How are you?

I am good. That's right, I am good, not well. I am doing well. I feel well. But if you're asking how I am, I can now confidently say, I am good. Thank godess.

It's a grammar question that's been bugging me for a while as I've listened to extremely literate, articulate friends answer, "I am well." It always rubbed me just slightly wrong somehow, but my grammar ins-and-outs are pretty rusty. Thanks to the trusty internet tubes and Grammar Girl I found a great explanation about why I am good.

Watery goodness

After a little cranky morning, I settled into a brief, but needed yoga session. The sun is actually shining today, but I found myself channeling the water that defines this season in the Pacific Northwest. Or maybe I'm still holding on to my turn as the dingy water in a Sea World dolphin show scene from my improv class last night. Or maybe I'm still dopey from my restless night of sleep. Whatever the inspiration, I moved slowly through my vinyasa, never really stopping the movement, like the steady drizzly rain we often see in Portland. Even in the stillness of downward dog or mountain pose, I enjoyed a subtle pulsing of the breath, of the muscles. And, rather than fight the restlessness I've been feeling, I'm sticking with that riding of the gentle waves for the rest of my day. So far, steadily accomplishing a variety of tasks, running a little behind on things, but feeling content with where I'm at.

Cross posted to Yogster.net

Fifth sentence...

This meme was posted on Facebook

Rules:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note on your page.
* (then tell what book it's from)


"I have my mother's hair."

- Maggie from Arthur Miller's After the Fall

web 2.0

i consider myself pretty savvy. i wrote a bit about it in the asian reporter a few weeks back. that column outlines my general internet usage at that moment. the crazy thing is that it's already out of date. i just started using twitter recently. and i've watched facebook evolve to incorporate a lot of this stuff, including twitter (i can update twitter and my facebook status simultaneously) and my blog feed. (another reason for this blog post, so i can see how it works.) it moves so quickly and fluidly that it's easy to get sucked in and then you realize, ack, i don't really want to use that feature anymore, or shoot, i'm up late playing that boggle game.

my question to you all is, what do you do on the internet tubes? do you have a facebook or myspace account? do you use both? what about linked in or twitter or other services? do you blog? do you use rss or social bookmarks? what else do you use? why do you use what you use? do you feel more connected or less connected the more you use these tools? post your musings in the comments.

sick and tired

yup. that's where i'm at today. sick and tired, despite the lovely sun brightening the day.

first up, i've had to throw in the towel on my first attempt at nablopomo. i forgot that i was actually leaving the internet tubes for two days and was therefore unable to post on those days. and once i got back it took me a bit to catch up on things. so, i'll be trying again for december and i'll try my best to post most of the rest of this month. it's hard to post everyday!!

next up, i found an interesting discussion on racialicious musing on a race equivalent to the bechdel test. the bechdel test refers to cartoonist alison bechdel's origianly strip in which the two female characters talk about the requirements of movies they will see. (the racialicious post includes the original strip). check out the blog post here and let me know your thoughts.

mother tongue

apa compass is a radio show i help produce as part of a collective at kboo. shameless plug: we're on today at 9:00am pacific at kboo or on the FM in portland 90.7. in case you miss it we'll have an archive (and podcasts soon!) at kboo.fm/apacompass. today we're talking about language and identity and community.

i long to speak another language fluently. my parents' first language is tagalog (filipino) and they never taught it to me and my brothers. when we were young, they thought it would hinder our ability to learn english and possibly leave us with an accent which might make it more difficult for us to fit in. and now as adults we all realize that loss and my mother tries to speak to us in tagalog at random times as if it might still seep in. and it might.

in fact, all these years, i've claimed that i don't know tagalog. but the truth is that i actually understand a LOT of tagalog, but can't open up my mouth and speak it.

in honor of our show today, i want to share a funny experience from when my husband and i went to the philippines last year. it was his first time and my first time with a "guest" who was not filipino. we were on our own a fair amount at the megamalls, the museums, tourist sites etc. i quicky found myself interpreting for matt. that's right, i was actually interpreting, much more than i thought i ever could. it was a delightful discovery and has changed my perspective on my relationship with my parents' mother tongue.

and another bizarre thing occurred, a story matt loves to tell. people would speak to me in tagalog. i understood the gist of what they were saying. then i spoke back to them in english. they understood me. we communicted back and forth in two different languages. i actually barely realized that it was happening, but matt, as an observer pointed it out. it happened all the time during our two week stay.

i'll keep working on my tagalog. but next i'm going to tackle me some espanol...

it's raining in my brain

okay, i'm doing this blog post a day thing and of course, now i'm stuck. i'll just run through my morning and leave it at that.

• i woke up and turned on democracy now! on kboo. interesting analysis of the elections from a more progressive standpoint, including a roundtable discussion with folks from around the world. definitely worth a listen and a welcome antidote to the rah-rah rhetoric of mainstream media.
• checked email, facebook.
• turned on some soothing tunes and did some yoga. first time in ages. felt nice. maybe i'll declare it MyYoEvMo - my yoga everyday month.
  
• waterproofed my new cute boots (thanks to mom for picking them up in krakow and finding boots that fit over my big calves!).
• hit the shower and luckily found some backup hair product after running out yesterday. gods forbid i don't have hair product!
  
• toasted a bagel for breakfast.
  
• perused different blogs through nablopomo's randomizer feature. looking for inspiration, encouragement to do my blog post.
• wrote this blog entry.

the date after

i'm still trying to sort through all this elections business. most things went the way i hoped. obama's decisive win is a step in the right direction for sure, though i still hope that obama will take some better stands on the wars, israel and a few other issues.

here's an interesting post from racialicious with a bunch of different thoughts on the elections. it certainly reflects my own cautious optimism, especially in regards to the part that race plays in our country.

i'm upset that california voted to pass prop 8 the gay marriage ban. despite the momentum of obama's election, it seems that our country's backwards view on gay issues. florida and arizona also passed their gay marriage bans. :-(

the fight is still not over...

DST

I'm up early this morning, and I attribute it to my recent East Coast trip and Daylight Saving Time. I've been doing a little bit of research on the ole DST and here's some nuggets I thought were interesting.

• Ben Franklin first came up with the crazy idea to save candles. An early conservationist.
  
• The official spelling is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight SavingS Time.
• Arizona does NOT observe DST. I guess McCain is a maverick amongst mavericks. Hawaii doesn't do it either.
  
• DST makes train schedules screwy. This is from npr: "When the clocks fall back at 2 a.m. this Sunday, Amtrak trains running on time will have to wait in the station for one hour before resuming their journey. Springtime overnight travelers find their trains suddenly one hour late, but their engineers just keep going and try to make up the time."
• During the mid-20th century there was no national law mandating DST. "Localities could determine their own DST. Here's a funny recounting from webexhibits.com: One year, 23 different pairs of DST start and end dates were used in Iowa alone. For exactly five weeks each year, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were not on the same time as Washington D.C., Cleveland, or Baltimore--but Chicago was. And, on one Ohio to West Virginia bus route, passengers had to change their watches seven times in 35 miles! The situation led to millions of dollars in costs to several industries, especially those involving transportation and communications. Extra railroad timetables alone cost the today's equivalent of over $12 million per year."
• Here's an amazing story about twins born during the DST switch, essentially reversing their birth order.
  
• Robertson Davies fictional character Samual Marchbanks wrote this little diatribe against DST: "I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves."

I for one enjoy both the moonlight and the sunshine. DST is a slight inconvenience, but if it saves us some energy resources then I'm for it.

Resources: webexhibits, NPR, National Geographic, WRAL

so i'm a slacker already

i already missed one day in my blog a day posts for the month. i can't help it. i was traveling back to portland from cleveland and couldn't put down my adorable nephew maceo long enough to post before we had to get on the plane and part ways with the family again.

so with that i'll give some capsule reviews on the plane movies we got on our flights. mostly not too bad...

Diminished Capacity stars Matthew Broderick and Alan Alda as a nephew an uncle pair who are both suffering from memory loss and mental issues, one due to a head injury and the other due to Alzheimers. They go on an adventure to sell a baseball card that may or may not be extremely valuable. Solid movie with that charming, quirky indie-wood feel. Alan Alda is great, a nice departure from his recent sleazy conservative yuppie types. And I'm always a fan of Matthew Broderick (since his early turns in Lady Hawke and Ferris Bueller's Day Off)

Get Smart is a pretty fun romp based on the old tv show. Not quite the same campy feel, but still pretty fun, especially when you're sitting in uncomfortable plane seats. Steve Carrell does a some slightly new things with his rendition of the somewhat bumbling 86 and Dwayne Johnson (yes, the Rock) is pretty hunky and funny in his role as one of the star agents. Oh yes and then there's Ann Hathaway who is also fine as agent 99, though she seems slightly miscast in the role. Masi Oka (Heroes) takes a turn as, you guessed it, a geeky sidekick who helps develops some of the spy toys used by the agents. Still he's always fun to watch.

Mamma Mia, we watched Mamma Mia. I wanted to get into it (I am a big fan of musicals. For an awesome treat check out Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog) but I have to admit I found a lot of it cringingly cheezy. That being said, Merryl Streep is super fab as Donna, the mom of Sophie who is trying to figure out which of Donna's three past lovers is her father. Another favorite hunk of my past Pierce Brosnan (Remington Steele baby!) plays one of the the potential dads and while he's still pretty damn handsome, the man is NOT a singer. Ah well, now I've seen it. And I'll never have to see it again.

Finally the last film we saw was Henry Poole Is Here. It follows the story of, you guessed it again smart readers, Henry Poole a man who's terminally ill and moves back to the street he grew up on to die alone. The story goes that a water mark on his wall is interpreted to be the face of Jesus Christ by one of the busybody, but sweet neighbors Esperanza (played wonderfully by Adriana Barraza). It's another well-intentioned indie film, that's refreshingly slower paced and thoughtful. Luke Wilson stretches his acting chops slightly to play a cranky, depressed, disheveled man. I think in the end the story was a bit to faith-based with the whole "you just have to believe" theme throughout.

brilliant halloween costume

saw this on angryasianman...

brilliant halloween costume

too funny.

today is my first post in my month of posting every day, aka nablopomo. yup, starting off easy cuz i'm tired and it's late. barely making it in time for the midnight deadline. i'll be back tomorrow for shizzle.