hello grindstone,
after a weekend like that, it's nice to see you again.

a little bit sadistic
after 25 years, i've figured out that i like the pain and torture i put myself through. makes me know i'm alive...or something.
i have the tournament set up tonight. and the tournament tomorrow. oh, and i'm moving on sunday. and no, i haven't packed.

on a more personal level... growing up, i was uber-confident. in fact, i once had a teacher write a letter of rec with the entire first page talking about how i was maybe TOO confident. it carried over into college, and once graduation hit, i'm not sure quite what happened. it started slipping. and somehow japan got involved. and now i second guess or am intimidated by so much; i hate it.

but i had a breakthrough: one person that i had up on an untouchable pedestal of success and awe recently got me caught up in a conversation that was so normal? real? too personal? (it was about personal hygiene) that she immediately and respectfully came sailing off that goddess-type level and landed comfortably in the land of "the rest of us". and it was a good lesson for me to STOP DOING THAT to other people and realize that, when it comes down it, there's no reason to believe i'm any less awesome than any other fool.

in the end, was it worth it?
my eyes left the friendly aquamarine 7:44 display on the dash and traveled the familiar path to the mirror. i noticed the strange expression she had, somewhere in between surprise and sadness, with her hand fluttering near her eye. the rythym of the wand against her lashes was mechanical and unending, save for a small break to refresh the thick black gook. the wand returned to her lashes and feverishly worked to shed itself of its new coat onto the already viscid mass bordering her eye. i was fascinated with the concentration; both in technique and material, and the fact only one eye was the receipient of all this attention and dressing. as the traffic around me started to move, i was forced to break my stare and turn attention to larger, heavier objects (is it possible?) around me. i thought about a similar experience and glanced back into the mirror to see she was still at it, except now also operating a vehicle. my eyes fell back to the greenish glow of 7:53 and i nearly ran into the guard rail with the realization that my entire 'makeup routine' takes approximately 5-7 minutes, and this girl had spent nearly 10 minutes coating one eye with mascara. that's amazing.

i ♥...
i'm once again enraptured with the enchanting jane. i am so happy for her; she PACKED lestat's on friday night, 'standing' and 'on-your-tiptoes-from-the-crowded-sidewalk' room only.

i spent a lot of quality second-family time this weekend; funner times had by some more than others (with the number of asian-type folks in attendance, you should have seen the red-color palette being showcased on their shiny happy faces). i had such a good time, and am still full with all the food and toxic lemonade (sheesh, even i had to cut it with 7-up!)

i am in and out of my head trying to figure out where i fit with my extended family and how. it's like having a billion siblings... everyone brings something different to the group, and obviously the relationships in and amongst us are as complicated and varied as the members of the group. think about your own family, how you relate to and get along with each person in a different way and on different levels... and then multiply by 20. perhaps you can see why sometimes i'm right there in the moment and sometimes i feel like such a stranger.

almost unrelated quote of the moment: "impressive the way you've remained intact/since the day i met you with the spine you lacked." (courtesy of jane's high school nemesis :)... they're friends now)

i laughed, not because it was funny
"do you love him?" she asked from the vicinity of nowhere...

and all i could do was flush; it's a question i can't bring myself to answer.

shameless plugs

see jane sing. sing, jane, sing.
(lestat's, this friday, 9pm!)




ichiban is 24! sushi eating contest, this sunday 10am, $10 for 24 pieces
(satomi says, "s'okay, woman's division AND men's division ga aru.")




ucsd karate kobudo tournament
(why i've been a mad karate beast lately... may 28, 9:30a)

and the winner is...
shama-lama wins for being the trooper, albeit the crazy-concert-fanatic trooper, of the weekend. both of us hate crowds of strangers (eww, get OFF!) but we decided to tackle the pb block party. well, not exactly. after driving around for almost 2 hours on sat to find a parking space, i finally ended up parking at in-n-out, and shannon and clark came to rescue me with their guaranteed spot safely awaiting us at home. through some mixed communications, they finally got to me at rubios (what?!) and off we went to a house party. we did walk next to the street where block party was, and that was close enough for us. good times had by most, other than the whiskey in the eyeball incident (1 word: THATF*IN'HURTS!), and finished with some mexican food and the OC.
sunday morning found holly, rick, and i on the way up to l.a. for d's champagne bday brunch. horrible singing and tin-man spotting before the first bottle ever popped pretty much had rick thinking that both holly and i were nuts. and i'm okay with that. got to see some fab people who i miss greatly (captain obvious!! and, of course, dareeoosh) on the way home wondered if it was possible to have a hangover in the middle of the day. l.a. smog + champagne = britto the sicko. HOWEVER, trekked down to my future neighborhood to catch a concert with shama, ming, and some friends. shama had been there since some ungodly hour of noon or 2 or something (might i point out that the concert started at 9...PM). ended up leaving before the act i actually came to see. oh well, maybe next time.
made a book on friday night for sensei's bday (ask, and ye shall receive $1500 from generous students!) and it turned out way better than i had expected.

lessons learned from the weekend: whiskey in eyeball = bad, smog + champagne = bad, people's overwhelming generosity = super good.

sushi o tabetai!
ichi-jikan watashitachi wa nihongo no kurasu ni sushi ni suite hanashimashita. dakara, kurasu no owaru toki, takusan sushi o tabetai!
we spent an hour in japanese class talking about sushi, so by the time it was done i had a serious hankering for the stuff. i drove down to ichiban in hillcrest where satomi-san insisted that i join the sushi-eating contest next sunday. i tried to reason with her, saying that i can't eat that much (24pcs for $10... good deal!)

s: "ah, buritto-chan, daijoobu da. onna no katagori ga arimasu." (no worries, britt, there's a women's category.)
b: "hai, demo... yukkuri sushi o tabeteiru hito... mankitsu ga suki desu." (yes, but i like to eat sushi slowly, enjoy it.)

since the prize is 24 free meals, satomi-san insisted that i could enjoy it 24 times later. i didn't know how to say "you crazy, lady" in japanese, so i let her win.

an army of one
now i be pretty smart most of the time. i done college and all that. and i've been around bugs a lot. but there's something about discovering a trail of ants in your bedroom that makes you lose all logic and grab any sort of aerosol product that's around, regardless of its bug-repelling claims.
the question i was faced with last night: endust or magic starch?
i slipped off to sleep with foggy haze of fresh lemony scent bombing my room. at least the ants were dead.

you can't be too safe, can you?
i was buzzing around my mailroom domain when they were closing up the mailboxes (think of a hallway with 800 XL fedex boxes sticking out of either side) when i heard one of the mail-girls grumbling about how she didn't want to touch the boxes. curious, i looked a little closer at where she was grumbling to and immediately agreed: a temp working for pricing had cut the back of his hand, and while he was sliding in stacks of price labels, he had left 3-inch bloody skids in the boxes.

uhh, that's a problem.

my first thought was "uh, ew". my second thought was to go to see if anyone was missing a limb in pricing. and my third thought was towards the infinite levels of lawsuits that could possibly spring up, and there i was stuck. i wasn't sure what my next step was, other than to documentdocumentdocument. the guy who had cut himself was kind of a punk; obviously he hadn't noticed/cared about spreading his dna all over the place, but he wasn't too keen on remedying the situation with a bandage (for him), a glove (also for him), and some understanding that no one else was about to touch that, nor should they have to. we ended up replacing the boxes and dirtied memos inside... can you imagine receiving a fedex with blood IN it? like i said before, uh, ew.

workhorse
at the moment, i can relate to this:
long hours, less leisure
in the past 3 weeks, i have left my desk for lunch a total of 2 times. TWO times. and that's because someone else made me. i've stayed till 6 or 7. i've come in on sundays. and i'm starting to really freak out that i am setting myself up for a destructive routine.
next week marks the end of my japanese class, and i find myself frantically searching for something to fill that void. although a little credit goes to the 5/805 merge traffic and how to avoid it, the reason i have a crazy daily schedule is so i can force myself to extract my ass from my chair before OSHA has to come and do it for me. the number of times a day i look up and see that "holy crap, it's already (insert time of 3-4 hours ahead of what time you actually think it is)?!" is increasing. and i'm missing out on some great connections with people because my energy is off working somewhere else.
the scary part is it's not that i have a ton of work, necessarily. but i have the mentality that i'm the only one to do it. and when my boss isn't in the office, i'm the entire representative of my department of 2 1/2 people (the other guy's in portland, so he's only 1/2). fiona's out of town at the end of this month for almost 2 weeks, which means to me that i HAVE to be here. i joke around with her that i would love to play hooky, but the moment i do, that's when disaster will strike. it's security, i guess
i feel bad about venting to anyone about my worries since i know everyone's under pressure. except that $56 million-lotto winner in l.a... i'll bet he's chill at the moment.

my mistake
i don't hate anyone. in fact, i don't not like most people (don't not? double negative makes a positive, right?). but there are definitely some people i choose not to include into my life for whatever reason it is about their character that seems to clash with mine. seemingly, this isn't apparent to all.
i was in the neighborhood of my future apartment (!!) and stopped into lestat's to grab a latte in transit to hang in the hood of shama-lama. immediately upon entering the door my eyes fell upon adam. i know adam from japanese class or two ago, and he never quite struck me as someone who was comfortable. and that's fine, i'm supportive. but as i shared more and more time and space with adam, i grew to dislike him, mostly due to his blatant insults on my existence that seemed to randomly tumble out of his mumbling mouth. so it seemed he didn't like me either.
explain to me why, then, he immediately rushed to my side as i waited for my vanilla latte, queried me with personal questions, and insisted i join him till i was out of steamy vanilla foam? i had a perplexed look on my face as i quickly told him that i was off to meet someone but hey, take care! and out the door i went, wondering if maybe i had him all wrong from the get go. as i analyzed and admonished my judgement-call, over the urban murmur i heard the mumbler yell, "by the way, buritto-san, have you gained weight??"
i kept walking, confident in my ability to recognize a creep when i saw one.

it's not that i'm a bad liar
it's just that i let my face do the talking for me sometimes, like in answer to potentially-awkward questions such as "what do you think of this color on me?" and "sooooo, how did you like ((insert blind-date's name here))" and "are you all finished with that brownie?"