Working Title

This one goes out to my friend Desiree, who started a new blog about turning thirty, which she will be in a few weeks. Adding to her semi-panic is the fact that she'll be in two weddings the week of her birthday. If this doesn't sound like the high concept for a romantic comedy, you don't watch enough trashy movies. I'm not sure what her movie should be called but Des' blog is titled Exclusively Des. In a purely non-coincidental move, the sequel to EC will feature a girl named "Desiree."

"As a man I'm entitled to a certain idea in my head of the kind of woman I want to be with, and -- poof! -- I'm a romantic. As a woman in her 30s, S has a certain kind of idea in her head of the kind of man she wants, and -- voila! -- she's unreasonable.
...
Perhaps S needs to 'put herself out there' more, as she's often told. Perhaps when push comes to shove she'll have to online date, or pick up some hobby that puts her in contact with different people, or learn how to animate yarn into a handsome prince. I really have no idea. All I know is she's great and she's single and, for the most part, she's happy. We all get lonely. People in couples are not immune. Some would argue there's nothing worse than being lonely in another person's company. Ask anyone who's ever dated someone they didn't really love or spent time on a New York subway.

The next time someone asks S why she's single, I hope she responds, 'Because I haven't been lobotomized yet, you miserable bastard.'"
-It's okay to be single in your thirties...unless you're a girl (June 2010)

The Donkey Express

A mental to-do for the past week has been to clean out my email inbox. Don't be confused, it's not like I have a ton of them in there. Some people get hundreds or even thousands. I get the occasional fan mail, a few personal correspondences, lots of fantasy or blog related stuff, random "you have to see this forwards," and a boatload of notifications from Google Groups, dating sites, newsletters, and digests. I was also lying about the fan mail. I haven't received one of those in awhile.

One friend wrote me a beautiful email asking for my opinion about her opinion on marriage (that she sent to someone else). It was the type of out of the blue email I love to get. And it made me feel all gushy inside to receive it. But then I took six days to respond, even though when you shoot out a "wish you were here" email you expect a response in a timely manner. I totally know that. So six days is ridiculous. And then there were a few thank you emails I had piled up. Just simple plain "thank you's" for things people have done or opportunities they granted me. Those sat around too.

Then there are the worst transgressions of all. An email that has been sitting in my inbox since December and two from February. Let me remind you it's mid-August right now. They haven't been archived or hidden, they've been right there but I've just never responded. And they are quality emails too. Which people put some thought into. Like we were dialoguing. They literally sat in my inbox because they deserved the proper time committment for a quality reply but then I seemed to have never found the time. Or the mood? Or something. But that's just rude, by anyone's standards, and I've never been that person before. In my prior life I was an excellent email responder.

Now they pile up and I experience a feeling I rarely get: guilt. It's like we were having a conversation, I say "hold that thought" and excuse myself to go to the bathroom, and then return six to eight months later. Well tonight I knocked them all out -- save the one from December -- and felt like I accomplished something. With profuse apologies and the gift of hopefully well received MP3s, I cleared the deck of digital guilt and can now move on. I'm back to on-time email responses. Because I don't want to be that guy. That guy with six emails lagging in the queue. That's pathetic and I want no part of it.

Texts you don't expect from your sister every day

"We've discussed over dinner and I think we need to have your sperm frozen and soon perhaps for your bday."

I guess I'm just happy she used an apostrophe.

A Day in the Life

Today was productive in the way that I nowadays feel productive. Like not normal person productive, just me productive. I was up at a decent hour (meaning before three), caught up on my RSS and Tumblr reads and reposts, made a responsible phone call, settled in to play some Starcraft 2, had a great book idea that fizzled away but I have the notes left over to confuse me, cleaned up and bagged all the clothes I'll be giving away, used Shazam quite a few times to determine the contents of a mixtape a friend made for me ten years ago, thought about completing some personal email but decided against it, managed to give some coherent and timely friend advice, ate two normal timed and proportioned meals, listened to a whole slew of podcasts, and finally got started creating content for an Asian American writers' blog I've been talking about since January. It's by far the most productive day I've had in a week.

Who knows what tomorrow brings? Oh wait, I know. Tomorrow I head to the horse track to earn my living. Bet on the outside horse, never fails to show.

The Land of Make Believe

Over the past weekend I went on a holiday retreat to Palm Springs, located about a hundred miles northwest of San Diego. It's a man made oasis in the middle of the California desert. After driving through miles of sandy landscape, we descended into the valley to see acres of golf courses, suburban tract homes with well manicured lawns, and gleaming resorts. I'd never been to Palm Springs before but a friend had a timeshare so even though it was one of the least likely places I'd normally agree to go, I said, "Yes."

A little more history on Palm Springs is in order. I think originally, Palm Springs was a place for celebrities to hang out and have an escape from Hollywood. Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Clark Gable, Gene Autry and those good old boys would come out and carouse in the desert sun. Nowadays Palm Springs is probably celebrity free since everyone I know mostly associates the place with old people and golfers. On this last fact, it's jarring to see so much green in the middle of a giant dirt bowl. I immediately wondered where the water was being pumped in from. Turns out it's from the Colorado River and Palm Springs uses more than half of California's share for its farms -- more than Los Angeles and San Diego's usage combined.

Now I don't know how much of this water is necessary for farming but I'd suspect a lot of it goes toward tending those golf gardens. Upon further research I can't even figure out what is being grown in Palm Springs with all this water since the only farms I could find online were references to wind farms. The miles of modern windmills fascinated me by the way. They are awesomely symmetrical looking and I liked spotting the ones that were out of order and not spinning along with its siblings. Well they were awesome until I found out that the electricity generated by the 3000+ windmills is mostly used to keep the Coachella Valley humming. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like there's a lot of water and infrastructure being used here for only a few hundred thousand people.

To be fair, Palm Springs also serves as a semi-oasis for the gays. "Current estimates are that up to thirty three percent of Palm Springs' residents identify as gay and lesbian. In addition, there are a number of gay resorts, bars, restaurants, and clubs. Wikipedia further illuminates by providing this tidbit: Palm Springs has one of the highest per capita rates of HIV/AIDS in the nation because of their extensive health-support systems.

Forget my hastily researched history of what keeps Palm Springs around, let's focus instead on the people. We stayed at very nice Marriot resort and everything about the place was classy. Our spacious condo overlooking a golf course, a beautiful soaring lobby, gondolas and caged parrots there for entertaining, and a staff attentive to every need. In fact, the place was the very definition of luxury, if by luxury you mean the entitled upper middle class versus dirty sopping rich luxury.

So if you love thirty dollar entrees, retiree shuttle van drivers, fifteen dollar poolside chargers, and an amusing mix of douchebags and their entourages -- in various sizes and ages, although not colors unless you differentiate between levels of tan -- then Palm Springs is the place for you. The very definition of classy yet trashy, Palm Springs was like a Vegas-lite. And you know how much I dislike Vegas. What's even worse about Palm Springs though is its absolute lack of minorities. At least in Vegas there are packs of minorities and mixed groups of people milling around. Lately I've been hyper conscious of spaces that are only filled with white people and Palm Springs was the definition of that. Sure there were a few European tourists, a gaggle of Asians there for a ballroom dancing competition, and the service staff had any number of Latinos and blacks, but the clientele was basically all the same. Semi-young adults transported from the worst areas of downtown San Diego or Pacific Beach, or families from Rancho Bernardo.

I may have to start a Tumblr about spaces with only white people in them. But I fear I'd have to do too much field research. Don't get me wrong, I love my white friend, but there are certain places that are overwhelmingly a particular type of white that makes me all sorts of uncomfortable. It's not the whiteness so much as the attitude. I'll try to explain it better in another post. And it's not whiteness per se, I mean, any spaces with a mono-ethnic crowd makes me weirded out lately.

The biggest problem I had with Palm Springs was how comfortable I felt. Intellectually I detested it for the utter lack of diversity, the overriding sense of economic entitlement, and a "these are people here to serve me so they better do it well" attitude, but this was the sort of place I grew up visiting. The accomodations, the marble floors, the delusions of grandeur settings, all of these were vastly familiar to me. I can easily imagine myself saying, "Hey, a gondola! Cool!" And that's the problem with Palm Springs. I went for research and found exactly what I expected, which just supported and heightened my hypocrisy.