Food & Activity Journal - 13 Aug 2012

Lasagna - 669 cals

-  - - - -- 13 Aug 2012

Lasagna - 669 cals

Gatorade - 320 cals

4 slices of pork chops - 1180 

gravy

lima beans - 216

mixed vegetables - 55 cals

Orange Juice  - 160 Cals

Walked for an hour and half with the dogs

Food & Activity Journal

Bacon	6 slices	200
Iceberg Lettuce		8
Almond Roca Candy		200
Ranch Dressing		140
Salami		120
Ham		46
Potato Salad	4 tbsps	140
Orange Juice	6	672
		1526

Steak		1170
Mashed potatoes		237
		1407	2933

Day 2 Done

I went to Than Merrill's Real Estate marketing seminar today - Day 2 of a 3 day experience.  I got an interview tomorrow to audition for their team.  They combine life coaching with real estate investing.  They have something I want and I have something they want as well.

That said, he said somethings that hurt but I needed to hear.  They were also things like why my business failed  in Los Angeles and why certain things in my life didn't work out.  I am glad I left Los Angeles when I did because increasingly LA was asking me to do things that weren't exactly ethical or I was getting stuck in someone else's rat race.

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One of the last couple of hours was spent on asset protection.  Basically, the millionaire speaker elaborated on the schemes he set up to protect his money against money hungry lawyer and the GSA spending government we have.  I love how we have communism programmed in our heads that we make capital unproductive and we don't complain when the tax man comes and keeps us poor.

We should pay a consumption tax - that's it.

Taxed Enough Already.

Wild Wild Life

My life is pretty awesome. I mean really. What me worry?



Friday, I went up to Zoo Productions on the Paramount lot and interviewed for a position that Andrew tipped me. We also dropped off some casting materials for Andrew at NCIS. While at Paramount I saw the only likable and telegenic cast member of Glee, Jane Lynch. I also got kicked out of the lunch line for Happy Endings. Andrew did not suffer such a humiliation as he noshed on the salad bar.

Saturday, we shot a spec commercial for Jake Albrecht's Jimmy Johns Subs So Fast You'll Freak! I love producing. I love being able to make it happen for awesome directors like Jake, Danny, Parker and Rachel. I love seeing their burdens of pre-production fade so that they can focus on the aesthetic challenges of the moment on days of production. But double bonus was I got to act in it as well!!!

I bought a bunch of books at this used bookstore. I didn't buy everything that I wanted but I did get a biography of Erwin Rommell, two epistolary books by Cicero and Chretiens de Troye - a compendium of medieval stories.

Saturday night, I went to Hollywood for Liisa Evastina's birthday party in Hollywood. I bought Liisa a drink. She thwarted my attempt to unduly corrupt her morals by insisting I purchase for her a sparkling water. I drank milk.

It was great to talk about the hard work that Liisa and our team has done. It brought back fond memories I have and great esteem for Levi's photography and our team coming together Danny, Polito and Curtis. I met all sorts of cool people. I can't party in Hollywood though - too expensive, too many wierdies, and too many cops. So I stopped off at this cool pizza place at the end of the night called Vito's on LaCienga. I ate my first Canoli. I have to say the customer service was excellent!

Sunday Andrew insisted we leave the house and cruise Abbot Kinney. Bowing to his forceful demands, Danny and I walked to Abbott Kinney. We had tea at a cafe called Intelligensia where 2 lesbians smelled Andrew's tatoos. I met a woman in a fur coat and we followed an Asian woman in hot pants into a Thai Massage parlour but we didn't pay. Then we went up Calabasas to do some location scouting for Andrew's next cinematic adventure - See Danny Thompson's photos. And while on the way back, a Highway Patrolman caught me on my cellphone. He gave me a ticket for being lippy with him. He wanted to arrest me, insist that I take a sobriety check, and search the car. I only got the ticket.

Andrew then said we should cruise Sunset and Whittier to look over the location where Ronnie Chasen was killed. I didn't want to go, but couldn't see a reason why not to go besides being squeamish about it. It was night by then and creepy. We three suspect the LAPD as the hired hitmen. Why? They killed musicians in the same manner. One disgraced LAPD cop/hitman confessed to the murder and the LAPD failed to follow through on a further investigation after the disgraced LAPD cop/hitman fingered more.

This weekend like Al Gore after a rub down had a happy ending.

The Belle of the Ball

The bell of the ball was a brunnette named Jessica. A toned woman who was a ballerina, we had good conversation. As usual, dancing is like going to watering hole. The Apache say you never want to build a house near the water because everyone goes to the watering hole. And a dance floor is not complete without serious dance rivals - Count Dracula and Dragon Balls Z.



It's the end of the night and Dragon Balls Z already has a girlfriend Princess Leah. And where is this guy? He is hovering around the belle of the ball and her lady in waiting. The thought occurred to me to ask the two of them if they wanted to go to Ihop to chat afterward. But Dragon Balls is there.


JIMBO
So Dragon Balls, isn't it time you practice your
Christianity rather than proclaim it?

DRAGON BALLS
You know I am not a complete idiot.

JIMBO
No one wants to accuse you of sincerity.

No, I didn't say that, but I wanted to.

I try

Another poem

In the Wilderness again,
Alone in the world
A strange and fantastic neverland
With different boys and girls

Here is the tree of life
Here is the tree of knowledge
Here is the treasure born of strife
Here is the epitaph of degraded heroes

There’s the low road
Here’s the high
Here’s a peasant’s death
Here for slaves

But even slaves are born free
And not without redemption, dignity or virtue
You can look at my past
Faith is my future

Quotes

“There’s no sign of life
It’s just the power to charm
I’m lying in the wind
But I never wave bye bye”
- David Bowie “Modern Love”

“Are you a gentleman Mister Johnston,” asked the last emperor Pu Yi.

Mr. Johnston as played by Peter O’Toole replied, “I try.”

- Bernardo Bertulucci

“A thousand half loves must be foregone to take the whole heart home.”

The State of California has determined

Choppers hovering above my head.
The sounds of sirens wailing.
The Black and whites stacked along the street
Weapons drawn, cuffs, flashing lights blue and red,
A spotlight hovering high, a failed state wavering

Innocent people criminalized
Criminals sanitized
Pay your fine, Pay your tax, Pay our fee,
Or else . . .

The State of California finds you . . .
The State of California declares you . . .
The State of California has determined you . . .

Obama Biden!
Make Love Not War!
Stop the Genocide!
Recycle!
Coexist!

No smoking here but you can roll up another joint.
The voicemail belonging to . . . is full.
If you were China, would you put your money here?

poems

Lady in a bar

Out of the darkness of the drizzling rain, thunder rippling along the edges of the Valley, I stepped into a room bright, red and yellow
Steve said hello.
And there she was.

Sitting at a table to a well dressed man without a face
I didn’t know desire had such clear skin.
She has soft eyes and an oval face
Hair that was shorter than I on other occasions would have preferred
And other days I got her to smile and laugh more.
She has a ticklish laugh and a weak heart
We danced a jig

I kicked her high in the air
She told me later her first dances were with me
She is light on her feet.

She was so serious tonight
Wearing the look of killers not wanting to do the deed.
Was it because others were watching?
Was it because the hammer was about to fall?
Was it because she was manning her defenses after the commander surrendered unconditional?
I didn’t know and pretended not to care

She was serious
I urged her, dared but didn’t beg
She warned me
Life and love is like rugby, you’re going to get hurt
I did not say those words exactly
She understood my words precisely

Her gaze returned like the familiar spring
We took turns staring at each other
Except that I looked more stupid
As she grew in grace

I paid the bar man
She walked me to my car
For a second time, I told her to kiss me and talk to me sometimes
I had already exceeded my quota of maximum allowable kisses

And again our parted lips met
The Intersection of two souls
The port from one world to another
The momentary experience of pleasure
The gift of a deathless promise
This and me and my night was over.


She is So Awesome

She is so awesome
This I know is true
She dances with a quickness of hummingbird and is lighter than rain

She is so awesome
This I know is true
She cares. She loves me even if she says otherwise

She is so awesome
This I know is true
She is the challenge of the new me
She is the future of what still could be
She is the mother of smiles
She is wife to laughter
She is companion in health and labor
She is partner in woe and wiles

She is so awesome
Because she is so true

Half 

Chapter 2

My Mother’s Tongue


It was a long, long trip and when we got there it was hot. We settled in an apartment in Phoenix. Dad got a job in the spate of less than a week. And we moved into a house even before I started kindergarten. We also bought a pool, took trips to Mexico, and traveled quite a bit. I saw the Grand Canyon.

Mom and Dad were very young back then. And they were very much in love. They hugged and kissed a lot. They also spent a lot of time behind a locked bedroom. Those were some of the happier days of my childhood.

One day, I woke up and my Mom had been teaching my brother and sister how to swim. Not to be outdone, I jumped in the pool and swam all the way to the deep end while the other two were still in their water wings.

I don’t know why I associate the water with my ethnicity. But I do. I feel that having comfort in the water is something that marks my identity and reaffirms me as a man. Somehow I associate that ability to my heritage.

About this time in my life, my paternal grandparents, my Oma and Opa had been the dominant influence, as far as outside relatives go. Their names denote their ancestry – my grandmother, Oma had been second generation German-American. And Opa was Pennsylvania Dutch. They followed us out to Arizona to retire and be with us.

I got a sense that I was different from everyone else in the neighborhood. Phoenix, the Anglo-American center in Arizona, was very white. I didn’t see a Mexican or Black when I was growing up. The kids that lived on my street were white. We played next door because they had a tree house and more Star Wars action figures than we did. Or they played at our house because we were the ones that had a pool. I was not discriminated against and was very much accepted.

I knew that my Mom was different from others in her religion and her language. Every now and then, a friend of the old country would come over and they would back and forth in a strange sounding language peppered with wild laughter. It seemed to me that one could not speak Cebuano with out dotting each sentence with full throated laughter.

Mom and Dad also had friends that were Filipino. They also had kids our age and the three of us would play “red light green light” and “Simon says.” I had a small crush on one of the girls that was my age. She had long black hair, skinny and had pouty lips. Other than that I can’t conjure any other distinct imagery of her least of all her name. Mom and Dad had put out a bowl of potato chips for the guests. They had eaten a few but some still remained. Mom went to eat one then she returned it and threw the rest out.

She determined that the girl I had the hots for, just licked the salt off each chip and left the rest in the bowl – not a keeper.

I found myself finishing my mother’s sentences and correcting the pronunciation of some of her houseguests which we had from time to time. I developed a sense of what people had tried to communicate even before they said it.

I don’t know why I didn’t develop an aptitude for my mother’s tongue as I am pretty good at languages. Mom told me that she wanted to raise me so that I could fit in. But I guess there was probably some self-loathing racism that may account for my lack of linguistic élan.

At any rate, I would not be interested in any aspect of my mother’s culture until my relatives came over to visit.

Half 

Chapter 1

Potatoes or Rice?


When you grow up different from everybody else, you tend to notice things at an early age. And those early memories, for one reason or another, whether they are painful or sweet mark you and mold you into who you are. My early memories do not differ very much from everyone else’s.

I remember running around the house and playing with plastic cars with my brother David. I remember the summer days the neighborhood kids played in the small trailer park that our family lived in off a busy highway in upstate New York. I remember my mother praising me when she compared my brother’s whining behavior at the attention Mother paid to our infant sister as I had not protested when David had been born. I remember Mom praising me for dressing myself at an early age – though I can’t imagine what I wore. I remember my father bent over the bathtub or toilet and Mother chided him for saying a bad word. I felt entitled to punish him by urinating on his leg. He wore plaid polyester pants. It is rather telling what one remembers.

When I was a boy, I asked what color my mother’s eyes were. She said brown. Then I asked what color was her hair. She said black. I asked Mom what color were my eyes. She said brown. And I asked her what color was my hair. She said black like hers. I asked what color were Daddy’s eyes. She said blue. “What color was Daddy’s hair?” I asked. Brown, she responded. I told her that I wanted blue eyes and brown hair just like my Dad.

My Mom didn’t say that I couldn’t have brown hair or blue eyes but instead said nothing. I could feel her become sad. She was so young back then and I never apologized for such a crass remark.

My father worked and would come home to meat and potatoes. Oma, my paternal grandmother, gave her classes on American cuisine. As my current size and girth attests, Mama was a great cook. She had made pork chops and gravy. My brother David had been slurping gravy and shoveling spoonfuls of white rice with a spoon. Mom too ate rice with a spoon and asked me, “Son, what do you want to eat rice or mashed potatoes?”

My father sat silent. He ate his meal with his elbows on the table but he ate potatoes.

I knew I was making a choice between that of my mother and father, in which cultural universe would become my lair. It was an important choice and every second felt like an hour.

“Mashed Potatoes,” I replied.

I know by saying this I will become the bane of multicultural enthusiasts out there – especially the Fil-Ams (Filipino-Americans) like me who will decry this disloyalty to the blood an affront to nationalism. And I may not be pure enough for them anyway as I am only “Half.” But I made a decision a long time ago to screw them. I was a coconut – brown on the outside, white on the inside.

As far as racial preferences go, I usually say off-white.

I would later grow up in Arizona and identify myself as a Latin more than an Oriental. I guess it would have been different if I grew up in Cerritos, California or Honolulu or even the Philippines. But I didn’t.

When people usually ask me: “What are you?” I take a smart aleck approach: “Has not a Jew not eyes? If you prick us, do we not bleed . . .” or I say, “I dunno guess?” Then they guess and I usually come up with all sorts of equivocating responses: Irish, Chinese, Scottish, German, Malay, Apache, Mexican, and recently Arab. They are not exactly the truth, but enough to keep them off balance.

A gay author on the radio program “Fresh Air” had been interviewed about one of his characters who was racially ambiguous con man masquerading as a feng shui consultant. This character would fake ethnicities. He would become a Dominican to one man and to another man, he was a North African. Though I couldn’t imagine myself living that lifestyle, I identified with being different things to different people as an Ottoman Jew residing Belgrade.

For a long time, I had always wanted to be white, because my father was white. I lived in the white culture. I wanted badly to fit in. It was a bit of culture shock to find out that when my mother told my Dad that she had enough of the upstate winters, that we would not be moving to Iowa, Indiana or another pale state but to Arizona – Hispanic, Arizona – Mexican, Arizona.

Half 

Prologue

A reluctant nationalist

The culmination of ramblings and agitations of nineteenth century troublemaking nationalists replete with the trappings of quasi-intellectual finery came in 1919 in Paris concluding the close of the First World War. The Germans surrendered to the Americans hoping to preserve their empire. They miscalculated badly as the American President Woodrow Wilson was an idiot.

You can trace every problem of the past one hundred years to this overeducated ninny from Princeton. Like a master of ceremonies to surreal variety show, note that everyone of the twentieth centuries’ great villains – Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milosevic to name a few all owe their gravitas to the miscalculations of the former Governor of New Jersey.

What would kind of peace would Teddy Roosevelt offer up?

While Teddy Roosevelt led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, Woodrow was grading papers, but I guess it is the same type of service, right?

We live in a world of wild eyed Jacobins, rebellious for rebellion’s sake; steal with avarice, murder with impunity and rape without shame waving the bloody shirt of nationalism.

Most of our world problems come from countries that didn’t exist a hundred years ago. The more advanced peoples ruled over the less advanced. A Jew could be a French citizen so long as he supported the Revolution. A Slavonic Christian belonged to the Ottoman Sultan. A Punjabi barrister could be a British subject. What was a Slovak, a Kurd, or an Israeli, if you were a Catholic with a Polish mother and a Czech father who made his living in the German Empire? Yankee go home! Okay where?

These were my sentiments when I entered college and experienced the Clintonian forays into multiculturalism. That we Americans did not consist of a melting pot of the finest spices from all over the world but instead a confederation of racial tribes competing for federal apportionment suckling taxpaying largesse. I was a bit disgusted by this behavior. I grew up alienated from my heritage save the links to my family. Because the world in which I grew up in had been so different from the world I navigated in the public schools of sunny Arizona that I formed to separate worlds and two separate identities as I could not easily translate one to the other. My ancestry, though clues to my identity formed a private part of me – not a public badge that entitled me to give-a-ways.

Having been influenced by the ideas of author, Leon Uris, I too venture away from the world I know and love – my country to that old country, the mother country, my own personal Israel.