a year of living in a trailer in the arizona desert had been a transforming experience. I was fresh out of college and my hunger for adventure was my way of survival. Also, my hunger for food was my way of persevering. So how did I get by for a year living off a stipend as a civil service volunteer? There was this one time when i asked my good friends and co-volunteers yolanda and andrea if they would compete in the wet T-shirt contest and we could make lots of money! Somehow, that did not go well. To this day, I have not heard from the two. I think the Honey Boo Boo trailer trash idea would have worked better then. Oh well.
fast forward to present day. Another year living on the edge. Well, almost. But a year of living earning a little has transformed me into a discount store snob. When I left my good-paying job of five years for a part time greeting card merchandiser I did not have any back-up plans. But it had happened before so I managed to stretch my last paycheck into four months of cutting down on my Rocky Road ice cream consumption to almost no ice cream at all. so, what's a guy to do when he has monthly rent to pay? I decided to keep my cozy pad and jettisoned what I could. first thing was cancel my gym membership. It is absolutely a cardinal sin for a gay boy to not have a gym membership, especially a 24-hour one. I thought another card was taken away from me besides my gym card. Dating not only became a physical effort but also a monetary one. Suckie! I did not know there was a free one though. The streets! I started walking around my neighborhood and before I knew it I was running for a good one hour at least once a week. And that was another forty five-dollars-a-month load off my damaged wallet. one gay sin I committed after another - zero wardrobe shopping. Even though I am living only a stone throw away from the largest grossing mall in san diego, I had endured to set my foot off the designer-store-filled fashion valley. Instead, I turned to Goodwill. At the store, I would bypass the garment section, although having vintage collection in my closet would be a marvelous one, I went straight to the bric-a-brac section which were about a-buck-a-piece. Now my pied a terre exudes Jonathan Adler-esque collections of white ceramics. how did I eat? My whole family already knew my secret of smuggling empty tupperwares into a party. One word - rice. A bag of carbo-loaded jasmine rice costs under five bucks from my favorite vietnamese supermarket next door. Not only it would last for a month but it goes almost with just about anything for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Although, I was afraid that I just violated Oprah's law on not eating white rice in your diet. I hope she's not ashamed of me but I'm still waiting to get one of her favorite things! I reserved eating out only for those especial occasions. And if i did it would be with my good friend over a good breakfast. No pseudo-trendy restaurants. I just want an honest homecooked meal. and so, it wasn't exactly like A Year in Provence where our dear friend Peter Mayle was driving around south of France in his little Renault. Aww. But it was my year of living fabulously frugal. it has been a little over a year and now I am back to working full time and my old self. i just added to my collection a cage skirt paper doll from ROCK PAPER TEKLA BY JESSICA YAMBAO back in late summer. Until recently, they were popping out of Alexander McQueen's Spring 13 runway show. I think my friend Jessica has a prophetic style. Go figure!
so today, i just wrote a check for four hundred eighty dollars to pay for the red light ticket that i got while driving on my way to work several weeks ago.
i could have easily given the money to charity or other meaningful cause and felt wonderfully good about myself. But that was not the case. For me it felt as if I was just robbed by a police officer at gun point on a broad daylight as I stood still, helpless. I wonder where this $480 is going. Is this more than enough to fix a perpetual pothole that I have been driving my car into every single morning? Fat chance! i bet anyone $480 that there were other more serious crimes occuring around the city that day when an officer pulled me over. Crimes like a home burglary while the homeowners were on their way to work. And where are the police officers when you need them? Well, they are parked in front of every single traffic light waiting for their next unsuspecting victims. Is it me or, WERE ALL THE DONUT SHOPS CLOSED THAT DAY?? i thought long and hard about writing them a little note along with my check on how i feel about all this. But immediately the thought of my little plea becoming a laughing subject matter for their own amusement. I thought about appealing my ticket to fight for my good driving record. But having a clean driving record being tarnished at this point in my life is less of my concern if we are living in this kind of system that is not so tidy after all. it just does not seem fair for the working class who abide by the common rules. I always do my best to not run a red light for my own safety. I have seen all kinds of violations and gotten away with it. I have seen a guy next to me drove away while waiting for the green light. I have seen some drivers just kept on going when it is already red. Perhaps I was just not lucky. And $480 is a large amount of money to leave me some residual anger towards sdpd. Do I still have the same amount of respect towards sdpd after this unfortunate incident? Nah! the only way I can eat avocados is with sugar and milk. A mention of this unusual concoction among my non-culinary fellows induces a lot of bitter look on their face. My circle of friends who are arbiters of good taste express a bad taste in their mouth every time I talk about it.
i can't help it. I am an avocado addict! in the western society it is almost a crime in health policy to eat food swimming in thick pool of milk and sugar. And avocados are among the high cholesterol fruits. health issues aside, first I would cut open and mash about three to four good sized avocados. Then I would add three to four teaspoons of white granulated sugar. Then I pour a little bit of regular vitamin D milk. Regular and not low-fat. It just seems so wrong, doesn't it? I would not start mixing it until all the ingredients are there. Normally, I would chill the mix for about half an hour in the refrigerator or fifteen minutes in the freezer. But lately, as soon as this makeshift adult recipe is done, I would spoon it right out of the bowl and right into my mouth. personally, it shouldn't be overmixed like blended or puree. I want my oral sensor to feel the texture of the unmashed bits of the fruit as well as the sand-like grains of sugar as my teeth grind them. When I indulge myself to avocados it brings back a happy part of my childhood with my dad. i was seven or eight when I would peek out from the edge of our wooden kitchen table watching my dad cut, mashed and mix the avocados with sugar and milk. He was so good at it I didn't know at the time any other family or relative who can make it (no offense to my mom, but she also cooked some food so marvelously that dad could not). i think that the only thing that bonded me and my dad was his sweet avocados. We did not spend a lot of time building chicken coops together but I would tend to hang around with him whenever he is in the kitchen. Consequently, there were a number of kitchen savoir faire that I had skillfully picked up from my dad. Cleaning and de-scaling live tilapias; crack opening several coconuts and grating the flesh one by one. And most importantly, making the sweet avocados. My dad was inventive when it came to tweaking common staple food. He could turn a poor man's meal into something like watching Food Network on a zero budget! i sometimes ponder that I had disappointed him for not being the boy that he wanted me to be but I know in my heart that he loved me in my own special way. These are the thoughts that go through my mind as I take in every bite of this very special dessert any way anybody wants to call it. I will always call it my dad's sweet happy avocados. dear mom,
i don't know any mother who was able to give birth to seven children (not all at the same time) and be able to raise them all one by one. Forget those reality tv moms. You're not one of them. raising seven children before the age of cell phones and internet was an unbelievably tough job. How did you do it without using a dishwasher, a laundry machine, a dryer or anything any other mothers could not live without? Forget multitasking here in the states. You did everything at home by hand. By your own hands. Even building a fire to cook our rice. thank you mom for teaching me the fine art of interior design. Do you still remember those days back home when you let me decorate for christmas? Maybe i was ten or eleven. I was so excited. You put me in charge of hanging all the curtains in the living room. That was my favorite house chore as a kid, not like chopping firewoods in the backyard. From then on i became the designated "window draper" in the house every time christmas season arrives. you are still as beautiful as your sepia-toned high school photographs. I vividly remember on one of them you were standing tall in your beautiful white dress. Elegant, classy, reserved and lanky but lovely. You were wearing flowers on your hair. Like a prom queen but only a lot smarter than the others. thank you for everything you have done for us and thank you for allowing me to become the sensitive one but be the best dancer in the bunch. I would never trade my life any other way as long as we have you as our Nanay. You are the best mom a gay boy could ever have. Happy Mother's Day Mom. I will always and forever love you. -noel the glorious interior. Once you walked in you wouldn't want to walk out. I stayed in for hours and on and enjoyed the million dollar view! -
the graphic posters for the school's fashion department that i have been working on incessantly for the past few days is now on display in front of the bookstore. I'm so proud!
as a design enthusiast, i can't help but talk about exciting spaces that i have been in lately - Fixtures. Is it a showroom or is it a working kitchen? It's both. It speaks everything about my deeply held value of the unexpected. I could live in this space and then die fabulously!
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