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So relieved the rain cleared up in time for the Lunar New Year 5K hyounpark and I did this morning in Chinatown!

I know, what, these words coming out of my mouth? But bike friends convinced me to sign up for the Hot Chocolate 5K in January, and I figured that was manageable, a one-time thing with friends and chocolate and a nice jacket for swag, and also Golden Gate Park makes for a pretty course. Then Rachel persuaded me to come out for a 7K in my town in February because community ties and meeting your neighbors and climbing my second of the four big hills in our town (Cutting and Moeser down, Barrett and Potrero to go) and cute bandanas. And then I told Hyoun we were doing the LNY 5K because the tech tees had dragons and also I needed cute long-sleeve exercise tops. His reaction: “YOU’RE FINALLY COMING AROUND AND IT ONLY TOOK 18.5 YEARS! 😍😍😍”

And now the Oakland 5K is in two weeks … which is kind of establishing a pattern of me averaging a 5k every month? Um. Lesson learned: make the swag cute enough and I’ll fall for it. (I know, I know, pukajenhas been priming this pump for years, too, as a friend and Orca Running ambassador ;) ) (Original post.)

Bay Area friends! We've got another concert coming up with Oakland Symphony Chorus a week from Friday (February 16, 8 pm at the Paramount; The Artist As Activist), and we'd love to see you there. The Symphony will be performing Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No 6 and Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No 5, and we'll be joining them for the world premiere of Carlos Simon's Here I Stand: Paul Robeson.

And then in April, OSC will be collaborating with Pacific Edge Voices for their The Sound Garden of Love concert at St. Mark's in SF. On the program: Elgar's Lux Aeterna, luminous and crystalline; it's new to me, but I'm looking forward to floating up there, supported by close harmonies. And to my utterly ecstatic joy, a piece with which I am quite familiar: Vienna Teng's The Hymn of Acxiom. Yes, when I found this out, my squeals could be heard clear across the bay. :D (I know! I still need to write about her Freight concerts in December, but suffice it to say for now that I am glad those shows have become part of my end of year rituals, grateful for every year she's managed to find a way to come back since my first time in 2019, or done an online concert the years she couldn't.)

There is something very now-ish about taking a song created with electronic voices based on one person's voice, and extracting it back out to a group of human voices to perform with all of our quirks and foibles, and the power of community enabling a group performance where we as individuals will need to take breaths unplanned, will make mistakes, but will make art, beauty, together. It feels zeitgeist-ish, similar to how I've written 100,000 words' worth of stories in the last six months, as if I'm rebelling against the mainstream embrace of large language models as authors, algorithms as intellects, corporations as people. Now-ish, even on the accelerated schedule of technology changes, because the forces Teng described in the early 2010s have had more than a decade to entrench themselves into our lives.

*

Sometimes, the advertising algorithms get stuck in a rut. Like Lily Diamond, I, too, have been inundated with lingerie ads in my social media in the runup to Valentine's Day, now barely a week hence, and I'm mildly curious if it's the usual spray and pray targeting feel of most ad campaigns, or if any signals I threw out being a person online have contributed to so intensely refocusing the ads that I'm being shown.

( (someone is gathering every crumb you drop )

But what's being advertised even more avidly to me at the moment than even the seasonally predictable lacy red and pink and black trousseaux? These Friends of the Boundary Waters x Hippy Feet Merino Wool Hiking Socks.

( they are cute ... )

( look, I know I tend to evangelize about wool socks, but also 'now we possess you, you'll own that in time'? )

(o how glorious, glorious, a new need is born)

*

Later in that piece, Diamond confesses:

Aside from feeling bullied by an ostensibly omniscient algorithm that's supposed to know me and anticipate my needs better than I do myself, I feel a bit let down. It feels good to be known. I've made many a joke about my phone being a pseudo-surrogate boyfriend, but it's the algorithm we rely on to feel understood psychologically, spiritually, capitalistically.

( (someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to (say just the right thing and) show that you're understood) )

(leave your life open, you don't have to hide)

And yet I'm posting this publicly, anyway - rolling the dice, seeing who will read, engage. (Hoping for who, rather than what. Betting that silence means what.) Going on four years of having our social life circumscribed by circumstance, our social media interactions bound by ever tighter limits.

Posting this here, while knowing that everyone is tired of creating Yet Another Account To Keep Track Of, and burned by the corporate mainstream options that are tolerated enough, if limited in other ways. And, too often, too worn down by the demands of twenty-first century life to conjure up the activation energy to engage, either. (Who has time for 2000 words of my rambling observations?) Yet I'll still link to this on the mainstream social networks where I know people, because. (I guess with Bluesky opening up this week, I ought to look again and see who's made digital homes there, on Threads, on Mastodon. I gave up last year because, again, Yet Another Account To Keep Track Of.)

*

I've also been reading Rebecca Solnit this weekend. Her latest for the London Review of Books, In the Shadow of Silicon Valley, weaves together a lot of loose threads. It's long, but worth the read. What caught my attention most was how she talked about the social pandemic both predating and coexisting with the current medical pandemic, a crisis of extractive technology impeding human connection, exacerbated since the first stay home orders. The loneliness Diamond expressed above, too.

( (let our formulas find your soul) )

The piece ends with even Solnit sounding weary, she of changing the story from despair to possibility.

"I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 and used their wealth to undermine its diversity and affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets and push its politics to the right. They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are bringing us all to a glorious utopia for which they deserve our admiration.

I used to be proud of being from the San Francisco Bay Area."

Valentine's Day will mark 4.5 years since hyounpark and I arrived (back) in the Bay Area. It is a markedly different Bay from the one I left for college; I am a markedly different person in my 40s now from who I was in my teens. But even with the 13-month interruption of staying home curtailing our plans to establish our Bay-based social life, see old friends more regularly, make new friends? The best parts of being here have been the relationships we're forging and reviving, the community we're finding our way into. And among our community, among the people we know, we're all trying to make things better for all of us.

We're all a chorus here, doing the work, needing to breathe at points when the sound must go on. Staggering our breathing as individual singers so we can sustain the sound as a whole. If you're feeling like Solnit here? Breathe. To end by quoting Vienna Teng again: "We've got you."

I was sad to miss Lucy Sparrow's Feltz Bagels art show in New York by less than 24 hours the last time I was out there, so upon hearing it would be shown at the Fog Design + Art Fair at Fort Mason this weekend, kitsch-appreciative me was all in. I still don't have a great workflow for getting pictures into Dreamwidth, so those will probably come later with an Instagram crosspost, but I loved walking around the exhibit and noticing different tiny details every time I looked. Bodega shelf contents that seemed random but you knew were because enough expats who'd moved to the city had begged their corner shop to stock Just This One Thing (hello Ro-Tel), bossy signs telling you what to do, a list of sandwiches you could order (all felt; if you wanted to make a custom one, you could pick your toppings and she would sew them up for you while you waited). I saw the portrait of a bottle of Fox's U-Bet (baseline ingredient for my favorite chocolate egg cream) and wanted to take it home, but it was not in my budget, alas. If it had been an actual 3D bottle, though, like a lot of other things on the shelves, I would have probably had a harder time walking away.

Walking around the rest of the show, I found myself drawn more to the sculptural, textural wall hangings and furniture pieces than anything else. One of these days, hyounpark and I will get around to finishing picking paint colors (I think we've tired of the default millennial grey on the 80% of walls we haven't painted yet, but still haven't decided what colors to replace it with in what rooms), and then hanging up the art we haven't had up since Massachusetts. But honestly, we need to bulk up our storage and shelving first before we can figure out what wall space we actually have to hang things up.

( memorable pieces )

After that, I was hungry, and not ready to face the long ride back home, so I stopped at Greens and sat in the covered parklet, rain going off and on. Had beet hummus on a fluffy pita (minty and lemony! must duplicate at home, we've got three beets that need using up), and then their coconut pandan parfait for dessert.

It takes awhile to get out to Fort Mason from the East Bay - BART into the city, then the "long" 30 bus winding through Chinatown, North Beach, and the Marina for another half hour. Still, watching tons of people walking around those neighborhoods on a Saturday morning was a nice counter to the doom loop of the mainstream media perpetually talking about the doom loop. Coming back, though, was another story - my bus back to BART got detoured because of the damned anti-abortionist march (why, why did I have to wade through so many women carrying those signs?). And then BART itself imploded; switch electricity problems at MacArthur (a key transfer station) meant everybody trying to use BART to get in or out of SF from Oakland and points north was hosed, myself (and one of my city councilors) included. Ended up getting home at close to 6 pm after leaving Fort Mason around 3 pm. Sigh. Still, I came home to hyounpark having procured fried chicken for dinner, which was an amusing and predictable balance in the universe to my having gotten a vegan lunch.

Me, yesterday: "... that means my posts about the Asian American Thanksgiving thing we've been formally doing for the last six or seven years, where the majority of dishes we put on the table came from recipes by Asian American chefs? ... haven't made it over here yet."

Me, today: *filled in the missing decade plus of Thanksgiving menus, including all of the formally-declared Asian American Thanksgiving ones* :D

And that brings me up to the end of November, where I had The Worst Meatball Sub EVER.

( utter abomination )

At least we ended that day on a better note; we were looking for fast food post-choir dinner at 9:45 pm on a weeknight, decided on french fries and chicken nuggets, and got in line at McD's, only to see the bright neon sign announcing that THE MCRIB WAS BACK. So hyounpark was quite happy!

But I still wanted a damned meatball sub. So a few weeks later, we made them.

Slightly overbroiled the bread in trying to get the cheese right, but it was exactly what we've been looking for since late November. Just an easy stovetop marinara, meatballs finished in the sauce (we had Molly Wizenberg's falafel spiced lamb meatballs on hand, so not exactly trad, but it worked for our purposes), sub rolls, and mozzarella (or provolone if you have it). Simple stuff, easy to do (the most tedious part is making the meatballs), and exactly what we'd been looking for. This will totally be going in the regular rotation now.

I've been busy the last little while! November update first.

( New York: meandering through Manhattan on a perfect fall day, foliage, serendipitous Brompton test ride, C Pam Zhang reading, finally went up the Empire State Building after 27 years?! )

( Boston: bagel delivery service, proper trains, finally getting to ride the Community Path Extension, never enough time with friends )

( Stravinsky tech week )

( Monterey: Hyoun runs, I find all the good food and the last remaining bookstore in Carmel, you all are shocked )

And amid all this sleep-deprived timezone confused chaos, I may have gotten into overenthusiastic bikesplaining mode with a friend of a friend on Facebook re bike infrastructure, and only realized after the fact that said person was somebody I'd gone out on a couple of dates with back in the day (🔒). ROFLMAO. Hyoun cracked up listening to me come to this realization in realtime. Me: "What, you'd been reading my LJ for three years by the time we got together and you knew me for years before that, you knew what you were getting into!" H, smiling fondly: "Sure did." Some things have changed, but clearly some things remain the same. :D

I *thought* this was going to cover November, but we're already past the 1500 word mark and I'm only up to November 13; Thanksgiving next time, I guess!

Imagine the setting. There are about 170 choristers onstage at the Paramount Theatre, along with the Oakland Symphony. We’re at final dress rehearsal for today’s holiday concert. It’s Oakland Symphony Chorus, Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, along with choirs from Cal State Hayward and like four area high schools.

The orchestra conductor has his baton up for the downbeat of What’s Love Got To Do With It, when several dozen cell phones START PLAYING THE bereal CHIME.

Oh my god the youth energy, 🤣, I love it. Happy holiday concerts to everyone else performing today! (Original post.)

Least flattering, most heartwarming photos of precious time with my Boston best beloveds Saturday night. Catching up since the last time (six months or four years) amid pizza devouring, cookie baking, genial mockery, and all of the laughter. We love and miss you all. 😘 (Original post has more pictures.)

If you ever get a chance to hear Sam Beam (Iron and Wine) perform Flightless Bird, American Mouth a cappella in person, DO IT. One of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.

Also, he’s a decent vocal percussionist, too 😁 (Original post.)

Still have a longer entry coming up about both Death Cab/Postal Service shows, but I totally cracked up tonight at Sam hyping up The Postal Service: "You guys ready for some hot licks and electronic love?" Which I promptly texted to Hyoun, telling him, "Yeah, this is what some married guy said to me tonight. Okay, and 18,000 others, he was the guy with the mic at that point." ggl

14 years married as of today! Still the best choice I made, to love you, to continue loving you through all the twists and turns of our lives. You’re the bestest. (Original post.)

Boston is well-known for its large student population. I think the latest numbers have 350,000 students living in the metro Boston area, with something like 150,000 students living in the city of Boston proper (which only has a population of about 650,000 people total). Boston University alone has 35,000 students, many of whom live in the Allston neighborhood of Boston.

Moving Day is September 1, when A. Lot. of these apartments turn over their leases. It's a great time to go get Free Stuff, Especially Furniture, if you're one of the lucky ones sticking around for another year; this is how it got the name Allston Christmas. I took advantage of it during my early-twenty-something years living nearby in the Fenway, hauling coffee tables and end tables and folding bookcases home on the T and then up to my third-floor walkup. (Never upholstered stuff, though, no matter what!)

Discovering that SOMEBODY IS MAKING A ROMCOM MOVIE ABOUT ALLSTON CHRISTMAS?! Utterly, utterly delights me. :D (And the Allston Christmas Story IndieGoGo is still open for another couple of days.)

"“An Allston Christmas Story” is a love letter to our city, written with the trappings of a campy Hallmark movie and traces of the supernatural. Three intertwined stories follow our Bostonians as they navigate the mean streets of Allston and their own relationships. Join us on this journey about love, heartbreak, loss, friendship, cursed furniture, and making it to the basement show on time!"