my brother came home from korea saturday afternoon and i dutifully went to pick him up at o'hare...the interesting thing about picking someone up who's coming from korea is that you most likely will get stuck waiting as they go through customs, and that you will find yourself in a throng of other asians as they wait for their overseas arrival...considering i don't often find myself amidst a group of people in which the vast majority are of my race, it was an interesting experience...there were people there who were dressed up with camera and bouquet of flowers ready to greet whoever it was they were waiting for...most were there in groups with other family members as they waited...i have to admit that i felt out of place...i mean, i was toting a bag covered in band buttons...bands most asians don't listen to i'd imagine...i know it's silly for me be self-conscious in situations like that, but i find that i often can't help it...i'm not what you'd call the model korean young professional woman, and sometimes it's hard when i'm around other asians...

alright...whatever...it was nice to see my bro again after 7 weeks...he seemed pretty happy and even expressed an interest to go back to korea in the near future for a longer term...that might not be a bad idea for him...he seems to get along just fine with the korean community...and i hear boys who speak english and play the guitar can go pretty far in certain korean circles...my bro & my mom & i hung out for a few hours, and it was probably the best informal time we'd had as a family since my dad died...hmm...that sounds pretty loaded...well, we'll see how this goes...i've been trying to be more communicative w/ my mother, but i'll admit it's like pulling teeth for me...

so i've been having some vivid dreams that often play out like movies...this is worthy of note because normally, i am a very boring dreamer and seldom even remember my dreams...i really need to start writing them down as soon as i wake up though because the details get all mixed up and hazy once the dream leaves the safe surroundings of slumber and enters the world of the awake...i already mentioned the gold paint tinged embossed asian greeting card white heron dream a couple days ago...well, on friday night i had my jd salinger dream...in this dream, it was like i was watching a movie based on a catcher-in-the-rye-esque novel...it felt like i was watching the movie and IN the movie at the same time...and i was a boy in a private prep school somewhere in new york...it was christmas break, and i was on the green hilly grounds of my campus chatting w/ a fellow student...we were talking about going home for the holidays and making plans to meet up downtown in the city during break...all of a sudden, we run into a professor who's considered somewhat of a lunatic by the students but who has taken quite a liking to me...he teaches poetry, and he's taken to singing his poetry to me, and only me...upon this encounter, he agains sings a few lines to me, and although i'm a tad embarrassed by the situation, i am actually fond of the professor and see in him a purity and simplicity and serenity that is absent in most of the humans i'm surrounded by, who, to my personal assessment, seem thoroughly entrenched in their affectations...i don't remember much else from the dream...i think i was wearing a tweed sportscoat...

anyways, the next dream was on saturday night, and i was driving down polk street, where teddy lives, except it was in evanston somehow, and i kept getting green lights (except in my dream they were yellow but they meant green) and when i hit where polk deadends at damen, there was a schlotsky's deli and the person i was with wanted to go in there for some reason...when we went in, there were people there whom we apparently knew...and it wasn't like a real schlotsky's deli...it was more like a sitdown place like cracker barrel...we sat at a table of a multiethnic high school boy's basketball team that had just played at the metro...i have no idea why they played a basketball game at the metro, but in the dream it sounded perfectly natural to me...everyone at my table took a kaiser roll from somewhere and we waited for our sandwiches to be served...when i got my sandwich, it was lettuce and tomato and potato chips in between bread, and i thought to myself, 'i know i don't eat meat, but they could've at least put some cheese in there!' and i gave my sandwich back to the waiter and asked them to put some cheese in it...that's all that's left of that dream...

sunday morning, teddy & his bro dave & i went to the wilson sk8te park at like 7:30 in the morning...there were a lot more people there than i expected...matt r. who went to loyola w/ dave & whom i'd met through michael g was there, and matt's good friend tony & tony's wife...i didn't really talk to them though cuz i stayed in the car so i could listen to tunes and continue reading my brothers k. which i'm deeply engrossed in lately...OH! i made a mix cd of some good old punk bands for the occassion...32 songs on one cd...bands like ALL, bad religion, bad brains, descendents, adolescents, 7 seconds, fugazi, gang of four...it was a fun mix...anyways, i wasn't really watching the boys this time, but i did peek every now and then, and i saw teddy doing the big bowl, and he was skating pretty good...

after the boys were done skating, we went to corona's on irving park for breakfast...that was dave's first place of employment back in the day...dave & i dropped teddy off for work @ trader joe's and then i dropped off dave and went home...i should've done laundry, but i thought i had enough clean underwear to last me a few more days, so i abandoned that idea and immersed myself in figuring out how to create a new format for my photo pages...for months now, i've been wanting to display a type of gallery made up of thumbnails and one big image that would change based on the thumbnail you clicked on...i didn't know how to do this using simple html (none of which is really all that simple to me anyway)...i finally figured it out by looking at the source code for one of my friend jesse's photo pages...i knew that there had to be a way of coding "if-somebody-clicks-on-this-thumbnail-change-the-source-of-the-big-image-to-display-the-bigger-version-of-the-thumbnail" into html...

so i have succeeded in creating my first photo page using this new format...check it out! it's my panda panda page....

in other random stream-of-consciousness news, yesterday was exactly one year since the watchers/duvall show @ empty bottle where i first laid eyes on teddy as he was setting up his drum kit...i still remember that moment when i first saw him and i thought to myself, 'oh my god he's so hot how'm i ever gonna talk to him?' if michael (watchers frontman) hadn't come up to me that night to ask me about the photos i took, i don't know how teddy & i would've ever met...i still remember standing outside the bottle that night, talking to michael, and secretly wishing to myself that the drummer, whose name i didn't even know at the time, would come out and talk to me too...

anyways, i cooked teddy dinner to commemorate the occassion...or rather, i picked the recipe, bought all the ingredients, and supervised as teddy cooked the dinner...it was a really great recipe too...it was for a creole mexican catfish, but i used tilapia instead, and it came out really juicy and with a kick! i did add some chili powder at the end...but it wasn't so spicy that we were crying and miserable or anything like that...but we did sneeze a lot while cooking cuz of the cayenne, which i accidentally spilled a bunch of on the kitchen table...so we had the tilapia, some brown rice, and green beans from teddy's mom's garden, white wine from new zealand, and espresso gelato that was absolutely divine...we hadn't cooked a real meal in a long time, and it felt good to make something yummy that's not pasta or pizza...

alrighty...i'm tired of typing now...

been listening to--
sk8te punk mix
troubleman sampler
time (the revelator)--gillian welch
no depression--uncle tupelo
still feel gone--uncle tupelo