's a lot calmer without my dad around, but still boring--she's not good at judging clothing unless it makes her look slim. And because I'm there, I also bear the brunt of the fat-shaming.

Because I was with her, I didn't get to start playing Pokemon Go until much later, when Kristin got to Subang Parade. And even then, there was no Pokemon catching until AFTER my mom left.

Kristin's husband had some sort of religious/spiritual/out-of-body experience that he really needed to talk about and with someone who's used to, idk, non-normative narratives? It was pretty cool; I didn't really have any advice for him other than to blog about it.

While driving around looking for parking in SS15, I managed to snag a Krabby and a Squirtle! (And while Kristin's husband was talking, a Magmar showed up.)

I've probably said it but I'm really excited to be reconnecting with Kristin like this.

Afterwards, I made my brother walk a round with me for a bit so I could nab some Pokestops that I didn't have a chance to hit up earlier. Added a Poliwag and Exeggcute to my pile! Among other things like Caterpies, the usual Pidgeys, and Ratatas which are ABUNDANT in SS15. I'm still waiting for the chance to take a picture of a real rat right by a Ratata. I lost a Bellsprout, tho =(

I've got to buy my bus tickets to get down to Singapore so I can see JOYCE!!!!!!!!!!!! and DEL!!!!!!!!!!! but it means figuring out where I'm staying, too, oops.

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fantasyecho — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 15:11:49 GMT

- Been having lunch with Tariq, which has been good. We ventured out to find some Pokestops, despite the hot sun. We also found a nice little cafe.

- Had breakfast with Kristin the other morning, which was great. I haven't really sat down with just her in years, when I've seen her it's usually with another friend. Which is weird considering she's my oldest childhood friend. And it's been nice to find out that we DO have things to talk about. She's actually a great listener, and she's also funny. We were going to visit the old school, but her kid had chest pains so she had to leave.

- Went shopping with Nina as well on the same day, which was also good. I really really needed new bras. I also got a lip brush and brush cleaner, and some new jeans. Yay!

- Dinner with Ray the other night, along with her mom and her second brother Thari, who happened to be out of the forest for a while. (This is the cousin doing research on dung beetles.)
(Ray caught a Squirtle and a Jigglypuff.)
(This prompted my dad to say, "okay! when we go home, we download Pokemon Go and try this game.)

- I went to a cafe that Tariq and I found today, and sat there for about 4 or 5 hours working. It's got really good WiFi, but the chicken chop was kinda lackluster. Still, I like the owner and I want to get some cake there sometime.

- Dad and I went walking around Subang Lake today. This was also a Pokemon Go trip. We took way longer than expected because he hadn't registered, and he had to come up with a nickname and all the things and blah. I told him we could catch a Pikachu as a starter Pokemon, but he instead looked at the screen, said, "this one is the biggest, so I'll catch this one." It took him a while to realize he had to flick the Pokeball, so we ended the walk around Subang Lake with 8 Pokemon (Magikarps, Ratatas, a Pidgey, and the starter Bulbasaur).

After eating at Silva's, we headed home (with a brief Pokestop). After that we went to walk the dog, where we proceeded to catch even more Pokemon. Some zealous Ingress agent did a thing of making practically all sorts of things a portal: frigging seesaws on the playground, random murals that aren't even there anymore, a shrine outside someone's house (and shrines in people's businesses), and hanging key signs outside the locksmith's. It's all very random and weird. My brother played Ingress and he's pretty sure he knows the agent who designated all those spots.

Nonetheless, we came away with a haul involving Eeves, Pidgeottos, Spearows, and even a Gastly.

We're going to Gasing Hill tomorrow to incubate a couple of eggs. (He has 9 eggs! WHERE DID THE EGGS COME FROM?) Dad also wants to try the curveball thing.

- Mom's annoyed that Dad's into Pokemon Go and we'll see how long she holds out seeing as she now has a smartphone just so she can keep up with everybody else.

- I'm annoyed enough by this that I'm looking into smartphone options this end.

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Call for Submissions: WisCon Chronicles 11!

fantasyecho — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 16:00:05 GMT

*yelling* I'M EDITING THE WISCON CHRONICLES THIS YEAR!!

The theme is "Trials by Whiteness" and I'm pretty open to different forms of exploring the theme.

So please send me things!!! Submissions open on Aug 15, close Oct 31, and I'm taking pitches anytime. I'd love to see stuff like roundtables, or conversations between two people who seem on opposite ends of a spectrum. Like a panel report, but from different perspectives. I'm also open to bonkers things like graphs and charts.

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5am, 1pm

fantasyecho — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 21:51:54 GMT

I'm in the transit hotel at Incheon. It's been a few travel full days. My computer says it's 1pm, and the clock on the wall says it's 5pm. I got in around 6pm local time, checked into the transit hotel, and crashed.

As soon as I got back from Clarion, I was out having dinner with Birgit. S came over on Wednesday to hang out--we went to lunch and watched Ghostbusters. (Leslie Jones was underused; Katie McKinnon was annoying except when she was talking science and even that was tiresome; Melissa McCarthy is good; Kristin Wiig's character was so incompetent I couldn't stand it.) Stopped by JoAnn's so I could get some jewelry things for my new piece of tree sap (which I saw on a tree in Balboa Park and made my classmate Derek get for me). It looks really good. Then the next day, I hung with Maurisa and Eric, and then Maurisa and I met with Nalo in the evening. Maurisa brought her friend and we went to Haagen-Daaz to get some icecream and listen to the live band playing in Uni Village.

The Amtrak to Oakland was some 11 hours; I missed the 6.50am train to LA because taxis are unreliable. But the 8.10 train got me to the train tracks, right on time for the Coast Starlight. I lugged my luggage to the Bart station, found Claire's place, and was greeted by Tempest.

Spent the whole Saturday with Tempest! We had breakfast with one of my classmates, and then worked in Borderlands for several hours before heading out to dinner with Chris. Then Joyce and Randy came out to hang and play Pokemon Go so we went to Dolores Park for it. So many Pokemon in SF!

Sunday morning, Maurisa came to get me and we went to dim sum with Emily.

Airport airport airport. The flight was 11 hours long so I watched the following:

MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING 2: This was AMAZING and I am SO glad I got to watch it. It picks up 17 years after the first movie, and since the characters have been established, there is SO much more going on alongside the main three plotlines. Paris is annoying as a teen as can be expected, but adorable all the same (especially her face when she discovers her date is a nice Greek boy, and I also like that he doesn't show up at the end); Toula and Ian are still sqwooshy. I was VERY pleased to see the continued involvement of Ian's parents, who were taciturn and a bit nervous in the first movie, in the whole family drama. It took me a while to realize that yes, they were in the family group, actively volunteering to help out. There were subplots involving family reunions, and as usual I really love how the men of the family act so macho but it turns out to not be a kind of toxic masculinity ("It's not good to keep secrets from your family," said Nick and I BAWLED when I realized what happened). Mama-yaya's character got really fleshed out in a really beautiful way; she was used mostly for comedy in the first movie, and she got a lot more moments in this one that's interestingly, uh, symbolic. Things have changed for Toula and Ian, like Toula losing her travel agency job due to the economy, but it was so believable, and the ups and downs of the family are trite but WHO CARES, it's a story about a family, with attendant suffocation and all. It was a satisfying, satisfying movie that hit all my buttons.

ZOOTOPIA: I see why this movie is good--it's got an ambitious scope and the plot twists and turns are really great. Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde are also really competent characters, which I like. I, uh.... I don't buy the worldbuilding, really. I think the scale is great with multiple climate types in a single city to have multiple types of animals, but what are the predators eating? Seriously. This bugged me all through the movie: WE NEVER SEE THEM EATING. Except donuts and popsicles. But it moves right along, each act feeding into each other really well.

THE MASTER: I watched this because I saw it playing on someone's screen ahead of me, which had two main characters having an intense conversation about their marriage while the husband is beating up thugs, and she's all like "we got married with the understanding that we would separate" and had great lines like "With or without a gardener, flowers die regardless. With or without a man, a woman would still live her own life."| It's not very coherent as a movie: a Wing-Chun master comes to Tianjin to establish a school (translated as dojo in the subs) but apparently the rules are that he needs a disciple who is a local to defeat at least 8 of the schools, and the disciple afterwards must leave Tianjin. Then there's the whole business where he marries a local woman (who's unmarried because she had a baby out of wedlock) for reasons unclear to me. Then there're the machinations of one of the leading schools (led by this woman who never does any actual martial arts, she's the wife of a former Grandmaster, and she's always really well-dressed), some double-crossings by a current grandmaster and the military gets involved and also a dual love story involving the disciple and a local noodle seller who I think is supposed to be coded as an ethnic minority due to her costume and aaaaaaaaaaaaaa what is going onnnnnnn. Like I felt like the movie was shot just so everyone could look cool (and to be fair, everyone does look cool)--it's so artful and posed. I also have never seen a Chinese movie with SO MANY random white people in the background before: the wife worked in a Western restaurant, seemingly the only local there; the grandmaster likes to watch performances of that Russian folk dance where the dancers seem to float across the floor. But really one would watch it for the escalating fight scene, especially the last part where it looks like the protagonist is making his way through a series of final bosses.

THE TALE OF TALES: This movie is hella fucked up and I watched it because I like fairytales but as far as fairytales go, this got hella dark and the bodycount was really high. It has about THREE stories in the one movie, and they never really cohere together other than, sometime at the beginning the characters come together for a funeral, and at the end the three courts come together again for a coronation. But you don't really see the characters from the different threads ever really talking to each other otherwise. And it's super fairytale because it's lush and gorgeous but apparently each kingdom really only needs like the ONE town to sustain it. it's based on a collection of Neapolitan tales, everyone is a one-note character, and it's made to be beautiful and lush and gorgeous, not to make any sense.

THE JUNGLE BOOK: This was pretty meh. There's still hella anthropocentrism up the wazoo; Mowgli is a special snowflake; I don't understand why the animals have American accents. It was entertaining but in the end I didn't care.

I played a lot of Phlinx, and now am in a transit hotel killing time trying to sleep some more. It's 7am, I only need to check out at 9am. So I'm gonna try to be horizontal a bit more.

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Brief Stop

fantasyecho — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 03:40:14 GMT

I am back in Riverside, from Clarion. My classmate Alan and I had planned on staying in San Diego but we couldn't find a hotel last minute and I ran out of people to call to put us up for the night. So he drove to Riverside last night, crashed on my couch, and left this morning. (This was rather necessary as the night prior, he partied until the wee hours and was also awake fairly early, only having a 20-minute nap sometime during our wanderings in Balboa Park.)

I am so tired and so sad and yet also quite relieved that it is over.

I don't get to sleep in my own bed because Soon Young is subletting my room until the end of August but the couch is incredibly soft so I'll use that. I'll also take a train up to San Francisco (Amtrak to Oakland) and stay with Claire Light a couple of days before I fly back to Malaysia.

Right now to relax my brain I'm going to listen to some music and play some Shanghai Mahjong.

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fantasyecho — Sun, 10 Jul 2016 06:54:03 GMT

Andy's come and gone.
This week is the first week that we're showing signs of fraying and also being careless around each other.

- Jen and I got out to the Aquarium today. I bought little manta ray earrings ^_^

- Got out to the beach again on Thursday too, and discovered to my horror that sand had been collecting in the inner lining of my swimsuit, which means a huge dollop of sand collecting right at the crotch /o\

Good thing it's a nudist beach so I could just take the whole thing off, and Emily and I went into the ocean to bounce for a bit.

- Hard to believe it's halfway over. I'm not sure I even got a hold of it.

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