Once again, meanwhile in Japan world...

Oh ho it gets better.

YES ad of the day: don't mess with pandas.

Kid: Dad, can we get Panda Cheese?
Dad: No, we have enough.
Cue pissed off panda. :D

Kitty tantrums: living with a cuddly-soft 5 year old.

This week in particular, Tucker Care has been like going through the rebellious, "mine!" phase that comes with toddlers. I've had him since he was two months old; feeble, no full coat of white and grey bunny hair, and barely enough teeth to eat with. Now, three months later, his tail is puffy and long and he's addicted to wet food like it's crack. I've never seen a cat that whined loudly at me for no reason till him. It's pretty funny.
Today, for example, I got kind of a late start on my day and finally stuffed my laundry in a bag to take downstairs. At the elevators (close to my apartment), I realized I forgot soap and hurried to get it. When I opened the door, Tucker zoomed out into the hall and I yelled after him, dropped my things and caught him at the elevators where he stopped. He'd never done that before. He's tried but stopped immediately outside the door because he got scared.
And what's become a nightly routine--almost every night--are my Tucker Sleepy Holds. When it's very late and I'm exhausted, Tucker is usually at his most hyper. If he's making too much racket, I grab him and hold him on my bed till he calms down (kitty tantrums) and gets tired. He definitely resembles a little kid screaming, "Nooo! I don't wanna gotta bed!" when I have to hold him in one spot.
Although I must say, even though it sounds like I'm complaining, I really, really love taking care of him. He's mine. My kitty who sleeps next to me every single night with his head on the pillow and sometimes I'll wake up with his arm around my neck, who skids onto the counter when I make his food, and who absolutely depends on me for everything. And no one would put up with him as much as I do.

WANT of the day.

SEIL bag by Lee Myung Su design lab from Ben on Vimeo.


Oh, asian people. You tickle my futuristic bone.

If I had enough money, I would...

I've been indulging my money fantasies lately via the Internet. It's like crack, I swear.

1. Invest in every single nail polish color Sephora has to offer.

2. Buy an isolated cottage in the French countryside and then drown it with lavish flowers, plants, and food gardens. 

3. Decorate said cottage with Ashley Croswell Shabby Chic and/or Anthropologie house furnishings and/or authentic antiques. 

4. Get a record player and play all music from vinyls. 

5. Purchase a mass array of plaid/plain button-downs from various places.

6. Seek out every useful appliance (garlic crusher, food processor, stick blender, grapefruit spoon, mini pie   shells, lemon squeezer) and stock up my kitchen with them.

7. Raise two cats and allow their kittens to romp around in the backyard and not give them up for adoption (families are families). 

8. Ride an antique, mint-colored bike on a open trail and really enjoy it.

9. Host massive Christmas and New Years parties for family and friends once every few years.
10. Never, ever eat another processed food again, breathe in toxic air, drink bad water, or become deathly ill.

11. Do a lot of things people want to do but never get the chance to.

Today (Wednesday) was not good...

For a number of seemingly small reasons that had a tendency to build and build like a damn pyramid...
1. Je n'ai pas obtenu de voir mon conseiller, la personne la plus importante au monde en ce moment. J'ai attendu vingt minutes et il n'etait pas n'importe ou.
2. Un ami a voulu me voir mais il etait deja assez tard. Il ne laisserait pas vers le haut ainsi j'ai du continuer a le rejecter a plusieurs reprises. Maintenant il est triste. (Calme vers le blas, mon appartement eset malpropre et j'ai eu une longue journee. Ne la prenez pas personnellement. Et il m'a juste dit que je semble toujours etonnant.)
3. I left sound class around 2 (while editing a Scott Pilgrim trailer) due to a gnarly head/neck ache and went home to eat and hurried back to class to take a final quiz.
4. Car incidents I never take lightly. Anything relating to my dear Honda Civic is taken with all seriousness. So, in the parking garage, when a lady (in her smirking Prius) and I were parked so close I could not open my door, she honked at me and asked, "How will you open your door?" Causing me to back up and repark it. When I started walking to school, I could feel my brain pushing against my skull like it wanted to jump out and stab itself. I was pretty heavy with rage by then so I had to compose myself before I got to class.
5. I kept thinking the garage guards would question me about my fob since I use it to get in yet I park on the visitor level because I don't live in that building anymore. They stared daggers at me just like I thought everyone else did today.
6. I saw He Who Must Not Be Named pulling out of the parking garage, showered and shaven, but immediately looked at my feet. I am in no state to act like everything is fine.
7. Je ne pense toujours pas ma maman comprend que je suis juste comme me suis inquiete d'obtenir un travail pendant qu'elle est. N'est-il pas mon souci du travail a ce sujet? En repetant ces soucis a plusaieurs reprises a moi soyez la pulpart de temps cauchemardesque pour entendre. Vraiment, il y a seulement tant d'heures pendant le jour. Me propres pensees sont assez psychotiques, je ne pensent pas que je peux manipuler beaucoup plus sans se developper en spirales.
8. I can't decide what to wear for graduation.... Yes, I worry about it.
9. Last week I impaled my heel and now my foot has a painful bump.

There you have it.

(Yep, definitely a video week) Oh yah, THIS is why i heart Fanny Pak.

Hey Mickey!

Looks like it's been a video week.

5 Reasons I love Tavi Gevinson.

1

2. She has a fantastic fashion blog.
3. She's been on the cover of Pop magazine.
4. She sits front row at Prada runway shows.
5. We have the same hair.

Lady Gaga PSA: Repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell.

I love how she has a flag behind her and how she waits and waits for the senator to pick up the phone. There are lots of people posting videos of themselves calling their senators asking to repeal don't ask don't tell. I just might do that :)

That's not a road.

It's fish off the Louisiana coast. I hate BP.

I've found it: the place I want to live.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt sings Lady Gaga... Need I repeat myself?

You cannot go wrong, in any way, shape, or form, when combing Joseph and Gaga. Pure magic comes out. The world needs more Josephs. And Gagas.

Oh my God yes moment of the day.

2010 MTV Video Music Awards - More VMA Video

I've loved Florence for quite some time now, but this is the first performance that really blew my mind (in terms of harmony). It's very flowy and oddly peaceful and dancers are so amazing. It's like they're from Planet Ballet.

Watch as Oprah tortures and tortures...and tortures her studio audience.

Oprah's Audience Freaks Out Again
Uploaded by TheDlisted. - Watch feature films and entire TV shows.

I wanna go to Australia, Oprah!
PS Why are people crying before they even know what it is? Calm down! I feel like they all need tranquilizers by the end of this.

Tucker has discovered how to crawl under bed covers...

And it's so cyooot!

I'm not sure why I want to marry this man, but I do.

This man is either French or from the seventies. Either way, I want him.

Let's chronicle how I'll manage without a microwave, shall we?

So I was in Whole Foods today for the first time in about two months doing some long-term grocery shopping (I won't say where I used to shop but it rhymes with "shmader shmoes"), going down each and every aisle tediously, scanning every product and weighing my options like a human calculator. Come the  Asian section and I realized buying those boxed Udons and soups were rather pointless since they were manufactured for microwaves. My new apartment is absent of the device, though. Not that it's a big deal, I'll just have to be patient while my Amy's meal is sitting for a good hour inside the oven. But what if I'm feverishly starved (happens every once in a while)? I'll need something fast, dammit.
I'll just have to make sure that doesn't happen. So no boxed soups or microwaveable egg rolls (ew) or radiation for me.
Isn't food tastier when its molecules are heated naturally anyways and not like its inside a tornado of invisible lava? Ok, that was an exaggeration, but it's not when you don't wait for it to cool down.

By the way: You're welcome.

WANT.

Exes of the world: yeah, what he said.

Catchy, no?

Movie Review: The Cove

First off, I have to say how glad I am that this documentary was made. It starts off a lot like "Man on Wire": with a rather illegal yet groundbreaking mission. There's James Bond night vision, people crammed into a van with cameras, and walkie-takies checking everyone's position asking how many cars are tailing them ("the Japanese mafia?"). All for one cause: to save a throng of dolphins.
The first person we meet is Rick O'Berry. Any time he enters the town of Taiji, Japan, he must be incognito, wearing a face mask like nurses wear and a wide hat. He even hunches over when he drives a car to keep his identity or else "they'd kill me if they could."He's referring to the chief of police in Taiji.
Dear Rick, once a dolphin trainer himself, has a history of getting arrested multiple times a year for attempting to free dolphins in captivity (and succeeding). His actions are rather simple: take a pair of scissors and cut a whole into the damn fence. I burst out laughing the first time I saw footage of him in a scuba suit with sheers snipping into an underwater chain link fence, purely because it was so joyful to see him in such an act of bravery, outsmarting the bad guys. It's a rush.
Rick tells us about why he's devoted his life to saving the dolphins--because surely someone can't just be born with this destiny. There has to be a solid reason for this madness he causes (or rather, tries to put a stop to). And it all boils down to his Hollywood days of training a dolphin named Kathy for the TV series, Flipper. Almost all dolphins in captivity are young females because they look the part. For ten years he helped build up the industry of show casing these animals, whales included. Until a pivotal event happened. "Dolphins breathe consciously," he tells us. "Every breath is a conscious effort. Kathy was severely depressed, I could feel it. Then, one day, she swam up into my arms, took a breath, and didn't take another. She committed suicide." The next morning, Rick went to a seaquariam and freed a dolphin from captivity and got arrested.
That was the minute I decided it was okay to cry. Who'd ever heard of such a thing? A British scientist goes on to explain how a dolphins are capable of doing the things they do. And he says, "The trainers communicate to the dolphins with their hands. In human form, it's Sign Language. But dolphins don't have hands, so it's one-way. This is a plain example of how incredibly intelligent these creatures are. It's extraordinary."
Enter Mandy and Tom. They're a married couple whose passion is freestyle scuba diving, which is essentially scuba diving on one breath of air. Mandy and Tom also have a passion for dolphins and whales because they've swum with them and understand them as animals. They were both recruited to help Rick and his team expose the cove of Taiji during the kill-fest.
Another man on board is an Australian surfer, who is the responsible for Hayden Pennetiare's display at the Taiji cove in 2007. He, Hayden, and five others swam out on surf boards into the cove, held hands, and refused to move from the killing spot--till the fishers started threatening them with the harpoons, jabbing at them, and yelling violently. This is where Hayden earns my respect because the girl, who was about 18 at the time, fought till she couldn't fight anymore, stumbling onto the shore in hysterics because she couldn't save a baby dolphin. All six surfers were arrested and banned from ever returning to Taiji.
Rick talks about the fisherman and their ignorance, and we see it first hand. They taunt the Westerners who venture to the cove to try and take pictures to expose the evil that happens--and so far, a lot of Westerners (photographers, journalists, activists) have battled with them on shore. One time, when Rick was there, one man in particular was so out of line that, "he wanted me to punch him. He was taunting me, and man, I would've socked him over the railing." I have to say, personally, that I was fairly surprised to see such behavior from the Japanese fisherman. I've been to Japan and they're not like that, not at all. Maybe it's a regional thing, but they are not ignorant or aggressive or obnoxious like these men were.
The method of killing is rather interesting yet irritating. It's too easy. I never would've known dolphins were so very sensitive to sound had I not seen this film (I only knew a little about it). Sound is the reason that droves of dolphins died when Sea World first opened. The tanks they were being kept in were so loud and terrible that it stressed them out, made them sick, and they died. It's a similar method at the cove: there's a long metal bar on the side of the boats that are whacked, creating a loud clanging, a wall of sound, and immediately the dolphins flock to the inner cove to be kept in a large net overnight and killed the next morning. It's too easy.
I must say, throughout the documentation of the crew's mission to film up-close what happens at the cove (building cameras in disguise and planting an underwater camera at night), the most satisfying moment comes at the very end. I won't give that part away. You have to check it out yourself. But I will say I was so shell-shocked I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. Thank God I don't have roommates or I would have been pretty embarrassed by the look on my face.
The film itself is not about animal cruelty (MOM), it's about restoring the way dolphins need to be treated. So instead of dismissing the matter just because dolphins died (MOM), watch it because of how much effort is being put into trying to rectify it all.

Hahaha. I laugh.

My favorite is "floppy."
I'm not a cat freak, I swear. 0_0

100 cats let loose in a store. What will Ikea think of next?

So here is the making of an Ikea commercial in Wembley, England. When the store closed, a film crew and the cat's owners huddled inside and set up. Then, well, they let the cats go and filmed the whole things. The video explains it all....
The end made me hug and squeeze my kitty!

Just so you know.

So I was on the Internet looking for the lyrics to an Interpol song, "Summer Well," and I noticed that every site I went to had them all wrong. How dare they. Is it so hard to understand what they're saying? No. It's not. So here are the lyrics in case you were wondering.

The fevered plastics that seal your body
They won't stop this rain
Hey hey
I was your eye in the night
when the profits fell
I said it looks like you summer well

I want to stay magical
I want to stay yearning
I want to feel up on your lie
I miss you
But it looks like you summer well

All the while the protests will shine the same
But you will never notice
It's alright
I rely on the process
Don't mind the frame
They will never take this
dream from me

It's alright
It's alright
It's all the way behind her
It's alright

I miss you babe
I want you back
The signs we gave
But weren't those signs supposed to last
The rainy days
The summer's back
The signs we gave
So what was that
You know we have ways
To make the seasons touch these words
So let me take this
Turn your eyes look away
Until it fades

All the while the protests will shine the same
which you will never notice
It's alright
I rely on the process
Don't mind the frame
They will never take this
dream from me
It's alright
It's alright
You send me

Today was better than I thought it would be.

(Pardon the lazy writing, I wasn't expecting to write this.)
First off, thank you to Interpol for reminding me just how damn cool the location of my school is.
Around 4 PM, my friend and I happened to go up to the roof of the school to see her new car (a Jeep SUV!) when we heard music coming from across the street at Space 15, a small place for any cool Indie people. We went to the edge of the roof and peered over the wall to see a concert set up. It took my friend a few seconds, but she shouted, "It's Interpol!"
We watched them rehearse for their concert and headed back to class five minutes late.
Once class was over, we had plans to go to Kabuki for dinner. Just as we were about to walk into the parking garage, we heard the music again. They were still playing! "We should go watch," Friend said. So we broke into a sprint--literally--and hauled ass down the sidewalk where people from high balconies cheered at us (not kidding). When we finally got to fence of the concert, panting and antsy, we realized the school roof was still a better view. So we hiked up the driveway of the parking garage and went back to the wall to watch the crowd of about 200 scream at the band and someone even managed to climb onto the roof of Urban Outfitters and snap pictures. About 20 kids from the school were balancing on car bumpers to watch and sing every lyric of their songs and scream to get noticed from the band members (I gave an exaggerated wave during their rehearsal from the roof).
We stayed for about 4 songs and then left for Kabuki.
One of the coolest days ever.

Dear Guys I Know,

So last night I had a friend over (guy) and our goal was to go out and get candy to quiet this sweet tooth of mine. That's it. Just hang out with mouthfuls of chemicals and sugar and neon dyes. And that's what we did.
My new apartment has a shaggy green rug that resembles grass, so we sat across from each other with a small box of Bean Boozled and dared the other to eat the disgusting flavors like baby wipe, dog food, and booger. We played with my kitten and fake-danced to a dumb song.
Come 1 AM, I was starting to pass into the realm of exhaustion. My eyes didn't want to stay open at all and I was in no mood to get up and walk him down to the front door to say goodbye. So at 2 I offered if he wanted to stay over instead of walk home and he said sure. Technically I have a bunk bed that's separated. One bed for each.
Until he got into mine with me.
Here's some insight into what I was thinking: 1.) If I clearly offer you the other bed while you're lying in mine, it means I don't want you in my bed. 2.) Scoot the fuck over. 3.) Oh my God, I'm tired.
I did the only thing I could think of, which was turn away from him and pass out after some lengthy prank texting with a friend.
Before I fell asleep, he took my hand and kissed it and then held it for about 10 seconds before I folded my arms.
1.) It's pretty damn obvious I'm not pursuing you, dude. 2.) This might be romantic if we weren't strictly friends. 3.) Oh my God, I'm tired.
I even woke up around 6:30 to find him lying way too close to me but there wasn't much I could do but ask where my phone was in order to move away.
HINTS. I haz them.

Colors!

So I'm moved into a new studio and I just noticed I have a crap-load of various colors in my apartment. It's rainbow time!

Purple: Towels
Blue: Towels, carpet
Green: Bed sheets, pillows, rug
Yellow: Pillow, towel, bathroom soap
Orange: Tissue box
Red: Lip phone, plates, cell phone
Pink: plates
White: bath mat, bed frame, plates, towels, cabinets, walls, lamp shades
Silver: disco ball, computers
Black: bed quilt, chairs, printer
Brown: table, drawers, fireplace, lamp stands

So many colors!

Some people were born to shut others the hell up.

Take that.

Convenient food of the day.

Yup. That is a Nutella Snack & Drink. There's biscuit stick things and Nutella to dip them in along with a section of lemon tea.
WANT.

Ian McKellen doth protest.

Ahem. Yes, please.

Meanwhile in Japan....

Is this a high school graduation or something? It's pretty awesome.

Batman, those men have breasts.

So 13 models and actresses and musicians teamed up with Paper Magazine for a spread of these beautiful women dressed as men. And I gotta say, they did a damn good job. Go here to find out who they really are!

Monkey adopts kitten in Bali.

Kitty: Ai trusts ew, monki.
Monkey: Dis mai wyfe. Wez mareed.

There's hope!