

Today I have strong feelings. Today I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel a migrant worker.
November 21st, 2022 § 0 comments § permalink
Today I have strong feelings. Today I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel a migrant worker.
November 10th, 2022 § 0 comments § permalink
About a month ago I was abruptly reassigned to another manager (incredulous reason I was given later was that my previous one was at his capacity for underlings), which must’ve prompted a dream where I was enlisted into a small cohort of unfamiliar folks from different departments as a part of some team-building exercise, the sort I’ve had to participate in more of since joining this company than in my entire career, and after taking a bathroom break, returned and was immediately put on the spot by the host. I was questioned as to the kind of person whose response to a new subject is to ask ‘of what importance is it’ or ‘how does it affect me’, in a rhetorical way, as if this were the enlightened course taken by our leaders. “Does this have any bearing on discussion during my absence,” I inquired, no, she answered, then snarkily replied, either someone who doesn’t have very much time or a narcissist. It’s attitudes like this that are really hurting my upward mobility, aren’t they?
In another more recent work-related scenario, Andy Hsu and I were onsite like we haven’t been in years, though I did have to remind him how our respective project responsibilities have changed as they have since. Alvin Jardin, from even further back, was the representative on the client side, and the three of us shared a connection which only made that special kind of sense it does in dreams whereby Andy’s piss flowed wirelessly through his bladder, but I regulated its entry into the toilet, hoping that by pausing and resuming ever-so casually I could reduce the embarrassing impression that I had let it accumulate for too long tonight.
November 6th, 2022 § 0 comments § permalink
When the fuck will I stop dreaming that I’m still in school? 윤대섭 and I were sharing a small room with flattened carpeting, and I realized I was late to class, took my backpack with one hand and a stack of books with the other, but not before his students began arriving and asking each other if I was his son. No time to look up directions—I had been to the first session so only a vague idea which direction to take on campus would have to do. There were several elevators in the building, and the nearest one open had filled fast; the up and down indicators lit above another across the hall, and I ran for it. Running always seems to require an unrealistic amount of effort (no doubt mirroring the bleak future that is come), but in this unusual case it produced the desired result and the nice old woman at the front of the passengers inside welcomed me. Half the service-sized large compartment was unoccupied, and I walked to the back and knelt against the wall on the empty left side to sort my things. An irascible gentleman who resembled Sean Bean in a red wig and black suit approached and told me that the space was reserved for riders with strollers, despite my taking up very little of it, not to mention a place closer to the others. It should have been quite clear from the expression I returned that he was free to go fuck himself.
October 25th, 2022 § 0 comments § permalink
Sexagenarian series seems only good for reminding us how old we are anymore, what with all there being to the new stories hyperkinetic visuals and characters who run around trying to explain them, surely not the stuff of later fan service …Of course I’m being a hypocrite, as I’ve criticized the lackluster serials during Janet Fielding’s tenure, even if it was very nice of them to bring her and her Doctor back for their latest Master+Daleks+Cybermen+kitchen sink special. Honestly, Baker’s including “The Invasion of Time” and afterward were hardly memorable, either, so maybe it was a drop in quality that accompanied the end of the seventies among many peaking creatives; see also Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd.
October 17th, 2022 § 0 comments § permalink
In retrospect it may not amount to much, but there was at least some progress from the Killing Eve remake where the queers were relegated to supporting characters then letting them be the leads, if only “coded” as such and surrounded by the most extreme examples of the opposite sex.
October 10th, 2022 § 0 comments § permalink
Even the Doctor said Trump was inevitable (in contrast to the optimism that Superman is), but I worry about living to see a day when we as a people can look back and heaven forbid, learn why. It’ll also be interesting to try and trace—forensically, of course—where some of his nonsense originated, whether it was Q-scripted and fumbled, anyway, or the product of a media-muddled “mind.”
September 25th, 2022 § 0 comments § permalink
The chair, a simple four-legged wooden one the kind I sat on for most of my youth, dragged me all the way over the thick carpet in the office to Rosario Dawson’s cluttered cubicle. I hadn’t brushed my teeth yet so I felt a bit embarrassed about just having woke up while she had already been on the job.
The heat and humidity had been suppressing just about any initiative to make good on all the ideas I had been accumulating, and even with my subconscious prodding me to complete the one about the chair we saw while walking to the store, it took the return of a few cooler nights before I finished the page in his journal—not that he’d notice; my hope was that it’d inspire him to make the time in his busier schedule to commemorate moments like these, however regular.
September 25th, 2022 § 0 comments § permalink
I suppose it’s never too late to be taken by surprise. And honestly, even if I had known about the Atari Falcon at the turn of the millennium, I doubt it’d have broken my resolve outside CompUSA, nor lessened my subsequent experiences in Liberty and Vice Cities, among the many places that glorious black monolith took me. This chance historical revelation does, in fact, reinforce my long-held belief that their next iteration nose-dived and explains my disenchantment with console gaming, maybe a loss of faith in the Sony of old. (I say that as if I’m an Apple convert, but the PS3 still sits connected to the even older XBR LCD, which I refuse to update with dominant 재벌 brands and if we ever make it back to Japan, I’m definitely buying one of these.) You’re my only hope to feel again, GTA6!
September 23rd, 2022 § 0 comments § permalink
Never seen this video before, but holy shit, Bowie was a god!
Back when he passed, I wrote an obituary of sorts on the old job’s content-starved Yammer site (thought that was bad enough, then after being taken over by a nearly 1K-large organization, theirs was still manned by a single executive whose role seemed to be to do nothing but), accompanied by this picture:
I remember some banter about David Bowie before the last staff meeting a couple of weeks ago, and I was rummaging through some of the boxes in the garage only to unearth these relics from a bygone era. 7th-generation [iPod] nano for scale… to think I ran with that thing, which really is as heavy as it looks! (And isn’t Apple getting a lot of flak over rumors that their next iPhone is going to do away with the headphone jack, it being what, 2016 now?) All the memorials may have since passed, but the “Heroes” cassette was surprisingly cued up for the title track—like a kind of time capsule, almost—and while the playback reminded me just how old this stuff is, it was a fine personal tribute to the artist.
Bonus: The song is just as brilliant in languages I’ve studied in my lifetime. Sadly, the only music I brought in to play on Mrs. Hogshead’s box turntable was Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France” 12-inch. (Pardon if the lyrics don’t display upon hover, the Soundcloud iFrame seems to interfere with the <title> tag. These links are all bound to fail one day, anyway, so best to preserve the content elsewhere.)
September 20th, 2022 § 0 comments § permalink
Used to be SoCal was a haven for those of us with a history of mosquito saliva intolerance, but seems we have the Chinese to thank again for an end to that. (Alright, globalization, climate change, whatever.) Still, for all our vaunted advances, we’re no less at their mercy: one fucker ambushed me in the car footwell this afternoon and the viral load was so overwhelming I had to stop and get out. Lucky for me I had just vacuumed the carpet so it was easy to spot and drunk on my range-exceeding blood that vengeance could be exacted, and while I’m no longer susceptible to the kind of hideous swelling I experienced until college or the kind of bubbling that might be even worse en masse, I’d like to think we’re not too far from developing dragonfly-sized drones to dogfight them.