OakMonster’s Den

SmileyJet

Originally uploaded by theoakmonster.

Everyone says hi to Jet Na Songklah, the first baby of my best friend Joy and her husband. He was born June 7 but had a bacterial infection. He is finally declared healthy!

Jet is a long awaited baby. Joy and Ruj had been trying for many years. We are sure he’d be super spoiled!!

My “cousin” Nicky (you know, family friends ARE family for us Asians) graduated from UCI yesterday. I was there as his carpool buddy and personal paparazzi. After I got home, we had a moment of scare when the pictures Brandon uploaded disappeared from the server and we had already deleted them off the camera.

Let me just say that thank GOD for data retrieval tools. We managed to get most of them, if not all of them back.

Plus the ones we thought we lost, like the pictures of 2 burly men singing “The Greatest Love of All” on Karaoke Revolution and got awesome score on that, even.

Today, Brandon’s coworker and her friend took us geocaching for the first time. Essentially, you go to the website, download the coordinates onto your hand-held GPS dohicky, go there and look for the “cache”. Officially, geocaching is…

…is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.

We did 7 today and I haven’t even found one on my own yet. Brandon found two, and the veterans found the rest. The last one was the easiest one, but by the time I got to the spot, 2 other cachers were opening the thing already. Dammit!

I took a few pictures on our first one, but then I realized that I would be compromising the location of the cache somehow. Although there were moments we should’ve had the camera with us. Like spending good 20 minutes looking for this one cache on the side of the street, prodding at the cactus behind the wall, looking over that wall, poking at the bricks to see if anything comes loose. Etc. Thank god we were with OC sheriff deputy in case anyone decided to call the coppers on us! LOL.

Tomorrow’s schedule is filling up fast. I originally want to visit Celeste for a little while but at this point I am not so sure if I will have time. I will have to further investigate tomorrow.

From Bangkok Post:

Patrician for premier?

ANALYSIS: By Peter Janssen, dpa

Chances of Abhisit Vejjajiva - the Oxford-educated 43-year-old leader of the Democrat Party - becoming Thailand’s next prime minister have risen in recent weeks in tandem with the downfall of his once arch rival - Thaksin Shinawatra.

ETA : I made more edits later on when I got home and actually had time to do research. So, here we go.)

Abhisit–his nickname is Mark, by the way–has been my favorite since he entered Thai political scene as one of the youngest politician ever years ago. He was in his early 30s then and when his face splashed onto television screen, the female population, young and old and me included, went ga-ga over him.

Obviously, he’s a good looking man. This is a lot like why back in the days, folks seem to like Clinton so much. Charisma and good looks go a long way for someone in politics.

But then you learn more about Khun Mark and you continue to swoon…and be impressed. Eton and Oxford graduate who walks the straight and narrow path with a dream to save the country from itself and corruption.

Khun Mark is educated, smart, polite, and an honest man (at least from we know of) who I have been rooting for PM since he’s started. Yes, he’s a pretty boy but it’s also the whole young blood, new wave thing. Out with the corrupted, power grabbing old geezers. In with the newer, highly educated, ethical and forward thinking younguns!

My money has always been on Khun Mark. I *KNEW* this man is going to lead my country someday. Every time there was a turmoil in the country, I kept asking my mom, “When are they going to make Khun Mark a PM?” Her reply has always been, “He’s too young for that still, sweetie. Give him a few more years.”

And here we are!

So, if he gets the seat, it’ll just be fabulous, adding one more to my “I told you so!” list.

I just have a way of predicting certain things. Like, this kid in this movie, he’s going to go on and be big. Or this song I just heard is going to blow up huge on the chart. ETC.

I predicted Amber Tamblyn was going somewhere from that first scene in The Ring. I knew America Ferrera was going to be a big star someday since “Real Women have curves”. I knew Nelly Fertado’s “Promiscuous” single was going to hit the chart the first time I heard it on a cell phone commercial.

And now, my beloved Khun Mark may actually have a chance at the PM seat. If he did get it, my whole prediction since the first year he stepped into the limelight would be true.

Damn, I’m good.

My friend Christine has always supported the Weevils since day one. And now, I am supporting her right back.

Besides, it’s a Star Trek related site! Do you think I’m going to let Captain Picard down? Never!

Take a visit to http://startrek.fanlib.com/ and http://startrek.fanlib.com/trailer.html
A little back story on the history of Christine and myself. Christine is a friend from HSX days. I partied at her place many a times. Lots of memories there. You’ll just have to ask me about it. Hehee…

Oh, and I’m back in my game somewhat tonight. Got groceries, started laundry (which Brandon helped finish…thanks babe!), made dinner, watched a movie, baked Absolutely Weevil Cookies…and I have to go back out there and do the dishes.

That’s the normal schedule. The whole eating out every night thing just wasn’t like us. I miss cooking a little bit.

The cleaning though, that’s the part I don’t miss much. LOL.

On one hand:

Support came pouring in once Celeste’s accident was formally announced at work. The get well card was signed in record time and everyone came by at least once a day to get the update.

Eva and I converged at Celeste’s house around 7:30 for a visit. I brought with me an El Pollo Loco family meal which fed me, the Fireball and her man plus leftover. Celeste’s neighbors were over. Her bus buddies also came by for a visit. Phones were ringing every 30 minutes or so with everyone’s checking in and saying hi.

People DO care.

On the other hand:

From Lost Boy’s post, I found out about this DC Judge Nut Case, suing a dry cleaner for $65 million over his allegedly lost pair of pants. I hope the real judge throw his case and his ass out of court.

And over in Thailand, my little blogger friend KorBua got a weird phone call from her ex-boyfriend’s mom who proposed a marriage for the kids. Mind you, Bua hasn’t talked to this guy for at least 5 years.

There are some crazy fuckers out in this world.

And then there are us:

Brandon brought home a bar of this European milk chocolate, a gift from his coworker who just returned from Germany. One little block of this rich, creamy and chocolatey goodness triggered a choc-gasm out of me over the weekend. Brandon relayed my little episode to the coworker and today I came home to another bar of the chocolate.  Yeah, more choc-gasm!!
Olaina and I had been going back and forth between our blogs as both of our families are going through tough times. Olaina ended one of her entry this way:

When the black numbness wears off (which is paralytic–no studying, no unpacking, no real anything except sleeping and eating), if it’s followed by body-swallowing oceans of sadness what will we do?

And I commented:

That would be when you call US. And we can come down to swim in there with you. We’ll make it the Ocean of Sadness Beach Party. I’ll grill for you guys. It’ll be fun.

And then she came back to comment on my emo moment with:

You know we’re always thinking of you and praying for you. But maybe we should start learning some Emo karaoke songs, and then at our Oceans-of-Sadness Beach Party we can play cards, and Brandon can see my dysfunctional step-in-law-American-family and raise it a dysfunctional in-law-Asian-family. Once again, it’ll be a sick kind of draw (remember, I’m Asian, you know). We should maybe chip in for a nicer deck of cards.

When you can’t just comprehend all the madness in your life, the crazy–and yes, dysfunctional–things seem make the most sense.

In Thai, there is a phrase “Jai Hai“, literally means your heart (Jai) has gone missing (hai).

The meaning of it is that your heart skips a beat when you’re startled. The same expression is used for when your heart drops when you hear bad news or read about something horrible that has happened.

With all that had happened on Mega Fun Saturday, I was in some kind of a daze today. It didn’t help with Nhien having moved into Amy’s old office. And the girl had her hair up in a bun and wearing a white shirt. The whole Princess Leia is in Amy’s office totally threw me for a loop a little bit. The whole day had been incredibly surreal to me.

Before I left work, I talked to Celeste after she got back from her doctor. Her hand actually was worse off than the burn on her back. We didn’t put that much attention to the hand since the burn on her back was bigger. But the burn was nastier than we all assumed it was. The doctor tended to her hand now she had open wounds there.

She couldn’t close her fist. It appeared she will need to go to neurologist to check out the nerves in that hand and may require further surgery to get the full use of it back. We shall see. Eva and I will see her tomorrow after work though. That girl needs some cookies to cheer her up.

That fresh thought of Celeste went through my head and it brought back images of Saturday of things that happened and I witnessed and things that my mind conjured up from the witnesses’ accounts. That blended in to the thought of going home and seeing mom. And that wandered into Justin and his mom this past few weeks.

Suddenly, I came to realize I wasn’t paying attention to the buses. I came to my senses.

And for a few seconds, I seriously wasn’t sure where I was or how long I had been there.

The light and the warmth told me I was Thailand. All the conversations around me, clearly English, sounded Thai to me. Even the downtown scenery felt vaguely like Bangkok, just the part of town I have never been to before.

That was when I had me a “Jai Hai“.

Just because I was sitting at Heroes’ “Kirby Plaza”, was I suddenly Hiro Nakamura? Did I just bend time and space and for a moment I actually was in Bangkok?
I blinked a few times. English sounded like English again. A cool breeze reminded me that it was definitely not Bangkok in June.

But I doubted myself for another moment if I was sure I was where I think I was.

Then, my “Jai” “Hai” some more.

I was losing my mind at 5:18 p.m. in the middle of Downtown Los Angeles.

I feel like there’s a black hole where my heart should be, swallowing all emotions after their brief existence.

Brandon kissed me good morning and that piece of happy that usually sticks with me for a good portion of the day instead was fleeting. Came and went like *snap* that.

Even the songs I usually have in my head are silenced today. Then again, quiet seems to fit this mood. Or actually, the lack of mood thereof.

It’s weird to feel this numb.

Gosh. I sound like an emo kid…

It all started with a wedding invitation.

I was invited to my coworker Candice’s wedding. Not wanting to drag Brandon along, I asked my friend Nora. But since the Anaheim Ducks won the Stanley Cup, they were throwing a celebration on the same night. Nora would never ditch me out right but the moment she mentioned it, I told her to ditch me anyway. Who am I to stand between my best friend and her favorite team!

So, going to the wedding solo. I can do that. I’d be among friends anyway.

But then, I woke up with a clogged sinus and runny nose. Of all the days to have allergies attack–which doesn’t happen as often nowadays since I have been using the prescription nose spray–yesterday was it. The sneezes didn’t go away many hours after the nose spray. At this rate, I’d have to take an allergy medication which would more than likely put me to sleep behind the wheel between here and Agoura Hills, 2-hour drive away. So I asked Brandon if the standing offer to go with me to the wedding was still valid.

And he said yes.

As it turned out, Brandon was meant to come with me all along. For all the right reasons.

When we turned off the main highway to our destination, both of us had never felt more relief to have Brandon driving the Santa Fe.

The wedding was at someone’s private home in Santa Monica mountains. As in, to get to this beautiful home, we had to drive down this steep, unpaved winding switchbacks that one wrong move would surely send you down to the bottom of the mountain. I would be way too scared to drive down that thing on my own. Besides, my Toyota may have made it down the road but I wasn’t sure about coming back up.

Uncharacteristically, I didn’t bring my camera to the wedding. My decision surprised everyone including Brandon. Well, heck. She will have professional photographers there. She doesn’t need me.

And besides, for crying out loud, I want to fucking enjoy a party for once instead of running around taking pictures. Sure, I always love taking pictures. But please, can a girl just party free of responsibilities sometimes? (Well, I did managed to take a few on my camera phone to stop my hands from shaking from camera withdrawal. Heh.)

Brandon and I and another coworker and his girlfriend were seated at a different table than the rest of the coworkers and Michael (remember, he left us for grad school?), away from the main crowd and pool side. See those balloons? They later let them up up a lot higher. We thought that these were hooked up to LED and would light up like lanterns. But actually, they were rigged to explode into spectacular fireballs by a professional Hollywood pyro-technician, a friend (or family?) of the groom.

Two of the ballons went off after the couple’s first dance into the intended spectacular fireballs.

“Oooh! The Hindenburg!” I giggled. From our side, the explosions looked unintended originally and yet they were awesome.

From the other side, it was more like a scene out of a Vietnam war movie.

A 2-inch piece of the burning balloon remnants landed on a lady’s arm and the other on her date’s jacket. The big piece of it, a good 6 inch long, landed on Celeste’s bare shoulder.

We didn’t know about this until much later. The word was that the EMT had come down to whisk her to emergency room already. But then as we were in line for the food, I found out she was still here, waiting for the ambulance.

I ran across the grass in my chunky 3.5 inch heels to house, a feat in and of itself if you know my history with heels. Michael was right on my six.
Fortunately, there was a registered nurse in the house. She already cleaned up Celeste and all the baggies of frozen veggies and ice which were applied to her burned shoulder, and gave her something for the pain.

My original thought was to just check in on Celeste. She was being brave about it because, well, that’s Celeste for you. But I thought at this scary time, it would be better to have at least one face she knows in that room. So I stayed and helped held the baggies onto her shoulder.

Pieces of her skin were coming off on the plastic baggies and onto my hands. As an afterthought, yeah that was gross. But at the time, I realized what it was and I didn’t freak out. I guess when your friend is in danger, the motherly/sisterly instinct kicked in, and nothing seems to matter but her well being.

Now that we were in ground zero, we found out that that EMT wasn’t coming down after all, and that Johann, Celeste’s boyfriend, was the one taking Celeste to the hospital. Brandon popped in to check on me and upon learning of the situation, he went back outside to the parking lot to look in on Johann.

Oh yes, there also was the car situ-fucking-ation.
You see, the parking at the estate was, well, all fucked up. All the cars were just piled up in this little lot. No valet. No nothing. Apparently, nobody put a thought into it about how people were to leave this joint parked the way that we all did.

Johann’s car was among those that was stuck behind other cars. But worse yet, the Impala actually was really stuck in a ditch. The guys, whatever they did out there, freed the car. It seemed like eternity for us in the master bathroom when we finally came out.

We put Celeste in the car with fresh bags of ice. Brandon hauled their wedding present out of the backseat and up to the house.

Brandon finally had his dinner.  I finally finished my second Guinness and had a few bites of dinner.  After all of that, I didn’t feel like eating.  Not to mentioned that the grilled chicken reminded me a little too much of pieces of Celeste on my hands earlier.  I decided to grab Michael and party up in Celeste’s honor.

Michael and I and another couple got the party started on the dance floor (aka living room). We found the bride trying to get people to dance.

“Screw that, sweetie.  You’re dancing with US!”  We dragged her to the floor ourselves. “Dancing Queen” came on. Candice asked for her sisters. I ran out and summoned all the bridesmaids and they swiftly followed me back in to join the bride.  We had ourselves a dance party! Lots of fun.

10 p.m. struck and the Borens turned into 2 tired pumpkins. Michael followed us out of the canyons and we all headed home.

Oh no. I ain’t over yet.

I found a missed call on my cellphone from my dad.

The doctor gave my mom at most 6 months, but they think she may have more like 3-4 left in her. It depends on when her liver goes.

Instead of the road trip for 4th of July we had plan for the past 5 months, I’m getting plane ride home.

Seriously, I have never been so grateful to have Brandon with me last night. From start to finish.

We think we are in charge of our destinies. But sometimes, like Mother Nature, the universe/higher power will make a show of force to remind you who’s the boss.

And last night was the epitome of that reminder.

My coworker Lianne had her baby boy KJ (Kevin James) last night just past midnight. He’s the couple’s first child.

Celeste and I went to see the baby and mommy around lunch time, taking with us flowers on behalf of the company and a camera. Good Samaritan Hospital was not very far from our office. We could’ve walked but we weren’t in sensible shoes for that kind of a hike so we had a little adventures on the Dash getting there and back.

The call that set the entire thing in motion came in this morning. Lianne called to report the birth time and baby weight.

Of all things, Lianne asked, “So who won the Baby Lotto?”
At the office baby shower, we had an office pool going for baby’s weight and birthday. At $16 for each category, Celeste got the right date and Nhien got the weight right on the money at 7 lbs. 2 oz.

Soon after the phone call, Celeste decided on our little excursion to visit KJ and Lianne.

Then it hit me.

Justin’s mom Toni passed away around 11 a.m. Soon after that, as Lianne was waiting for her OB/GYN’s appointment at the hospital, her water broke. (Talk about convenient!)

One life ends. Another begins.

Welcome to the world, Kevin James!

We took a bunch of pictures so hop over to Flickr to check it out. And I even have a video clip, my first YouTube clip ever! I knew the camera takes video but I didn’t know it has a mic.

Justin’s mom Toni passed on today. Please keep the family in your prayer.

I am sure Olaina will update the blog as soon as they all can get their heads around it.

People say death seems to come in three. For us, it’s more like four. First, Shane’s uncle passed away almost 2 months ago. A week or so after that, Nhien’s aunt. Then about the same time Toni went to the hospital, Erik’s relative passed away. And now we wrapped the sweep with Toni.

Life does come and go in seasons. I mean, at some point, your friends were all getting married. Then later, they all seem to be having kids. And then folks you know start to get ill and died.

This is when I turn to the teach of Buddha about the life-death cycle. We are born. We age. We get sick. We die. It’s the only way life goes. And all you can do is the best you can.

I read this article a while back in the Bangkok Post about the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh who visited Thailand and gave a sermon of sort. His message speaks to me loud and clear.

Life is only a moment. All you have is this moment.

…He simply says that you too can become an enlightened person if you focus your mind on the present and become mindful or conscious of your daily activities.To him, nirvana is not something that lies in the future or in the past but something you can experience right now, with every breath you take…

…we can live a normal life by simply being aware of our activities every single moment. We can let our conscious mind, instead of instinct, guide us. Then we will have compassion towards our fellow human beings. Then we can love peace, accept differences and have more understanding of others.

What are you going to do with your moment? Do you live it well? Do you live it for loved ones who have gone before you, honoring the memories of their great lives?

I ask that question everyday especially with my mom in the state she is in. When time comes, I only hope I can live my life in her honor, continuing her legacy of being generous, kind, and a wonderful friend.