Pictures tell a story. Pictures capture things that the mind may never think to include in writing a novel. A picture’s worth a thousand words, as I’m sure you’ve heard.
It only looks like a toy. photo credit: kidstechreview.com
To me, pictures are a way of life. I am ever grateful for the advent of digital cameras and the ever-growing memory capacity their chips can hold. I still remember my very first camera, which I got on my birthday when my parents and I were in Florida visiting Sea World and Disneyworld. It was a pink rectangular wind-up thing that looked more like a toy meant for Barbie than a functioning camera, but it certainly did work. Rolls of film were precious to me at that time, over a decade ago, so I took pictures sparingly and carefully. After that came a more professional-looking black camera complete with neckstrap and nice fancy buttons with a digital display screen to indicate photos left. No more of those little numbers rolling by a magnifying glass (except on disposable cameras).
My current camera model. photo credit: dphotonews.com
At some point in high school, I began to use digital cameras and never looked back. From that point on, I felt the freedom of taking pictures as I wanted, pretty much whenever I wanted and as much as I wanted. It was liberating. I don’t think my picture-taking obsession hit full swing until college though, when so much was going on that I wanted to document. I generally go for action shots that tell a story, but I’m a sucker for some good food or just posing with friends for posterity as well. Mostly I try to get a candid shot, probably a little goofy if there are people in it, and definitely one that explains why it was taken. My observation skills got put to good use as I documented all the little things I would find, from the insects around us to the odd sign or cool building.
Perhaps the influx in college was also due to the birth of Facebook, which became a great way for me to share the photos I took for myself that most people never even saw. Now I had a way of showing them as well, which just encouraged me to continue capturing all the action around me. Soon enough, my friends knew they could always rely on me to have a camera at hand for any occasion that may spring up. In fact, it is well known that I have well over 3000 pictures tagged of me now and certainly thousands I’ve put up in the dozens of albums I have. I used to go through and delete it all every few months, but at a certain point about three years ago, I decided I may as well leave them up – after all, there are no limitations on storage! It’s a pity I didn’t keep everything up though; it would be a fantastic chronology of my life starting in the fall of 2004, as I embarked upon my years at UCLA.
Because of the significance pictures have had on me, I am drawn to photo blogs (phlogs?), where a picture is posted each day to depict a certain moment during that day. Marylin kept something like that, meant to chronicle her life in a year picture by picture. I don’t know if she ever got to 365 before stopping though. I am tempted to do that here and let the images of my life do the talking. I have been considering whether I should finish up an entire year of writing an entry per day and then do another year of photo blogging, or just start integrating it now. I’ve been trying to use images as much as I can to help illustrate my entries for many months now, which I find is a nice break amongst all that type. I suppose I could try doing one of each for awhile, or switch off every other day, or just do whichever whenever I feel like it. It might be a slight challenge to have an interesting picture every day, what with my policy of not including people I know in the shots. Guess we’ll just have to see!
I eat it all the time, I think about my life in terms of what to eat next, I socialize with people preferably with food at hand. It’s a great way of uniting people – after all, who doesn’t eat food? I even go around taking pictures of all the food I am served at various restaurants and gatherings. Sometimes it’s the presentation that makes it almost too good to dig into; sometimes it’s the delicious aroma that makes your mouth water and your heart fill with happiness. Seriously, good food can lift your spirits! The best thing is, it can be enjoyed over and over again – sometimes alone, sometimes shared, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.
One of my favorite places to go as of late (and unfortunate for my health, I’m sure) is all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ. Between the cute little appetizer dishes, the tasty salad dressing, the rice paper, the egg soup, and the scrumptious brisket and bugolgi, what more could you ask for? Sure you come out smelling of meat and smoke, but that’s not exactly a bad thing, is it? I’m also a huge fan of BCD’s (which I like to joke is missing an A), which is a Korean tofu house that’s open 24 hours. Who needs Denny’s or IHOP when you can get those Korean appetizers, a small yellow fried fish, a bowl of fresh rice, a stone pot of boiling tofu soup, and a toasty rice soup at 2 or 3 in the morning? Granted, for those poor vehicle-less souls living on campus, I guess they have little choice, since they can’t get out to K-town. But hey, as long as you’ve got motorized wheels, you’ve got no excuses!
The great thing about LA is that you never run out of good food to eat. I can’t wait to go back to Buddha’s Belly in Santa Monica for some Asian fusion and chocolate fondue, or over to Daphne’s for some amazingly tasty shrimp pita, or out to cha for tea to get the best boba in town and some yummy treats as well. There’s still plenty to explore, like this other place that has chocolate fondue (which I only knew of from pictures that Opti put up), or the various places lining the streets I often drive along. From Chinese to Greek, from Korean to Persian, from Japanese to Brazilian, there’s a lot more to try! It’ll be slow going though, until I find myself a job and have an income again! For now I’ll just take advantage of UCLA Young Alumni events (like the one tonight) to meet people and try new restaurants.
UCLA is rich in its culture and full of traditions. One such (relatively new) one is the ever-lively Undie Run. By the time I arrived on campus in the fall of 2004, it was a blossoming tradition that I had heard of, but didn’t really know much about. I spent my first year hearing the rumors, but not knowing anyone to go with or where to find the gathering, I never tried to join in the festivities. My second year I returned, eager to find my place and I did so by joining over a dozen organizations on campus. As I spent my time going from meeting to meeting, social to workshop, I didn’t quite find the bonds I was looking for. And so in the spring, I opted to pledge for Alpha Kappa Psi, a co-ed business fraternity on campus. My time was sucked up by that, but I still managed to meet some new friends who were the type to party it up. In them I found Undie Run enthusiasts, so I prepared myself for my very first participation in such an event.
For my first time, in the spring of 2006, I got some cute frilly underwear (black with pink hearts and completely useless as normal underwear with way too much poof) from Urban Outfitters on 3rd street and wore a plain black bra. We congregated at the bottom of what was known as “Rape Trail” (now Saxon Trail/Steps), right on the road where Landfair meets Gayley. The closeness of the crowd provided warmth in the cool night as we got ready for our journey. At some point, the front part of the group began to to scream and run and we all followed suit, flying down Gayley, passing through De Neve Court, continuing down Bruinwalk, then up Bruinwalk, and making our way to the destination at the fountain in front of Powell Library. (Yes, we like to run scantily-clad and scream and sing right outside the library where students are still studying for finals.) Along the way, some creepy guys were standing around just staring and a few more were waiting at the end of the run. There’s always a bit of a downside to everything, right? Some were taking pictures and video and others were just scanning the crowd.
I naturally do not have double eyelids, merely single ones, but as a child, if I rubbed my eyes a lot, sometimes I could get a temporary crease. When I went back to China after high school, I took some glamor shots at a studio, where they taped little clear crescents onto my eyelids to simulate the look. It was fascinating to me that they would do that and I’ve always wondered if it really does look better. It certainly gives my eyes a little more dimension and now eyeliner applied along the top layer of lashes wouldn’t get buried in the depths of my eye when I opened them. It makes for more “Western” eyes, which, perhaps, is the point? It feels weird though, to have this crease in my eye, with skin folding up around it and sometimes I wonder if it’s one of those things like a displaced joint that needs a little boost to get back into place. There’s certainly a kind of pressure there and opening my eyes larger makes that feeling even more pronounced.
Sometime while I was in Singapore (and I didn’t notice at all), I somehow developed a double eyelid. That’s right, just one. So now my eyes are uneven (much like everything else in my body) and I wonder if one eye looks bigger because of this incongruency. It’s kind of cool and it has been pretty permanent, but I wonder how long this will last. Will the other eye change too? Will this one go back? Or am I stuck with one single eyelid and one double eyelid? Since I have no idea how I got the first one to begin with, I have no idea how to make my other eyelid like that, or undo this one. I guess it’s fun though, to observe the differences side by side and feel the differences when I open my eyes.
