Dawn Xiana Moon: Intelligent folk pop with influences from jazz and traditional Chinese music. From Chicago.

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Monday, March 31, 2003

Ah, he speaks the truth.

"There is nothing that steals man's time, his talents, his vigor, his energy, even his prospects of salvation, in greater degree than the crime of procrastination."
—Reed Smoot

I type this as I sit in the computer lab trying to do homework... and obviously, procrastinating myself. [sigh]

^ Top | 2:57 AM | | |

Saturday, March 29, 2003

A Music Story

The funniest thing happened to me today: I'd borrowed my friend Justin's guitar because I was playing at Evening with the Arts, an event sponsored by Arts at Michigan; I played a short set and went to a fiction reading (Jonis Agee reading from her collection of stories Acts of Love on Indigo Road) for my creative writing class. Then I was hungry and decided to stop at Potbelly Sandwiches, still carrying the guitar--I'm playing a regular gig there on Tuesday nights now--to get some food. Picture a cafe--wood finish, tables, chairs, and floors, upbeat music--serving a much better tasting version of Subway. When I got to the counter, the manager launched into a story about how bad the musician who played tonight was, and the girl at the counter chimed in. Apparently tonight's live entertainment was horrible and played acoustic covers of Britney Spears, not to mention that she had no rhythm. So the manager told me that if I played three songs--he needed a pick-me-up and loves my stuff--he's give me my food for free. Guess what I did? Will play for food. :-)

^ Top | 12:38 AM | | |

Friday, March 28, 2003

Creative Juice

I'm not quite sure what this is--it was going to be the last paragraph of the short story I mentioned earlier, but I had to cut it even though I really like it. As one famous writer (who was that again?) said, "I have to kill all of my little darlings." Sadness. So while I'm trying to figure out what to do with this little paragraph....

On the surface, invincible. Write to escape vulnerability, to escape self. Trusting doesn't come easily; the music fills the void, the songs introspection. Better to be strong. Better to drop the masks on a stage, on a page, in the face of art, in the face of parts. There are stories I'm afraid to tell; there are stories words cannot voice. Let the notes tell the truth instead. I can't let you in. You don't want to know. In every melody relive what might have been.

^ Top | 3:51 AM | | |

Tuesday, March 25, 2003

Breaking News

The latest advance in US military technology... not only are we using chickens, we're adding another animal to the roster: US Enlists Dolphins to Aid Iraqi War Effort. “They will be given restaurant quality food and vitamins, and they will work out of wells which we’ve set up here.”

^ Top | 10:16 PM | | |

Monday, March 24, 2003

A Piece of Short Fiction

Here's a little section of the story I'm currently writing; it's around 14 pages now but keeps getting longer (maybe I'm getting too ambitious?). The working title is "Snapshots" and the piece shows glimpses of the lives of four Chinese-American girls--the first time I've tried to write about being Asian. Without further ado:

She remembered the time Renee--Miss Popularity herself, who rarely deigned to talk to girls on the bottom of the elementary school totem pole--told her about that year's Halloween costume: a geisha. It was third grade, amid the grayness of the playground's misnamed blacktop, cracked and striped with the white outlines of half a basketball court, and Lee didn't know what a geisha was. "How can't you know? They're Chinese, like you. Like those pictures on fruit cans." Lee was in high school before she read Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha on a whim, searching for material for her next prose competition piece, and discovered who they really were. They were Japanese.

^ Top | 12:36 AM | | |

Saturday, March 22, 2003

War... From the Other Side

With all the war reporting going on, it's easy to forget that there are actual people on the Iraqi side, people who are living in the midst of a Baghdad under dictatorship and warfare. Take a look at Where is Raed? for Salam Pax's take on living in Baghdad in the middle of bombings, censorship, and a limited food supply.

The streets are empty only bakeries are open and some grocery shops charging 4 times the normal prices, while I was buying bread a police car stopped in front of the bakery and asked the baker if they had enough flour and asked when they opened; the baker told me that they have been informed that they must open their shops and they get flour delivered to them daily. Groceries, meat and dairy products are a different story. One dairy product company seems to be still operating, not state owned, and their cars were going around the city distributing butter, cheese and yoghurt to any open markets. Meat is not safe to buy because you wouldn’t know from where and how it got to the shops.

Iraqi TV says nothing, shows nothing. what good are patriotic songs when bombs are dropping....

^ Top | 2:18 AM | | |

Friday, March 21, 2003

French Jokes

From a comments posting at Dean's blog... and though I love French and am hoping to go to France this summer, I've got to admit that this is pretty funny.

Q. What do you call 100,000 Frenchmen with their hands up?
A. The French Army.

"We can stand here like the French, or we can do something about it."
--Marge Simpson

"You know why the French don't want to bomb Saddam Hussein? Because he hates America, he loves mistresses and wears a beret. He is French, people."
--Conan O'Brien

"I don't know why people are surprised that France won't help us get Saddam out of Iraq. After all, France wouldn't help us get the Germans out of France!"
--Jay Leno

War without France would be like...World War II.

"The last time the French asked for 'more proof' it came marching into Paris under a German flag."
--David Letterman

Q. How did the French advertise surplus World War II rifles?
A. "Never fired, only dropped once."

Why does Nike like the French Army?
Because, in war time, they are the biggest buyers of running shoes.

Why don't they have fireworks at Euro Disney? Because every time they shoot them off, the French try to surrender.

^ Top | 12:57 AM | | |

Thursday, March 20, 2003

The Future of Our Country

Teen People's 20 Teens Who Will Change the World. In a word: scary. We all know Teen People isn't the most discriminating news source, but this is ridiculous. Amongst the lists of actors and other Hollywood types, there are only a few teens who have done things truly worthy of comment, like one who invented a glove that translates ASL (American Sign Language) into English. Highlights from two of the more absurd entries:

Bow Wow: Kids won't listen to teachers, but if I'm their favorite celeb and I tell them, 'This is cool,' they'll do it.

That's just frightening. [mock Mom voice] If Bow Wow told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?

Kelly Osbourne: I didn't work my whole life to be famous.... It might sound selfish, but I do whatever makes me happy, as long as I don't hurt anyone.... You can't please everyone. In the end you have to care more about what you think of yourself and whether you're a good person.

[mock Kelly Osbourne voice] Yes, and I, Kelly Osbourne, am running for Miss America. I'm going to change the world because you see my teenage rebellion on TV every week!

^ Top | 8:07 PM | | |

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

Everything I Know I Learned at the University of Michigan

+ Pulling an all-nighter before an exam usually works. You remember the material pretty well if you've just read it.
+ If you're trying to find housing, you will inevitably be pressured to sign the lease "soon, because we have people coming to look at the house/apartment tomorrow."
+ Check your email at least twice a day. Every hour or two is recommended.
+ Cars break. Often.
+ Computers crash. Often.
+ Most professors really want to be nice.
+ The Fishbowl holds people and some houses hold zoos.
+ The more acronyms, the better (props if you can identify all 67 of these; not all are entirely Michigan constructs, although they all relate to the university): TA, GSI, RA, MPA, MPAA, APA (there are two definitions here), APAA, UGLi, U-M, UMS, CRLT, CCC, IVCF, ERC, UHS, URC, CRC, UCO, ULC, RHA, MSA, LSA, LSA-SG, MUSKET, UMGASS, RC, RCP, S-M, MSU (!!), OSU (!!!), SEA, CCF, KSA, CSA, AP, CSC, TSA, BA, AWA, DAAP, BAM, LGBT, APAWJ, SOLE, YAF, BTA, SAFE, ISA, FSA, BFA, ANSWER, SKITT, BSU, NSCS, BS, BGS, BSE, MA, ASL (two definitions), PhD, MFA, MBA, BBA, BPC, IM, PIRGIM, PIRG.
+ Football is god. At least on Saturdays in the fall (much to my disgust... j/k).
+ Weekends are for sleeping.
+ (Student) elections are a joke.
+ Don't even try to park anywhere in a downtown area before 6pm.
+ Yes, Virginia, landlords really can come from hell.
+ If you let it, instant messenger will consume your life.
+ If you let it, the internet will consume your life.

^ Top | 7:21 PM | | |

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

From the Strange File

Seems to be a recurring theme on here lately... the latest entry in the Strange File is Duct Tape Creations. Every object here is made of duct tape (which, as we all know, can fix anything).

^ Top | 1:56 AM | | |

Sunday, March 16, 2003

My Dad in International News

This is so crazy... my family's from Singapore, where my grandparents still live, and somehow the story about my dad's recent kidney transplant made it into the Straits Times, Singapore's largest (I think) newspaper. Check it out: Stranger, your kidney saved my life.... Part of the reason it's newsworthy all the way over there--halfway around the world--is because in Singapore the laws currently state that donors have to be related; obviously that's not how things work in the US.

Here's the story that appeared on the front page of the Redford Observer, the local paper from my hometown, coming at the story from a slightly different (read: human interest story) angle (though I mass emailed it to most of my friends, so you may have read it already):

Redford Observer, Feb 27, 2003
Divine help: Fellow parishioner gives kidney

By Diane Gale Andreassi
Correspondent

Andy Low of Redford is doing well after receiving a kidney donated by an acquaintance who also attends Dunning Park Bible Church.

Donating a kidney to a family member is a tremendous gift, but when you barely know the recipient it becomes an extraordinary act.

A 25-year-old Redford man underwent a three-hour operation and a four-week recovery period for a church acquaintance. He didn't want his name publicized. "It was kept a secret for a long time," the donor said. "I didn't want it to turn into me being some great guy. I didn't want that to be what it's about."

Andy Low, a 48-year-old Redford man, received his new kidney Feb. 10 and says it not only saved his life, but the future of his family. Without the transplant, Low says, he couldn't have continued working at Electrodynamics, a Livonia engineering business he operates with his wife, Cathy.

Before the operation, the type of kidney dialysis he received forced him to spend a day, every three days, at the hospital hooked to a machine, said Low, who has two children, Dawn, 21 and Benjamin, 19, attending college.

The donor and Low describe what they believe are acts of God before, during and after the operation.

For instance, they were surprised to learn that their blood, tissue and even some antibodies closely matched. In fact, the similar antibodies mean Low needs less medication after the operation.

'Divine intervention'

"The doctor told me that he would be hard-pressed to find a related donor with a closer match," Low said. "This is truly divine intervention. We're talking about someone who is half my age. I'm Asian and he's Caucasian. To get as close a match is impossible."

Their lives are dissimilar, too. Low came to the United States from Singapore 15 years ago. The donor, who grew up in Dearborn, plays guitar in a local rock and pop band and also works with a company that detects Internet intrusion.

"It was pretty evident that I was supposed to do this," the donor said, pointing to the similarities in their blood, tissue and antibodies.

Their one commonality is that they attend the same nondenominational Redford church, Dunning Park Bible. Low and the donor knew of one another, but weren't really friends.

"That he would do this kind of thing is amazing," Low said. "I think it's a testimony to Christian love. It's not like we were buddies. He came up and volunteered for it and stuck with it for two years."

In fact, three other members of the 50-year-old church, a small congregation of less than 250 people, volunteered to donate their kidneys. There was never a plea for a donor, only prayers for Low to get better.

The donor underwent blood tests, physical exams and met with the surgeon and a social worker to make sure he was a good donor candidate. The transplant changed Low's life.

Since the operation, Low's kidney function is 94 percent before it was less than 5 percent. "I'm feeling quite literally great," Low says. "Most people are amazed that the recovery is so quick."

The donor took two weeks off work on a short-term disability leave and recently began working from home for two weeks. Doctors said he wouldn't be allowed to drive for four weeks after the operation. But, since last Monday the donor hasn't taken painkillers and he believes he will drive sooner.

'His Example'

When asked why he would he go through all this pain and suffering for a someone he barely knew, the donor says: "I saw he was in need and someone needed to. People knew what Jesus had done for them and this really paled in comparison. I'm just following His example."

The donor said he admired Low at church. "I would love hearing him talk, because he was into science and numbers and he would give these really fascinating facts about different things, like the vastness of God's creation and stuff like that," the donor said. "It always blew me away."

Even on the day of the surgery, he and Low prayed for a miraculous healing without the operations. "It has been so much better having gone through it than if he were to be healed miraculously," the donor said.

Many good things have come from the operations, the donor added, referring to church members who organized a 24-hour prayer and fasting vigil surrounding the surgery.

"Most of the church members had no idea there was so much of this practical self-sacrificing love going on until Andy revealed it in a speech of gratitude the day before the surgery," said Holly Giannola, a Farmington resident, who recently wrote the Redford Observer about these two men.

The kidney donation has also created a lifelong friendship.

"His family has kind of taken me in as almost another child," the donor said. "They're an awesome family and my family got to know them in the waiting room during the surgery."

In a world when so many people are consumed by their busy schedules, this kind of sacrifice is extraordinary, said Giannola, who added: "But, when the divine hand reaches down and touches people with His love, miraculous things happen."

^ Top | 11:53 PM | | |

Time for a little Lord of the Rings Satire

Aw, the poor Uruk-Hai; they don't really deserve their terrible reputation. And right now they can't even get jobs....

Uruk-Hai Unhappy with Portrayal in Films

^ Top | 3:41 PM | | |

Friday, March 14, 2003

What a strange world we live in.

Some days the world just seems to get more and more bizarre.

Crunch! Giant Chee-to spurs online frenzy: Can you believe people are making such a big deal about this? Ebay pranksters bid the gargantuan Cheeto into millions of dollars and the site finally took the listing offline. The Cheeto's owner finally decided to donate it to a small community. Geez, it's just a snack food.

Cops Charge Queens Man In Robberies: Say he held up banks to pay for cost of 'female physique': A (male) transvestite needed money to buy medicine to keep his breasts. Yeah, you read that right.

A Denton man may have driven around the city for months with his dead mother in a trash-filled van before he died a few days ago in the same vehicle.... How scary is that? Not to mention the fact that he wasn't entirely clothed (read: naked from the waist down) when they found him in the van.

Duct Tape Get-Up Was 'Part of Our Art': Get this: Olabayo Olaniyi and Reena Patel were arrested on charges of staging a bomb hoax in Washington that they say was performance art, never meant to seem dangerous at all. The funny part to me is that Olaniyi was an artist-in-residence at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design last year; Patel just graduated from the same institution. Just one of the many ways my college makes the news. For the record, they seem sincere in their astonishment--it doesn't look like they meant to imply that they were carrying bombs.

^ Top | 3:02 PM | | |

Thursday, March 13, 2003

My Poor Guitar

How shall I start this story... Ben Rickert came over this morning so we could get some rehearsing done; he's going to record some background vocals on the-cd-that's-taking-forever-to-finish tomorrow afternoon. We pulled out my guitar, a beautiful Tacoma Chief, and he was tuning it when all of a sudden he noticed that the bridge was coming off. Yikes! So we de-tuned it and borrowed one of my roommates' guitars for practice. I brought the guitar to Herb David Guitar Studio and discovered that not only is the bridge coming off, the entire face is cracked through and will probably cost $700 in repairs if Tacoma won't fix it under the warranty. And they're about the only people who can, since the design is so unusual. Their guess was that the air was too dry and it cracked... and to think, it was perfectly fine just a couple of days ago. So if things don't work out it looks like I'll have to buy a new guitar, since if it really will cost $700 to fix a new one is only a couple hundred more. But where am I going to get the money?

I guess the moral of the story is buy a humidifer, lest your instrument fall apart at the seams.

^ Top | 1:26 PM | | |

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

On Land(SLUM)lords in Ann Arbor

Minor rant (prepare yourself): NEVER rent from Jun Zhang and her husband; they have to be some of the worst landlords in the Ann Arbor area. In addition to the pathetic, filthy state the house was in at the beginning of the year (read: my room reeked of cat urine), taking forever to fix anything, and removing a wall and door from one room so that now Evan and Joe are essentially living in the hallway (apparently the door and wall are illegal, and had to be removed for the housing inspectors), yesterday Jun's husband--incidentally, no one in our house knows his name--came in and started turning off the hot water without warning us ahead of time. In the middle of the process, he sent Andrea upstairs with the news; of course, Elise and I were both right about to head for the showers. Was it an emergency? No. None of us were exactly sure what he was fixing in the first place--the hot water heater, maybe?--and to top off the whole escapade, he left his van in the driveway and left the house. Joe works in Novi (around 25 minutes away), and his car was parked behind the van, like almost every other vehicle that we own; Joe had to call Jun and acquire her husband's cell phone number to make him move. Grr. End rant.

^ Top | 10:13 PM | | |

Monday, March 10, 2003

So wierd, you won't believe it's true.

From Relevant Magazine's slices:

Despite carrying the latest in military technology, American troops going into battle in Iraq will use chickens to detect chemicals or nerve agents. The US is concerned pollution from oil installations will clog up detection equipment, hindering efforts to pick up traces of poisonous gases or chemical agents. Chickens will be placed in cages on the top of their Hum-Vee vehicles. The smallest traces of gases or chemicals will kill the birds, warning the troops to put their gas masks on.

Sometimes fact really is stranger than fiction.

^ Top | 1:20 AM | | |

Thursday, March 06, 2003

Spring Break Pictures, Part 2

Instead of posting them all here, go ahead and click on the link. :-)

^ Top | 5:59 PM | | |

Spring Break Pictures, Part 1

We took a scenic stop along the side of the road to catch the last vestiges of a beautiful sunset.

The Falls still thunder, even in the winter cold--but there's ice and snow everywhere. Ah, the joys of living in the North.

The Niagara Falls rainbow.

^ Top | 2:10 AM | | |

Wednesday, March 05, 2003

Miscellany

I feel like I've finally redeemed myself with the long post on spring break. :-) Here's something amusing for Tolkien fans: Why Faramir is Better than Aragorn. Scroll down to the entry from 2/24/2003.

^ Top | 11:05 PM | | |

Spring Break

For some reason I feel like I'm writing one of those "what I did during my summer vacation" papers (actually, I don't know if I ever wrote one of those... but you get the point, and hopefully a laugh out of my pathetic attempt at humor). This was the first year I'd gone anywhere for spring break--I figured it was my last chance to do so since I'm graduating in April; I'd originally planned on going to Minneapolis to visit my friends Emily and Dave, so when plans fell through I scurried to formulate new ones. I came up with a few options: going on something of a retreat, either in Northern Michigan or Canada, taking a trip to New York (yes, I know I'm obsessed), or going to Montreal. In the end, I couldn't sell the New York trip to anyone so late--break was only a week or two away at that point--because of finances, but I did convince Tait and Ryan that a retreat would be fun. Hours of planning later, I'd hit upon the idea of going to a bed and breakfast somewhere in Canada (much cheaper than Michigan); it'd be something different, something out of the ordinary. The funny part about this stage was that we didn't decide which bed and breakfast we were going to until the night before we left--with three people, finding a room was tricky and our options narrowed to one place, a place I wasn't feeling particularly fond of (any place that decorates with an inordinate amount of pink and purple loses points in my book). So I kept looking. And looking. And finally, we ended up at Niagara Falls, Canada.

Most of our time was spent talking and reading (Tait, the lone boy, ended up getting his own room after all, since our host decided to give us the extra room for free rather than make up the pull-out couch--hey, we weren't going to complain); I finished most of Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the theatrical version of which I'm going to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform next week. You'd think that since we had to be up for breakfast every morning at 9:00am we would go to bed early and get ourselves on a "normal" sleeping schedule, but no, we were generally up until about 5 o'clock in the morning discussing everything from anime to relationships. So while we didn't get much sleep--though we did get some naps in there--the time was relaxing, spent in the company of good friends. There's something comfortable about spending entire afternoons with a couple of other people just reading and enjoying the warmth of the fireplace you wish was real instead of gas. We saw the Falls--I'll get a few pictures on here in the next day or two--and wandered around town a bit, stopping at the second-largest Buddhist temple in the world (unfortunately we didn't get to go inside since they closed for the night, but we walked around outside for a while comtemplating the bizarre mixture of gaudy colors with modern and ancient architecture) and random restaurants in a downtown area that was frighteningly similar to Las Vegas (glitzier) and Times Square (classier); picture large neon signs for the Guiness Book of World Records Musuem and a large assortment of horror/torture chambers amid a background of the Niagara Falls Casino, a restaurant named New York that served Chinese and Canadian food (you just know that it has to be terrible), Hard Rock Cafe, waterfront, Hershey store, more Italian and steak restaurants than you've ever wanted to see in one place, and Rainforest Cafe. It's a crazy image, isn't it?

Conclusions reached during the trip (and these, by the way, are only half-serious, if at all): Tait would like to be a cannibal, frequently says funny things, would be happy as a dog, and has an scary obsession with girls in kimonos; Ryan likes deformed people because they're "interesting" and writes crazy stories about anime characters; the Canadian military is comprised of "washing machines"; Buddhist monks can be seen wearing winter coats and sweeping snow; it really is possible to talk about politics when you're at breakfast, half-asleep after only three hours in bed; Canadian milk comes in plastic bags instead of cartons or jugs; and you never know when the host of a bed and breakfast could be a lesbian former NATO pilot/trainer with two grown kids and a really cute puppy.

^ Top | 4:25 AM | | |

Monday, March 03, 2003

Wow, I've been a slacker.

So we're now into March and I missed Randomness's first birthday (how sad!) or any other posts for the last week. Yikes. Well, spring break was wonderful--more on that later, since I need to grab dinner in a minute--but in the meantime I'll leave you with a somewhat bizarre list of quotes compiled from my trip to Niagara Falls with Tait and Ryan (who, by the way, is a girl :-). If you don't understand, don't worry--I'm sure no one besides the three of us really gets what they were all about anyway. ;-)

The Official Spring Break 2003 List of Quotable Quotes

Tait: ... With homemade strawberries.
Ryan: I know it's your turn, but don't pick anything stupid.
Dawn: So inside you just really want to be a pet, don't you.
Ryan: I like deformed people.
Tait: [The host of The Price is Right], he comforts me.
The host of the bed and breakfast: I'll never get in one of those washing machines [aka Canadian helicopters]—they're dead, all dead!
Ryan: You're screwed up, Tait; you want people to hit you--you’re a masochist... girls in kimonos....
Dawn: You're going to slip and fall on the ice and break those glasses of yours.
Tait: I know why you don't hit girls--you’re abiding by the old rule: guys don't hit girls, therefore Dawn doesn't hit girls.
Tait: I'm going to eat you. Agrumph.
Tait: I thought you were going to take my foot and read my fortune.
Tait: That’s a cute little girl.
Dawn (reply): If only she was wearing a kimono....

^ Top | 6:13 PM | | |