Easter/Spring break

On Easter temperatures went up to close to 90. I made a spontaneous trip to the beach, Coronado. I went because I figured it's a good place to get away, it's quiet, and I wouldn't suffer the wrath of those who felt I should be in church. I had this plan to actually go to church, for the first time in my life, to visit the megachurch - Crystal Cathedral in Irvine. I was actually up there on Friday, and they had service at 12.15, but then I never made it over. It turns out they televise their service every week (?). I caught about 5min Sunday morning. The founding pastor seemed quite enamored with celebrities and name dropping. Not a good 5 min impression.

So off to the beach. Remember Coronado and the Hotel? It looks something like this....


But you know what? By noon, it looked something like this....


I'd also brought with me a few of my new favorite friends. Part of the 30 student articles I have to read this month. Some of them are really good, some really terrible. The saddest part - I look forward to the ones that are obviously bad because the writer makes it easy for me to spot the problems. The better written ones, good but not great, on the other hand - they make me pay attention because they don't explain in a way that lets me clearly understand their points!

I packed a sushi-lunch as well. We don't have Mitsuwa any more (I think) but we now have Marukai! There's Marukai, Marukai living, and Daiso, which is Japan's 99 cent story but in the United States is where you find all the white-geeks-obsessed-with-asia-who-can't-cope-with-american-life. Nah that's cruel isn't it? Well, it's kinda true.

You can see going to the beach is quite an activity for me. I had to pack my folding chair, water, food, my comments, multiple layers of clothes in case it snowed - everything, and that was a spontaneous trip! I lay out there for 2hrs and didn't even get sunburned though, and I only put sunscreen on my face! I did have to leave early once some guys constructed a soccer field out of sand and started playing by my head.


I also got a new shirt! It's from Forever 21 and is a total knockoff of another shirt I wanted at a much more expensive store. I used to make fun of people who couldn't afford designer clothes because they choose to have babies instead of indulge on themselves. Well, I'm now ok with buying low quality clothes from discount lines. And while it does support China, and while China is busy killing people in Tibet and Darfur, I'm much too shallow and materialistic to not spend money I don't have on clothing I really don't need.


Face shot. You've gotta take a few mug shots of your face every few years, preferably up close mug shot style, from different angles. You never know when you'll need facial reconstructive surgery and these photos are what surgeons use to reconstruct your face. I suppose if you didn't have those photos, the surgeons would give you a much better face though...

Unrelated: A really good film about Tibet: Tibet Cry of the Snow Lion. It's a documentary but instead of focusing on talking heads, it shows tons of beautiful unique imagery. It's also very disturbing what's happened to the Tibetan people. The Chinese did the same thing in Africa, they go and modernize, but the jobs they create are given only to their own people, they hire the 'other' races for hard labor. In Africa, China flies in their own prostitutes, their own cooks, they take nothing from Africa except the resources, shipped back to their own people, and the corrupt African government leaders go along with the plan. It happened in Tibet. Do you think it'll happen in Taiwan?