As some of you might have heard, I was in New York this past weekend to celebrate litlkittykat's birthday with a big crew of Xangans. So many, um, crazy things happened, but I will have to save all that for the next post. Even though I won't spill all the details, don't worry. I will show you just enough that you can kind of guess what went down. Fair enough?
I will say, however, that there were many reoccurring themes that came out of this weekend. One of them was memes, which I've been addicted to ever since I discovered an iPhone app that allows me to make them super fast. Another theme from this weekend was the song, "Look at Me Now". For whatever reason, we kept on referencing the lyrics to Chris Brown's part in the beginning (perhaps because it has too much swagga?). Here's the song below for your convenience (FYI, expect a lot of bad language when you play this):
Combine both of those reoccurring themes during our 4 1/2 hour bus ride back home and what do you get? Us recreating the song, meme-style! Follow along with the YouTube video for the best effect. This was all done just for the LULz, so hope you enjoy the silliness of this as much as I did!
(Yeah, no way I'm going to meme the rap part! Way too much)
Two months ago, Swtaznxtc90 and I decided to reenact Cyanide and Happiness comics strips just for fun (click here to see the original entry). Well, I had so much fun doing it that I decided to do some more! This time around, I had a few more Xangans helping me out. Hope you enjoy our versions of the following C&H comic strips:
Back in early high school, I started a list of things I wanted to experience in my lifetime. Since then, I've added and crossed off numerous items as life went on. Some of the ones I've listed are probably really common (i.e. meeting and marrying my love, having kids, visiting Japan/Paris/etc.) while other ones are...well, I rather not say them publicly here (). Yes, anyway...
As I looked through my list, I noticed that many of the items happened to be media-related. I know for some people this type of experience doesn't matter much, but I always found it appealing to have a taste of fame, even if it's only for 15 minutes. Luckily, ever since I wrote my bucket list I have managed to achieve several of the things I've listed. For example:
Appear on television - Complete!
While being the dumb guy who didn't know what tuberculosis was in the local news wasn't what I had in mind, I guess it will have to count. You can see my original entry on about this here. By the way, this took place during junior year of high school, which explains the silly hair.
Appear in a newspaper - Complete!
When your high school tennis team wins it first match in over 25 years, it's apparently worth noting! Yeah, we were pretty awful. I don't have the newspaper article on me, but just take my word that it exists.
Appear in a calendar - Complete!
Not sure how many of you knows about the BFN Online Store, but it's basically the Xanga store. In late 2009, I entered into a contest that would feature the winners on the 2010 Xanga calendar. I ended up being Mr. July. Sweet!
Appear in a book - Complete!
I didn't know how feasible this was at first, but I managed to cross this off my list after being featured in the Xangans book last year. Random note: I thought this was only sold online, but someone told me they thought they saw it in a bookstore not too long ago. Hmm...
Appear in a magazine - Complete!
(click to enlarge)
I've done this twice so far, both in tennis magazines (surprise, surprise!). The first one was about finding love on the court and the most recent one was about college tennis players that ended up in tennis careers. I definitely had some input for both!
I finally became the featured reader of the week on this popular Asian American issues/news website a couple weeks ago. This was a big deal for me since I've followed this site for a long time and I've even met the guy who runs it (funny enough, during the same time as the San Diego Xanga meet). FYI, he's not so angry of a person in real life.
Items still in progress: appear in a comic (waiting for nimbusthedragon to change that in the future!), appear as an extra in a television show or movie (if for nothing else, so I can tell my future kids, "You see that guy being eaten by the alien? That's your daddy!"), and being part of a viral video (any ideas?). There's still time to accomplish these things, so we'll see how soon I will be able to check them off my list!
I bet many of you had brushes with fame too. What are some of your experiences? If there's an article/video clip online, you should show me!
Wow, it still hasn't fully hit me yet. Is it actually true? No more long, late night classes? No more papers? No more class presentations? No more exams? Really, no more frickin' papers?!
Oh yes, it became true the moment I turned in my final exam last night. I'm done! I officially finished graduate school and managed to do so with straight As and no loans to pay off.
Where to go from here? For now, I will continue doing my thing with my current job. After all, it was my dream job coming out of undergraduate and I'm just starting to make a name of myself within the industry, so I want to see what else I can offer. I am, however, planning on using my master's degree for my organization, so hopefully I can end up combining two of my passions (tennis and psychology) together.
It feels good to finally have my master's degree! You all must address me as Master Alex from now on, you hear? (just kidding)
Let me end this by showing you a portion of my final presentation. I originally was going to be boring and do it normally like everyone else, but my classmates and professor urged me to do something extra since it wouldn't be an "Alex presentation" without something creative. I was not going to sing again like last time, but I did do a throw back to one of my first presentations where I talked and interacted with myself on screen.
Here you go, me reenacting a conversation I had with my executive director:
It might have been slightly exaggerated for effect. Just slightly.
You know, I have a hard time answering that question. I can speak Cantonese conversationally and understand it well enough, but my grammar, vocabulary, writing and reading skills are shabby at best. When I was a little kid I used to be much better at it, but over time my language ability faded away as I started speaking more English. It makes sense though. Living in the United States, I tend to be around English-speaking people more than Cantonese-speaking people. Even my parents pretty much stop speaking to me in Cantonese since they were practicing their English skills. My grandma was really the only one consistently speaking to me in Cantonese at my household, which honestly didn't help me much since she's usually asking me about food. I can say "I'm not hungry yet!" amazingly though!
It's no surprise to say that I can be uncomfortable with my ability to speak Cantonese, especially around fluent speakers. It stems back to when my aunts and uncles used to call me out all the time whenever I spoke English to them or spoke Cantonese improperly. They would lecture me, saying that I'm not really Asian because of it. They made it seem like there was something wrong with me and for a while there, I believed them. Can I really be considered Asian if I have a hard time communicating? If I'm not really Asian, what am I? I wonder if they thought I was ignorant to my cultural background or that I didn't care. That's definitely not true.
Nowadays, I understand that there's more than just language that defines the Asian part of me and I'm learning to accept this gap of mine. Having said that, I wouldn't mind being able to speak/write/read Cantonese more fluently. I've made attempts to improve it by asking my parents to speak to me in it more, watching Asian dramas, taking a Chinese 101 course, and getting myself heavily involved with the Chinese Student Association during my undergrad years. It's tough to learn when you're older though since by this time my brain is used to thinking in English. It is also not a good sign that my English isn't exactly perfect on many occasions (ask me to say "buffet" or "river" sometime. Actually nevermind, don't worry about it!).
So yes, this language issue has lingered in the back of my mind for some time now and probably will continue. Maybe one day I won't feel as self-conscious about it. Do any of you have similar cultural identity issues when it comes to languages?
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*On a somewhat related note, I'm featured over on Angry Asian Man, one of the premier Asian American issues/news blogs out there. Click here to check out my interview.*
I was 17 years old (as pictured above) when I first joined this site. Initially, I did it so I could comment on a good friend's blog, back when we were not able to leave comments unless we were also members. My first post was written on May 5, 2003 at 5:30pm. At the time, I didn't think I would be writing much on here so I simply directed people to my Livejournal (I wonder if that's why TheXangaTeam only gave me 1 eProp on my first post?).
Over the following year, I treated my blog as if it was my Pulse; entries made up of short (and usually emo) thoughts. They were pretty bad, to say the least. Here are a few actual entries I wrote during those early years:
Eventually, I distanced myself from Livejournal and began using Xanga for all my day to day thoughts. I used to think I had to write everyday because I believed my future self would want to read it all (that turned out to be totally false). As bad and embarrassing as some of the things I wrote though, I don't really feel the need to delete them. They did, after all, represent parts of my past self, so I've accepted them as such.
Once college rolled in, I discovered more of my friends using this site. I continued writing about my day, my feelings, and posting funny stuff for them on my blog. As years went by, those friends migrated to other websites or stopped blogging altogether. For some reason, I kept on going.
I eventually discovered the wonderful community in late 2008, after clicking on a random Datingish ad on my homepage. "People actually talk to strangers on here? Crazy!" I thought. Not too long after, I began making a ton of new friends and began putting out better written posts than the ones I used to do. For whatever reason, people seem to enjoy them.
Today marks the eighth year I've been a member on this site. How many more years will I be on here? I have no idea. I do know this; Xanga has been wonderful to me. It has allowed me to express myself in ways I can't often do otherwise. It has allowed me to stay connected with friends, following their ups and downs as they do the same back to me. It has led me to discover new friends, many of which I have met in person and are now some of my closest confidants. It truly has given me a lot of memorable experiences that may very well define my twenties.
For all of that, Xanga has my full support and loyalty. I hope I stay an active member as long as I can.
I sort of have a reputation among my graduate school classmates of putting on...interesting presentations. I had a big presentation that I did yesterday night and it was no different. In the past, I've done a lot of videos to express my material (for some examples, click here). I actually did make a video for last night's presentation as well (you can see me interviewing, well me, by clicking here). Being as this was one of my last presentations, I wanted to take it up a notch by doing something I haven't done before. But what?
An idea came to me as I was in the car listening to music. Katy Perry's E.T. came on and I noticed how the beat was pretty simple and the vocals weren't too crazy. It suddenly came to me: what if I sang this song but changed up the lyrics to fit my presentation? Ah ha!
There was, of course, the slight problem with the fact I'm not a good singer. However, I do love to sing for fun and my classmates/professor were expecting me to do something unique...
So, I actually went through with it (hope your ears don't bleed too much!):
(Make sure you have YouTube annotations on to see the new lyrics I created)
It ended up sounding more like a rap, but whatever. Judging from people's reactions, it looked like it went over well! Watch until the very end of the video to hear my professor being too stunned to grill me with questions on my presentation, like he was doing with the presenters before me. Whew!
There's a strong chance that my school will start showing this video and other presentation videos I've done to incoming students. Those poor souls!
On April 16th, 2011, I hosted the 2nd big NYC Xanga meet after the one we had last July. Overall, it was a CRAZY, memorable, wild weekend and I'm honestly still not completely recovered from it. I miss you all already.
Hosting a meet up takes a lot of work. There's so much planning and coordinating you have to do in order to get it going successfully. I'm not complaining though. As stressful and time consuming as it can be, it was all completely worth it. It's always happy to hear that people had a wonderful time. It makes me want to hurry up and get the next meet started! I will probably write a post in the near future about things I've learned from hosting multiple Xanga meets.
Here's my perspective of how the Saturday went down (HUGE POST AHEAD):
Lincoln Center
We arrived at Lincoln Center around 12pm to begin the meet up. I was so happy it was not raining just yet! We just kind of hung out there, waiting for people to stop by. At around 12:45pm, we began our walk through Central Park to get to the zoo.
It took some time, but eventually we found the entrance to the zoo. I had most of the people go in first while I waited outside for some stragglers. The zoo visit was brief, but nice. It started raining at this point, but luckily I had my trusty swordbrella! Hiya! Unfortunately, because of the rain we had to cancel the flash mob and the free food event in Central Park was canceled. It was okay though, more time to eat before we headed off for karaoke!
Save those tickets. In the future, it will be worth .02 cents
We did karaoke at the same place as the last meet since they have a large room, a nice bar area, and was a block away from our next destination. This time we had a much more crowded room, but it was all good! The two hours of singing (and for some folks, boozing) was really fun and relaxing. However, my ears might have been bleeding just a little. Others too, after hearing me sing.
OH OH OH OH OH OH OH MY GOSH
Paparazzis! We're such a famous group
PARTY OVER HERE!
Air guitars?? YEAHHH!!
They love Miley Cyrus!
Where did this come from?
Uh oh...
WUT!! I thought I was just letting someone walk through!
All together now! Man, there's never enough Asians...
VaneDave's Comedy Show at Maui Tacos
Apparently, VaneDave ran into some technical difficulties as there was no mike and speaker system like he had expected. It was fine though as we could hear him loud and clear. Unlike last year, he brought 4 other comedians with him to help do the show. I'm happy to report they were all funny, except for VaneDave (just kidding).
Notice the empty mic stand? Haha, just noticed there's an arrow in the background pointing at it
We be a lovely audience
Dave & Busters
At this point, the meet up was officially over. However, that doesn't mean we ended! While some people parted ways, others continued to hang out. We split off into smaller groups, with some of us going to Dave & Busters for a little while. Fun fact: SerenaDante is AMAZING at ticket games. She had what looked like hundreds of tickets while I had maybe 20 tickets. Fail!
The power...IS YOURS!
Hotel 41
We met up with the rest of the group at this lounge/bar near by. Just a heads up: the martinis here are deceptively strong! Er, you'll see. Thank goodness there weren't any videos taken here.
Started off very nice and chill...
Hello_Bianca was already gone by the time I grabbed a drink. Sure, I had an empty stomach and I'm a bit of a light weight since I'm allergic and don't regularly drink, but what can martinis really do?
Oh...
Here, I was freaked out when litlkittykat seemingly appeared out of nowhere from under the table. Notice the empty drinks? Ruh roh.
Yep, here we go. By the way, my hand was reaching for my phone in my pocket, not up her shirt!Meanwhile, Cakalusa is in the back amazed by the candy ring.
"WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT! I'm thinking of something, but I can't quite figure out what I'm thinking about..."
SerenaDante/NimbustheDragon's Hotel Room
Once again, our group split up. Half went out clubbing while the other half chilled at the hotel room. I was mad tired by this point, so I found a place to lay on the bed and didn't move for hours. People started appearing on the bed with me as the night went on. Hey, what can you do? The night eventually ended around 5am or so. I didn't sleep a wink, but then again who really needs sleep?
Soooo comfortable
We were engaged in a finger battle. Yeah, I don't know how this started.
Pile up!Ignore the face I'm making. I don't remember doing that...
That was my Saturday for you guys! I'm sure I will be doing another big NYC meet up, probably next year. Come join us then! It will be a big family reunion all over again.
(Thanks lcrazyaznl, whotakethmycoke, cakalusa, and airborne_muse for letting me use your pictures!)
In case you didn't read any of the 302841 updates around here, there was a large Xanga meet up in NYC this past weekend. So much happened this weekend that I know I won't be able to cover everything in one post. Luckily for you all, there was a lot of Xangans that were there taking pictures and are in the process or already started posting about the weekend. I will start collecting all the updates and put it all in my next entry for your convenience.
I will save the actual Xanga Meet on Saturday for next post. For now, let me tell you about FRYDAY!
Everytime I come to NYC I always plan on visiting Xanga HQs, but it just never worked out...until this weekend. I coordinated with Eugenia to make sure it had to happen this time around, and it did!
I met up with John (sorry for missing your text! Don't shut me down!), Bob, Marc, Jessica, and Eugenia at their office briefly before we headed off to Bon Chon Chicken. Why? To get ready for our happy hour!
It was actually Eugenia's idea to do a happy hour for the Xanga Team and Xangans. Originally, it was only going to be a small gathering, but some how it ended up being 25+ people =O!!!
FlipGuy31O (ever so serious) and me with Marc (yes, he's really tall)! It was great chatting with you and hearing about Xanga from your perspective. I'm glad you were impressed with the meet!
Random group shots:
Once everyone settle in, it was time to really get the party started!
Bob was quite the bad influence on us Xangans! That guy sure knew how to guzzle down the drinks and he made sure to encourage others to keep up with him. By the end of the evening, I would say more than a few of us were having a good time. What do you think? (Some shots borrowed from lcrazyaznl, whotakeththecoke and Cakalusa):
It's starting! Partyin' partyin' YEAH!
That chicken tasted SO good
Even the TV guy had to watch and go damn!
To the left to the left!(wait, I mean to the right?)
OMG, an empty drink! MUST FILL UP!!!
I guess we just turned this restaurant into a club!
In just a few more days it will be about time for...
***The New York City Xanga Meet!*** (Saturday, April 16th, 12pm-7pm)
Basic itinerary as followed (for more specific details, please see previous post here):
12pm-1pm = Lincoln Center Note: Feel free to arrive earlier. We will be meeting near the fountain. Around 12:45pm we will start heading over to the zoo.
1pm-2:45pm = Central Park Zoo+ Tavern on the Green Note: Tickets are $12. This would be a good time to grab some food in the area. Apparently, there's an event at Tavern on the Green where there's live music and (more importantly) the food trucks are giving out free food! Click here for more info.
3:30pm-5:30pm = Karaoke at Duet 35 Note: Price will be $11 per person. Singing is not mandatory, but encouraged! I recommend picking songs that are more well known and upbeat so more people can sing along! There's a small bar right outside of our private room by the way.
6pm-7pm = VaneDave Comedy Show at Maui Tacos Note: Tickets are $10 person at the door. This is also a good time to grab dinner from this place.
Other Notes: *Nothing else is officially planned after 7pm, but some of us will probably continue on into the night *Weather looks rainy and around lower 50s/upper 40s this weekend, so prepare accordingly *PM me if you need contact information from me or one of the other hosts.
Note: List does not include other guests coming and attendees are subject to change. I'm predicting that while we have over 50 people that are coming throughout the day, we will most likely have between 30-40 people at any given time.
When you arrive, find me (or any of the other hosts) so I can mark that you're with us! Let me know your name and screenname, especially if we haven't met before.
). After my next post, I promise I will cut down on the memeing. Until then, get ready! Here, this FB status of mine hints at the number of memes to come:
). Yes, anyway...
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