Which isn’t necessarily true – life is great, thanks for asking!

I think this blog — at this domain here anyway — has run its course. That’s not to say I’m not available on Twitter, Tumblr (hint), Flickr or a myriad of other social medium that end in the letter R; you’ll probably find more about my wacky adventures there, if you haven’t done so already. But until then, this weblog will remain in stasis for now.

On the train ride back home, I came to the following conclusion: Angela has chosen to interact in the space around her in her rules of reality. At some point, there was our side, the side of my family and of the television and the newspapers and the world around us, and on the other side, the safe comforting world of the voices in her head, her skitzophrenic reality of Jesus and Satan and Barbara Bush and Princess Diana all telling her the same thing at the same time. Being a sibling of someone mentally ill you grow up reading a shit-ton of material on people who have schizophrenia, and they all have this weird pattern of how they all feel like their “double agents” — like they have one foot in our world and one foot in their own, but they’ll be more than happy to stay in their world forever if you fuck it up for them enough.

Honestly, I think this is where we fucked it up for her: between the stress and the lousy home life and the unattainable expectations — and yes, from my lack of support as a sibling, because how the fuck was I supposed to act when someone breaks down when you’re a teenager? — she gave in. Not because she’s weak, but because she is human with a mental illness. Everyone in my family learned the hard way that while all the Zyprexia can take away the voices in her head, the medication can’t fix the fact that all this is all she has known, and will know.

And there it is. That “with proper treatment, your sister will be a normal person again” mantra my father spouted to me for thirty years? Bullshit. There’s nothing to fix. Plenty to control, perhaps, but nothing to fix. This is how my sister will be when my parents eventually pass, this is how my sister will be when I become her default guardian, even though I am ten years younger than her.

We’ve known that reality for a while, and we’re all dealing with the repercussions in our own ways: My father has started his new life, trips around the world with his girlfriend. My mother plays Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony at deafening levels, partly to drown out my sister, the C-SPAN she watches, and maybe her own loneliness. As for me, well, I’m writing this blog entry. But we’ll deal.

That said, if there was a God, He done fucked up this one bad. Or maybe we did. Or maybe everyone did.

Alone? Lonely? Something.

This quiet — the high pitch of the television, the hum of the laptop fan — it’s unsettling, because there’s always some sort of noise that goes on; the ADHD three year old throwing a tantrum, the lesbians at the corner bar, a bunch of douchebags going all “whoo” at some random passing taxi or truck. Maybe they’re all at home getting ready for Thanksgiving. Maybe that why I’m so unsettled. Or it can be the fact that Thanksgiving has always been kinda shitty for me.

(If this was an adapted screenplay, this is where the montage would begin: scenes of my sister throwing tantrums in various restaurants, scenes of my sister thinking that dinner has been poisoned by the devil, dumping it in the sink after being told to by the voice in her head named Jesus, scenes of my parents screaming at each other in front of a garage about Grandma somewhere in cookie cutter suburbia and getting stared down by the trashy Samoan neighbors across the street. A Chinese school Christmas pageant is in there too for some reason, but I think I’m just mixing up my traumatic childhood stories.)

And that leads me to tomorrow, I guess. In the morning, I get to drive to my cousins to have a Thanksgiving lunch with my dad’s side of the family. Dad’s girlfriend will be there; the one that he’s known for years because she’s the widow of his naval buddy, the one he went to Argentina and Brazil with shortly after my parents got divorced. The one who’s gotten him to soften up, unless he’s suddenly got the memo that if he yells at his children for thirty or so years, they probably won’t like him very much.

She’s nice. She speaks fluent English, and out of a mix of Chinese guilt and respect, I respond in Mandarin. What kind of fucked-up maternal alternative universe is that shit?

“It’s her, isn’t it?” asked my Mom in Chinese, inferring that her casual acquaintance over the past 40 or so years is my father’s new girlfriend. It is, but I keep my eyes glued to dinner, shoveling rice in my face. That’s my usual M.O. when I’m eating at Mom’s house: come in, eat dinner, listen to Angela talk crazy, chain-smoke on the drive home. “That’s fine. What makes him happy.” She pauses. “Your sister thinks she’s ugly, though, although I tell her that’s not a very nice thing to say.” My mom savors saying that last sentence.

I get to visit mom and Angela shortly afterward. Gone are the days of turkey and Chinese food; now I take them out, one year to a fancy American restaurant where my mother heaped her portion of her Caesar Salad directly on my lobster bisque soup to the horror of the snooty white waiter, another year to a Muslim Chinese restaurant where Angela was tired of her “Missionary work,” her code name of spending hours walking up and down Berkeley conversing with the voices in her head. I had resigned myself to taking them to Hometown Buffet so we could stew in our pathos like all the other old people eating there on Thanksgiving, but my co-worker Shali convinced me to take them to classier restaurant, one that doesn’t serve green jello with a Cool Whip garnish. We’ll see how that goes. And in two days, well, in two days there will be less quiet discontent, less awkward situations that I have no control over.

But until then, it’s just me and the hum of a laptop. I just hope my mind will quiet down like everything else.

The first question is “if you were stranded on a deserted island, which one of your friends would you eat first?” According to Jen, it would be “Sean*, because he would have the perfect combination of protein and fat that it would be marbled, like fatty tuna sushi.”

The other is, of course, “how would you prepare for the oncoming zombie apocalypse?” (And if you must know: steal some no-refrigeration needed Nutrisystem dinners, destroy the wooden back patio stairway with a rusty axe, spend an extended period of time with my neighbor Laurie eating emergency rations and discussing who we could invite over for company [and as an emergency, as an option to eat later. See previous question.])

* Name changed because “Sean” is on Facebook and probably wouldn’t appreciate finding out via his activity feed that we would eat him.

“Hyphen”
Hyphen Magazine is a non-profit Asian American magazine. It's an artsy high-brow magazine about cultural and activist issues which I never, EVER read, even though I'm a regular subscriber. But it makes me feel like I'm supporting the Asian community. That makes me a shitty Asian, doesn't it?

“Real Simple”
Because I'm apparently a 40 year old woman. I don't subscribe to this magazine, so I secretly hide the mag behind a Wired to read this behind a Barnes & Noble. (That's right! When I was 16 it would have been a Playgirl, and now it's a Real Simple. God, I'm beyond lame.)

It seriously does not help that Cancun Taqueria in the Mission – one of the best burrito places in the Bay Area – is less than a block from my house.

If I've had a fairly terrible day, I have been known for getting a super carnitas burrito and then bring it to my neighbor Laurie's, slowly rocking back and forth while I talk about how terrible my day was.

We call them "stressitos." Stressitos are delicious with extra avacado and sour cream, I'm just saying.

This came to my Inbox because I do testing for Hoffspace. And by “testing,” I mean “I was a featured member when the social network launched.”

Really, this is the gift that keeps on giving.

Thankfully, humans have ten fingers on each hand, thus making my birthday completely insignificant. (That said, I’m not too crushed; it would be really difficult to hold a fork to eat your birthday cake if you only had a finger on each hand.)

(Although honestly, to give you an idea of the mindset that I’m in: I just spent 45 minutes just staring at a textbox on my laptop, trying to think up something constructive or positive or clever to say. But what was once eloquently blogged about so many years ago is now just kinda bottled up deep inside, because, at this point, I’m not really sure if there’s any mind-blowing revelations to declare anymore.)

It stresses me the fuck out. Take this scene, no less than twenty minutes into the game:

Guy sitting shotgun: [in a Serbian accent] QUICK QUICK! THE COPS ARE CHASING AFTER US! WE MUST NAVIGATE THROUGH THE UNFORGIVING STREETS OF LIBERTY CITY WHILE YOU DRIVE THIS SHITTY CAR THAT DOESN’T HANDLE WELL AND I YELL AT YOU CONSTANTLY.
Ernie: Fuck me.
Guy sitting shotgun: WHAT THE FUCK ASSHOLE WHERE DID YOU LEARN HOW TO DRIVE DRIVE GODDAMMIT
Ernie: [Makes a left turn into a light pole] Fuck.
Guy sitting shotgun: YOU PIECE OF SHIT NOW WE’RE D–
[car gets rammed by 150 Police Squadrons from all sides, MISSION FAILED message appears on the screen, Ernie removes the disc from the PS3 out of frustration and plays Minesweeper on his laptop]

Seriously, I don’t care if this is the highest rated game on the Playstation 3 — if I wanted to be screamed at in an automobile, I could driving my mother around the Bay Area and tell her I was gay.

This morning we are opening the nomination process for the user-representative positions on the LiveJournal Advisory Board … Everyone here at LiveJournal is looking forward to this first-ever User-Representative election!

A motherfucking LiveJournal election. Sure, it’s for an Advisory position but for all you know, people are going to treat this as a shot to be LiveJournal Supreme Being of the Universe. And holy crap, that’s awesome. It’s just like the upcoming political elections, really, except you have to replace all the candidates with bulimic girls, furries, self-cutters, hirsute gay men and angst-ridden Russian teenagers. In other words: just like the upcoming political elections! These are going to have the best smear campaigns ever.

(As to why I’m getting LiveJournal updates? Uhmm…. uh….)