good morning

It's only the second week of school and already I'm up earlier so I could do the homework I didn't do last night.

*bangs head against desk*

I don't even have a very valid excuse (but does anyone, ever?). Wasn't abducted, didn't hurt myself on office furniture, wasn't sent into traumatic rage by one or the other parent, didn't develop carpal tunnel...

Oi, I just didn't feel like reading "The Cask of Amontillado" for the seven hundredth time, alright?

Defensiveness aside, have you seen the trailer to what is certain to be one of the best movies of 2003?

Alan Rickman, Colin Firth, Keira Knightley, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Rowan Atkinson...

together in ONE film.

Listened to loveangstsex v.1 obsessively last night, as I went to sleep. antigone921, it's a gorgeous mix, thank you for making it.

we are all made of stars

I was here last year.

And when we were all so young (the day of).

What's changed in my life? Not the little things, like playing a cd or staying inside when it rains, or the color of my favorite lipgloss (Paparazzi Plum)...what's changed in the past two years is the overall feeling of what it means to be an American, now. What it meant for my mother to leave Taiwan and come here, and for me to be born in New York, and then packing up our lives and moving to California after many false-starts...it might sound cliche, but America was and is the land of opportunity. It was our first choice then, and as I'm older and learning every day - I can see the beauty and the horror of it, the injustices and the triumphs, the wonderful people who populate it amongst the crazies and the opportunists...and I'm glad that we chose America.

But I'm also conscious of the world outside, and how we've changed in the eyes of the international community since that day. It's tough having a reputation for being rash, impetuous and prone to overdramatic heroics -- especially if those are the same traits that we are lauded for later on. It's hard not being able to be proud of your country (or being deemed overly patriotic for it) or conversely, being shamed for saying unflattering things about your country because your President has such a delicate sensibility.

I remember reading a question on one of my friends' lj's asking the question about what was it about patriotism - and at the time I couldn't think of a reply. Definitions can be so arbitrary, after all - we have the basic gender labels - I define myself as Girl, yeah, but then there's the Asian bit, and oh, and add the hyphenate of American, and bam, the census's done with you.

But I'm a person before any of that - and patriotism to me is finding an over riding sense of home. You have your emotional home and your physical home and maybe the two overlap, but then where's the last bit about belonging to a space? To know you can go there at the end of the day and find someone who may not be exactly like you, but is familiar enough to be comfortable. My kind of patriotism is like my relationships - I know and find all the things I love about them but I know all the stuff I don't like about them as well -- but I still love them.

It's just another day....and yet it isn't, at the same time.

I'll be heading home in a bit, but before I sign off - I've been listening to live Tom Mcrae performances at Kcrw's Morning Becomes Eclectic program.

Search for Tom Mcrae

The October performance is especially interesting as it was a month after the attack, and Tom's comments about being a person and performing...

( Corrected Tom Mcrae American Dates )