It's looking at me !!
Wed Mar 8 17:03 PST 2006

Just a quick note. Jupiter has a new "Great Red Spot." That's all. Bye !!

This image was acquired by amateur astronomer Christopher Go in Cebu, Philippines. As is traditional for amateur astronomy, the image appears reversed, with Jupiter's south pole at the top of the image. That's because this is how the image appears to the eye when looking through the eyepiece of a reflecting telescope.

Xplant photos.
Sun Mar 5 22:45 PST 2006

Week 4, post-operation, is about to begin. I am mostly recovered, except for the part about not lifting more than 10 pounds unless I want to risk a hernia. I was back at work last week about half time.

I just got proofs back from Mark, who took photos in the hospital, so now I have 4 pages of transplant photos. Go to my photo page and click on some of the transplant albums to see the pix.

Mark was saying he had post-operative depression after he came back to SF. He gave a kidney to his dad in Boston. My time in the hospital was a wonderful experience. I felt really special because I was doing something good for someone I love, but even while I was there I knew that the time of being at the center of so many people's attention was limited. I guess one of the things that helped me avoid depression was just knowing that everything was temporary, so that I could enjoy the experience but not try to hold on to it. It also helped tremendously to have so much support after I got out of the hospital: everything from assistance carrying things more than 10 pounds, to all the food that John, Daniel, Mark, and Simone's aunties made for us, to the continuing calls and visits of people checking up on me, to the various totally unsolicited presents.

My Bloody Valentine.
Tue Feb 14 23:59 PST 2006 (valentine's day)

CREDITS: Daniel Tsao (left), Thomas Phan (right).

There's no way I could capture everything that's been going on in writing. Life has been too... dense. For the past week I've just been spending time with people constantly in real life. No time to reply to emails, little time for the phone. But as my roommate in the hospital, Dan, pointed out, I am very lucky to be so loved and have so many people who care about me. I certainly appreciate it.

So just to clarify, that's Simone in the picture. She has one of my kidneys now. Daniel took the pic when we were being good patients and exercising by hobbling around the ninth floor. On the right is something that is best appreciated as an abstract photograph. But it's evidence of what I'll go through for someone I love. Simone's health after the transplant (it's been a week now) is excellent.

I'm out of the hospital, and about to go to sleep for the second night, at Simone's house. John and Auntie Theresa are taking care of me here, since Daniel has busy workdays. Simone's friend Celeste was over at the house today. After hearing me whine about my deflated bloody blisters, Celeste said, "You're my bloody valentine !!"

Homeless.
Wed Feb 01 23:32 EST 2006

I'm in DC now. I just love this feeling of coming back to a place that's like home. I brought my SmartTrip card, I know exactly where the bathrooms are in National, and I knew I didn't need to wait in line at Ben's Chili Bowl if I'm eating there. My hotel completely sucks, except for the view. I see the Pentagon, the 14th Street Bridge, the National Cathedral, the Capital Building, the Washington Monument, and a bunch of smaller stuff.

Tomorrow is Groudhog's Day, and Peter's birthday. Peter will be officially OLD. And I won't be there to celebrate/commiserate with him because I'm serving our nation's science community.

Hi, LA !!   Bye, LA !!
Monday afternoon, 31 January 2006

 
Last week I went up to Lick Observatory with Franck, and we collected an excellent night of moonlight-free data. That exhausting night was the beginning of the sleep deprivation that is weighing me down as I'm typing this at UCSF now. But at 7:30 in the morning after observing, the 3.7 earthquaked that rocked the place delayed me only a couple of seconds. Should I take shelter and try to preserve my life? I looked out the 3rd story window to the steep mountainous slope below. Or should I just get into bed? zZzZZzZZZzZz...

Then Saturday morning, it was time to take off. I had a 10:30 flight (early for me) out of Oakland, and I uncharacteristically got there with time to spare. In the check-in area, I ran into Jeff Bower, a UCB research astronomer. Past security, I ran into him once again, in my gate area. I met his wife and their little hapa infant amidst a constant stream of passengers cooing over the baby. Then again we ended up having seats in neighboring rows on the plane, but that was the end of our overlapping LA trips.

It took me a while to find the Southwest baggage claim at Burbank, and then Ching whisked me off to a diner in... Valencia? We went through some towns near CalArts, but I couldn't tell what was what. Ching just called them the Mexican area (a small region with a higher population density) and the Mormon area (everything else). I used the "I need to go to the bathroom" trick to pay the bill before Ching noticed, and then it was off to school.

Silkscreening is a process that fits naturally with a smoking habit. There are numerous breaks where you have to wait for things to dry. The process was a bit more elaborate than what I vaguely recalled from Crafts class at Sheppard Middle School. At CalArts, you start by printing the image on Xante (some kinda thick translucent paper), and then you run it through a bath of toxins to increase the paper translucence and the toner darkness. I could tell it was toxic because the open cut on my finger started getting irritated. After the Xante dries, you coat the screen (sythetic; silk is no longer used) with a gooey emulsion, and then THAT has to dry. Transferring the image from Xante to screen involved the largest piece of equipment in the house: a giant glass table upon which you place the Xante and then the emulsified screen. A cover then fits down over everything, consisting of a giant rubber sheet stretched over a frame. We closed that, and Ching flipped a switch to turn on a vacuum pump. The air was sucked out, causing the rubber sheet to tightly hold the screen in place against the glass table. Flip the table up so the screen is vertical, and expose to 15 min of intense light from some kind of scary light which probably emitted a lot of UV. Then, it's time for Ching to smoke 2 cigarettes.

The blow out room gets painted every few weeks, Ching said, because the walls get covered with so much paint and crap. After exposing the emulsion, we took the screen into the blow out room, sprayed it with a toxic chemical, and then used the high pressure water hose to clear off all the areas of the screen that had been covered by the dark parts of the printout. At this point, it would have been time for another cigarette while the screen dried, but instead we hung posters in the halls. Ching and her roomie Leslie (?) had made Year of the Dog calendar/posters on newsprint, with a cute little S&M scene between the princess and Mario, both of whom were wearing dog masks. For some reason only Mario was pixelated.

After hanging posters in the labyrinthine windowless maze of CalArts, we were ready to print. Load the screen into a hinge on the table, mix the ink with something to make it dry and harden in air, put the target under the screen, "flood" the screen (saturate it with ink), lower it, and then pull the squeegee over the screen to force the ink through and onto the target. The result is similar to a tattoo: it looks fresh and wet first, but then you apply heat (with a blow-dryer) to fix the ink and it changes color a bit and dries out. The brown hoodies were hard to print because we needed to precisely align the red image over the white image. Ching solved this problem by cleaning the screen between every red print, so that we could align the screen with the white pattern just by looking though the clean screen.

The last step was in the blowout room. You use the most toxic chemical of all (I don't even know what it's called) to spray the screen, and then the emulsion is blasted off by high-pressure water blasts. I knew this chemical was toxic because the backspray off the screen started irritating my eyes.

The finished product looks nice, but I am very upset because I can't find my digital camera. It's small, and it's lost. Argh !! !! I could have totally documented everything !!

Ching wanted to take a shower before we headed out to Quentin's cocktail party, so in the meantime I narrowly avoided catastrophic injuries as I vaulted the spiked fence around her complex's hot tub. The hot tub was ice cold. This place is in the mountains, so ice cold means ice cold. Oh well.

On the drive to Quentin's house in K-Town, I ended up telling Ching about Quentin's book. If it wasn't about me, I'd probably admit to liking it. But Quentin wrote something partly biographical and partly fictional, and I don't really enjoy how my personality faults are exaggerated and sensationalized. Also, some of the sex scenes which are so vigorously derided in the Amazon reviews are pretty much taken straight from real life. It is a bit strange to see what originally seemed to be private moments, somehow turned into something public. But it is not the first time he's done this to me (and others). Quentin's stance on the division between public and private is almost as militant as John Cage's stance on the division between sound and music.

The cocktail party was perfect though, people sitting around and chatting in approximately three distinct rooms. I finally got to meet Quentin's boyfriend. Most of the people were gay though, and I pretty much brought nothing but straight folks. But it was awesome that Laura came, and there was nothing but good vibes between her and Quentin. Laura's friend Promise said she really wanted a Giardia hoodie, but I couldn't just give it to her, when I basically only have three to give away. It was like the second time I'd met Promise. But maybe she'll get one. I am thinking of giving three of them away in a contest. When Ching, Laura, Promise, and Peace tried to leave Quentin's party, there was a storm of the staying-people getting the leaving-people's numbers. I couldn't tell if it was the hubris of the moment or something more substantial, but does it matter?

Wyman, who had gone to "Ladies Who Like Ladies Night" for DeeDee's birthday, finally picked me up after his club closed at 2am. By the time we got to bed in Orange County, it was about 4:30 in the morning.

I woke up by myself Sunday morning, seconds before my dad called to say that they were heading over. We had a tasty breakfast of fried rice and won ton prepared by Uncle Moe, before my parents and I set out for the Tao temple. There, for some reason, I had hoped to see Auntie D's teacher, the one whose powers are so strong that his Mercedes is always dry during a downpour. The one who Jonathan called "that 4th-dimensional traveller." But no, it was just Auntie D at the temple with some aunties and uncles. My other expectation, which proved to be much more accurate, was to bow a lot, leave money, and burn some incense. Most of the activity was carried out by the Aunties, while the rest of use picked and ate pomelos in the driveway, and the adults talked about their investments and about the charitable activities of their children. In the back, there were some oil drums with holes in the sides. Into these we threw folded paper with gold paint on it, and the fire inside whisked these offerings off to another metaphysical realm. In addition to the great mass of origami treasures, there were several prayer packets, one for each major diety. Aunty Polly let me throw the biggest and most important one into the fire, and although at the time I didn't acknowledge it, it felt like this was a big gift from her. I don't know much about this ceremony, but since the basic idea is burning things for spirits, I tried to silently dedicate whatever was going on to Sam Mychopsticks' mom, who passed away suddenly in December, as well as Crouton's mom and Anne's dad.

Many things from the offering table at the temple, like the roast piglet, later showed up at Auntie D's house for dinner. Her chicken wings were a new arrival though, and so delicious, I asked her to recite the recipe. There wasn't enough beer in the house, so Ivan and I went on a beer run to 7-11. But then we ended up getting too much. The checkout lady was insane. She guessed that Ivan was 60 years old and I was 80. She just wouldn't stop saying wacky things. This wackiness cropped up again later in the evening when Ivan's friend Leon said I looked 23 and Jonathan looked 21. Now that Jonathan shaved his head, he looks like the youngest brother.

So as the uncles and aunties started trickling out of the dinner party, the cousins split to go get bo-ba. Then Ivan's friend called and we went over to Irvine to watch Friday the 13th part III, sports, and Family Guy at Ivan's friends' place. There was a lot of guys there and I never quite figured out who all were the residents. It was a very TV-dominated setting, although me and Peter noticed that as long as sports was on, we were somehow immune to the hypnotic control of the TV. I hope Kristine was able to deal with being the only girl in the house. But since it was cousin bonding time, we called Derek as well. I found out he has a kidney condition (this?) that I'd never heard of, but in his case, he thinks it will not lead to renal failure. What is this, year of the kidneys?

We cleared out before 1am, and I ate leftovers at home and chatted with Auntie D before going to bed. Auntie D asked me what was the thought in my head that led me to decide to give up a kidney. I told her that I was trying to be like that boddhisattva who gave his eyeball to someone who said they needed it. But later I was thinking back to the exact moment when I made the decision, and I realized it was a lot simpler than that. I think it was soon after Simone told me she was on dialysis. I remember imagining, just briefly, how I would feel if she died. And then I made the decision.

The scary thing is I have not yet had anyone truly close to me die yet. And there are a lot of people really close to me. But in the mean time, I'm all about getting the most out of life. Thinking about mortality helps me get the most out of life. What if this is my last blog post? What if this is the last time I crave Ben's Chili Bowl? What if this is is the last time I see you?

There's no guarantee that the transplant trick will work, but we have to try.

On the way to the airport at 6am Monday morning, Uncle Moe said the only thing he still wants to see is the aurorae.