new go-go gadget.

wahoo! for my devoted readership who don't obsessively click the reload button to see if i've posted anything new on my blog, i've finally gotten around to setting up email subscriptions to my blog. check out go-go gadgets to the right.

as usual, this service could not have been possible without the patience and technical support of one bo dirty. thanks bo! xoxo.

overheard.

on gchat:

kristine: i'm not an equal opportunity dater. if i were a corporation... i would be sued for discrimination.
paul: this is your vagina we're talking about... not coca-cola.
kristine: can i keep that forever and ever... so you can read it at my wedding?

sometimes you eat the bar...

and sometimes the bar... well... eats you.

dude, new york city and i are in a fight. a lovers quarrel. mostly it has to do with the weather, which has been mostly poopy. cloudy. rainy. yucky. can't fall hold off for another month? my first night back was torrential, and i practically had to wade through the upper west side to find my last minute gmat book that was unavailable in indonesia. then, my bathroom was a disaster because, even though i live on the ground floor, there appears to a be a correlation between the rainy weather and the leak right above the toilet. sal, my super, thinks i'm crazy. but apt 2A must shower more often than twice a week...

then moo-moo swooped in from san antonio. i showed her around and fell in love all over again... uws, union square, east village, south street seaport, upper east side, lower east side, teany's (of course), and a game of chess with some weirdos in bryant park. ah, new york... you seduced me. then, you turned around and bitch slapped me.

okay, that's inaccurate. i'm just cranky from some minor boy drama that unfolded last week, which ate up my entire thursday, and hung over my head all weekend in connecticut. details require a four drink minimum... and possibly a cupcake. (fyi--my friend kim is treating me to south east asian food on tuesday in exchange for my company and the dish... so that is the standard to which everyone else will be held.) for those of you in the know, oh-so-over it. next!

anyways, my point is... every time i come back from being anywhere, for any amount of time, i go through decompression. if you've known me for long enough, you've seen it: i'm m.i.a. for about a week... i don't return calls... i don't answer emails. that's "me" time, and i use it to get reacquainted with whatever version of my life happens to be going on at the time. in this case, for instance, its the "living alone on the upper west side/intern by day/student by night/business school applicant whenever i can fit it in" version. between having moo and now my mom in town (auntie san is flying in in t-minus 7 hours), jetting to boulder, colorado, taking a bus to livingston, new jersey (i know it's the suburbs, but i was scared), and weekending in connecticut (how bourgeoise of me, n'est-ce pas?), the emotional distance between me and new york city has yet to be bridged. i'm not concerned, i'm just antsy for us to be back to normal.

plus, i am pretty anal about my routine and get pretty anxious when i'm out of sync. i need to get back to my yoga, my long walks, and my daily cupcake. i went to homemade bakery for the first time last week and the woman behind the counter asked me about my foot. i couldn't believe that she remembered that i had limped in with a cane the month before. she told me that she was worried the first couple of days... but then after a week or so figured i was on vacation. "welcome back!"

and that, my friends, is evidence that my addiction to cupcakes has reached pathological proportions.

a belated e-postcard from indonesia

my first weekend back, my family escaped from jakarta for a little r&r in central java. we stayed at the losari coffee plantation, a newly opened resort built on a restored dutch coffee plantation. absolutely beautiful, simultaneously paying homage to its colonial roots and its javanese setting. with the exception of the spa, all of the villas and resort buildings were restored antique homes. the "concierge" was housed in the old train depot. the villas we stayed in had been purchased and moved, piece by piece, from nearby villages and cities. the club house was the original plantation manor, outfitted with antique javanese furniture which my dad drooled over. he lifted each piece to confirm that it was made of heavy teak, then examined the joints before exclaiming: "no nails!" apparently, one of the features of well-made furniture here is its pure construction.

on the agenda for the first two days were eating (chicken satay, nasi goreng, fried bananas, barbeques), drinking kawista and tamarin sodas, sleeping in the sun by the pool, a massage and traditional lulur scrub (involving tumeric, which has the effect of yellowing your skin, if you're not careful. mark had yellow armpits for awhile), and a tour of the plantation.

in my mind's eye, i expected to see sprawling fields of coffee trees arranged in perfect symmetry and order. what i got was much better: all the coffee grown at losari is shade-grown and organic. so instead of using chemical fertilizers or pesticides, the coffee trees are planted among local vegetation (bamboo, cotton, banana trees) that provide both nutrients and protection; a twiggy plants man's dream. speaking of which, i had no idea that i had a twiggy plants mom--she was the best at identifying the different trees and fruits; i was totally impressed!

our guide showed us the different varieties of coffee (java, arabica, acelcor, and robusto--which is what i'm bringing back with me), how they graft trees together to take advantage of different qualities (for example, arabica's trunk is not very thick or sturdy, so they often graft arabica branches to robusto trees), what leaves they use to line the bottoms of trees to prevent insect infestations, the process of planting, harvesting, drying, and roasting, and finally, how they drink the coffee (instead of stirring a sweetener in to their coffee, they put a piece of palm sugar into their mouths before they sip their coffee). i'm not a coffee drinker, so i can't attest to the whether or not it tasted better than starbucks, so i think we should do a taste test next time we're together.

probably the funniest thing to happen was when i asked about purchasing cat poop coffee. have you ever tried to describe anything involving feces without actually saying the word, or any word that describes poop? well, it's even more difficult if you're trying to do so with a language barrier. my attempt to gingerly describe what i was looking for, using hand gestures to fill in the blanks, was like a round of taboo: "i'm looking for the coffee that the cat eats and then, well, it comes out... and... well... then you pick out the coffee beans..." there were lots of confused "is-this-woman-out-of-her-mind?" looks around the gift shop. in the end, the woman i was speaking to laughed and said something about how the plantation squirrel had died (???). no doubt something was lost in translation.

***

borobadur

now, my family is not known for being early risers. and i'm not the worst of 'em; kaye has been known to sleep for 14 hours on a pretty regular basis. so it was quite a triumph, on our last day, that we all managed to wake up at the ungodly hour of 2am to travel west to borobudur, the thousands year old buddhist temple that had been lost under ash and jungle, then found again by dutch explorers. from the moment we arrived on the grounds, it was well worth it. armed with flashlights, we followed our guide up to the temple in the darkness and settled down on the first level of nirvana (there are three levels of inner peace, apparently). these pictures do not do the view justice. from our vantage point, we could see village below, which was cloaked in jungle mist. the sun rose between two volcanos... one of which, mount merapi, has been active for some time, and was smugly smoking through the morning. apparently, on some nights, one can see lava flowing down the side of the volcano.

this link describes the structure of borobudur quite nicely, so i won't reinvent the wheel. what was cool was that our guide walked us through some of the levels and told us the stories of the buddha's many reincarnations and karmic tests. good lessons about being unselfish and taking the middle path... by the end of the tour, all of us were ready to throw in the proverbial towel and convert to buddhism. at one point, our guide took us to one of the many stupas (see left), on the first level of nirvana, which housed a buddha inside. legend has it your wish will come true if you are able to reach inside and touch certain parts of the buddha: for men, the ring finger on the right hand and for women, the heel of the right foot. (see picture on the right). as all of us tried to touch the buddha, it became apparent that the goal for the men was much, much easier to attain than the goal for the women. i remarked on this observation, saying to our guide: "i wish that women could touch the ring finger instead of the heel." in all his wiseness, he replied, like the buddha himself probably would, that the struggle to touch the buddha paralleled similar struggles in life... and sometimes, women need to reach even further then men have to, in order to get what they want buddha must be a feminist.

star struck.

my block has been taken over by the cast and crew of "the knights of prosperity" which is airing this october on abc. i only really care because i might have my fifteen seconds of fame in the pilot or something as the uncredited "girl walking home with her mail" and also because the one and only donal logue (of "the tao of steve" fame) is in it, and i saw him today sitting on my block, on a director's chair, reading the new york post, and commenting on the capture of jon benet's killer. in the words of us weekly, "he's just like us!"

***

i have a few posts in the queue that i haven't published yet... sorry about the hiatus! i can't blog unless i'm stressed out.

flight log.

new jersey --> singapore
singapore --> manila
manila --> singapore
singapore --> jakarta
jakarta --> semarang
semarang --> jakarta
jakarta --> singapore
singapore --> kuala lumpur
kuala lumpur --> langkawi
langkawi --> kuala lumpur
kuala lumpur --> singapore
singapore --> jakarta
jakarta --> singapore
singapore --> new jersey

i have spent an inordinate amount of time in the friendly skies this summer. and i think i'm now intimately familiar with singapore's airport. looking forward to being on solid ground in nyc next week...

point of no return.

i'm within two weeks of my scheduled gmat date (t-minus 9 days and counting), which means that any chance of rescheduling/postponing has come and gone. so i'm basically in full view of the firing squad, and frantically working on as many practice problems as possible. after a few demoralizing rounds of questions in my peterson's guide to the gmat, i looked up reviews on amazon to see whether other people found the book to be as challenging as i found it to be. turns out that everyone pretty much had my reaction: "wtf???" i won't torture you with the gory details of the critical reasoning questions/answers that made absolutely no sense, suffice to say that i've switched over to the princeton review guide to the gmat and things are moving a lot more smoothly, though on the math end of things, permutations and combinations are especially frustrating. i'm hoping i don't get any of those questions, which probably means, given my luck, that my exam will lead with one. ugh. in any case, while i'm not smugly confident, i'm not totally panicked either. i think i'll be okay... wish me luck!

24

i hate tony almeida.
i hate president david palmer.
thank god for michelle dressler. and chloe is hilarious.

i think season three of 24 is completely asinine. the whole scheme to capture the virus by busting out ramon salazar was quite possibly the most ridiculous operation ever planned. in order for it to be a success (which it wasn't, in the end) too much hinged on close calls and near misses. good thing neither jack nor salazar were killed during the jail break. check. good thing they managed to catch ryan singer just a second too late. good thing salazar didn't blow jack's brains out before they flew out to mexico. the only reason that there's 24 hours of drama is because from the beginning the plan was completely flawed.

i'll admit that i'm hooked anyways. grrr.