little. yellow. different. A weblog by Ernie Hsiung

YAY A CRYSTALINE STORK WHA?!

My friends Jen and Paris reminded me that I forgot my friends baby shower gift at their house. Oops, my bad.

Now, Mogues & Christine, if you read this: I’m totally stoked that you’re having a child, seriously! I’m completely happy for you, and wish all the good health on you guys and the baby. And I don’t need a parting gift, forreals, I’ve known you guys for years and years.

But seriously, what am I supposed to do with this? Is it, like, a coaster? A paperweight? Does this go with the other baby shower figurines I’m supposed to have? Do I put this on my end table where all my gay friends can ooh and aah on the baby I’m not having? I mean, I could use the mirrored base to snort lines of cocaine, if I wanted to. (NOTE TO CO-WORKERS: NOT THAT I WOULD EVER DO THAT.)

Paris also remarked that from far, this photo looks like I’m smoking a crystal doobie.

In an effort to avoid blogging the same content in two different places, I send you over to a blog post I recently wrote for 8 Asians: Six Asian Reality Stars that Make Me Cringe.

Not Quite the Mission Hipster

After two weeks here in the Mission, I think I’m giving illusions that I’m slightly more settled in San Francisco now. Some furniture needs to be sold and I need to somehow buy a drawer to fit all my clothes, but if you walked into my charming, Full House-like Victorian unit, you would say, “my, Ernie’s place looks quaint and charming” and be done with it.

But I still kinda feel like a stranger in a strange land when it comes to life in the Mission, an area of San Francisco that’s filled with hipsters and gang-bangers and crackheads and Vice Presidents of Product Development, all within close quarters, doing their best to ignore each other. Like, I somehow need to shred all my preppy tight clothes that I’m too fat and self-conscious to fit into, as well as lose my awkward baggy clothes and fraternity t-shirts I’ve had since my college days. In 2000. From what I’ve seen from people walking around the area, I kinda need a rock pullover and a lip ring, lose the oversized cargoes for a pair of those weird fucked up acid-washed jeans and a haircut like the lead singer from OK Go.

Basically, I have to look like an overweight heroin addict from the 1970’s to fit in this neighborhood. How the fuck am I going to pull that off? When someone I see around this neighborhood wears a Fidel Castro hat, they look like a hipster. When I wear one, I look like a communist.

I don’t fit in the neighborhood yet. But then again, it’s only been two weeks. And I’d still rather live here than in Fremont.

7 years, 1,400 posts, 1 exasperated blogger

By the time you read this blog post, you will have noticed that my weblog archives have increased by, oh, fifty-fold. This is because, if all goes to plan, I will have imported all of my blog posts online - all blog posts that I’ve written over the past seven years. The funny ones, the sad ones, the posts that have gotten me in tech magazines and gay magazines and about a bajillion gay Bloggies and in trouble with various employers a couple of times. It’s a lot of stuff to go through, but if you’re old school and want to read an old post, search through the archives (or recommend a post to someone, since I’m not so keen on going through the approximately 1,400 blog entries I just imported from my hard drive. No lie, fourteen hundred, although a couple hundred of those posts are left unpublished since they’re links to dead websites. “I found a great article from webmonkey.com!” Hah.)

You might be wondering why I’m doing this, or why I haven’t done it sooner: a long time ago, I had thoughts of compiling all this madness and somehow using it for financial gain. There’s no shame in admitting that, I think: old school bloggers have their Adsense or their book deals. I’ve also learned that doing something like a book deal takes effort, and that my time is better spent, well, living my current life rather than spending energy trying to capitalize on my past. Not to say I wouldn’t mind some kickback, and maybe I’ll still spend a chunk of time trying to edit down three megabytes of written text into something feasible, but until then, have at it. (Hell, maybe one day I’ll make the whole thing available on a Creative Commons license and someone can write the damn book for me, but I think that will be for another time.)

Going through some old posts and coming back now, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

• My really funny posts - the reason, I’m assuming, why most people came to my blog - happened between three to five years ago, right before I got in my relationship and roommates with my friend Paris, who is a thoroughly hilarious person. Then I entered a relationship, where I cocooned for two and a half years, went through a break-up and watched my parents separate. I mentally fell apart and now that alls been sorted out, I’m less manic and not trying so hard to be “funny ha ha,” as my friend Anil puts it. I’m like a fucked up Frasier-like funny, in that Frasier really isn’t a funny show at all.
• Like all bloggers that started in the early 2000’s, content centered around link commentary, rather than having your blog be a personal soapbox. I had a mini-blog a couple of years ago, and it was a lot of fun, although integrating it with this blog didn’t seem to work so well. I miss that, so for that very reason I’ve set up a tumblr blog - a place to quickly blog about videos I like or links or thoroughly hilarious yet trashy Instant Messenger conversations. As my friend Jason says, it’s 1999 all over again, in the form of gradients and rounded corners. And it really is.
• After reading some old posts, I don’t think I could ever make myself so vulnerable to such a large audience again. But it’s a reflection of a life previous, and the more I realize I’ve changed since those days, the more okay I am with having this stuff available on the Interwebs.

Pack Day

Tomorrow is the big move to San Francisco. Today was pack day, or at the very least, “pack as much as you can that isn’t tied down” day. As a result, my mother is spending the night, mostly due to a combination of her wanting to help and Asian parental obligation and child obligation to let the parental unit guilt the child into moving far, far away from said parents. If “far, far away” meant, like, a 35 minute drive.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m totally grateful for her being here - I hate packing and moving with every fiber of my soul. The fact that I’ve hired movers to actually do the grunt work for the first time ever says a lot for the fact that I’m willing to pay money out of my pocket to make the moving process that much easier. But packing is a necessary evil, and my Mom, bless her heart, is here to help me out, and crack the whip and constantly brew pots of tea - even if it means having Taiwanese commercials for the SAT in the background and her rummaging through my photographs, wondering if every girl in the photograph could have been “the one.”

That doesn’t mean she’s not driving me crazy. (Mandarin in italics.)

Mom: Why did you throw this away? (Holds up an old shirt that hasn’t been worn since 1997 that was lying in the throwaway pile. It might as well have the Cross-Colours logo on it.)
Me: Because I haven’t worn this since college.
Mom: But it’s warm.
Me: I haven’t worn it, Mom.
Mom: But it’s warm. San Francisco is colder than Fremont up there. SO COLD!!
Me: Ma, I’m not going to wear it.
Mom: …
Me: …
Mom: I’m packing it back in.
Me: Fine.

You know how some people use moves as an opportunity to purge stuff? Somehow, I get the feeling I’m going to end up with more items than I started.

Mom: What’s this?
Me: It’s a business card holder.
Mom: So what is this inside?
Me: It’s a gift certificate card for Coldstone.
Mom: Coldstone?
Me: Ice cream.
Mom: ICE CREAM? WHY ARE YOU EATING ICE CREAM? ICE CREAM GETS YOU FAT.
Me: Mom, I haven’t eaten any ice cream. That’s why I still have the card.
Mom: Then why do you have the card?
Me: It was a gift from a co-worker.
Mom: Some gift! Those Americans, they’re always eating their ice cream. Whenever they’re sending you things like this you just tell them that you don’t need something like this!

<BEGIN DREAM SEQUENCE>
[cut to an awkward, imaginary date]
Cute guy: Hey.. I know we barely know each other, but I figured I should send you something, so I got you… this. I know it’s not much, but…
Ernie: Ohmygod, that’s totally sweet of y- oh.
Cute guy: “Oh?”
Ernie: It’s a gift certificate for Coldstone. You see, my mom always mentions that “your people” always eat ice cream, and really, ice cream gets me fat, so, uhm, yeah. No.
CG: …
Ernie: …
</BEGIN DREAM SEQUENCE>

Me: Okay, Mom. I’ll do that.
Mom: Hmph!

LMN

Last night I was at my friends house, where my friend Isabel was watching the worst 75 seconds of a TV Movie I’ve ever seen: I walked in on a scene where a mother and son were lying on a frozen lake bed, screaming at what I presumed was the mother’s other son that had fallen through a hole in the ice. Except the son had somehow managed to position himself completely under the ice and unable to come up for air. In a final dramatic moment, the kid punches his fist through the ice, and the mother holds it tightly as the kid both drowns and freezes to death at the same fucking time. “NOOOO!!!” the mother screams, as the camera zooms out to the dead child’s hand, then the lake bed, and then the forest. The announcer tells me that I’m watching LMN, and seeing as I’ve never heard of the network, I look it up on Wikipedia.

The Lifetime Movie Network.

To which I say this: SWEET LORD BABY JESUS, THEY CREATED A CABLE NETWORK WITH NOTHING BUT LIFETIME MOVIES. [Update: OK, the channel has been around since 1998, but somehow I missed this memo of awesomeness.] I have just spent the past five to ten minutes trying to figure out something funny to say about the Lifetime Movie Network, but then realized that all I really have to do is cut and paste these actual movie synopsis from LMN’s home page, and really, the blog just writes itself:

• Destination: Infestation: It’s a new kind of terror at 30.000 feet! Jessalyn Gilsig and Antonio Sabato Jr. star as a bug expert and a U.S. air marshal who must stop deadly ants from taking over a flight from Costa Rica.
• They have an exclusive web-only show called Inspector Mom. It stars Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years. (As this is the Lifetime Network, I was going to make a catty comment here — something horrible, like “she fights both crime and breast cancer” — that’s a pretty assholey thing to say, though, so I will refrain myself.)
• The #1 Video from the site is from If Someone Had Known, a 1997 film where the chick from Life Goes On plays, you guessed it, a beaten wife.
• I’m saddened by the fact that I do not see Meredith Baxter Berney on the website, portraying someone with a mental disability. She’s usually my go-to mascot for melodramatic female roles.

I’m sure someone in America loves these movies; otherwise there wouldn’t be a cable network devoted specifically to them. Maybe there can be a show about them. They could call it I’m a Midwestern Housewife or a Stoned College Student: The People Who Love Watching LMN.

Moving to San Francisco

All the talk about taking a new job at Brickhouse brings me to this point as well: Starting in July, I am renting out my unit in Fremont and moving to San Francisco. And not just anywhere in San Francisco, but in the Mission District. I used to joke that the Mission was a place where only two types of people exist: heroin junkies and product managers. Well, burn me a spoonful of drugs and give me a copy of Microsoft Visio, because I’m comin’ home.

To illustrate the contrasts between my current and future living situations, I’ve written a simple list.

Commute time:
Fremont: 1.5 hours including traffic and parking and time sobbing in the men’s restroom from the stress of commuting
SF: 20 minutes, walking and BARTing

Building style:
Fremont: Two-story condominium, build in the 90’s, vaulted ceilings. Actually, not too bad.
SF: A Victorian, converted into three separate units. A fucking Victorian! It’s like I’m going to be living in Full House, except not in a safe area and there’s absolutely no children that will grow up into born-again Christians, meth addicts or socialites. There will, however, be a laugh-track machine.

Children:
Fremont: Greater in number, mostly Indian or Taiwanese, agitated due to the apartment complex not allowed them to play outside due to liabilities
SF: Fewer in number, agitated due to their mothers previous heroin addictions; may or may not be in a street gang

Neighboring commercial building of establishment:
Fremont: Kentucky Fried Chicken
SF: Lexington Club (For the record, this will actually be the second time living next to a lesbian establishment. I know, crazy, right? I was also going to be a really inappropriate comment about chicken or fish, but that got self-censored by my notoriously refined taste in humour. With a fucking u; that’s how refined it is, bitches.)

Neighbors:
Fremont: Angry older woman in her 50’s with tall plants in her patio to prevent neighbors from looking in. Has a bobblehead cat on her SUV.
SF: Laurie, who referred me to the apartment. Fellow gay geek, no bobblehead cat that I am aware of. +10.

Parking:
Fremont: Ample, but I have a parking space.
SF: Shitty, but I have a parking space.

Social life:
Fremont: Zero, on a scale of one to, well, anything
SF: It’ll be at least a million times better; unfortunately, a million times zero is still zero.

Returning to Yahoo!

A couple of months ago, I had written a blog post where I had announced I was leaving Yahoo! to pursue an opportunity in Vancouver. Maybe if this website wasn’t so public I would go into some of the details; instead, I’ll simply say that lessons were learned, photos of myself sitting alone in restaurants were taken. Once it became obvious that I wouldn’t be moving to Vancouver any time soon, there was a lot of moments working from Internet cafes and watching television at home. (Did you know Bob Barker isn’t on The Price is Right anymore? Or that Rosie O’Donnell was once on The View? I KNOW!)

When it was time for me to start looking for jobs, applying to Yahoo! again wasn’t even remotely on the radar - besides, who leaves a company only to come back to it, right? - until Kevin told me about an opportunity at Yahoo! Brickhouse, Yahoo!’s experimental start-up incubator in San Francisco. When he told me about the project, the types of things I would be doing, as well as some of the fantastic people involved - people I respect professionally as well as am friends with in real life - well, I had to at least see what kind of trouble I could get myself into. (I’m under NDA so I can’t really say much besides that. If anyone really gives me a hard time, I’ll just say I work on Gay Pipes or something.) This job is also giving me an opportunity to move out of Fremont and to the Mission, but that’s for another blog post.

So we’ll see.

By the way - just so we can get it out of our system now: I’m a Brick… Hooouuuse. Yes, I’m might-tay might-tay, just lettin’ it all hang out, yes yes. I know. It’s the name of a popular song in the 70’s. I get it.

gay bomb

Mike: In the “I’m so ashamed of my home country” department, or in the “HOLY FUCKING SHIT FUCK” category: http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_159222541.html
Ernie: I read. trust, i read
Ernie: that is SO a gay porn movie plot written all over it, you don’t understand.
Ernie: they’re filming that shit RIGHT NOW.
Mike: Life in the Iraqi desert was hard for SSgt Jack Throbmore, but it was only going to get … worse. When the chemical bombs hit, Jack was unable to get into his protective rubber suit in time, exposing him and many in his unit to the full effect of the pink gas. The crush of humanity in the barracks became too much to bear. Thus begins story of the 4069th MASH.
Mike: (Yes! Alan Alda and gay porn in the same thought!)
Ernie: [slow clap]
Mike: Although instead of following Hawkeye, the movie should follow BJ Honeycut.
Mike: Right. Back to powerpoint.

The National Spelling Bee

Right now on the local news there is a live feed of the house of the local 13 year old boy who won the National Spelling Bee. I wonder if the news crew is aware that the kid isn’t going to be at his house since, you know, the spelling bee takes place in Washington DC.

This took top billing on the 11 o’clock news tonight, probably because it’s a slow news day and we don’t have any humpback whales slowly dying in our rivers this week.

I did get a chance to watch the live coverage on ABC, though - they had ESPN Commentators and those special segments that they do with Olympic Athletes - except replacing “athletes” with “11 year old geeky boys with glasses and braces.” One segment in particular focused on blond hair, blue-eyed, Tia Thomas - the all-American girl with pigtails and is athletic, unlike all the other home-schoolers and Chinese and Indian overachievers. Shots of her playing the flute and skiing and discussing Parkinson’s Disease over dinner. The producers had a plan for her, man. Pretty and smart, she was going to be America’s next sweetheart. Maybe even a walk-on role in a movie.

Then she spelled “zacate” wrong. Oops, her bad.

I would have live-blogged this - I mean, it’s two hours of live spelling, and thus, instant blogging zaniness, but for the most part, watching the majority of spelling bee consisted of the following: Some random Asian kid is given the task to spell “bouleuterion.” Kid writes with his finger on the back of the piece of cardboard with his name on it, while an ESPN commentator reminds us that he’s not REALLY writing the word out, it’s just his finger. After we watch him do this for two minutes, the bell rings, meaning that he’s spelled the word wrong, and defeated, he walks to his parents and sits with them, on stage. Neither of them console their child or look supportive.

“Holy crap,” I think to myself. “That kid is going to get the beat down when he gets home.”