on my way to cagliari, in sardinia. yesterday, an italian in my photo class told me, I think it is the most beautiful beach in italy. swoon.

While winding through the Italian countryside, with the blue sky and the white Alps facing us through the windshield, I told M, I’m going to write a book. Then, two days later back in New York, as I tried to process my cousin's tragic death, I remembered how he was the first person in my family to tell me that I should be a writer. I told my sister, and my other cousin, that I want to write a book, or a thousand words a day at least until I get to something book length.

That was over two weeks ago, and I’ve netted about three hundred words since then. This morning, I woke up feeling pretty foolish. Then I imagined myself, a hundred thousand words in, and looking at the mile of writing behind me with dread and not joy. I know the process will be hard, so I am demanding to know up front that it’s going to be good.

ummm, that's not going to work!

If you don’t trust, it won’t matter how much punishment you’re threatened with, or how bad you feel about it. Once I asked a journalism professor about which of his students did well in school. He said, the ones who work. One student of his told him once, “I need my ass kicked to get work done.” By the end of the semester, the student hadn’t produced any good work. He just got his ass kicked.

So in the end, the only engine that leads to discipline comes from inside the heart. For that, the heart has to be large, and strong, and full of good things. These good things, like joy, or beauty, or the love of others, fill us up so that we can be supple and fresh even while facing a little worldly deprivation. Then we can see discipline for what it is, which is simply love of our best selves.

anywayyyyyz, back to one thousand words.

i am hungry again! but i tried to eat a larabar and i had to spit it back out. yick. the last thing i need in my stomach is ground up nuts and coconut.

the past two days have been busy. on monday, i ... ah, yes, I began the next level in my photo course. my new teacher is great, very thorough. he wears all black, which i've noticed is the law if you work in computers in some creative/professional context. he's also gigantic, in the pale nordic calvinist kind of way. last week my teacher was also gigantic, but in the haute couture african queen kind of way.

even though i think it's creepy to comment on the appearance of someone you know, i can't help but notice the parallels.

now you know. if you met them, you would totally think the same thing. so there.

oh i am so hungry, but i am going to write this first, because I know how annoyed you get when i don't write at least once a day.

yesterday, i spent the afternoon at the waterfront park in my neighborhood. i sat with my friends, watched the water, and felt the wind. the sun was strong, and i wore a big hat.

i have two friends who are in love with each other. that is less dramatic than it sounds. I mean, they are in a relationship, and i am friends with them both. i have known the girl longer, because that is how i know the boy, but i wouldn't exactly say that i know her better. I feel like I know them equally.

yesterday, everyone left except these two. i watched them play a funny game with each other about what to eat. she says don't eat that. and he says, i want to eat that. then she says, no, you shouldn't eat that, but she starts going towards it anyway. and he says, yes, I want that, and you should have it too. and she says, no, i don't want to eat that, but i guess you can have a taste. and he says, you should eat that. she says, no way, ok, maybe just a taste. then just before they eat it, he says, i don't want to eat that. and she says, you should eat that. and he says, but you don't want to eat that. and she says, i do want to eat that. and he says, no i don't want to eat that.

so they don't eat it. they eat something else. but then, once they've finished eating, he says, I want to eat that. and it starts all over again.

i watched this happen for hours and I thought: there are so many different ways to make love to a person.

i have a beauty mask on my face. but only the bottom half. that's my trouble half.

after a whole lot of this and that this week, i let my body do whatever yesterday, and I gamely trotted after.

it wanted to rest, i rest. it wanted to drink coffee and run around downtown manhattan, no problem. it wanted to go to an alexander wang sample sale, and i said amen. it saw a girl peeling litchi on the subway, and it wanted to go to to chinatown. I said, sure. Then, it wanted to eat alone at nyonya. i argued with it for a while, because the food can be a little heavy, but it won. it ordered hainanese chicken, and it ate the whole thing, even the chicken skin, which I was surprised by.

what a funny day.

ok, beauty mask done. time to start this lazy sunday, folks!

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.