Fluoride blocks the Third Eye.

Inaugurating my second week at the Lakeshore co-op! I'm basically completely moved in and it's still such a novelty to have my own space again, to host friends and board game nights, or to have my decorations up instead of boxed. I was excited to have my massive desk back, the same one I hauled off the streets of Berkeley with Talia and then spent an hour wiping hobo poop off of.

I should block out weekends where I don't skip town, but until then, the wilderness beckons. This past weekend, we opted for the concrete jungle side of things, and the main quest was the grunion runs in SoCal.  Of course we incidentally picked the weekend that LA Pride occurs, as well as the end point of AIDS Lifecycle.

It's hard to believe that it's been a year since I was last here.

I expected to be in a weird headspace to be in LA, but I didn't even think of last year until now. It's been a lot of forgetting and accepting that I am indeed better off, not that it's been completely easy. Too bad no one else had seen 500 Days of Summer, or I could have totally gone back to the Bradbury. That was one sunny afternoon in 2012 where I felt like the pieces all fit and I was loved, and now it's just a small sweet nugget of memory, of me getting to know Los Angeles, laughing at the girl who wanted a picture at Angels Knoll with her stuffed T-Rex by her side.

The Aesop lesson is on a post-it I've had on my desktop for the past year: "Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy."

We flopped down on the camouflage blanket at the beach at 1 am. No fish fucking away. We wade into the water, watch the foam chase up our ankles, and then sneak into the house to go straight to bed. I wake up early and have a tour of the poisonous garden before rousing everyone else.

Cooking and then serving breakfast on a little pool-side terrace is shockingly not the worst thing ever. Surprise. We had a solid spread of breakfastibles, and I don't think I would have made it through the Getty without this early load of eggs and carbo-action. I want a little tub of honey almond cream cheese now.

Ema then led us on a tour of the Hollywood Sign and the Universal Studios backlots from above.

The meat troughs at Hae Jang Chon still run deep and fast, and as soon as we were seated, the banchan flew over. Like amateurs, we demolished the first wave and the meaty clouds didn't even descend until the second filling of the fish cake. Once the safe meats had been tackled, we opted for both stomachs and some miniature octopi. The abomasum (fourth and final stomach of Bessie) was my favorite of the not-so-awful offal (sorry, I had to), and it was a Pioppini mushroomy chew. I left room for the epic kimchi fried rice and sikye, but neither were forthcoming. Everyone else had surrendered at this point, so I wasn't going to one-man army it.

Of course, after throwing the ring into Mount Meat, it only made sense to flop down at Santa Monica beach like voluptuous whalepeople. The fish failed to show up again to get their rocks off, so we parted for WeHo to see if some action was to be had. The Gayborhood definitely had turned into a gay refugee camp for the weekend, and the Abbey had a line that went on and on and on. We all called dibs on various menfolk as they ebbed and flowed by us.

After being at SinBala for an hour, our Din Tai Fung reservation finally buzzed. In another crowd, we would totally have marched off for a second load of 小籠包. SinBala did indeed hit the spot though: oyster pancake, homemade sausage over rice, fried turnip cake, dumplings x 2, and then shaved ice to close it all up.

In n' Out wrapped up the weekend, though some of us subsisted on figs, Okinawan sugar, and pure light.

Life Advice: Hide your ears and wear a little lipstick.

Holy smokes, Batman, who knew that a bag of fifty fresh oysters, wine, and plenty of sunshine would make for a good Sunday? Tomales Bay Oysters can now be knocked off my bucketlist, even if we didn't have the patience to pop the mollusks onto a grill to try BBQing them. Kumamotos, om nom nom. It did make me hunger for the big clams I had in DC though.

And that night, we finally made it to BrewLab! I'm surprised that pillagin' hipster hordes haven't descended en masse on this event since it has so many hashtagged things going for it. When we showed up to this quiet little house, a friendly lass handed us a mason jar (encouraged donation was $10-20, but it's an All-You-Can-Taste-Drink-Gorge, so...), and then we were in the basement/backyard where two different stations were serving seventeen homebrews. Breakfast in Bed (Oatmeal Maple Stout) stood out for smelling exactly like something you'd want to reduce in a saucepan and then drizzle over pancakes. There was also some flowery beer that tasted like summer or something that a talking rabbit would drink in Redwall Abbey.

There were more chest-length beards than you could shake a maraca/caxixi at, and when the sun finally set, the Kwanzaa lights twinkled on. It was one of those sickly sweet summer days that you just want to stick in a box to look at and remember later.

Kimchi time happened again. This time the means of production were not as robust, but we still pumped out thirteen jars of delicious spicy vegetable matter. I was honored with the task of washing all the little verminous critters before we salted and spiced and puree'd away. Another two days and I'll have bubbly tanginess to throw into anything I happen to be cooking.

And speaking of foodiness, I just published my first article on Spoonwiz on Cantonese consumption!

In more exciting news, I finally can stop trolling Craigslist for housing ads! No more insecure sex workers, techies looking for pot, or bros looking for live-in hos!

In June, I'm moving into an awesome co-op right behind the Grand Lake Theatre. It's right by Lake Merritt, a farmer's market, and Great Western Power Company. For the price of a parking space in San Francisco, I'll have a massive room and a separate study of my own to read/write. This doesn't even include common spaces where I plan to spend most of my time: the garden (so excited about herbs!), dining room, humongous living room, and the sunny reading nook.

I would have never found the place without Talia sending it to me and now she's even supplying me with bed, couch, dresser, and the massive desk I picked up off the street and cleaned hobo poop off of so many years ago. The Universe does indeed provide, but it helps to surround yourself with excellent friends.

Out of all the interviews I've done, this was the only one where I walked out and immediately got my hopes up, already planning out all the awesomeness that was going to occur if I got an offer. Somehow the house folk liked me enough too, so it all worked out in the end!

It's an excellent sign that this past Saturday during the farewell/welcome kegger, a friend brought up how chicken and waffles would be delicious, and bam, suddenly my future housemate was whipping up pumpkin waffles on a hot griddle. Excited to get to know all seven of the scrappy crew that'll co-habit the Randch, and hopefully there will be much climbing/brewing/camping!

And as part of the return to the East Bay, it was a great weekend to hit up the ol' Strawberry Canyon firetrail. I love the side trail after the connector that takes you to the tippy tip of the golden fields to where it looks like you could just dive into the sprawl of the East Bay towards San Francisco.

The shortcut to the trailhead still exists and it's certainly more well-defined. I remember the first time I charged into the underbrush, I was a skinny skinny freshman in college, and I certainly had no idea where the path went, but the idea of getting lost in the dark and wandering in the trees wasn't such a bad one. I definitely slipped and rolled down a hill into decomposing leaves, but emerging dirty and sweaty into the lamplight was pretty effin' triumphant. This time around, in broad daylight, it was just a nice escape into trees and foilage, and it was nice to know that somewhere in muscle memory, I still remember all the little winding roads here.

We'll wrap up with a teddy bear who clearly doesn't understand he's the other woman and that although three points of contact are the most stable, third wheels aren't always welcome, even in TeddyBearlandia.

Someone has to pay for the Revolution

Embarcadero an hour before sunrise

The South African time difference meant that we were at work at 6:40 am to interview a client, scurrying around in the darkness because the ACLU building's lights don't work before the ass crack of dawn. If it had been an episode of the X-Files, Eugene Tooms would have waited until I got settled in with my tea and Skype before consuming livers. Yesterday was the four-month mark since starting at ORAM, and I'm still excited to go to work every day, which either means it's a great gig, or I have a dopamine irregularity/mood disorder.

Public interest lawyering really can be all kinds of awesome, and it's funny to think that it could all have been very different if the economy hadn't swirled into the toilet. As in some poor law firm may have been deceived sufficiently or had just enough free associate spaces to say, "Sure, we'll take an extra weirdo."

Fresh out of a Labor Union Summer with the AFL-CIO, I had put myself through at least fifty on-campus screener interviews and a dozen callback ones. At most of these talks, they'd flip through my resume of public interest red flags and ask me to defend why I'd spent my summer with a labor union, why I feel like the firm's pro bono program would be enough to "satiate my public interest spirit" (direct quote). Sometimes, I'd run into someone who would proactively defend why they were now second-year associates. My favorite line was an assertion that "someone has to pay for the Revolution." Not that I have anything against firm life, but somehow it just didn't work out (Firms, it's not you, it's me.). Throughout it, I did my usual Try-Hard Bear thing: I hustled myself through Lavender Law's OCI, followed up on any and all personal connections, etc. In the end, I didn't get a single offer, and I scrambled to chase the public interest jobs that I should have been hunting down in the first place. Stormy times indeed.

This is certainly the gray matter doing its sneaky thing by smoothing out all the inconsistencies along the way, but it seems to have worked out so far. Where I end up next is thankfully a question I can delay for a while, and it's a relief to be off of the usual schedule where as soon as you land a one-year fellowship, you're already casting your resume back into the great dark seas.

YOLO artwork

Lois the Pie Queen

 Finally made it to Lois the Pie Queen for breakfast. I don't know why you would have fried chicken for breakfast, but it happened, and now I wonder why we don't usually have it. We got seated under the YOLO collage, and I again wondered why I haven't already moved to Oakland.

Especially when the BART stations get all glamm'd up:

After I took this shot, other BART denizens also whipped out their phones to take the same. It's disappointing to climb up into Oakland and expect Sapphire City, but I met some fun people to climb with at Great Western Power Station.

And to wrap up, here's a picture of Dinga with no context. 

Whatever you may be thinking about, he disapproves of it.