Poison Ivy, donkeys, and more!

So I've had an outbreak of poison ivy since my arrival on the West Coast. To say the least it's been annoying. In my search for a remedy, I've called my pharmacist sister, asked her doctor fiance, asked my cousin, googled it, even asked jeeves. Along the way I've think I may have found a decent solution (calamine and benedryll, hopefully). For the most part I think the websites were pretty informative and helpful. However, one site went further to pose this interesting possibility: "If poison ivy and a four-leaf clover were combined, you'd get a rash of good luck."

Yes, how clever! And if poison ivy and pollen were combined, you'd SCRATCH and SNIFF! And what about if a mix between honeysuckle and dandelion? You could pick the plant up and SUCK and BLOW!

I don't know about you, but the last thing I want to hear when I've got red pus-filled and itchy bumps all over my arms is levity concerning my tortured state.

On an entirely unrelated note, I met a Chinese guy named Achilles. How cool is that? Seriously, I think that's fucking cool. So what if he probably got taunted mercilessly as a kid. It's worth it now. Maybe I'll named my kid Agamemnon or Zeus or something. But I probably will chicken out and name him something less exotic and creative like James Two or Child or You. Anyway, Achilles, his Caucasian girlfriend, my cousin/roommate, and I went shopping on Clement at some Chinese grocery stores. Chinese grocery stores are basically places that make everything old and cheap. And they have the most random things as well. My favorite example of this was standing next to the register: a rack full of 2006 calendars. Typical things you'd expect to find calendars devoted to. San Francisco, Fast Cars, Golden Retrievers, jackasses. You know.

The front:


The back:


I don't know whose idea it was to devote an entire twelve months of a year to "showcase" (the term they used on the back of the calendar) these wonderful creatures, but whoever's it was, that person is a friggin' GENIUS.

The list price was $11.99, but they only wanted $2 for it. So, of course, I absolutely had to buy one.

Berkeley proper

Sorry there haven't been updates in a while, but I've been busy with my other project: trying to find a job. I auditioned to teach for KAPLAN, a test preparation company, Wednesday night in Berkeley and poked around other avenues as well. For the audition we had to prepare a 5-minute "How To" presentation. After shooting down ideas like "How to Pick Up Girls at Gas Stations" and "How to Dance to Phish Like a Real Hippie", I finally decided on "How to Make a Blog People Will Read...and Love!"

A sidenote about Berkeley: It has a bunch of liberal-looking people and a bunch of different kinds of restaurants, all next to each other. On one block of Shuttuck Ave. (one of the major streets near the university), there was a Vietnamese place, an Indian, and a retro burger and shake joint. Even more than the restaurants or the liberals, though, Berkeley has a lot, and I mean A LOT, of panhandlers. As in loads more than San Francisco proper (yes, I said "proper") or New York. Which is to say, gratuitous amounts. So either bring your change or your "approach at your own risk" prick face.

Anyway, so that's why I haven't been updating lately. Here's a link to a rather ridiculous and amusing website: X-treme Platform Jumping School My way of making it up to you, loyal reader!

I'm famous! (Sort of, in an online kinda way.)

So today I got published on Yankee Pot Roast, an online literary humor site. Check it out here: What I would have done to that jerk who asked me, "Hey you know karate", had I actually known karate

Woot.

San Francisco Firsts

Today, some San Francisco firsts:

1) First person seen nude. (A 30-something white guy, changing at the Richmond YMCA. And, of course, he was quite hairy.)
2) First crazy person seen on bus. (A middle-aged Asian woman, strutting around like she was on a runway and saying things like, "Spells! Spells! Abracadabra! Racism! Spells!")
3) First mail received. (Mom sending me my cell phone charger.)
4) First time--in my life, actually--asked, "What's your sign?" by a stranger. (A girl behind the counter at the Y. Actually I had talked to her yesterday too, so, technically, she's not a stranger.)
5) First illegal thing done. (Flashed bus transfer ticket that had expired 20 minutes earlier to uncaring bus driver, walked beyond his line of sight, did Tiger Woods-like fist pump, exclaimed "Yes!" I guess this isn't really illegal, per say, but it certainly wasn't right either.)

Also, I got tickets to Nickel Creek/Andrew Bird at the Warfield in early December. I guess that's a first too, but that's kind of a mundane thing. Pretty soon I'll be talking about other such non-events as my first West Coast lay or first "vigorous handy" received in the back of a late-night BART from a tranny dressed like a character from Scooby Doo. Um...

SF pics coming soon!


Scoob and Shag, on what suspiciously looks a whole lot like an air mattress. 

Going to California

So I'm in San Francisco and I like it. No life-changing heartbreaks, conquests, or realizations yet. A recap of the week:

Oct. 11. Anderson, SC.
Spent my 23rd birthday doing yardwork for my dad and then going out to eat at a nice restaurant with my parents in downtown Anderson. After that, I went home and sat around doing pretty much nothing. Even more disturbing, I seemed to find some sort of happiness wallowing in my lack of festivities.

There seems to be a trend of diminishing significance to birthdays after 21. I can smoke cigarettes, drink, and buy pornography. I was looking forward to my 25th, so that I can rent a car, but, much to my chagrin, I recently discovered that I can rent a car right now; I just have to pay a little extra. So my 24th b-day will find me not answering phones calls from my family, neglecting to inform anyone outside the family of the date, and hermitting myself from leaving my apartment. And liking it.

Also, I received word that my short humor piece "What I Could Have Done to that Jerk who asked, 'Do You Know Karate?'...Had I known Karate" (based on an earlier blog entry) was accepted by yankeepotroast.org and they needed me to write a short bio. I wrote in a little over an hour, but it took me almost four days before I finally felt comfortable enough about it to send it off. It doesn't pay and I'm not sure if anyone reads it, but it's the first thing I've written that has been accepted for publication by people I don't personally know. I suppose it's a start. A meager one, but one, nonetheless.

Oct. 13, Clemson, SC.
A night of Beat poetry at 356 (a new artsy bar in Clemson, if such a thing is not an oxymoron). The crowd was great and the readers were as well. This was followed by a great party thrown by one of my best friends, Jud M. We had it all; cheap wine, cheap beer, and, my favorite, cheap women. About the women: of course, I jest. They weren't cheap at all. They were actually quite expensive.

During the night, I was feeling quite pic-happy:


f. Simon Grant, organizer and MC of the Six Gallery Celebration, reading at 356.


The moving and talented Sam Renken, cowboy poet from Nebraska, invoking the muse.


Keith Morris, one of my favorite professors and an excellent writer as well, makes an appearance at the party.


KT Zenger and I. And can you believe I met this beautiful girl off the facebook?


Reburn, Judson's floor, sometime between 4 and 5 am. Although you can't tell from the picture, there are countless obscenities scrawled all over his unconscious body.

Oct. 15, Anderson, SC>Greenville, SC>Washington, DC>San Francisco, CA.
Shipped out to the West Coast via a $100 one-way ticket from Independence Air. After spending a mention-worthy amount of time arranging my cds into my 100 absolute favorites, left the f-ing thing at the Greenville-Spartanburg airport. Indescribable panic and anger directed at myself. Freaking out, palms becoming sweaty, calling a bunch of customer service numbers. 4-1-1ed the number to GSP. Was connected by the operator to the airport gift shop. Laughed and asked to be transferred to lost and found. Case had been found! Called my mom to pick it up. Received lecture. My mom refusing to return it--"punishment" for my absent-mindedness.

Oct. 17, San Francisco, CA.
Staying at my cousin's apartment, which is located three blocks--walking distance!--from the Pacific. The weather here is, per usual, amazing. Daytime highs in the low 70's and nights in the low 60's. Went to City Lights bookstore in North Beach today and spent over three hours sampling everything from Eggers to Bukowski to lesser known authors like an early-twenty-something-looking guy named Davy from Ann Arbor who wrote a short story collection called "The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas". It got a great review from John Updike, if I remember correctly, but I wasn't terribly impressed with the guy (it kind of read like a wannabe Denis Johnson). I love Denis Johnson--Jesus' Son is one of my favorite short story collections--but I thought this Davy guy was either a) trying to rip Johnson off (and failing) or b) hadn't read him and, to use the common metaphor, inadvertantly reinvented the Denis Johnson wheel; although while Denis' wheel is smooth and almost effortless to roll, Davy's is block-like and cumbersome, and altogether, pretty much unnecessary. You may say I'm harsh, but it's just a defense mechanism, really. Oh well, point is I left with a little more self confidence in my own work and the latest from David Sedaris. On my way out, I saw two really cool photo opportunities, but alas, I forgot the batteries in my digital camera. Go figure.

*UPDATE (10/20/07):
Upon rereading this entry/review I would like to say, 2 years later, that while I do not remember whether Davy's short story collection was as bad as I claimed it to be, I have since seen his production Found Magazine and I think it's pretty awesome. I've also since seen him read from Found and he was great. In conclusion, I am an asshole who makes hasty judgments. Thank you, that is all.

My internet belittles me and calls me "weird".

So I’m bored and I took an online personality test. Although it’s kind of long and the questions are pretty dry, this one makes some bold predictions at the end of the questioning, and I appreciate that. It also has a strange streak of subjectivity, biased wording, and unrational thinking--things not typically found in a test like this. Usually everything is put mildly with an equal number of positives and negatives. You could be a child molestor and it would put something like "young at heart."

Anyway, according to this thing, I'm:

"messy, outgoing, open, self revealing, ambivalent about chaos, unpredictable, not good at saving money, social, likes large parties, likes to stand out, risk taker, quick to make friends, does not like to be alone, rash, fame seeking, sarcastic, craves attention, social chameleon, low self control, food lover, not rule conscious, weird, assertive, not a perfectionist, anti-authority, thrill seeker, vain, likes to fit in, reckless, emotionally sensitive, leisurely, [and] trusting."

For the most part, it's disturbingly right on. But, honestly, there are really only like four different traits there. Outgoing, open, social, likes large parties, does not like to be alone--I get the point already. Also, there are a couple traits that make no sense whatsoever, and, frankly, sound pretty darn unscientific. I mean, how do you find out if someone is sarcastic or a "food lover" or not based on questions like "On a scale from 1-5, How vain are you?" or "Do you like things to be unchanging or not?" And "weird"? What a pinpoint descriptive word. I'm guessing they just equated that with "artistic". They do usually go hand-in-hand.


Here are a bunch of stats:

Extraversion 86%
Stability 43%
Orderliness 40%
Accommodation 50%
Interdependence 70%
Intellectual 30%
Mystical 43%
Artistic 90%
Religious 10%
Hedonism 50%
Materialism 56%
Narcissism 83%
Adventurousness 90%
Work ethic 63%
Self absorbed 76%
Conflict seeking 56%
Need to dominate 83%
Romantic 83%
Avoidant 36%
Anti-authority 43%
Wealth 56%
Dependency 70%
Change averse 36%
Cautiousness 36%
Individuality 43%
Sexuality 76%
Peter pan complex 23%
Physical security 83%
Physical fitness 64%
Histrionic 83%
Paranoia 56%
Hypersensitivity 90%
Female cliche 36%

Underneath all this is a result box of that's more a lecture than anything else:

“Stability results were moderately low which suggests you are worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious.

Orderliness results were moderately low which suggests you are, at times, overly flexible, improvised, and fun seeking at the expense of reliability, work ethic, and long term accomplishment.

Extraversion results were very high which suggests you are overly talkative, outgoing, sociable and interacting at the expense too often of developing your own individual interests and internally based identity.”

Yeah, fuck you too, personality test.

In case you want to be abused too:
Take Free Advanced Global Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

Insomniac with James Yeh

Eventful day. In the span of the last 24 hours or so, I:

1) took the LSAT on three hours of sleep,
2) did OK on it (I think),
3) landed awkwardly after scaling a parking garage wall, scraping my left knee and palms,
4) won the entire pot of $35 in Texas Hold 'em,
5) drove by a car going the wrong way on I-85,
and 6) dialed 9-1-1 for the first time in my life (to inform the highway patrol).

Thrills and spills of excitement, let me tell you!

The win in Hold 'em was in appropriately dramatic fashion: On the last hand everyone went all in and I ended up with three Jacks and a King high against three Jacks with a Queen high. Not too bad for someone whose mother had earlier called and asked, "James, you're not GAMBLING ARE YOU??" I have to admit I got a little bit of a rush from the whole experience--kind of like, now that I think of it, receiving your first French kiss. Your hands sweat and self-doubt shouts in your chest and all the while you're just trying to be calm and act like you know exactly what you're doing. And when you're done all you can think about is just, "Damn, I can't believe that happened. Well maybe I can. It couldn't have been all luck. Yeah, I'm the man."

Tomorrow I'm going to sleep in until 2 pm, play English major softball, and then call it a day.

Music of the moment: Sufjan Stevens, Illinois.


Is it just me or do those cards seem abnormally large? (Yeah, I know you're probably thinking, "There are cards?")