todayyyyyyy

my photo class ended. i actually slept enough last night for the first time this whole week so it was so much more fun. we printed photos. my teacher was like, where did you find mountains in new york city?, because i barely bothered to do any of the assignments and instead brought my own stuff from my own time to print. i had stuff from the italian alps, the madrid airport, new zealand, babysitting babies in my apartment, my apartment period from a long time ago. those pictures from new zealand really stood out for me. it was lots of dirt, and beautiful people, and clams. Also, sky. These are all things i love.

then i went to norwood, a beautiful exclusive club on west 14th st. it is membership only. I asked the man at the door, what is the application like? He had white hair, was wearing a shirt with a scarf, and was very handsome. He said, It's very involved, and then gave me a card. I asked, when you say it's involved, what do you mean? He said again, oh, it's very involved.

then afterwards, before my feelings got too hurt, he came up to me while I was examining a bulletin board. He asked my name, introduced himself, and shook my hand. I thought, this is what it's like to be a member of an exclusive club, and i liked it.

ah, i'm still up

these things happen.

again, i'm exhausted.

but somehow i just landed on my jizzkool homepage

things snowballed from there.

i'm looking into my future

and i'm seeing...

many continents

and a whole lot of faces, my friends.

i am exhausted, but i am up. after having kimchi chigae with my mom in her kitchen at 11pm, I came upstairs to my sister's old room, where her pencil sketches of my parents in their pajamas, and her Ranma cartoon stickers, and the globe I bought for her a decade ago, are all sitting there, like she's still a fourteen-year old.

I took the LIRR home after my digital photo class. My phone was dead, so I used the phone belonging to the girl sitting next to me. Her name was Terry, and she was a cherubic twenty-five year old. She was so nice about letting me use her cherry colored LG Chocolate that I started a conversation with her. She used to be a legal recruiter and now dreams of being a wedding planner. I told her that twenty-five is so young, because at twenty-five, I couldn't have said where I'd be at thirty. But now that I'm thirty, I'm pretty sure where I'll be at thirty-five. That's aging for your. Less surprise.

For instance, the next time someone I love is killed in a tragic and unexpected way, I'll be less floored, and thus less fucked up.

On an unrelated note, Mauro took pictures of my VJ last week. He wanted to show me how it was lopsided. Truly I was astounded when I saw how one side was distinctly floppier than the other. I laughed and then forgot about it. This evening, while downloading images from my one memory card in class, the teaching assistant came to my computer just as seven color shots of my VJ froze on the screen. I said, "Whoops." She didn't say anything.

Now, four hours later, I'm almost amused.

My cousin Matt died early Friday morning. He was three weeks from his thirtieth birthday. He was killed in a hit and run on 149th St. and Sanford Avenue, three blocks from his house. His body had to be identified by dental records.

I want to know more. I want to know how you can kill someone with your car so that you are “nearly decapitated,” as the New York Daily News put it. I want to know how long he was lying there before someone walking his dog at three am stumbled over the body.

I want to know why he had two IDs in his wallet. That’s why the police first approached the family. They thought the body was of the other guy, and they asked my uncle’s family if Matt knew a forty-one year old named Hyun Kim. Only six hours later did it occur to them that it might be the young one.

At the memorial service, Matt’s younger sister Julee cried over the coffin at the beginning of the ceremony, cried in her seat through the service, and then cried and held every mourner in the line. When the line dwindled and disappeared, she went back to Matt’s coffin and cried over it again until her father pulled her away. She said to my mom, “This isn’t real.”

I am mad about this most of all because now he will always stay twenty-nine, laughing Matt who turned out to be too good for this world. But he wasn’t a saint, he was a person, figuring it out along with the rest of us, with me.

I was born four months before him. There are many photos of us looking like twins during our first three years of life, before my parents moved to the United States, in 1982.

He and his family moved to the United States in 1995, when he was sixteen years old. They lived with us for several years. He liked Bryan Adams, I think because he thought he seemed All-American. He really didn’t have a fucking clue about America. He asked me, “Beverly Hills 90210” isn’t really how high school in America is, is it?

I proceeded to ignore him for several years. I was busy. He never complained, he was resourceful, he made friends. He might have been the most popular Korean American in the greater New York City area circa 2000.

But he struggled too. He studied at the New York Institute of Technology, but his dreams of becoming an architect couldn't compete with the money from waiting tables in Koreatown clubs, a job for which he was truly gifted. He played with enlisting in the Army, but couldn’t do it because his English wasn’t strong enough. Still, he never complained. He got jobs doing various things, because he was charming, and charismatic, and had a way with people. He never kept the jobs. He was young, he was handsome, he was free.

He lost interest in clubbing, and promoting parties, and switched over to a similar, but less lucrative track – being the president of his church’s youth group. It channeled his innate talent for helping others, his gift for being good. Driving a vanful of teenagers home from a praise retreat, he inspired them with his confidence, his good nature, and the sense that there was nothing in life he’d rather be doing than watching over them. He was figuring out how to be a charismatic grown-up.

When we hung out, when he drove out occasionally to see me in Williamsburg, he made fun of himself and the work he did at the church. He probably did it to make me comfortable, knowing that I didn’t share his faith. He had an instinctual barometer for being non-judgmental. It just wasn’t in his DNA to dislike things about a person.

But he was no boy scout. He had a scary streak. He liked to drink to the point that he lost control of everything but his most basic instincts. But even his basest fucking instincts were good. Once, after a long night out a bunch of us ended up at a diner. Slurring, he interrogated Mauro about his intentions with me. "You want to join our family, then you better listen up," he shouted, and made Mauro, thirteen years older, squirm in his seat like a little boy.

Now this angel of a man, this sweetheart, this stupid fucking idiot twenty-something, is dead. We were helping each other figure out how to live, slowly, a few months at a time. I feel like I was helping him. Or that I was about to help him. And now I can't. It is fucking over.

the news is bad and i don't want to share it.

i am not sorry.

"never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation."

-- william zinsser, a kind old writing soul

i'm back home. busy.

Siamo arrivati a Roma! A protest is being staged outside my window, or a crowd of drunken people are singing on our street. Anyhow, local color.

We finally made it, if three hours late. Our plane spent over an hour taxi-ing around the Madrid runway, and then we were held up at baggage claim. It's just hard for fourteen musicians to get all their instruments and things, especially when there is a crowd of families waiting at the luggage belt like they're moshing - lots of elbows and shoulders to get through.

The Rome airport is nothing fancy, but did the job. A very effective barista made me an espresso in about eight seconds, and it was yum (is that not foodie language enough? i mean, it had a light head, and a fruitiness that didn't overwhelm the base). He made the guys at Oslo around the corner from me, whom i love, look like American amateurs.

Oh, it's my turn to shower! Allora, um momento.

"Flower power, but very well organized." -- the bandleader Vittorio, describing Festival Med, in Loule, Portugal

the madrid airport has the best pillars. In pantone hues, they stretch across the terminal like the ribs of an abstract dinosaur.

i don't know what this says about portugal, but this is the best thing I've seen so far on our trip! loule, a town an hour from lisbon, where mauro played his first show, was a little resort town. It has a Moorish influence and seemed interesting, but we stayed at a hilton resort that might as well have been in vegas. then, we went straight to festival med, the five day festival where just four nights before, buena vista social club had played.

The festival featured cobbled streets, winding alleys covered with flowered fabric, and hippie artisans selling handcrafts.

The music is as follows. Take an indigenous Italian musical tradition with origins in shamanic ritual. Then add two drum kits, a soprano sax, and an electric violin. Top it off with a bandleader who happens to be the drummer from The Police. Yup, that's it.


(M's watch blending, chameleon-like, into the Madrid Airport)

what do I, a world-weary book nerd with an asian face, have to do with a traveling Taranta ensemble? I've just started grappling with this question, as I'm celebrating the fourth of july by following an entourage of Italian gypsy musicians (and a Brazilian percussionist) through five european cities.

I hope things are not as grim as I fear. i've been telling myself that if all communication and interaction breaks down by day three, then I am allowed to be a horrible American, hide in my hotel room, and get my way by throwing currency at locals. Moreover, during performance days, I am allowed to sit in the green room drinking complimentary San Pellegrino, avoid eye contact with the musicians' whose food I'm eating, and spend the performance in a dark corner, napping.

Mauro won't care as long as I am pliant and offer sex after the shows. This, I can do. I LOVE hotel sex.