please take care of your furry, four-legged family member for the duration of its lifespan.
I’m the type of person who cringes whenever I hear about fish and turtles dying because, oops my friends forgot to feed them. Or dogs who live outside in the backyard with no shelter during rainy days and cats who are left home alone for days while the owners go on vacation. Humans are a queer species. We breed dogs until the size of walnut-brained chihuahuas who have lost all survival instincts, and then we decide, oh shoot, I can’t raise this animal.
Two days ago, a chihuahua wandered into our backyard while the gardeners were here, so my mom brought him into the garage while she was teaching kids art. I had thought he belonged to our neighbor, because who else would he have belonged to?
For the next two days, our own dog moped with jealousy while this little intruder demanded salmon and rice (since he wouldn’t eat dog food) and slept on beds (because he wouldn’t sleep on the ground in the little bed we made him). My mom took him around the neighborhood to see if he would recognize his own house, and after no success, we assumed his brain wasn’t capable of image and smell recognition. I listed a lost & found Craigslisting and received no response. My sister called the Fremont animal shelter, who said no one has filed a lost report yet. So today, my dad and I drove around the extended neighborhood looking for signs on doors and light poles before we finally took him to the animal shelter to be scanned for a microchip.
Read more on Dear Dog Owners,…
The day before I left for New York, I was invited to AIA East Bay’s Emeritus meeting, since they were discussing the needs of under-employed emerging professionals and possibly forming a mentor/workshop program to keep us afloat. “What will happen [to the architecture industry] if three to five years of emerging professionals are gone?” Just food for thought.
“Architecture is always heavily impacted by the economy, and I’ve worked through about five recessions. I’m just glad that I’m retired now, because this one’s pretty bad,” said one emeritus member. Well how bad is “pretty bad”? Just yesterday, The New York Times published an article, “Architect, or Whatever” with the popular photo of John Morefield underneath his “architecture 5¢” sign.
The article explains:
A troubled economy and the implosion of the real estate market have thrown thousands of architects and designers out of work in the last year or so, forcing them to find or create jobs. According to the latest data available from the Department of Labor, employment at American architecture firms, which peaked last July at 224,500, had dropped to 184,600 by November.
“It’s hard to find a place to hide when the economy goes down,” said Kermit Baker, the chief economist at the American Institute of Architects. “There aren’t any strong sectors now.”
Read more on What’s In It for Architecture?…
It hurts to pay $5.44 for a soy latte… and even more to inhale outdoors. It’s nerve-wracking to take the subway through Brooklyn to Manhattan then stand confused in the middle of Chinatown alone at night…and even scarier to wake up in the morning and realize that no one’s there. Yet it’s exhilarating to walk through Times Square for the first time and watch the sunset from the top of the Rockerfeller, powerwalk through all of Central Park then grace the steps of Apple’s glass spiral staircase, even hop on a megabus at 1:30 in the morning (with a Halal food cart gyro in hand) for a spontaneous trip down to Boston, then wander around the MoMA for the last few hours before saying goodbye.
I did borrow a few couches (from high-class financial district’s to cozy Chinatown’s to college Cambridge’s) yet was blessed enough to have a friend by my side nearly at all times (thanks Alex). It also helps to be comfortably flexible and just use the Axe shower gel—”Brazilian mud with red dragonfruit extract”, to be exact. (I’m only grateful to smell like a man instead of puke and sweat.) When without a local, Yelp is there to suggest la Esquina tacos and Ippudo ramen; and when timid, someone’s there to make me try raw oysters and ultra rare steak…or convince me that I should walk three miles for black & white cookies or red velvet cupcakes. And when without a tourist plan, Toys “R” Us is equipped with endless pleasures, like wave street surfboards and child-sized bikes. (And you thought I’d just go clubbing, which I didn’t do.)
Read more on The Empire State of Mind…
Past the windmills, cows, and grapevine is a valley blessed with year-round sunshine yet cursed with traffic and pollution. And the stereotypes are true—everyone does work in media and entertainment. Host #1, Jon, works for Formosa Films while host #2, Christina, manages people like Jaeson Ma and Vanness Wu with Plan C Agency (FarEast Movement, Jin the MC…). There was Adam Wang on my left during brunch at House of Pies on Sunday and Will Tiao on my right at Starbucks afterwards. And of course, how can a trip down to LA be complete without grabbing breakfast with Phil and Ted in Alhambra, “The most Asian-concentrated city in America?”
As expected, I was too awkward to sustain any real conversations with anyone other than Joz and Kevin, two 8Asians bloggers—people I finally have something in common with! (Slightly kidding…only slightly.) But I had fun anyway watching the sunset from a hill, eating at a dinosaur themed restaurant, wandering around indie bookstores and vintage shops in Los Feliz Village.
Last comment: 16 oz. beers + avocado fries at Dillon’s Irish Pub (on Hollywood Blvd.) = cardiac arrest, immediate death, and a taste of heaven. I died in good company.
The following blog post was posted in New York…I am no longer in sunny LA but freezing NYC instead. The people here are equally well dressed…in winter wear. I was just in a T-shirt a few days ago.
Read more on LA: Cars & Glamour…
As a recent college alum and “unofficially employed” freelance designer, I’ve been trying to network as much as possible…and every time, I wish I had witty or beautiful business cards instead of flimsy ones straight out of my own printer—victim to a ruler, x-acto blade, and human error. After all, my business card is a representation of my design abilities; I better not make a poor first impression. (If you’re not a designer, you still need a business card if you’re a freelance writer or professional bum, because I’m not going to remember your contact info if we don’t “casually” trade numbers. I always thought it’d be cute to hand out cards with simply “@serenawu“—or maybe not.)
I’ve heard of people using the laser lab in school to etch cards—witty, and I’ve seen what Twig & Fig can do with letterpressed cards—they’re absolutely stunning…and beyond my budget. I figured, I’d just have to focus on the 2D design and go with a regular printshop…and still be creative at the same time.
Here are some collections of creative and beautiful business cards for inspiration!
Business Cards – a set on Flickr
584 ways to design a business card by LifeClever
75 Creative Business Cards That Inspire by Larissa Jaster
Read more on Business Card Inspiration & Free Giveaway Contest With PrintRunner!…
Best of Wordpress
In 2009, I…
Celebrated the dawn of the new year with hundreds of architecture students from all parts of the nation, in one grand ballroom in Denver
Talked to MC Hammer at the Crunchies after party in SF City Hall
Watched Obama’s inauguration with thousands of other students and teachers on Sproul Plaza
Learned from the best studio instructor I’ve ever had at Cal (and sometimes pulled too many all-nighters in studio)
Spoke at the ITASA West Coast Conference at USC and the Midwest Conference at UIUC and met some of the most creative folks in film, music, and literature
Graduated a full year early and spent graduation day in San Francisco with ninjas instead
Biked fifteen miles around downtown Chicago and along Lake Michigan on LSD—Lake Shore Drive
Nearly “died” after a fourteen hour flight then a sixteen hour layover in Hong Kong before getting pseudo-H1N1 in Kaohsiung, seeing a doctor in Tainan, and interning in Taipei before fully recovering
Had the most amazing time in Taiwan by myself: fell in love with Taipei, experienced an earthquake, lived through Typhoon Morokot, and fell in love with high-tech homes
Got up close and personal with the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Read more on Obligatory Reflections & Resolutions Post…
In Asia, everything is cute or compact. What’s cute is usually compact as well: miniature toys, toy poodles, girls… but what’s compact is not always cute. The room I stayed in at my distant uncle’s over the summer was a Taipei standard. Oh, an 8 x 10′ box, perhaps? The mattress was smaller than a twin and hugged the ground without a box spring. My baby pink, Hello Kitty sheets were much appreciated (since they have two sons and no daughter, but for someone who’s room is black & blue back home, I did not find them that cute). This time, I stayed at my distant aunt’s and pretty much slept in the 6 x 10′ storage room with a sleeping bag “blanket”…but I didn’t mind. Though this trip still paled in comparison with my summer adventures, the last two weeks I spent in Taipei were fucking fantastic.
Besides spending quality time alone in the library and Eslite bookstores (think B&N or Borders with 6 stories), I also…
Met up with my old colleagues in the Shida or Shilin nightmarkets numerous times, where we did stuff like…play jenga
Ate brunch with Tina and the gal behind Hungry In Taipei (who took Jon and me to another place for lunch two days later)
Read more on Taipei In A Wrap…
I kid you not, I spent the last two days nerding it up in Taipei’s National Central Library, flipping though Shih-Jung Tzeng’s Oxford-published PhD thesis, From Honto Jin to Bensheng Ren: The Origin and Development of Taiwanese National Consciousness. Why? The 361-pager studies the diaries of two Taiwanese literary figures, one being my great-grandfather, Wu Xinrong (吳新榮).
A few weeks ago, I sat in my a-ma’s living room and listened to her read and explain my a-gong’s commemorative essay regarding my a-zoh (who are both long gone). Afterwards, she sighed and commented, “It’s a pity you can’t read Chinese. If only you could read a-zoh’s books, you’d know how 偉大 (significant) he was.” From that moment on, I vowed that I would do my research and learn as much as possible about my great-grandfather, my a-zoh, while I was still here in Taiwan.
Before leaving Jiali (a small town in Tainan Province), I took a copy of my a-gong’s essay and told my a-ma, “I think I’d like to translate this into English with Daddy.” So of course my a-ma called me a few weeks later, “Sa-jit-gong (3rd Great-uncle) says a professor translated some of your a-zoh’s writings into English. I’m not sure, you should call Sa-jit-gong and ask.” Less than an hour later, I was in Taipei’s largest library hassling a pour soul behind the reference desk.
Read more on Preserving My Roots: Introducing Wu Xinrong…
While I was out catching up with ex-colleagues in the Shida district, my mom took my three-year-old cousin up to the Sheraton’s lounge area for afternoon tea. Apparently, there was a double-decker glass tray with treats on top and wine glasses on the bottom shelf. Wanting to reach the M&M’s, my cousin climbed up on the bottom shelf, tipped the entire glass piece, and sent all the wine glasses crashing. Needless to say, a 5-star hotel lost an entire collection of quality wine glasses, and my mom had to pay an “軼事軼事” reimbursement. Meanwhile, I probably tipped the Jenga tower at its most vulnerable state.
photos taken by Joe two nights ago; Joe also wrote essays for four of my photos not long ago—future shooting buddy!
Despite giving up the idea of ever working in China, I’m still considering Taiwan. As with building a Jenga tower, I have to sacrifice its structural integrity for the sake of making the tower taller—growth. And just as my heart pounded as I watched my lens cap drop and roll towards the platform gap at an MRT station, I breathed a sigh of relief when it stopped 1mm away from doom and someone else kindly picked it up and handed it back to me…before someone else kicked it over the edge.
Read more on Life Is One Big Jenga Tower…
The Good
Public transportation is efficient and very affordable. Buses cost 2 yuan (RMB) each trip (~28¢) and run frequently, while the metro costs 2-9 yuan each way (28¢ – $1.28), depending on the distance. The D train from Hangzhou to Shanghai was 54 yuan (<$8), and another (slower) train from Shanghai back to Xiaoshan was 26 yuan (<$4). A 30min taxi ride from the airport to hotel was 85 yuan (~$12).
Construction is happening everywhere! Infrastructure is improving and high rises are popping up all over the place. (If fact, there is extremely loud construction happening right outside of our hotel room window…) Architecture firms with projects in Asia should be thriving.
The West Lake in Hangzhou is beautiful, as with a lot of the new architecture in Shanghai. If I were a real painter or photographer, I’d move to Hangzhou and paint the four seasons repeatedly (pictures to come at the end of this post).
The Bad
Living costs are not that low. Rent in downtown Shanghai is equally absurd (and comparable to San Francisco). Food can be cheap (street vendors, hole-in-the-walls, supermarkets, convenience stores, etc.), unless you eat at the New World Plaza, where a dinner set at any one restaurant was 30-50 USD. Ridics. Shopping mall items cost about the same…maybe even more if they’re American brands.
Read more on China: The Verdict Is In…
My social media capabilities are incredibly limited seeing that I can’t check my Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr, Facebook or Friendfeed. (I’m not sure if this is all censorship or half a connection problem, since the wifi bars just so happen to go down whenever I check those sites.) I can, however, access all of my self-hosted blogs, upload to Flickr, and Posterous-tweet via email (pseudo-hack win!).
This isn’t exactly my first time in China, but I would hardly consider Kunming, Dali, and Lijiang (in Yunnan Province) “cities” when Shanghai has a population of 20 million. This is definitely my first time in a Chinese city without cobblestone-paved roads, horse-drawn carriages, and yaks. In fact, I see exactly what I expected to see: grey skyscrapers, construction cranes, and more skyscrapers in the making.
In half a day, my mom and I went from Kaohsiung to Taoyuan to Hangzhou, with plans to go to Shanghai tomorrow. On the plane ride here, the gentleman sitting on our left gave us a few tips: speak as little as possible (as folks will judge by our Taiwanese accent) and only take metered taxis (to prevent overcharges). I figured I’d just be a starving mute for a few days. (Prior tips included eating as little as possible and buying as little as possible…to prevent getting diarrhea and fake merchandise.)
Read more on Sloppy Firsts in China…
8am Monday morning, I left the sunny pseudo-countryside for Kaohsiung, murky-grey industrial galore. Once again, I dragged my luggage through the front doors of my grandpa’s dilapidated high-rise and took the sketch elevator up. 6th floor is the office, 9th floor is the old condo in a sun-bleached shade of mustard yellow.
The 6th floor has upgraded from cable modem to wifi, but my great-aunt still uses a typewriter for God knows what and wears glasses with a pearl chain draped behind her ears. (She also happens to be on Facebook, so no judgments held.)
At noon, my grandpa, mom, and I head upstairs for lunch—dumplings yesterday, potstickers and carrot cake today (Monday we ate out). At 4:30 sharp, we head back to the “mansion” in the outskirts of the city, on top of a hill behind gates, away from the air and sound pollution. (I fidget nervously on my computer as time refuses to move, eat dinner, fidget some more, shower, and sleep.)
Every morning, my step-grandma prepares us homemade yogurt with generous chunks of fruit and nuts along with a buttered piece of 2” toast. This morning, I also had ginseng tea to combat my returning flu symptoms. My grandpa spends a good hour in the garden watering the exotic plants while my step-grandma tends to the flowerpots outside of our window. Every withering flower, weed, overgrown leaf (perhaps aphid as well)—gets plucked. 9:30 sharp, we leave the mansion for the high-rise, and life commences as usual.
Read more on Princess Complexes…
To truly experience Taiwan, you’ve got to get out of Taipei and go down South, preferably to Tainan. And to better understand what it means to be “really Taiwanese”, I would recommend watching Cape No. 7, a film about a Southern young man who goes to Taipei for better prospects, only to be let down (you know, Grapes of Wrath/Little Miss Sunshine’s broken California dream). He comes back down to the South initially depressed, but slowly appreciates the oddballs who happen to know everyone else.
The movie pokes loving fun at various Southern stereotypes: men driving scooters without helmets while chewing beetlenut, politicians having petty arguments with each other then bonded by their love for the town, people gathering at the local church and singing praise songs in Taiwanese.
The one full day that I spent in Taipei hardly consisted of anything truly Taiwanese—I stayed at the Sheraton, ate lunch at the Agora Garden, visited my mom’s friend’s interior design firm, walked around the Mega House next to the Living 3.0 office—but then painstakingly tried lamb hotpot (heart, liver, feet and all) with a few of my ex-colleagues. (They were out of brains when we arrived—thank God.)
But the weekend that I stayed with my grandma in a small town in Tainan county was…”很台” and hilariously Taiwanese.
Read more on Like Cape No. 7 But Better…
On a scale of one to ten, my stress level’s like an eleven right now. I’m not really sure how to explain why an apparent “time off from…life” could be in any way stressful, but I am high stress prone and copying down contacts, making to-do lists, setting my auto-email responder…anything to calm my nerves. You’d think that after so much traveling, I’d be used to it (40 passport stamps since 2006, impressed?!), but let’s see…I’ve been stuck in Thailand due to airport bombings and protests, nearly got lost in the Big Ben tourist trap in London, ended up at a police station once and nearly missed the last bus another time in Taipei, been stopped mid-freeway past midnight in Malaysia to have my passport checked, waited for an hour-late bus in downtown Brunei the day of our flight out, been harassed by gypsies and street vendors and traveling monks on multiple occasions all over the world…but I also fall in love with cities easily and have quite a blast before a major typhoon hits—so stress and fun balance out (usually).
I guess it’s just unsettling to think that I can pack my bags and leave so easily…proof that I haven’t settled down or planned anything out with jobs lined up and relationships to take care of. I have…nothing and I am equally unsure of everything. For every job offer, I’ve responded with, “I’m still looking around”…aka “I’m still unsure of my life and considering options on the other side of the world because I’m indecisive and young and looking for an adventure yet equally afraid of challenges and hardships.” (Slight exaggeration.)
Read more on Migrant Wanderer…
What version of the UC Berkeley protests would you like? AP, SFGate, or The Daily Cal?
For those with an aversion to text, here’s raw footage:
and more raw footage…
The catalyst to the havoc? The UC board approved a 32% increase in undergraduate fees yesterday. (Details here.)
(Cal students also want the reinstatement of 38 custodians, but why don’t we just fight for all 300 laid off ex-employees?)
I’m not even going to try to understand how the budget works considering that Cal can’t even manage without the help of Bain consultants—and why are we hiring Bain?! (who costs what, quarter to half million per month?) Because our own management can’t manage the budget crisis? Yudof seems mighty unpopular these days, but he’s got quite a few Twitter followers (myself included) and even a sympathizer…and a $326,791 paycheck.
But say we don’t point fingers at President Yudof or $445,716 Chancellor Birgeneau or anyone on the Board of Regents or even the Governator (why is my signed diploma even framed on the wall…), PLEASE EXPLAIN WHY deans and business and law professors are all worth 300k+ each while 300 “less important” people get fired, other classes get cut, starving students face a tuition hike, and Tarloff feels the need to write Berkeley an eulogy. (According to my friend, Arthi, last year 21% of the UC budget paid for management salaries while only 8% went towards instruction. I don’t have to be an intellectual Haashole to raise one eyebrow.)
Read more on “Fiat Lux?” So Enlighten Me….
Saturday, January 30th, 2010 · Causes
Comments