Come back in a week to check up on me.

The hair is still afalling. I told my doctor today and she said I should start taking a multivitamin and see if that helps. So I am. She also added, "well coumadin is a poison." awesome. I really don't want to take this stuff for the rest of my life. The hematologist at Stanford is the only one who has said that I will need to. Cross your fingers and hope he's wrong. I'm going to ask my hematologist here on my next appt (the 9th). Anyway, I'll let ya'll know how the hair thing progresses. I got evaluated in PT earlier this week. He said I could be discharged if I wanted or if I wanted to continue we could do 3 more weeks. So I figured it wouldn't hurt and he's a cute guy, so three more weeks it is!

I also got to hang out with Lauren the other day. We went to get beignets and saw The Island. Kinda weird, but it wasn't bad (the movie that is). It was cool to hang out with her. She's coming by again before she leaves to see my mom, eat fried shrimp, and try my cornbread:)

Nothing else is really happening. My brother comes back on Friday and Tiffany comes back next Thursday. So that'll be cool.

That is all. Love you guys!

delovely

mood: especially agnostic

listening to: “clark gable” by the postal service, on repeat

i had a really good weekend, which might make up for what seems to be a trying week ahead. as in, trying on my last nerves.

saturday i decided to venture out into san francisco on my own. i had intended on waking up extra early to escape the bourgeois museum crowds, but after hitting the snooze button three times and rolling my eyes at my roommates for starting their day i realized that an early start just wasn’t going to happen. and when i eventually woke up around noon, my horoscope read that i was essentially a slacker and that “saturday and sunday, [i] might not make it out of [my] pajamas.” granted, if i had forgotten to read my horoscope that morning that might have been true. but given my defiant nature, the very fact that yahoo! horoscopes had the audacity to tell me i wouldn’t get going inspired me to do precisely the opposite. the last time those idiots told me i wouldn’t be able to make any decisions about my academic life, i sat down and made a four-year plan complete with motivational quotes and footnotes.

so i quickly bought a snapple and a stale honeybun at the arco across from campus, and then i set out to find free parking in palo alto and a caltrain ticket to the city. when i arrived i walked straight to the SFMOMA (san francisco museum of modern art) to replenish fill up on the artsy fartsiness i’ve been missing all summer, and i found myself having so much fun. there is this new product design and architectural art exhibit that was inspiring for me. it had all of these new, young artists with such creative ideas that i felt ashamed of how little i’ve applied myself in school so far. i should be brilliant by now, or at least on my way to being someone memorable. my absolute favorite was this one south african artist named william kentridge who fashioned “movies” from pencil drawings of progressively erased images, kind of like those flip books you used to play with when you were younger but so much more intricate it must have taken years to make. and there was another woman named marilyn minter who made these huge paintings of “ideals” (a woman’s foot in a red stiletto heal, a mouth sucking seductively on a pencil, etc.) that were so gigantic and realistic that you could see all their imperfections (oversized pores, sweat, etc.) up close. but when you stepped back far enough they just looked like your average pin-ups—you should google these brilliant mofos, seriously. i’ll stop boring you with the details—also, before walking back out into the scorching sun i talked to this 50 year old guy about modern art and oxidized copper (he was a construction worker) for about an hour until his wife and daughter came to get him from the lobby. apparently, he’d been embarrassing them with his lowly opinions of the art so they deserted him early in the visit. poor guy. i liked him.

i walked some more to union square where i window shopped for hours. in the end i was proud of myself for not having bought anything that i can’t afford, meaning i didn’t buy anything at all. well, originally i’d told myself that if i couldn’t find anything reasonable to buy i would go back to the first store i’d visited on market, diesel, and get this cool green jacket with red and yellow embroidery that was completely impractical and expensive, to reward myself for having saved money this summer. but when i finally came back to the store they had just closed, so i took it as a sign that bad financial times are in my future, and the yahoo! gods are somehow protecting me from myself. i also caught a bus to haight/ashbury and walked to soma to stroll through the nice apartments and fashionable people until it got cold outside. at last i caught the bus home at 8pm, exhausted, and there were bomb sniffing dogs all over the caltrain station, combining the two things i fear the most. dogs and blowing up. lovely.

on a shorter and less fun note, my dad decided to accept another year in iraq, so i’m depressed/pissed about that. some bitch named “federal income taxes withheld” took $400 out of my first paycheck. and lauren has yet to get her birthday present from me in the mail, which was supposed to be an amazing surprise for her a long time ago. but i’d rather repress those issues.

love *manda panda

A(nother) Night on the Town

Hey everyone - I've been reading all of your posts and I have to say this was a really great way of keeping in touch. Oh, also, before I forget - you all need to send me your mailing addresses if you want to get postcards; so far I've only got Yamanda's.

Things in Shanghai have been pretty good, but I'm glad I'm only here for a month because I'm mostly going out at night and not learning much Chinese (which was kind of the entire point of the whole China thing). Anyhoo, most of my good stories I put up already on my other blog. I'm actually posting more than I thought I would - I think I'm just kind of using it as a journal for myself and to remind myself why I took the pictures I did, because a lot of the times I just home and forget what all of them were of. Anyhoo, I figured I would write a blog entry here about one night where I got completely wasted and stayed up until 6am, because I figured that wouldn't be a very good one to put up on the blog that my grandma reads...

Anyway, so it was a Friday night, and (as usual) everyone decided that it would be another good night to go out. Not that it needs to be Friday - it's like being in a frat here or something, the partying starts on Monday and ends on Sunday. Luckily I've found a couple of people I can stand going out with (and even more luckily, one of them is my roommate - we're still getting along pretty well). So this Friday night we were all supposed to go out to this Moroccan bar called Barbarossa's. We went in two cabs, and of course the other one got lost, so the people in my cab decided we'd go to another bar while we were waiting for them to walk back to Barbarossa's. We headed over to this place called Windows, which is probably the skankiest bar in town, but has really cheap drinks. However, this was a Friday, so they had put in place a cover charge of $3 (outrageous!), so we got some pizza instead. Then we headed down to this other really sketchy bar area that seems to be a headquarters for 50 year old foreign men looking for prostitutes. Yay. We ducked into this bar called Woodstock, which was going for a sixties hippie theme but for some reason was playing dance music (dj'ed by a seventy year old man on a laptop and a projector). We grabbed a table away from the old men and the prostitutes at the pool table and had some awful cocktails from a mix.

After a bit we get the word that the other cab of people finally found their way to Barbarossa's so we head back there - it turns out to be a really cool bar shaped like a big castle (complete with a moat) with three stories and all this cool fabric draped everywhere. We get a couple of cocktails and an apple hookah and hang out on the balcony for a while, playing with this weird spotlight and shining it on people as they walk below (until the owner takes it away). Before we know it, it's 3am and they're closing. Next door is the Marriott - we'd been speculating how many floors it was, so we thought the natural thing to do was go in and check. Turns out that the estimate of 60 was spot on, but we need a key to get up there. Luckily a wasted Italian couple used their keycard to get us up there, and we get out at and wander around and have a look at the view. We go down to the lobby (on the 38th floor), but there are cleaning staff out and about so we decided to get out of there. We decide to stop off at the grand ballroom on the way down, which was a mistake, because when we get back on the elevator we realize that we can't get back down to the ground floor from there. Suddenly a voice comes out of the surveillance camera asking us what we're doing and where we want to go. Luckily Alex, a guy from London, has enough presence of mind to say "uh, out?" - they tell us we have to go back up to the lobby and take a different elevator down from there. I knick a vase of flowers on the way out (I was pretty gone at that point), and then we run past the front desk people in the lobby to get on the elevator and get out before they get seriously pissed.

A quick cab ride later, we're back at the dorm, but we decide we're hungry. We get on our bikes and ride to the pedestrian mall south of campus, only to find that the restaurants that advertise being 24 hours were lying. We bike over to the little noodle shop run by a Chinese Muslim family near our language classroom because I remembered that they were supposed to be open 24 hours, too. The two teenage boys manning the shop woke up enough to make our noodles by hand - by the time we finished it was about 5:30. The ride back to our dorm was a bit easier, considering the sun was up by then... By the time we got back to the dorm, it was 6am - we all collapsed and slept until dinnertime the next day.

hello all...

Let's see...

Today I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and it was amazing. I completely agree with Nadya that it was "so good that...there should be laws." I must admit I don't usually associate really good things with law. But seriously, it was greatness.

I also saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I thought it was going to be a little too creepy for my taste but I really liked it. Hooray for another successful Tim Burton and Johnny Depp endeavor.

On a less happy note, I had been noticing that a lot of my hair was coming out whenever I showered, so I told my hematologist and apparently this happens to some people who are on coumadin (the blood thinner I'm on). So, those of you who have heard me freak out about cutting my hair can imagine that I didn't take this news well. I'm so scared that I'm going to lose a whole bunch of my hair. I don't know what to do. I'm going to tell my primary care physician on Wednesday and see if she has anything comforting to say.

Physical therapy is better. Doesn't hurt so much anymore. And I've been driving every now and then.

That's about it. Hope everyone is doing well. Much love!

The Other Side

Today was my first day off in two weeks. Well, not really, I mean I technically was supposed to do work today and a lot of it, but I chose not to. You know, I don't know why I keep agreeing to do these jobs that I can "do on my own time" as long as I make the deadline. I'm a certified procrastinator... I was just about to say "by birth" when I realized that's not true. That's not true at all. I was born three months before I should've been. I must have been traumatized by the experience of finishing something early (in this case, my biological development) and my little infant self vowed never to be any where near early or "on time" to a damn thing ever again. I've succeeded.

Afterthought:
Song: Well nothing, Linda's watching The Godfather for the second time today. But If I lived in a perfect world, I'd be listening to "I Know" | Fiona Apple

Mood right now: slightly annoyed but generally ambivalent

Speaking of films, this one's for you Lo, I saw Big Fish some weeks ago. It was amazingly beautiful, simply riveting. I thouroughly enjoyed it. And then Linda and Yamanda opened my eyes to the many other films that Tim Burton has masterminded, I love that guy, he's a genius. I'm going to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory some time soon. I'm so excited! Huh... maybe I'll make it a date with [censored]....

[censored] that is. [name censored again] Yeah, I've been debating about this one. We've talked a few times, he seems interested in hanging out. I dunno if it's worth it though. By virtue of being on the crew team and being good friends with Nico, he's got a 95% chance of turning out to be a supreme asshole. Also, [censored] has an immense crush on him and I'm off the radar with sensing potential catiness about that. We'll see though.

check in:
song: still The Godfather
mood right now: Much better. Do I dare say happy? Yes, why yes I think I shall.

Would you look at that; talking to you never fails to brighten my day. Thanks for that friend. Thanks.

she works hard for the money.

i think i’m in a good mood, even though yesterday i tried to cook dinner for the quillen girls and failed miserably. bettycrocker.com always has these fantastic recipes in their online database (try the guacamole, it’s fabulous daaahling.) and i thought it could never go disgustingly, devastatingly wrong. i mean, the name of the dish is “spicy bucatini pasta” complete with a foreign word, an ethnic reference and an indication that it includes a crapload of calories. unfortunately, either their idea of cooking raw bacon in the sauce is the worst technique known to woman, or my hormone levels plummeted that morning thereby depleting my ability to be a homemaker. it just came out tasting like bacon grease and tomato paste, so i retired my apron for the rest of the summer and offered my uterus up to the gods in defeat.

also yesterday, dina and i were at safeway and we saw the most beautiful man in the world. he was beautiful. he was so beautiful. i tried to peer pressure dina pbs-style into being rash and tactless, just so i could live vicariously through her and have little, beautiful, latino and black, hypothetical, vicarious children with him. she was supposed to walk up to his basket and tell him that he was stunning (because he was!) in her vixen voice, but she decided not to at the last minute. still, i can honestly say that i feel like a better person for having seen this man. i have developed a whole new faith in humanity and the workings of non-genetically-altered reproduction. that’s not why i’m in a good mood, though.

i am getting my first paycheck this thursday and it will be huge. all of you know me well, and therefore you know that if there is one thing that i can’t handle it’s money issues. put me in a room at 9am on the first day of my period to take a final exam that i have done absolutely none of the reading for and turn the thermostat up to 95 degrees with the windows closed, and i will be able to perform under the pressure. but make me live in an apartment with no money for rent and bad credit and i will crack like you wouldn’t believe. but all is well, or will be well thursday, july 21^st at 8am pacific time.

glad to hear we’re all doing well.

love *manda

Mission accomplished!

First of all, I want to say: Nadya and Yamanda, I'm sorry your summer jobs have not lived up to expectations. But I hope the summer is enjoyable nonetheless.

Ronnie and I have hung out the last three days and I have yet to cry or yell. He's leaving tomorrow to go to Baton Rouge for a week and then will be here next Saturday for the day and then goes back to California on Sunday. So he still has today and next Saturday to be a jerk and return things to normal.

But that isn't the big news. I finally had beignets! They were great. Totally worth the wait and the sticky hands and the powdered sugar under my fingernails.

I just got back from PT a little while ago. They bumped up my weights so I don't get too "comfortable." Yeah, I don't see that happening quite yet.

And now I am watching Jeopardy which I have been doing just about everyday for the last two weeks. I didn't think I would ever be dedicated to Jeopardy again without Ken Jennings. But I'm still enjoying it. There's this guy David who has been on for about 8 days. He's good. The other day Alex Trebek was like "Will he be the next Ken Jennings?" I was like um no, because now the pressure will kill him. Walking in Ken's footprints is no easy task my friends...

The long awaited 6th Harry Potter book comes out on Saturday. Does anybody remember when I decided to reread the first 5 before it came out? Yeah, I remember too. But the problem is that I just remembered yesterday, and it's just not going to happen. I'm really excited though. I have a copy reserved at Borders. yay! I was going to go to their little midnight deal to pick mine up with all the other Harry Potter addicts, but I don't stay up until midnight anymore. That may be a problem when school starts.

That's all my news for now. I'll update again when some more comes.

If I Was a Rich Girl...

Mood: Relieved
Currently Playing: Suddenly Everything Has Changed | The Postal Service

Where do I start? Where do I begin to start? Where do I begin to begin?

That is the real question.

After staying up until 3:30 AM this morning debating equitable public education, unjust corporate practices, and discussing our wholesome (and not so wholesome if you're Linda or Yamanda) childhood memories of the zoo, I went to sleep. I woke up at 9:15, foggy-headed, and zonked out so that I could be at the Drama Department at 10 AM. I got there at 10:02, was chased down by a police officer before I could get out of the car, and was told that today and tomorrow only the Hoover Institute affiliates could park in the DRAMA department parking lot. They were having "an event." Damn conservatives. After 20 minutes of driving around, I parked at a meter, put in 30 minutes worth of coins, and was in the costume shop by 10:29.

It appeared to be the start of yet another awfully busy day. I'm the Wardrobe Supervisor for the Pintor Festival at Stanford Drama. So I spent this morning, and will spend every-other morning from here on, cleaning, ironing & mending clothes.

I worked there until 12:30 so that I could go on to my next job: nanny for this lovely little girl named Emi, which is from 1 PM - 6 PM, M-F. Emi's dad phones me right as I'm on my out to see if the car has been towed and tells me to go ahead and just come in at 2. I do some more costume shop stuff, arrive at the house at 2 and am promptly told that I can go home. Emi's dad has the rest of the week off, including today, he pays me for sitting Monday and Tuesday, and pays me for today since I had already blocked out my schedule to sit today (his idea not mine).

Oh yeah, and that car I mentioned, not mine. It's Emi's Dad's. It's Emi's Dad's red BMW. He let me use it for the past week since I usually pick Emi up from school.

Oh to be rich.

Anywho, so I jetted out of there struggling to conceal the thrill of relief I was feeling for having the rest of the week off from baby-sitting. Being a full-time nanny for them was only temporary since Erin Braddoc is on vacation until next week. And starting next week I'm going to babysit 1 or 2 days a week, if at all.

Slowly but surely I'm getting my summer back.

Thus is my attempt and subsequent failure to try and update you on what I'm doing now and let you know why I've been so uncreachable lately.

I'm going to take a nap right now though... I've got work again at 7.

See you on the other side.

how bazaar.

mood: blue, like this webpage, and melodramatic

bravo, your posts have been funny. i’ve been sitting at my desk, a little frustrated, and your posts have made me laugh aloud inappropriately for the past few days.

the idea of a summer job began to tear at my nerves today. i thought it would never happen, but it has. and it makes me wonder if i’ll ever have a career that i can stay satisfied with for more than a month, or at least one that makes it worth waking up extra early most of the time. for now, i’m thinking that i’m probably better off just working at carl’s jr. after graduation like i’d planned before, because it’s a lot easier to do mundane tasks and have a product (read: burger) to show for it than to do a lot of abstract, non-profit, work and have a bunch of warm fuzzy feelings. apparently, warm fuzzy feelings only stay warm and fuzzy for about four weeks until they become just some, like, lukewarm scratchy responsibilities at 9am. but don’t cry for me.

in other news, escondido village is still a party zone, except not really. not to mention yesterday as i was riding the elevator up to my floor this lunatic stepped onto the lift with his laundry BAREFOOT. i just about died from sheer squirminess. why even wash your clothes, eh? why not just roll around in a steaming mound of fertilizer in them and dip them in cooking grease to match your nasty life habits of walking barefoot on disgusting communal floors. i could go on forever about that.

but i should get back to work.

love *manda

A Day at the Beach ft. Kevin Shen

So, one morning, completely out of the blue, the all too familiar sound of an AIM message grabs my attention. Normally this wouldn't be that big of a deal, however this message I realize is from our friendly, and at times psychotic (but who isn't psychotic at times, right?) Branner RA Kevin Shen. He informs me that he's staying in NC for the weekend and wants to have a true NC experience at NC's Outerbanks. I've nothing to do, so I'm like sure Kevin, why not?!

All in all, it was a fun, hot and humid day. It was a little strange being a tourist in your homestate in a place you've visited at least 4 or 5 times before. We started off visiting the Wright Brothers Memorial, and as we walked throught the small museum we concluded that Orville got everything: the looks, the longer life, and to ride in the plane. Wilbur looked like a psychotic serial killer, died fairly early in his life, and only got to run beside the airplane. He pretty much got the short end of the stick. Kevin theorized that the Wright Brothers were actually incestuous gay lovers, and while it's still just a theory nothing in the museum said otherwise. ;o) After the Wright Brothers Memorial we headed a little south to check out Bodie Lighthouse. It was a small lighthouse and actually a little strange because it wasn' t even on the water. It was a little inland. Across the street was a public beach, so we hung out there for a half hour or so before heading to our next excursion: hang gliding at Jockey's Ridge State Park. Jockey's Ridge has the tallest sand dunes on the East Coast. It's basically a desert, only not. We checked out the hang gliding school, but the decided we'd save hang gliding for another visit. The winds weren't that great and we didn't have 3 hours to spare for the beginners lesson. We did walk around of the sand dunes though. It was sooooooooo hot but once you got to the top of a dune is was cool because you could see all the way to the ocean.

After the sand dunes we had dinner at the local fave restaurant, The Lone Cedar. Then we headed to Manteo, NC to check out the Elizabethan Gardens and the outdoor production of The Lost Colony. Brief history lesson if you aren't familiar with the lost colony: the first colony in the new world tries to survive on it's own while being neglected by England b/c she's at war with Spain, when the war is over England learns that the colony has completely disappeared. No one knows what happened. No bodies were found or anything. The production was nice: good sets, actors with a combo Southern/British accent, and good singing.

And that concludes our day at the beach. Now, I have a week before I leave for Orlando and two weeks before New Orleans. I'll blog about those when the time comes.

Hope everyone is having a good summer! Bye for now!

I got nothing

I think I've told everybody this individually but I'll just reiterate. I am so sore. Physical therapy is totally kicking my ass. I didn't even realize how weak my leg was until I started. It's not like Stanford rehab where the biggest challenge is stairs, which at the time, was a really big, scary challenge. But now they're like oh you can walk, but can you do 45 leg presses and then some wall squats and lift some weights with your leg? And I'm like if my muscles weren't shaking uncontrollably, maybe. But it's not so bad. The pt is very cute. Except during my last session I worked with a different one cause he was evaluating some other girl. oh, and he's married. Details...

I also visited Josh in jail last week. That was strange. It was like in the movies where you see each other through the glass and talk through a telephone. It was hard to see him like that though. Hopefully he gets moved to rehab soon.

In other news, wait... I have no other news. Well there is the hurricane that I think is going to miss us, so we're staying here. There will probably be some nasty weather though. The tropical storm that just hit us had 70 mph winds and took down lots of trees and just made the streets messy. But it happens.

Beauty and the Geek has ended. I have mixed feeling about the winners and am very saddened that there is now a void in my Wednesday night. Especially since Dancing with the Stars also ended. But Average Joe has started and so has I want to be a Hilton, so there is still justice in reality tv land.

Ronnie gets here on Monday. So I'll see him and some people from high school next week. Becky is in Baton Rouge all the time going to class and Tiffany is still in New York, so there aren't tons of entertaining people to hang around with. I've only hung out with Drew like once cause he's always all sad about his mean "girlfriend" type person. And he brushes aside my support. So that's that.

I still haven't had beignets. I'm sad to write that. I'll get some this week though.

Ok time for some food and a pain pill. I love ya'll!

Milk poisoning

Hey everyone,

I'm about to kill blogger - I think their server in Asia is down or something, but it's been a royal pain in the arse. Anyhoo, I can get in to post but I can't see the blog itself, so I hope that this gets published somewhere...

Anyhoo, things in Shanghai are going OK so far, see my blog for excruciating details (http://www.stanford.edu/~noralev/blog/). Classes start on monday, so I've just been putzing around, running errands, getting to know the city, etc. It seems like everything takes forever to figure out.

Breakfast, for example, has been an epic battle. I wanted to buy some breakfast cereal and milk so I went to the grocery store. I picked out some non-toxic looking cereal and some regular looking milk. Of course when I get home and open the box, I realize that the cereal comes in little mini-ration packets that each contain enough to give to a small rat for an afternoon snack. And there are only 5 packets per huge box. And then I also realize that I can't drink the milk anyway if it's not pasteurized, apparently otherwise all sorts of things will start growing in my stomach and next thing you know an alien will be bursting out of there and getting everything all slimey. So I spent the next three days trying to find the word for pasteurized in Chinese. When I finally confirmed that my milk was indeed pasteurized, my three days of detective work culminated in one bowl of cereal (as all 5 mini-rations fit in a regular person sized bowl). Apparently victory is not sweet, but tastes a bit more like a stale bowl of multi-grain Cheerios.

Anyhoo, hope you guys are all not too bored and are eating nice, healthy, pasteurized breakfasts.

-Nora