I rode the ferris wheel. I ate tunnel cake. I had a very good day. A great farewell to Garden Grove.

A couple of gay flamingos at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Slimbridge, England, have adopted an abandoned chick, according to this Agence France-Presse story.

Carlos and Fernando have been together for six years, according to the story, and had a history of trying to chase mother flamingos away from their nests in order to lay claim to the eggs inside. When another flamingo abandoned her egg, they swooped in and took over.

The story says that male flamingos can feed the hatchling flamingo by producing milk in their throats. The Wikipedia entry on flamingos says that both male and female flamingos produce a “milk” in the glands lining their upper digestive tracts.

Apparently, both the male and female flamingos feed the chicks in a “traditional” family arrangement. How progressive!

This weekend is the best weekend in the whole year to live in Garden Grove. This weekend is the Garden Grove Strawberry Festival. This year’s theme? Accomplished kids. What? Exactly.

There’s a beauty pageant for redheads Also strawberry shortcake and strawberry funnel cake. But my favorite part is the rides. I really like parking lot carnival rides.

I had fun last year. I can’t wait for this year.

My dad e-mailed that cute picture of Elena and me in Newport Beach to my brother and sister with a dad-quirky message. My sister just pointed it out to me via Facebook note. I felt I had to share:

Kids,

This is Newport Beach CA [picture attached]. It is like a resort on the beach. It must be neat to live here. Think about when you graduate moving to a resort type town where they do not have drive bys.

Love DAD

I love my dad.

The first transparent screen photo below was done by the amazing and multi-talented Mike Lawson, but there are clusters of transparent screen photos on Flickr. Fantastic!

I don’t know why it took me so long, but sometime last week I realized that Mike Lawson isn’t coming with me to Rochester. I always knew, but it didn’t really hit me. When I thought about life in Rochester previously, I always had this sense that he would be there too.

I know, I know. Why would I have that sense? I think it’s because Mike has been there for me practically since I moved to Orange County. I’ve come to take his presence for granted.

I met Mike when I was certifying to tutor SAT classes for Princeton Review a couple weeks after I moved to Orange County. He watched my final teach back, and he kept making silly faces at me from the back of the room while I was trying to recite. I had just met him.

I totally lost focus of the lesson. I kept thinking, “That guy is making faces at me! What kind of guy makes faces at someone they just met? Why is he making faces at me?!“

I liked Mike right away.

I drink coffee with Mike at nearby Starbuckses often. We go to Borders and Barnes & Noble and look at books too. We’ve worked together, eaten together, written together, read together, shopped together, blogged together, eavesdropped together, snarked together, drunk liberally together… and I’ll miss him terribly.

I think the only reason I’m not walking around with tears in my eyes all day might be that I’m holding onto hope that he’ll miss me so much when I moved away that he’ll be willing to move too.

Mike has a really great life in Orange County, and I know my hope is unrealistic. It just hurts too badly to deal with the idea of him being 2,600 miles away.

.

.

I found notes from a conversation I had with Aaron Jasinski a few years ago while I was flipping through my old notebooks:

My undergraduate career has been long and eventful. Here’s the summary:

Intro to Computer Science
Cultural Intersections, Cooper
19th Century Russian Fiction, Nickell
Editing & Publishing, Hallinan
Calculus
Programming in C++
Bioethics in the 21st Century, Suckiel & Deamer
Social Documentation, Dunn
Print Magazine Design, Sieu
Graphic Design III, de Bartolo
Advanced Publishing, Hallinan
Brazil and Portuguese-Speaking Africa Through Cinema, Seara
Newswriting & Reporting, Mendoza
Technology Foundation, Crichton
Computer Art, Theory, & Methods, Anderson
Images of the United States of America from Abroad, Sanders
Communication Policy, Wellman
Advanced Screenwriting, Caruso
Talk & Mass Communication, Clayman
American Fiction Since 1975, Jones
History of News in Modern America, Fellow
Print Newswriting, Adelsman
Broadcast Newswriting, Mitchell
Online Newswriting, Smith
The Ethics of TV Journalism, Rosenberg
The Physical World, Feinberg
Print Reporting, Moran
Broadcast Reporting, Feldman
Computer-Assisted Reporting, Raney
Language & Mind, Andersen & Walker
Broadcast Production, Jimenez
Print Production, Hanson
Online Production, Busby
Language, Society, & Culture, Lubowitcz
Languages of the World, Schneider-Zioga
Writing & Critical Reasoning, Nanes
Investigative Reporting, Lait & Glover
Community Journalism, Domanick
Intro to Linguistics, Schneider-Zioga
Phonetics & Phonology, Lubowitcz
Advanced Writing, Waller
French IV, Moore
Syntax & Semantics, Zubizarreta
Directed Research (Kinyarwanda), Walker
Honors Thesis, Mintz
Phonology, Walker
Psycholinguistics, Kaiser
Modern Chinese Literature, Tang
Art & Society: Renaissance to Modern, Baker
People of Color in News Media, Merina
Law of Mass Communication, Zachary
Advanced Psycholinguistics, Kaiser

Chris Brown was an English major at UC Santa Cruz with whom I took a Russian literature class my freshman year. We were friends, but it turned sour quickly. I don’t remember the context of this letter. I found it unopened, addressed to me at my mom’s house, in the garage today. I vaguely remember receiving it, but I think I tucked it away in a file drawer for later. It was waiting for distance to be read:

He was a big fan of Charles Bukowski, but that’s probably obvious.

I graduated Friday from USC with a B.A. in Linguistics from the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences and one in Print Journalism from the Annenberg School for Communication. Yay!

Ted Koppel delivered an amazing address at the main commencement ceremony. He talked about the immorality of an administration that engages in war to protect the nation’s freedoms while simultaneously trampling upon them. It was gutsy. It would have been gutsier had he delivered that same sort of address via the national platform to which he’s had access for more than 40 years instead of at a college graduation, but it was a good speech nonetheless.

Clint Eastwood was also in attendance, as he was being awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters degree. He’s one of my grandmother’s “heartthrobs,” as she calls them, so she was delighted when he came walking through Alumni Park. Nobel laureate Arvid Carlsson and California Supreme Court justice Joyce Kennard also received honorary degrees.

Approximately 40,000 guests attended the commencement. I posted pictures of some of my favorite guests here. I particularly like the photo of me and my baby sister Elena. (She was evidently not impressed by Ted Koppel’s speech, but, like most babies, she tends to lean right.)

There is a lot more me in this photo montage than I’d generally feel comfortable with, but because that’s sort of the nature of graduation photos, I decided to suck up my discomfort just this one time.

I’m going to miss a lot of people from USC, particularly the linguistics faculty members who have advised me over the past few years (Rachel, Toby, Dani, Elsi, and María Luisa), and the graduate students, who helped guide and encourage me through the whole admissions process (Stephen, Michal, Daylen, Michael, Janet, Jelena, Rebeka, Laura, Aaron… a lot more). I’m hoping to keep in contact with people, and I’m sure I’ll be back to visit but, you know. Not the same as seeing people everyday.

Kittens! Newborn ones! Were in the backyard! Hidden in a bush! How fantastic!

The black and white one is a boy; the tortoiseshell and white one is a girl. We’re calling them Kyle and Emma, after Kyle and Emma the friends.

There’s a story. Mikeh read an article last week in the OC Register about a tragic big-rig accident that killed three children: Kyle, 5; Emma, 4; and Katie, 2. While Kyle and Emma aren’t entirely unusual names, I know only one Kyle and one Emma. And they happen to be two of only a few people with whom I speak (almost) everyday.

I tend to see meaning where there isn’t any, so Mikeh was afraid to tell me about the story at first for fear I’d take it as a sign of something. He thought naming two cute kittens after my friends would undo any potential jinxing the ominous news story might have done.

The idea of Kyle and Emma have feline counterparts makes me laugh. So the names are sticking. At least until the kittens are old enough to be given away to good homes.

If anyone is in need of a kitten, these two are cute. And they’ll be ready for adoption in another three to four weeks. That is, if Mikeh hasn’t fallen hopelessly in love with them before then. He’s already enamored. Mikeh and the kittens may be inseparable before long.

Mikeh and I went to La Crêperie Café in Long Beach the other night for dinner. I realized at the end it would be one of the last times, since I’ll be in Rochester by August, so we took this picture.

La Crêperie has a very good Zorba crêpe with spinach, tomatoes, caramelized onions, Kalamata olives, and feta cheese in a vegetable broth. I like that, with the lemon and sugar Bolero crêpe for desert. Mikeh likes the chicken Marsala.

The Crêpe Ecrevisse at La Crêpe Nanou in New Orleans is infinitely better, but I love crawfish, so the comparison really isn’t fair. Plus, Crêpe Nanou has hometown charm. It’s tied to lots of happy memories.

I hope I can find a place I like in Rochester. There’s a place called Simply Crêpes, but their seafood crêpe uses imitation crab meat, which makes me skeptical. There’s a place called Bistro 135 that looks more promising—no crêpes, but crawfish! and cheap!—so maybe that will work. There’s a more expensive restaurant called 2 Vine and a cheaper French/Italian/American one called Streppa’s Bistro, so there are four options total.

Worst case scenario, I’ll invest in a crêpe plate. I should do that anyhow. I don’t go out all that frequently.

Meet Diabl33ta. She is ub3r l337, so we call her L33ta for short.

I got her the dog collar and the dog bone tag around her next for her first birthday because I thought it suited her. She looks good in leather, yeah?

Mikeh took this portrait of her sitting on a sheet of decorative research symposium poster components. I like how when L33ta she sits on my things, she sits right in the middle. It’s a very candid way of sitting.

We’re not sure why, but for some reason, she is very small. She’s stuck somewhere inbetween kitten and cat size, just like me. I know size isn’t a good reason to like someone, but I just can’t help it.

The quote is Sean Penn’s. I have mixed feelings about the whole “blood-soaked underwear” business, but he called Donald Rumsfeld a “party clown” on “Larry King Live”—and how can you not find that kind of color in punditry enjoyable?

Plus, he actually went to New Orleans. I don’t care how much you disagree with his politics or if you think the whole motor boat rescue was an ego-driven publicity stunt. I have to empathize with anyone who went out to New Orleans to see it for themselves.

What happened after the levees collapsed was horrifying. Honestly, I think colorful punditry is a completely justifiable (maybe even conservative) response to what has happened.

I don’t agree with everything Penn says, but he was right in calling the federal response to Hurricane Katrina an act of “criminal negligence.”

I like the absurdity of the quote above. It’s a bit existential. Penn said it in 1997, a long, long time before his dramatic boat rescue, during a publicity tour from some movie or another that I was a bit too young to see at the time.

A lot of human compulsions—even the basic ones, like eating and sleeping—are really absurd and senseless when you look at them alone. When you consider just the acts and not their functional roles in sustaining life.

Eating: you put things in your mouth and chew them into a pulp and then swallow. And your body has this whole elaborate system of turning that pulp into energy that you can use to move around and do things. Like cook elaborate meals to put in your mouth and chew into a pulp. It’s all very strange. Sleeping is even weirder.

The non-basic life functions—studying, watching movies, socializing, dancing—are even harder for me to rationalize sometimes. When I’m by myself at night writing a paper on the influence of Dadaism on modern architecture, or in the book stacks at USC reading about computational learning theory, I find myself having to pause. Why does this matter again? Why am I doing this? Why am I here?

Oh yeah. I’m creating a fleeting sense of meaning through actions and interpretations so I don’t feel inconsolably doomed and alone. Thanks, Sartre.

Here are some things that are absurd and irrational:

WEB COMIC: XKCD | Sometimes it seems bizarre that we take dreaming in stride
PHOTO: Autistic boy naps after getting his ducks in a row
MUSIC VIDEO: DJ Shadow | High Noon | Directed by Brian Cross
BLOG: Eric Martinez | Flannel Ass | The Only Way’s The Naked Way | NOLA Life
ARTIST PORTFOLIO: Blaine Fontana | Totem Book Media
PHOTO ESSAY: Chernobyl Legacy | Slate.com
PERSONAL DATA: Personal Pies | An Audit of Craig Robinson’s Life So Far

Birthday this past week. I’m a year older now. Huzzah.

My mother groaned,
my father wept,
into the dangerous world I leapt;
helpless, naked, piping loud,
like a fiend hid in a cloud.

-William Blake

Today is Greg’s birthday. (Hooray!) He’s in New Orleans now, so I can’t physically buy him a drink, but I will next time I see him. (Also, I need to mail you a birthday something, Greg, but I’m totally late because of finals. So sorry! It’s not because I don’t care.)

Greg has known me since I looked like a boy, since before even Eric. I think the first time I met him we went skateboarding in a church parking lot in Metaire. I saw him a lot throughout high school, and even went with him (and his girlfriend and my date who was not Greg) to Rummel’s prom his senior year.

In addition to being terrifically nerdy (he gave me the idea to become a tutor in college), Greg is also really artistic. He drew the cover of my long-dead zine, Assorted Pieces of Ed, a million years ago when we were both in high school. Check out his cover art:

Talented, yeah? Yeah.

Greg just bought a cute house in New Orleans not too terribly far from Eric’s, but I haven’t seen it yet. Like Eric, he also has a blog where you can read about all his audio engineering nerdiness!

I’m posting a bunch of Greg photos I’ve been holding onto in honor of today. Most (if not all) were taken by Eric. Except the one with Eric in it, of course. Happy birthday, Greg!

Here are the final top 20 search strings people typed into search engines to find my blog for April:

1. post secret
2. post secrets
3. tattoos
4. child beauty pageant
5. glow in the dark tattoos
6. soccer hooligans
7. child labor
8. biomechanical tattoos
9. embedded tattoos
10. fat asses
11. glow in the dark tattoo
12. celeste kidd
13. bad tattoos
14. biomechanical tattoo
15. ana georgean
16. adult babies
17. slutty
18. angry panda
19. love tattoos
20. child labour

Hey, that’s my name at #12! Well, part of it. And slutty is still going strong at #17, although slutty chicks has dropped off the list entirely, despite my avant-garde poetry writing. Post secret(s) have rocketed to #1 and #2 and tattoos are notably more popular now that they were at the beginning of the month. With regards to #9, aren’t all tattoos embedded? That one seems strange to me.