I used to laugh whenever I saw people getting their cars blessed at Shinto shrines in Japan. Well, I am laughing no longer. Since I bought my Prius two years ago, my eco-conscious move has caused nothing but mishaps:
a log dislodged by a 18 wheeler came hurling at me on the freeway and hit the car
I was backed into in a parking lot by a guy talking on his cell
a construction cone got lodged in the front grill when a truck hit the cone and made it fly into my lane
someone side swiped me from the lane next to mine and drove me up onto the curb.
And now, I find out that I am driving a speeding death trap with sticky pedals. Read more...
Sister Anne works at the St Vincent de Paul soup kitchen in Oakland, a drab one story building sandwiched between a freeway overpass and a wide thoroughfare that is home to liquor stores, storefront churches and single room occupancy hotels. Sister Anne is 93 years old. I do not know her last name. She does not wear a full habit, but she still does wear a wimple. She also wears plastic framed glasses, orthopedic shoes, a black skirt, and a light cardigan sweater. The same every day.
Her job is to carry trays of food across the dining hall to people who can not make it through the serving line – the disabled and families with small children. They use a side entrance, and have their own tables set aside for them. Read more...
In my everyday life, I often see the world through Woody Allen or Larry David tinted glasses (as opposed to Oprah Winfrey or Tony Robbins.) Especially in a city where people exist largely in their hermetically sealed SUVs and enclaves, I’m not always feeling the communal “we’re all in this together” vibe and it’s easy for me to get annoyed and put upon by the frustrations, the injustices, and irritations of the world. But there are these moments, when I step back and realize that I’ve been blessed with luck and other “bonus offers, “freebies”, and “gold stars” from life, and that I am not Job…God is not jabbing his finger at me and that I should in fact, show some gratitude for those things I enjoy – big and small that are good. As coined by Martha Stewart – the high priestess of perfection, here’s a shortlist of “good things”. Read more...
Yesterday, I blogged about how Koreans are the Irish of the Orient. So as today is St. Patrick’s Day, I wanted to further show my solidarity with my Irish brothers and sisters. And what better way to do that than to profile a prominent Irish American to educate our readers. Not an Irish figure like author James Joyce or U2 front man Bono, but a genuine Irish American. But unfortunately I couldn’t think of any prominent Irish Americans except one: Lucky the Leprechaun a.k.a. the mascot of Lucky Charms cereal (sue me, I’m a product of the American public school system).
FYI, I’m counting Lucky as an Irish American because Lucky Charms is an American cereal and, therefore, he is an American creation. Read more...
Luck. I believe “luck” is really a factor of how much positive energy you have in your life. How much positive energy you have brewing within your heart. How much positive energy you have directed towards you by your friends, peers, and even strangers. And how much positive energy you project out into the world. The more positive energy and good will we can cultivate, the more “luck” one can create. At least that’s what i think. : )
May this video put a smile on your face and add to your “lucky”.
If Better Luck Tomorrow had never been made, this blog would probably never have existed and you’d be sitting in front of your computer right now thinking, “Man, I feel this emptiness in my life like something’s missing, but I just don’t know what it is.” But luckily for you, the film was made, directed by fellow Offender Justin and starring fellow Offenders Roger and Sung, and we do exist to help push that empty feeling back into the void with your other buried neuroses.
But Better Luck Tomorrow could have also easily been a different movie altogether. Justin was originally offered the money to make his film by investors if he could do just one little thing…change the characters from Asian American to Caucasian. He obviously refused, but perhaps in an alternate universe, that world’s Justin Lin was so sick and tired of eating ramen three meals a day and carrying a six-figure credit card debt that he decided to accept the offer. In which case, Better Luck Tomorrow might have looked like this:
By now, everybody must have heard of the gigantic Pacific Garbage Patch—millions of square miles of crap, which consists mostly of tiny pieces of plastic debris, floating in a toxic oceanic vortex. And now, I find out that there’s another garbage patch forming in a gyre in the Atlantic Ocean as well. Apparently, there are 5 gyres in our ocean systems and soon we’ll be over-run with islands of debris that break down into nasty chemicals like bisphenal A, PCBs and derivatives of polystyrene, which are all making its way into our food supply. AAAAAAGGGHHHHH!!!
So I have been thinking of ways to solve this problem, otherwise I won’t be able to get my sushi fix without thinking I’m playing Russian roulette, and I have come to realize that the great creative minds of Hollywood have already come up with some solutions to our woes: Read more...
My mother and grandmother both live by the mantra “cleanliness is next to godliness” and in response, I had no choice but to become an OCD pack rat. In anticipation of the rituals of Spring cleaning (I need to start early), here’s a list of some of their anal retentive ways:
1. They save all those plastic shopping bags and fold them into origami triangles so that they can be compacted. No jack in the box surprises of plastic baggies flying out of overstuffed drawers.
2. They swab down the mouthpieces of phones with alcohol to kill off any germs. A necessary procedure for households where yelling on the phone is akin to using your normal speaking voice. Read more...
When I was in college I had read that before he became a famous director, the young Steven Spielberg used to sneak onto the Universal Studios lot. He’d wear a nice suit, walk past the guard at the front gate, wave, smile and he’d be in (in high school, I’d sneak onto studio lots by placing a big brown paper bag in the passenger seat of my car and telling the guard I was there to deliver Chinese food). Ah, the innocent pre-9/11 days. Anyways, the young Spielberg would walk around the lot watching movies/TV shows being filmed and even squatted in an unused office. I was inspired by his story and decided, upon my graduation from college, that I wanted to follow in his footsteps.
My friend Ross was an assistant for a successful TV director at the time and his boss had just been hired to direct a feature. They would be on location for about four months and their office in the main TV building on the Warner Bros. lot would sit empty that whole time. I saw my opportunity to pull a Spielberg. I asked Ross if I could “use” their office while they were shooting. To my surprise, he said yes. He gave me a key, even the password for the copy machines and said I had full reign while they were gone. Read more...
As a kid, I would badger my mom to clean my ears at least 3 times a week. I would run to the pen cup, pull out the skinny little bamboo shovel with fuzzy cotton ball top, and scream out to my mom, “Mama, can you clean my ear???!!!” If my mom wasn’t busy outside harvesting silkworms or chopping the head off a duck, she would usually oblige. So there I would sit, Indian style, with my head kinked 45 degrees to the left or right depending upon which ear canal was being excavated. I’d usually have my hand sticking out like I was expecting someone to give me money. But instead of cold hard cash, my hand acted as a depository for the bounty of ear wax my mom would soon be pulling out of the dark recesses of my canal. It was beyond satisfying to feel the little bamboo spoon probing my ear hole, scratching and scraping the walls and occassionally hearing it encounter a little boulder of hard wax. Crunch! And then, to my delight, my mom would present me with a yellowish-green chunk of gold and let it drop into my hand. After a few minutes, I would have a little stack of wax piled on my palm and a smile on my face running from clean ear to clean ear. Little did I know that this innocent mother/son ear-probing ritual would become a fervent, lifelong obsession…
When you’re a young woman growing up in the 80’s, there may have been real women I could and should have looked up to: Margaret Thatcher, Sandra Day O’Connor, Sally Ride, Geraldine Ferraro, heck Sigourney Weaver for goodness sake! These were women making strides, making waves, changing the world! But no, I was a kid, so my female heroes were all ANIMATED. Read more...
The most anticipated films this year might be Iron Man 2 or Robin Hood, but my #1 must-see for 2010 is The Runaways (well, Hot Tub Time Machine might be a close second). The movie tells the story of the kick-ass 1970s all-chick rock n’ roll band of the same name whose roster consisted of the first ladies of rock—Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Sandy West, Jackie Fox, Lita Ford and other “temporary” members (bassist Micki Steele played a brief stint before leaving and later joining the Bangles).
Why is this my must-see flick? Well, this week’s flavah of the week is “women” and some of my fellow male Offenders have written about the fetishes types of women who do it for them. For Roger it’s the Ninja-Assassin, for Alfredo the train wreck and for Anderson the glasses-wearing girl. As for me, I will always have a place in my heart for chicks who rock. And nothing embodies that “chicks who rock” vibe more than the Runaways. Read more...
When fellow Offender, Alfredo, wrote about Tina Fey in his post about loving women who are hot messes, it provided me with the opportunity to announce that I may have a problem. A fetish, if you will. I love women with glasses! There, I said it. Big weight off my shoulders. In Japan, there’s a term for this sickness: MEGANEKKO or “glasses-wearing girl.” It’s huge in anime and manga. If you did a google search, your mind will be blown away at the amount of sites out there devoted to this “attractive trait.” Mainly, it deals with anime, like here and here (NSFW).
So yes, I’ve always loved girls, err, women who wear spectacles. They’re something about how they frame a face. It’s also a character quirk, because most likely, women who wear glasses tend to be intelligent, or read a lot; they don’t wear contacts, therefore are not too vain. Well, that’s what I think. It’s a signature trademark that I just immediately notice. In fact, celebs that I have crushes on, tend to be women who wear frames. Charlyne Yi from PAPER HEART is too darn hipster cute, for example. But here are my personal bespectacled faves. Hey lady, need me to massage your nose pad marks? Ooh, that was creepy…. Read more...
Some years ago, I was in a playwriting workshop and one of my fellow writers/classmates was “Terry.” Terry was awesome. He was the gayest guy I had ever met—very out, very flamboyant, very proud. Other gays would look at him and go, “Damn, that boy is gay!” Terry would regale the class with tales of his wild “gayventures” and many of his stories would revolve around these underground S&M clubs he would often frequent.
As I am always up for new things, I asked him if I could tag along with him to one of these underground clubs. “I’ve been waiting for you to utter those very words,” Terry replied; a small tear trickling down his cheek. He said one of the clubs would be in Silver Lake that coming Friday (they moved around to different locations) which was just blocks from where I lived. I told him I was definitely there.
At the time I was dating a woman named “Sally.” When I told her about my plans for Friday night, she wanted to come along too. I didn’t see any harm in this (big mistake as you will also learn shortly) and I called Terry to let him know Sally would be joining us. Read more...
When it comes to women on the screen, my fellow offenders Iris, Elaine and Roger are all fans of name-taking, ass-kicking, long legged characters who can outdo any male badass. They are the cool, lethal silent types – independent, resourceful, surviving and thriving on their quick wits, disarming sexuality and devastating body blows. Fair enough.
But I’d like to make a case for damaged goods.
I like train wrecks. I like characters who are way flawed, way hot, and who all need a nice stable Virgo to attempt to – and fail at – reforming them. But this Virgo also quickly concedes that you don’t really want to tame a tiger, that even if you could, it would kill the life spark in them that attracted you in the first place. Put that tiger in a cage and it will end up depressed, dead, or pissed. Read more...
A woman is like a ninja. Her body the perfect weapon, able to effortlessly dispatch even the hardest of men with casual simplicity. She is born with a natural arsenal in which to choose and depending upon her intent, can flirt, seduce, liquify, or terminate her opposites at will. Instead of tonfas, swords, throwing stars, and bamboo darts dipped in blowfish toxin, the modern, woman ninja possesses weaponry of mind, breast, shoulder, tummy, persona, tongue, etc. 21st century steel is no match when compared to the flesh of a woman ninja. Not even close.
i will seduce you with my mind and hypnotize you with my bodice...
As much as I fear the woman ninja, I simultaneously desire her. It’s like superman wanting to make love to Lois Lane after she secretly smoothed on Kryptonite body lotion. The allure is beyond temptation but indulging in it will instantly vaporize any man’s nut sack and mojo. A frank with no beans is a useless stalk, so they say. But as my wise, one-eyed grandfather of the Shaolin once told me before my departure into the modern world, “Grandson, it is your destiny to make love to the woman ninja no matter how painful. It is through this great pain that you will find your truest self. Just make sure to practice safe sex and say thank you.” My one-eyed grandfather was a wise man indeed… Read more...
In honor of Women’s History month, here’s my tribute to a few of the heroines that inspired me through film. Who are your favorite film femmes?
1. Golden Swallow of ‘Come Drink With Me’: Played by Chen Pei Pei, Golden Swallow inspired the heroines of ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ and ‘Kill Bill’ who also give the male baddies a run for their money. But none can match her deft swordplay, footwork, and charisma.
2. Jane Craig of ‘Broadcast News’: Holly Hunter’s most iconic role and so perfectly designed for her tough, plucky energy. She was the girl who ended up with neither guy and on top of that, dumped the alpha male because she didn’t respect him. The heroine for women who cannot stomach most romantic comedies. Read more...
In an age of bigger, stronger, faster, I love stories of people who succeed by finding alternate routes. At 5-foot, 114-pounder Eri Yoshida could be a perfect example. Yoshida became Japan’s first female professional baseball player when she made her debut last year. The then 17 year old who throws a sidearm knuckleball, stuck out one batter in Kobe 9 Cruise’s 5-0 win over the Osaka Gold Villicanes. Read more...
Before Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, or Lucy Liu, there was Etsuko Shihomi (aka “Sue” Shiomi). She was my hero growing up in Hawaii. She was the female version of Bruce Lee – strong, beautiful and able to kick some major butt.
She was a member of Sonny Chiba’s Japan Action Club. (Another graduate of the JAC is Hiroyuki Sanada, who has been making guest appearances in the series “Lost”). Ms. Shihomi has appeared in a number of martial arts films, which often co-starred Sonny Chiba and/or Hiroyuki Sanada. But more impressive was the fact that Ms. Shihomi was the headlining star in several films including the “Sister Street Fighter” series and “Dragon Princess”. There aren’t many action women out there that can actually open a movie today, let alone back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Read more...
I used to laugh whenever I saw people getting their cars blessed at Shinto shrines in Japan. Well, I am laughing no longer. Since I bought my Prius two years ago, my eco-conscious move has caused nothing but mishaps:
Luck. I believe “luck” is really a factor of how much positive energy you have in your life. How much positive energy you have brewing within your heart. How much positive energy you have directed towards you by your friends, peers, and even strangers. And how much positive energy you project out into the world. The more positive energy and good will we can cultivate, the more “luck” one can create. At least that’s what i think. : )
By now, everybody must have heard of the gigantic 
As a kid, I would badger my mom to clean my ears at least 3 times a week. I would run to the pen cup, pull out the skinny little bamboo shovel with fuzzy cotton ball top, and scream out to my mom, “Mama, can you clean my ear???!!!” If my mom wasn’t busy outside harvesting silkworms or chopping the head off a duck, she would usually oblige. So there I would sit, Indian style, with my head kinked 45 degrees to the left or right depending upon which ear canal was being excavated. I’d usually have my hand sticking out like I was expecting someone to give me money. But instead of cold hard cash, my hand acted as a depository for the bounty of ear wax my mom would soon be pulling out of the dark recesses of my canal. It was beyond satisfying to feel the little bamboo spoon probing my ear hole, scratching and scraping the walls and occassionally hearing it encounter a little boulder of hard wax. Crunch! And then, to my delight, my mom would present me with a yellowish-green chunk of gold and let it drop into my hand. After a few minutes, I would have a little stack of wax piled on my palm and a smile on my face running from clean ear to clean ear. Little did I know that this innocent mother/son ear-probing ritual would become a fervent, lifelong obsession…
When fellow Offender, Alfredo, wrote about Tina Fey in his post about loving 
A woman is like a ninja. Her body the perfect weapon, able to effortlessly dispatch even the hardest of men with casual simplicity. She is born with a natural arsenal in which to choose and depending upon her intent, can flirt, seduce, liquify, or terminate her opposites at will. Instead of tonfas, swords, throwing stars, and bamboo darts dipped in blowfish toxin, the modern, woman ninja possesses weaponry of mind, breast, shoulder, tummy, persona, tongue, etc. 21st century steel is no match when compared to the flesh of a woman ninja. Not even close.
Before Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, or Lucy Liu, there was 
