Manolo Doesn’t Want to Call It a Comeback

About a year ago, I was unceremoniously dumped in what was clearly a fixed and corrupt poll. I disputed the poll results and when that didn’t pan out, I took to the mountains and staged a bit of a revolution. I was doing okay for a while but changing real estate market conditions meant I had to go back to my regular life. I took refuge in my work and tried to keep the banks at bay. You would think I owe them money…oh wait, I do.

As an escape, I also started blogging in the new and improved Hose… That didn’t last too long since I was too busy and my lack of activity had nothing to do with the fact that a lot of nights I stayed home drinking my sorrows away or playing with my Wii (Evil, please mark this as a single entendre).

Every 3-4 months I would come back and scan the Hose and saw how everyone was patting themselves in the back. I saw how snide comments were heaped upon me every few posts. This did not happen with the Bumpasaurus or Sleeve or Cheo (previous members of the Hose). I saw how charts were made up to showcase how the amount of comments per month went up during my absence. Of course, said chart did not take into account that the number of posts per month increased as well. Where is the chart to show that the number of comments were proportional to the number of posts and that said ratio has kept pace, if not decreased through the years?

It seems that the Hose became a popularity contest were quality was eschewed in favor of quantity. Trust me, I know about quantity versus quality. I have slept with quite a few ugly chicks in my day…Nowadays, it seems the Hose now revolves around American Idol and lame “looky-likeys”, and teabagging all in a ploy to pad the numbers in the Google page rankings….

Can’t you see that money and fleeting popularity have blinded you? Can't you see that you sold your souls for the ad revenue?

The Hose has failed to live to the founding tenets of its charter….and I quote “The Hose is like "id Gone Wild". Join us as we fail to push our agendas both online and in real life.”

How are Sparks and Catjjy failing online and in real life? Beautiful family, happily married, probably in the top 1% of wage earner, living in San Francisco, beautiful kid, tons of Facebook friends with photos to prove it…

Where is the emotion exposed? Where is the rawness? The pain? Where are people’s dark and inner secrets? Why doesn’t anyone talk about the time xTian gave himself a roofie? Does anyone make fun of him for his love for Gilmore Girls? Where is the counter to see how many 16-and-under country girls Evil has "erroneously" banged while in China? Why isn’t anyone questioning Killer B’s sexuality? Come on, you kind of have to wonder with all his American Idol reviews...

You see, I was going to comment all this on a random post, but as I was scrolling the Hose, I was very surprised to find my name listed back as one of the contributors…Perhaps it was an editor’s mistake (someone should be fired for this)….I took it as a sign from above (not religious at all but the thingie that moves my chair up and down broke and since I am too lazy to swap it with the one in the office next door, technically the monitor is kind of above me)…

I have decided that I may not be the most popular but my stuff will always be from the heart with no filters...it will be raw, emotional, personal…it will be just like the original Hose except that my posts will include the more/hide feature (once I figure how that damn HTML code works...Satan's spawn, I tell you).

More to come...that is unless my access is revoked once again...and please, don't call it a comeback because I'm gonna knock you out [huuuhhh!!!].... More...

Goodbye, Chris Benoit

Evil

The Rabid Wolverine... he did too young. I just got off the phone with Xtian... he's all broken up. Xtian really loved Chris Benoit. Not in a gay way.

Random Memories

Evil

i have a younger brother. growing up, he and i were partners in crime. we used to mix the chemicals in household cleaners and other items to see which would fizzle, sizzle, change colors, eat through cardboard. we'd then apply heat, sometimes cooking the concoction on the stovetop, but most often, we just throw lit matches into the brew. once, we burned a plate-sized patch of the rug. my dad fumed over it. but he never bought a new rug, so for years, we just covered up the burned area.

for about eight years, we lived on the 2nd floor of a two-family house. our living room faced Northern Boulevard, which was a five-lane street, two going in each direction and one turning lane. our house (well, we rented it, so it wasn't technically ours) was on the corner. when cars came to a stop at the traffic light, they were right below our living room window. i dont remember exactly how we developed this idea, but it was pure genius: we made shaving cream grenades out of Kleenex and shaving cream. Squirt a child-fist-sized lump of shaving cream into a sheet of Kleenex and pinch the ends together. we'd make a bunch of these and set them below the window. we'd watch the cars on Northern Boulevard stop at the red light. and just as the light turned green and the cars started their acceleration, we'd lob a shaving cream grenade onto the street. when we'd hit a car (which was often!), it would already be moving forward, so there was nothing the driver could do... except keep driving. we were geniuses who never got due credit. those were great times. my dad never caught on that we used his shaving cream to make these grenades, thanks to the fact that he had (and still has) this penchant for buying things in bulk. so we'd basically exhaust and entire can of shaving cream at a time and he never noticed when one or two can disappeared.

one summer, my brother and i perfected how to make rubberband guns out rubber bands and chopsticks. this must have been why i ended up going to an engineering college. mid way through the summer, we had a robust gun design that included a working trigger mechanism. this rubber band guns were powered by rubber bands (and held together by rubber bands too), but it didnt shoot rubber bands. no! it shot paper "V"s. you did NOT want to get hit with one of these V's because they hurt like a motherfucker. if you're like my sister and welt up easily, then you'd see little red V imprints on your skin.

i'm glad we came up with the rubber band guns because they were so much sophisticated than what we used the previous summer, which was slingshots fashioned from metal clothes hangers. for bullets, we used chick peas. those things are hard as rock. you can buy a pound of that stuff for 79 cents. in retrospect, i'm glad we never shot anyone's eye out because that was certainly a possibility. but we didnt realize it back then. there was one time when we were on a bus and landed a perfect bulls-eye on this mexican guy's bare belly. he had been sitting on his front stoop, shirtless, trying to beat the heat.

Kurt Cobain

Evil

Sunday night. Drinking alone. Watching a documentary on Kurt Cobain. I miss Kurt Cobain. He was only 27. He died 12 years ago. Is that possible?

For A Fleeting Moment, I Felt Like A Kid Again

Evil

I went to the corner grocery store to buy three serrano chilis. The Korean lady rang up my purchase: 22 cents. I took a quarter out of my pocket and put it into her open palm. She gave me three pennies in change.

Walk Down Memory Lane

Evil

Just got one of those automated emails from Columbia telling me to log on to the Alumni website and either accept or decline the undergrad interviews that they put in my queue. It's undergrad interviewing season again! I always have a good time interviewing undergrad candidates. Most of them remind me of how immature I was when I was that age.

Anyway, while I was on the Columbia alum website, I couldn't help but click on the "facebook" link (facebook in the generic sense, not as in facebook.com). What an amusing walk down memory lane. I saw Xtian's undergrad photo. His head is just as big! I also saw ET#2's photo. She had short hair in that photo. But I couldn't find ET#1. Waaah. What's up with that? Maybe ET#1 did the same thing I did, which is click the "Hide" checkbox under our profile options. :)

Mystery Solved

Evil



This is a picture of my sister, circa 1975. Proof positive that she's an alien! Look at that giant forehead!

My Childhood

Evil

Sort of random, but I thought about 2 things that remind me of my childhood.

1. The "Give a hoot, don't pollute!" (isn't that cute?!) TV commercials.

2. The jingle from the Mount Airy Lodge commercials. C'mon, sing it with me... "All you have to bring, is your love of ev'ry thing."

Also, 2 things that remind me of childhood as it directly relates to my dad:

1. Being yelled at because I kept needing to get new glasses... because my eyes always got progressively worse... probably because I watched so much freakin TV.

2. Being yelled at because I hated taking showers and was mostly a smelly, icky kid.

A Good Day

Evil

I've been emailing with a friend of mine recently. We haven't communicated the previous half-year or so for various reasons. Most of it was due to her job cutting off her IM. Damn you, The Man! (*shakes fist defiantly*)

Over email, I asked my friend, "When was it that we first met? Was it while I was unemployed? That must have been 2 and a half years ago."

She wrote back, "...you were unemployed and giving me tips on how to roast a whole chicken. you told me to stick a lemon in its butt! i still do it that way..."

Maybe this is weird, but her comment made me feel pretty good. It made me feel like I've actually made a difference in someone's life, however insignificant.

Josephine, the Brown/Blue Eyed Girl

Evil

Josephine's eyes are one brown, one blue. It runs in her family actually; her brother has the same except in the opposite eyes. I don't know what's more rare for Chinese people: to have a set of blue eyes, or just one. I don't know any Chinese people with both eyes blue, so I guess having just one is actually more common. Go figure.

I saw Josephine on the train this morning. She was sitting in the next subway car, but I saw her thru the scratched up plexiglass. I recognized her instantly. Not by her eyes, because you can't see that stuff through scratched up plexiglass. I'll always recognize her because she has this smashed-in looking face and too-thick eyebrows. The last time I saw Josephine was about a month ago, also on the subway. The last time before that was a long time prior. I was 14 and she was 10. It was the last day of Chinese summer school and I thought I would see her again the next year as usual, but who knew... my parents didn't make me go back the following summer.

In my mind, I play out the scene where I cross the subway cars and walk up to Josephine. I say, Hi, and smile and she glances up. She wears a sullen look and it doesn't change when she sees me. I say, You're Josephine, and a glimmer flashes across her brown/blue eyes. I think it's a glimmer of fright, but I'm undeterred. I say, We went to Chinese school together, way back when. I knew your brother, Ba. Then I smile. When I smile, she cracks a smile, but it's forced. I know a forced smile when I see one. In the scene that I play out in my mind, we get to my stop and I'm relieved. I bolt out of there and wonder why I couldn't amuse even a brown/blue eyed girl with smashed-in face and too-thick eyebrows. It gets me sort of down.

In real life, we actually come to my stop. I step out, walk past the car that Josephine's in and check her eyes. Yes, one brown, one blue. It's her. She sees me, but she doesn't recognize me.

Sighting

Evil

I thought I saw Betty Ng at the Starbucks this morning. My heart skipped two and a half beats. I grabbed the cup from the Starbucks girl's hand and quickly shuffled out. I've been in-between beats ever since.

Is This Normal? (Part 1, of many)

Evil

We came to this country when I was three and a half. My dad spoke a bit of English, but in the house, we just spoke Chinese. When I started kindergarten, I knew about 20 words in English. (One of them was "automatic.") I learned the words from my sister, who was older than me and had been in American school for a year and a half.

On my first day of kindergarten, I didn't know how to play with any of the toys. Things like blocks, puzzles -- and especially playing house -- were foreign concepts. So I mostly kept to myself.

There was this one day when I got sick and I puked all over some other kid and he started to cry. The teacher sent me to the office, where they would call my mom to come pick me up. I couldn't communicate with the ladies in the office, so I reached into my shirt and pulled out an index card. My mom always made sure I wore that index card when I left for school. The card had a hole punched in a corner and a loop of red yarn through the hole and I wore it around my neck. The index card had my name, address, and home phone number, written by my dad.

I sat on what seemed like a very large, very old bench in the office and waited for my mom. I sat for what seemed like a very long time and when I realized that school was over and students were starting to go home, it crossed my mind that maybe my mom wasn't coming to get me. Various old ladies who worked in the office were saying stuff to me that I didn't understand.

They close the office 30 minutes after school lets out. In fact, they close the entire school building. Someone shooed me outside to wait on the front steps of the school. I looked around for my mom, with renewed hopes that maybe she just didn't figure out how to get inside and that she was waiting for me all along. But no.

It was a rainy afternoon, so not only was I sick, I was being rained on. And oh, I can't find my mom. Some neighborhood people walked past me but no one said anything. I guess the Don't Talk To Strangers rule also applies to pukey little kids.

I'm not sure what happened first, the fact that I gave up hope that my mom would appear from down the block, or that I just got too cold and shivery. I went up to a passer-by. He looked like a friendly old man. I pulled out the index card from inside my shirt and showed it to him.

If I remember correctly, the friendly old man brought me home. But I can honestly say I don't remember any of the rest -- why my mom didn't come to pick me up, what I said to her when I finally saw her -- I've lost all of those memories.

Is this normal?

Evil

THE OFFICIAL PASTTIME OF SUMMER

There's a simple way to tell whether or not your neighborhood is keepin' it real: by the amount of stoop-sitting that takes place. I just moved and I've noticed that there's much stoop-sitting activity around me and I'm glad to see that. It reminds me of the old neighborhood, of growing up. The old neighborhood had lots of stoops and also lots of asses to sit on them. The asses mostly belonged to Colombian dads and moms. On summer evenings, my parents always liked to go for walks around the neighborhood -- mostly from our house to the elementary school and back. This was before everyone had cable and Xbox, so after-dinner family entertainment was decidedly low tech. I remember we would walk past house after house, decorated with sitters on their stoops. The kids of the family would be out front, kicking around a soccer ball. My dad liked to cheer, "Maradona! Maradona!" when he saw Colombian kids playing soccer. In retrospect, I don't know if that was a stupid thing to say or what because I wouldn't want no Colombian dude coming up to me and cheering "General Tso! General Tso!" I'm just glad no one ever got popped in the eye.

Anyway, my new neighborhood is kind of like the old neighborhood, except that most of the families here are black. Not much kicking around of soccer balls, but there is much grilling of meats on the street. On a random summer night, I see at least one active grill per block, you know, the ones that are huge half-spheres will three legs sticking out of them. Seeing this makes me want to get a grill. I swear I could eat grilled meats three times a day. But I'm hesitating on that decision because really, how sad would that look? Some random Chinese dude who is grilling all by himself. Most likely I will also be sobbing quietly to myself. Also likely, I will be wearing clown makeup.

I don't know. Maybe I'll get a grill anyway. I'm going to go think about it. Outside, sitting on the stoop.

Evil

THANKSGIVING AND MY FAMILY (PART 1)

For the most part, my family doesn't eat together at the table anymore. It started years back -- I had just entered college at the time -- and my parents moved from Jackson Heights to Flushing. The new house had a dining room, but from the start my dad claimed it as his office space. Besides, with me leaving the house, my sister already in college, my dad with his erratic work schedule, it only made sense to use the dining room for something practical. On occasions when we did get together as a family, we would just eat scattered about the house and that seemed fine to everyone.

I mention this bit of history because I spent Thanksgiving with my parents and grandparents. My uncles, aunts, and cousins were there too. This was at my grandparents' house so they actually had a dining room table and as such, I sat down to a meal with family for the first time in quite a while. My dad made me sit next to him, which I guess was fine because it beats sitting next to any of my strange uncles.

We have this one uncle, Second Uncle, who was in the military for many years and fought on the front lines in Vietnam. We're all pretty sure that the experience made him somewhat crazy. He's unmarried, works in a factory, and has several gold teeth -- old school style. He likes to talk about "the war" and offer to break out the old black and white photos of him in his army uniform.

And then there's Third Uncle, but everyone calls him Fat Uncle because, well, because he's fat. My family is creative like that. But anyway, I try to avoid Fat Uncle as much as possible because he's always pestering me to mentor his son, who of course, is my cousin. My cousin is 2 years younger than me and has been trying to complete his undergraduate degree going on 7 years now. He's declared and undeclared majors in business management, American literature, and international relations. He lives in his parents' basement and emerges into the light only to play networked games on the PC. I mean really, what am I supposed to do for this kid?

Lastly, there's Fourth Uncle, but since he's the last, we call him Small Uncle. In his youth, Small Uncle dreamed of being the biggest pop star in all of Vietnam. He's 36 now and in some ways, he's still holding on to that dream. About once or twice a month, he'll work a gig at a Vietnamese wedding, doing the MC'ing and singing. Apparently (according to my dad), there's quite a demand for Small Uncle in the Vietnamese wedding circles. Who knew?

One time, my dad told me that Small Uncle has promised to sing at my wedding and my immediate reaction was to make this gesture of a noose going around my neck and snapping taut. My dad was so disappointed at my outright disrespect that he simply lowered his eyelids and shook his head. My mom caught hold of the entire exchange but she kept in the background, as she was nearly doubled over in laughter. My mom does a lot of that stuff -- hanging in the background and laughing at other people (mostly at family).

Part 2... coming soon.