Jury Duty: Day Three

This was quite possibly the most difficult day of service. I spent all six hours listening to testimony, some of it impossibly dull. My rate of yawns per hour skyrocketed, despite some truly catty performances from the trial lawyers.

Something that bothers me about the legal process: the judge neither specifies nor defines the law that applies to the case before the trial. Instead, this absolutely crucial information is not disseminated until all the evidence has been presented, a sequence of events that seems quite backwards to me. Sitting on a jury is an evaluative process, and to begin the process without all the necessary information feels like a deeply flawed approach. However, not knowing the exact criteria by which I will decide the defendant's innocence encourages me to take really good notes. Which may be the point.

Jury Duty: Day Two

Well, I'm on the jury. I have a feeling I should have kept my mouth shut and been more inscrutable, as that strategy seems to have been effective for a fellow Asian-American juror candidate who was excused.

The trial should last until Wednesday. I get $15 a day, and a free weely Metro pass. I also get Monday off, so I can at least make an appearance at the Center for Hot Moms during my tour of duty.

I'm not allowed to discuss the case, but I'm finding the experience at least somewhat interesting, as I'm interacting with people I wouldn't normally encounter during the course of my day. Not only that, but I get to hear some deep and dark secrets from total strangers. And trial itself, despite being a lowly misdemeanor trial, has no shortage of theatrics from the players involved.

Jury Duty: Day One

The great irony is that when I was punching a clock, I couldn't get on a jury to save my life. But as soon as I quit my day job, the justice system issues a summons.

I spent most of today reading in the juror lounge in the Washington Blvd. courthouse, a masterpiece of 70s Brutalist architecture with space-age lighting fixtures and oak-veneer walls. My fellow juror candidates represent a fairly accurate cross-section of Los Angeles - it's like the cast of Crash up in there.

"Is there an elderly black woman?" asks my roommate. "Yup." "Gotta have the elderly black woman."

We were this close to escaping the courthouse without being called to a courtroom, when a judge summoned us at 2:30. We spent the next two hours receiving lectures about the criminal justice system and answering jury selection questions from the judge and lawyers. I'll be back tomorrow, to find out if I'm actually selected as a juror. There are 24 candidates, so my odds are even.

I'd much rather be in yoga class.

The Arrival of Autumn

Something my yoga instructor reminded me of today is that last Saturday marked the beginning of fall, and the end of summer.

I'm inclined to pick fall as my favorite season - a preference I elegized in one of my scripts - despite growing up in a place in which the leaves don't turn. My wardrobe is heavily tilted towards cooler weather, I don't have to be so obsessive about wearing sunblock, I can stock up on school supplies, and the tone of the days turns a bit more serious.

I don't really think it's a coincidence that I happen to be starting a new writing project and performing website maintenance at this time. And now that I think about it, every infatuation and/or relationship I can remember began in autumn. There's clearly some sort of internal Aztec calendar at work here, demanding the modern equivalent of fresh human sacrifices at the appropriate solar-mandated moment.


Tetris at the Hollywood Bowl.

I forgot to post details about the Video Games Live concert. Essentially, if you have to ask what this is, you're probably not going to be interested. The VGL concert consists of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra covering video game music from the seventies to the present day. The quality of the show was acutally a bit lacking - the sound engineering was problematic, and some repertoire selections were questionable. But the show began on a stroke of brilliance: the orchestra performed a stirring rendition of the score from Pong. Which, as you may or may not know, consists entirely of two notes, repeated over and over again, as the pixel bounces between the paddles and the walls.

The best part of the show is merely sitting at the Bowl and chilling. The actual music on offer is kind of irrelevant, really. And with ticket prices for VGL starting at $3, you can be sure I'll be back next year.

"Site Maintenance"

As you know, we here at A Very Big If are committed to providing you with the best possible blog-reading experience. As part of that commitment, we recently performed some "site maintenance". Unfortunately, as part of this "site maintenance", certain content went offline, including some reader comments. We sincerely regret the disappearance of the content. Thank you for your attention and understanding.

The $1400 Apartment

This is the view from my brother's new apartment: a two bedroom-two bath affair located near the University of Texas at Austin campus. The building was brand new, and in fact, had not actually been completed when we arrived. The asking price? Fourteen hundred dollars a month.

For comparison's sake, one of my friends recently moved into a studio apartment in a very nice area of Los Angeles. A studio. As in no second bedroom, no full-size kitchen, no second bathroom, and no separate living room. The asking price? Fourteen hundred dollars a month.

Let's take a closer look at Jon's apartment:


Hey kids! Can you spot the three things in this photo that don't belong in a Los Angeles apartment? 1) The laundry machine. 2) The free fridge. 3) The wine rack.



The living room, with the kitchen in the background.


The kitchen. Note the marble counters and the modern appliances.


The living room. Note the polished concrete floor.


The shelves in the living room, and the door to Jon's bedroom.


Jon's bedroom. Sup ladies.


One of the two bathrooms.

The Hollywood Tooth

I was at the endodontist's office to check the status of a tooth that the doctor had repaired about nine months ago. It's impossible to evaluate the tooth visually, as the problematic area is inside the bones of my mouth; I don't have any symptoms, either, so an x-ray is necessary. So the doctor took an x-ray of my tooth, told me nothing had changed, and asked me to return in a year. She told me we won't know for a full year whether the tooth is healing properly - that's how slowly a tooth heals. So even if I were able to see the affected area (which I can't), I would still be unable to see any progress due to the glacial rate of change. And the first thing that popped into my head was: this tooth is an excellent allegory for Hollywood.

Pillow Crisis is on hiatus. We sent the treatment off to our contacts a few weeks ago, and proceeded to hear absolutely nothing from them. A week passed. Then another. Then another. Huili went through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I leveled up my characters in Final Fantasy Tactics. Another week passed. Finally, we decided to reinitiate contact: even if our contacts hated the thing, it would still be valuable to get the studio notes for use as a calibration tool.

Out contacts returned the message. They were really busy, and still hadn't read the entire treatment. However, they liked what they read a lot. I'm inclined to believe in the sincerity of the liking, but sincere liking is not exactly a primal motivation in this industry.

So we continue to wait. My career, like those of many others, is an extremely stable mixture of waiting and non-committal liking which may or may not precipitate into action.

In the meantime, I'm on to my next writing project: Lobsters vs. Butterflies. My intention is to finish this script within six months, which is an utterly laughable ambition, given my project history. But LvB has a simplicity and an energy that my other projects lacked, and I have a pretty good feeling that nine months is wholly doable. This was supposed to be my "easy" project, but if there's one thing I've learned from myself and other artists, it's this: there is never any such thing as an easy project. There will always be unforeseen difficulties. Already, LvB is requiring more research than I had anticipated, which implies a graduate student-like existence for myself. Admittedly, my graduate school is located in California and has very low graduation requirements, but still.

Rise From Your Grave

So I'm back from Dallas. One thing I've noticed about trips home is that time seems to pass more slowly when I'm there. I suspect this temporal phenomenon has much to do with the utter lack of responsibility I have to shoulder. Someone else cleans up, someone else does the groceries, someone else gets the mail.

My visit to Dallas seemed to be some sort of Zen koan revolving around the utter futility of making plans. My trip was originally scheduled to last only a week; just long enough to visit my parents and help my brother move into a new apartment in Austin. And then a ridiculous chain of events began to unfurl, straight out of the first act of a Hollywood road movie.

My youngest brother's apartment wasn't finished. So I spent a week longer in Austin, surviving off of microwaved fried chicken and biscuits, as the tardy contractors rushed to finish the project. We spent much of our time hanging out in a temporary condo, surrounded by unassembled, boxed Ikea furniture as we competed for high score in Metroid Prime Pinball. I also ate Thai fajitas while watching the sun set over Lake Travis, hung out in UT Austin's library, pondered the fashion choices of Austin coeds (they all dress like desperate housewives), and got to know my brother's girlfriend's pets: 2 cockatiels, a dog, and a hamster. For sheer comedic value, there is nothing quite like the sight of a dog playing with a hamster. If I ever wanted to know how a hamster expressed the notion, "WTF?!", that curiosity has been satisfied.

(One thing I can recommend in Austin is the bookstore Book People - it's easily one of my top five book shops of all time. You know how Barnes and Noble has little handwritten recommendation cards for about twenty volumes in the store? In Book People, every other book has a card like that.)

On our last day in Austin, my mom arrived to help us move into the new apartment. The three of us, along with Jon's roommate, set up an efficient assembly line, in accordance with the principle of division of labor developed by American industrial tycoon Eli Whitney. Together, we assembled a bedroom, a kitchen, and a living room's worth of furniture, all in about eight hours. This might very well be a record of some kind.

Then, as my mom and I drove back from Austin. We encountered a classic Texas thunderstorm. The kind of storm that may or may not erupt into a fullblown tornado. Visibility diminished to about a ten foot radius, allowing me to just barely make out the tail lights of the car before me and the headlights of the car behind. Lightning strikes were followed almost immediately by thunder, suggesting an extremely proximal storm center. The rain hammering on the car's roof was deafening. Simultaneously, all traffic on the interstate slowed to the pace of a funeral procession, as everyone switched on their hazard blinkers and their headlights. As we crawled beneath a massive, elaborate highway interchange, I saw torrents of water spouting off the freeways, incongruously reminiscent of tropical waterfalls. I pulled off the freeway, and we waited for about half an hour for the storm to wither. My mom, having glimpsed the Nintendo DS Lite, decided to play some Zoo Keeper, and I read a Scandinavian novel. In over a decade of driving, this was the very first time I've ever had to stop the car because of the weather. For some reason, it had been decided that I was to leave Austin as slowly as possible.

Then my mother decided to have back surgery. She's doing quite well, and the hospital discharged her early. I spent about a week in the hospital as she recuperated, eating surprisingly decent hospital cafeteria food and plowing through more of the Scandinavian novel. Meanwhile, my middle brother developed some strange ear malady. His earlobe swelled to the size of a walnut, and doctors were unable to ascertain the cause of the condition, and just preemptively decided to cut the ear open. So I spent a lot of time with my family, cleaned out much of my parents' garage, did some gardening, discovered a long lost cache of old video games, reached the halfway mark in Final Fantasy Tactics, and most importantly, began the outlining for my next story (more on this in a bit). Lobsters and butterflies have never been more exciting.

A pretty good vacation (from my preexisting vacation), all in all.

And now it's over. There's a been a sudden shift in the tone of my life upon my return; more urgency, more nervousness. Pillow Crisis is on hiatus (more on this in a bit), I'm beginning a brand new writing project, and I am opening serious and formal inquiries into recent individuals and events that have given me pause. It's an exciting time.