The Last Stretch of Freshman Year...

It's crazy. At 2:00 pm, I walked out of my last class of the semester. Of the school year. Of my first year of college. Did it really fly by that quickly? It still really hasn't hit me that I'm not waking up at 8:50 and running to class this Monday. No detour to Annenberg coffee cart. No sudoku when we enter the second hour of lecture and my mind begins to wander...I'm not ready to leave!

It's pretty surreal. I walked out of my last class holding this:

In one week, I will be taking finals.

In two weeks, I will be at LAX and leaving this country. What? Really? I thought I just got here. I thought our trip was months away...

More later. Today was full of adventure :) But I'm tired and it's time for bed.

xoxo [hehe]

Music

In light of Andrew's blog post on music, I've decided to write a little bit too. Actually, I was planning on writing this post, but I'm just so darn busy and lazy...I need to get myself to blog consistently.

*note to self: if you're going to procrastinate [like I am doing at the moment], you might as well blog and be productive*

Anyway, Andrew talked about how college kids are key consumers in the music industry. College kids are the ones who search and find unknown songs. Slowly but surely, these songs are passed on from one person to another, heard across the courtyard, and at small gigs in the campus cafe.

At the beginning of the year, I heard a band named yOya...they were playing at some point on campus at USC and I just happened to stick around. [They're also playing this Wednesday at Ground Zero here at USC. Unfortunately I can't go due to other obligations. Sad days...] They were simply amazing...back in the fall, they were in the middle of changing their sound. A two man band, with one guy on the keys/percussion and the other on the guitar. Both sing. Somehow something stirred in my soul as I watch them live. Real, raw talent. I'm not musically savvy, but the guy on the keys/percussion was maintaining all of this through some kind of machine that lets you add sounds and such [or at least I think that's what it was!]. Anyway, he was adding various percussion and wow...I watched him intently listening to the timing and snapping out the rhythm so fast in order to put in the next sound at the perfect time. I love their focus on the various elements of percussion.

Since hearing them, I've been really into indie rock. While Top 40 is great when going out, it makes me laugh and die a little inside to think that this is our generations "music". Okay maybe that was harsh, but in a time of auto-tune and whatnot, I am in love with the sounds of raw music. I'm pretty sure I'm just going to shell out my non-existent money to buy their cd.

Anyway, if indie rock is anything up your ally, or want to check out something new, yOya is releasing their album and has a free preview right now for the next week. All you have to do is put in your email, so if you get a chance to listen I'd love to hear what you think. If you don't want to listen to the whole thing, my favorite tracks are Fireworks, Looking in the Window, Lovers On, and New Years Morning.

Click here to listen to their album!

Time for bed. It's going to be a busy week!

"Velvet? I love my velvet..."

Hello non-existent readers!

I definitely haven't been blogging as much as I would like, but things are getting really busy. And update on my life:

I have two more weeks of school left before finals. And then freshman year is over! It's crazy...I'm not ready!!! I just got here! I'll probably freak out about this later when it starts to hit me.

I went to Irvine to hang out with my family last weekend. My baby cousins [they're brother and sister] are starting to fight a lot...it was driving me crazy. And then my aunt declared that they're fighting the exact same way my brother and I used to fight. Thinking about it, it's so true. We probably drove everyone around us crazyyy...but I if my brother and I are to be an example of the relationship between siblings, I'm glad the two are fighting because it's a sign that they're close! By the way, fake crying is super cute the first time, but after awhile it gets realllly old reallly fast.

Anyway, wow it's been awhile since I've updated! So a few weeks ago was Relay for Life which was an amazing experience. Sleeping in a tent, wind blowing, freezing my butt off...good times :) I was napping from 12:30am and around 4:00 someone decided to be SUPER annoying with the speakers [which was blaring music throughout the night] and was pulsing the volume. So I woke up and got out to walk the track and someone decided to hold a mini fundraiser [at 4:30 when tons of people were sleeping]. They declared "Hey guys! We're going to play this same song over and over until we make $50!" They played Hanson's "MMMBop" over and over for thirty minutes to my dismay [I love flashbacks to the 90's, but that song annoyed me back then and annoys me on the second repeat now], and then announced, "Hey guys! We've raised $10.75...only $39.25 to go!" Haha, pretty clever. I would have forked over my wallet if I had it with me. I think they could have made a lot of money if people were awake. I also chopped my hair and donated 9 inches the next morning. It was really traumatizing, but honestly, my hair is my life. If I ever got cancer, I'd probably just go screaming and declare I'd rather die with my hair than lose it. So go cancer patients! I hope my little sacrifice makes a little difference in the world...

Also, I tried red velvet chocolate chip pancakes at a truck called Buttermilk.

In all honesty, I think I could make it. It seems like the pancakes themselves were just colored with red dye, and the chocolate chips were the chocolate flavor. I think I could detect a slight cocoa flavor in the batter, but I was disappointed because I didn't know if I was just imagining it there because it should have been there. Anyway, I plan on trying to make these myself. Tasty, but not worth $5. However, the butter on top was really interesting. It had almost a slightly sour hint to it...not in a bad way. I think it might have been made from scratch.

Hope I will post again soon!

Sunshine, Food Trucks, and Drives

Today I was chatting with a guy sitting next to me in class right before discussion started and I was talking about the weather [haha I'm lame but nice weather is an actual conversation!]. Anyway, I was just telling him about how I really wanted to just be outside and have summer already because sunshine is such a tease! Anyway, at that moment, he looked at my TA and asked if we could have discussion outside. My TA looked around at the room [only half of us were in attendance] and then said "we'll have discussion outside if five more people show up." After a few minutes, five people randomly trickled in. YAY! So we had discussion out on the grass outside. I think this has made my week. I guess simple things really make me happy...sitting on the grass in the sunshine + banh mi = a lovely date :)

A recap of random things in my life since my last post...

I went to my first food truck in LA!!! I was actually intending on finding a truck called Phamish because I was craving Vietnamese food SOOO badly, but they weren't there near USC like their website said they would be =/ No worries, I ended up eating at Bull Kogi, and just had a bowl. It was just okay...I want to try the original Kogi truck though!

Hehe so Asian...they had plastic trash cans [more like buckets] flipped upside down for you to sit on right where the lunch truck was.

Last weekend I got picked up by a friend to go eat dinner in Westwood, and I was telling him a fairly lengthy dramatic story. The next thing I know, I look around and think "wait...I don't recognize this...this isn't how you get to Westwood..." Well, I guess he wasn't paying attention to driving cause of my story and we ended up taking the 10 all the way to Santa Monica, and then ended up on the 1. After a few miles going on the 1, I was like "we should turn back!" but there were no places to make a legal u-turn so I suggested that we turn right onto a small street and then turn around. We ended up randomly turning onto Topanga [Canyon Rd.] which is basically a winding mountain road that was rather dangerous and not exactly ideal to u-turn, especially with cars tailgating us due to the lack of horsepower in the hybrid we were in which was struggling to drive up the mountain. Anyway, using the fabulous technology of 3G, I used my phone to figure out where we were and decided to just keep going through Topanga state park.

I'm so glad we decided to drive through Topanga State Park. Some of you may have already heard me bitch [excuse my language] about how much I hate LA [well I don't hate it, but the Bay Area is just better on an infinite number of levels. hella.]. But seriously, I concluded on my flight back to LA at the end of winter break that Los Angeles is just a desolate flattened grid of grey poured concrete and steel. At the sight below me with 7 minutes till landing, I finally saw this massive patch of green. I got superrr excited and was like "Wow a large park!!! I need to find this place!" We flew lower and lower and finally flew over it and I realized it was actually a cemetery and I could actually see a funeral going on. -_________- shattered dreams much?

Anyway, back to driving through Topanga. It's a little north of Santa Monica, and I never realized I could escape the city. I was so happy! We stopped by a liquor store [for a snack] and the owner of the store was telling us about how about 200 feet up the road, we could make a left onto a street called Fernwood[?] and at the first and only stop sign, make a right and go up around 8 miles. At the top, supposedly, is the best view of just the city and the ocean...we didn't go because a hybrid car would die, but I will be checking that out once I have a car in the next few years! :) We kept driving through and passed through a small town called Topanga. It was really cute!!! Ah, to live up there is like the perfect retirement...huge nice houses and secluded from the city.

Proof that we were in Topanga! haha

Okay, so I saw this RANDOM flying pig just on the side of the road and I demanded that we pull over so that I could take a picture. Haha :)

Eventually we made it to the other side of the mountain and you can take a slight right to a vista point and it was absolutely fantastic. The view of the city lights is just incredible and Priya's Hill pales in comparison. Hmmm, but I've never been to Hunter's point back home so I can't compare it to Hunter's.

So we took a 2 hour detour and made it back to Westwood around 10? 11? and had a very late dinner. The End!