Fire (San Diego, CA; 11/2010)

Birthdays & Abducting Friends (San Diego, CA; 11/2010)

NYinBW (Long Island City, NY; 10/2010)

Stuff

I feel a little disgusted by excess, by myself. I went furniture shopping with my Mom today, on my first full day back in NY. It's my first time staying at their new home in Long Island, deep in the boonies, off the side of some middle class road where strip malls are "shoppes" and all produce is organic. The house is big and still mostly empty, spread thin with traces of our old home in Queens. We grew up poor, but sometime while I was away at college and later working in LA, things changed.

Unexpectedly, I was at once relieved and saddened to find that the many items they had hoarded and refurbished over the past 20 years in the US had been thrown away in the move. And as we snaked through the various show floors in search of a second set of couches for an upstairs seating area, I felt an uneasiness welling up with each but cursory glance my Mom gave to the price tag of something that caught her fancy.

----

A few weeks ago, I bought myself a nice Marc Jacobs purse. In all fairness, I don't shop often, and when I do, it's usually one or two items on sale (like the purse). Buying stuff isn't usually top of mind for me. I wear items that last and clean out my closet regularly for Goodwill.

And, so, I justify nicer purchases as occasional investments that will be used until their dying day--just like my old phone whose screen was cracked and crumbling, and was only thrown out when it finally refused to wake up one balmy summer morning..just like Carl, my 1991 Toyota Cressida who spun out on the highway, hit a side railing causing engine damage, and eventually decelerated into an eerie silence off the shoulder of the 60 East.

All this writing, even now, is a shame-based attempt to convince myself that I haven't sold out to a level of comfort that is unnecessary but permissible by the world's standards--not completely, wholly, or easily. Part of me is still putting up a fight. In all honesty, the most freedom I've felt in recent years came with the selling/giving away of my few belongings before heading out to China to teach for three months. There I lived in the girls dorm with communal showers, out of just one suitcase with two pairs of jeans and my Chicago sweats. It was plain, austere living among others doing the same, and I haven't since then felt that I needed anything more.

But I have so much, I realize. Coming home to the States after those three months, I eagerly clicked through Craigslist listings for single room rentals. Pack light and be ready to go. Perhaps sensing this and worried about my inability to settle down, my parents asked me to find some cheap real estate as an investment. It only made sense in a buyer's market, they said. And, so I did, and furnished the empty space with well-loved items with character from thrift stores and a couch I rather like purchased with a glut of amassed credit card points. I somewhat took pride in the final product that cost little, but was still very much more than what I've needed or wanted.

My camera battery is dead.

This leaves me thinking about random stuff I've wanted to photograph but couldn't, like the bottom-lit clouds I saw hovering over the 60 freeway at dusk or the Vegas skyline at dawn.

I like it when the crackling of thunder cuts through summer heat.

Chicago @ Night (Chicago, IL; 06/2010)

Fun with light from the Adler Planetarium:

Meg's Wedding - Before (The Poconos, PA; 06/2010)

I'm having some trouble pulling together all the wedding pictures into an engaging visual narrative.

It's difficult because I realize that, more often than not, I don't treat picture-taking as a journalistic endeavor. Usually, something just catches my attention and I'm soon fixated and snapping away in an attempt to capture it. This produces a lot of random images of many random things that don't always tell a story. The lighting in each photo is different, as are the composition and the subjects. All that said, it's been taking a little extra long time tweaking with Gimp (long live open source!) to pull together a visually cohesive story with what I got over the weekend.

I like to blame this a few things:

1) the aforementioned obsession with taking lots and lots pictures of many random things
2) technical shortcomings, like my non-SLR lens that isn't always able to capture moments fast enough, depending on the lighting (a poor excuse that's quite possibly an attempt at justifying the purchase of a new camera)
3) my actual participation IN the wedding, which kept me from really taking on the role of a good historian
In any case, it was a beautiful wedding with beautiful people nestled in the beautiful Poconos mountains.

Community (Yosemite National Park - 05/2010)

Times like these, I wish I had a real copy of Photoshop.

Doors & Shops (Barcelona, Spain - 2/2009)

I never went into any of them.

Been tired lately.

Back to Gaudí (Barcelona, Spain; 2/2009)

I <3 Gaudí.

Tumen 5 - No Vons (Tumen, China; 11/2008)

The North Market was a one-stop-shop for everything from fresh fish and vegetables to fly swatters, school supplies, and tailoring services. It was one big open rectangle, with vendor spilling into vendor. Butcher tables and seafood tanks stood in the center while vegetables, grains, beans, and other dry goods flanked the outer walls. Behind those walls, there were small eateries for dumplings and noodles. And those stood alongside hidden, often unmanned shops.

It wasn't so much the eating and shopping that I enjoyed--I kind of just liked getting lost in a landscape that was so different from the sea of Del Tacos and supermarket chains in the LA burbs.

Does Anyone Else See Coral? (Barcelona, Spain; 2/2009)

Anyone?

Tumen 4 - Broken Bridges (Tumen, China; 10/2008)

The neat thing about Tumen is that it's right across the river from NK. If I remember my history correctly (and I may not), the Japanese built a number of bridges over the Tumen and Yalu rivers during their occupation of NE China (mid 1930s through the mid 1940s). Their primary purpose was to provide a quick route for the transportation of looted resources from China to Japan. Unfortunately/fortunately, these bridges were destroyed not too long after they were constructed: further south along the Yalu, some were bombed by the Americans during the Korean War in the early 1950s. Far up in the NE, in Tumen, the Japanese actually had to bomb their own bridges as a means of blockading Russian attack, after the onset of the Russo-Japanese conflict.

The broken bridge along the Tumen River was never reconstructed, for obvious reasons, and remains unusable to this day. The funny thing is that you really don't need it to get to the other side (or for the other-siders to come across to China)--the river is narrow and shallow and it freezes over during the winter. Today, it's just this odd artifact of Chinese / Japanese / NK history that serves no practical purpose. There hasn't been an effort to clean up the debris and the fallen parts. It's just...kinda there.

I feel like those in the area (at least the older Chinese) passively acknowledge it as part of a past reality that they can still recall. And I feel like they look upon the first-world expats and tourists who come to seek it out so eagerly (cameras in tow) with some degree of mirth and judging bemusement.

Tumen 3 - Nothing for Kids (Tumen, China; 10/2008)

There isn't much in Tumen for young people. You can walk around the entire town in under three hours and the local economy is fueled by the outside world--a mix of tourism and foreign currency sent home by overseas workers (this included many of my students' parents) in South Korea, Singapore, and sometimes the US.

There were a few businesses that catered to more affluent local youth however. The kids whose parents sent money home oftentimes spent it playing Starcraft at 24-hour internet pubs or drinking at the bars against school rules. The kids with no money worked for their tuition by cleaning the squatters in the dorms and mopping the floors.

Tumen 2 - Students (Tumen, China; 10/2008)

I was there for three months teaching English at a vocational school for Korean-Chinese students, ages 15-24. Most were from disadvantaged backgrounds or broken homes. Some were extremely bright, but just didn't have a chance at going to regular school. Others were bad kids who were forced back into the classroom by grandparents and relatives. They were all eager for attention in one way or another.

Tumen 1 - Landscape (Tumen, China; 10/2008)

Tumen is a small town in NE China. It's surrounded by farmland on three sides and North Korea on the fourth. Sometimes on clear days, you can see people walking around on the NK side--a farmer, a child, a soldier in arms. On most nights you see the steady, soft lights of the detention center downtown.

BLAST

I lost part of an entry earlier this evening when my laptop ran out of power.

Please enjoy this picture of my sister eating a burrito while I try to recover it.

I like good kids. (Seattle, WA; 4/2009)

I've been going through my pictures from the past couple of years (hence this blog) and found this one from a trip to Seattle I made just around a year ago. I was visiting one of my favorite families (from my short stint in China) with three of the sweetest, most innocent kids in the world.

It's strange how you feel like a different person with different people. I think I like myself better around them--I'm who I fancy myself to be on the best of good days. It helped that the kids were so endearing and joyful and that the parents were so admirable in many ways. It helped, too, that they reminded me that I'm not always tired and sarcastic.

There's life outside of marketing.

Hi, Zachary!

More lighting fixtures. (Barcelona, Spain; 2/2009)

 

Oh, the strange obsessions that I have...I just think they're beautiful. I like examining things like lighting fixtures and fencing material in other countries because I think it's intriguing how design reflects the unique sensibilities of its native culture. I guess lighting fixtures are a little different because they're meant to be part of a larger aesthetic, but the idea is that their function and practicality are expressible in so many ways. What am I saying? I don't know. It's 1PM and I'm taking a 10-minute break from writing about open source software.

Anyways, the lighting fixtures above adorned the ceilings of a museum honoring a lesser known Spanish artist from the 1800s.

Shop at night. (Barcelona, Spain; 2/2009)

I was on a side street in Las Ramblas in the middle of the night. Stores were still open, their colors deeper and more saturated than what's permitted by daylight.

Not sure if I thought anything more about this moment other than that it was really beautiful.

From Inside a Mansion: La Pedrera (Barcelona, Spain; 2/2009)

From inside a mansion.

I like lighting fixtures. (Barcelona, Spain; 2/2009)

Who knew there were such simple, clean lines inside La Sagrada Familia?

I Heart Gaudi (and Jesus). (Barcelona, Spain; 2/2009)

While in Barcelona, I stayed at a hostel just a couple of blocks away from La Sagrada Familia.

I made two trips and I spent much of my time examining Gospel vignettes and admiring the shadows cast by construction scaffolding that decked the unfinished exterior.