> tapioca world tour

Check it out — seems an intern discovered them at the bottom of a closet in the office, and now they’re being published, 40 years later. God bless interns.

I’ve been under house arrest all weekend and then some, due to the insipid bird flu or whatnot. Since I’m convinced this stupid ailment doesn’t really exist, it’s started existing less and less, especially today, but I’m still holed up, relying on DD’s generocity to cook me Italian dinners and special soup and bring me coffee and Thai food. I have a theory which I’ll always hold to: when sick, don’t change ANYTHING about your normal diet. Food has no impact on health; it’s all psychological. That said, I’ve happily continued to indulge in N.’s Godiva dark chocolate truffles, chocolate brioches, dark roast decaf, cookies, ice cream, wild mushroom ravioli, etc., etc.

It’s freezing outside, they tell me, and I can feel it through the walls. I’m leaving the country for a big trip in five days and I’m not at all fully prepared, but I suppose one never is. Any advice for the shopping list? So far I’ve got bug repellent, water purification powder, mosquito netting, duct tape, sunglasses, power bars…it’s all very daunting. I want to pack the smallest bag possible and just go, take lots of moving photos, stay healthy-minded, etc. But suggestions are always helpful. Danke.

The moving train of my orthodontal adventure continues to tunnel through winter with its engine in flames.

“My bite is all messed up,” I told the doc, when he asked me to bite down. “I know. Your bite is terrible,” he said. “But that’s normal. The teeth are moving all the time.”

So, he did things to realign me again, though I don’t know what. He popped off two brackets, then had his new assistant [Gael’s replacement] recement new ones to my teeth via a horrible mouth-stretching plastic contraption, causing me to swallow acetone since they didn’t use the spit-sucker the entire time, ending with my throat burning for a while. When all was said and done, I had new brackets and new wires (he wanted to put on metal wires but I refused, citing the fact that I already look 12) and now, two days, three muffins, two bowls of overcooked noodles and many hours of achey mouth later, everything looks great. Except, needless to say, for the gaping hole in the front of my mouth waiting to be filled by my now infamous impacted canine, which is *still* hanging out just above the gumline, inching down ever so slowly. The only uplifting thing is that I don’t have to yank it down with clear rubber bands anymore in the front of my mouth; they’ve attached invisible rubber bands from my molar to the impacted canine, pulling it down in a much more subtle fashion.

In other news, I got my passport renewed today. Can’t believe it’s been almost 10 years since I got the last one. Looking at my old passport, I noticed my teeth in the photo. How messed up they were at eighteen! How straight they are now! I like when I see fast returns on investments. It keeps the blood boiling and the gratitude high.

September, Doc says. This will all be over by September.

Dude I posted my first video blog. It’s just me in Ry’s van, driving around Vermont this past weekend, but I think it’s kind of cool.

This is so incredibly funny. (Watch the video)

Yeah, that’s right, I’m going to Indonesia and Thailand in two weeks. For human rights work stuff. We fly in east both times, which means going halfway around the world to get there, then the other half to get back. We’ll be doing follow-up tsunami reconstruction reporting, focusing largely on Burmese refugees doing forced work in Thailand. I take photos and write about it, eat curry, try not to get malaria, etc. Very exciting, no?

In other world news, let’s have a moment of silence for the 1500+ people in the Phillipines who died in the mudslide this morning. I think we’ve had enough of natural disasters for one lifetime.

she’s moving slowly toward nowhere good, the car is in neutral

with the brake at a right

angle to the floor. everyone can see them through the windows,

and the burnt light falls

evenly on their intensity but this infidelity

can’t last too much longer. it’s like the train

she’s supposed to be on; it’s like

the overcast sky, the sheen of her new shoes, the table he’ll soon fill

with flowers and deceit; a good freeze kills,

but lies burn faster through the body and this is the

hot red truth they’re both avoiding, hungry, inspecting

one another in the backseat like two starved dark birds

competing for the kill.

I just joined ourmedia.com to start vlogging (video blogging). They have a podcast (not entirely comprehensive, but hey) that explains technically how to begin video blogging, although I’m still kind of fuzzy on how to go from Wordpress or Blogger to an iTunes podcast. Any tips?

Apparently if you want your media (video) hosted, you have to subscribe to archive.org or to blip.tv. I chose the latter, and it seems like a good site. It allows you to auto-synch your video posts to both your blip.tv blog (tapioca visual tour) and your regular blog. They also integrate flickr and del.icio.us, allow for mobile posts, and provide a comprehensive selection of syndication options, text and media-focused.

So much progression in modern technology, so little time…I’ll post a full step-by-step setup process once I figure it out. Stay tuned for the upcoming Home Workout podcast D. and I will shoot tonight…

We cleaned out her late grandfather’s late wife’s apartment in the Prudential all day Saturday. The whole place was filled with dust mites and trash and furniture from the 60s. We put on rubber gloves and bug repellent and went to work, dissecting the life of a secretive old woman who left behind salad tongs and silver platters and china teacups and who left no one behind to appreciate it. Some stuff was her husband’s, and now one of his modern art prints hangs in my kitchen, his blown-glass orange vase lives on my table, a French thermostat dice-shaped pen holder made of amber sits on my desk at work. “I don’t want any of this stuff,” my roommate said. “It’s dead peoples’ things. It creeps me out.”

“At least we kind of know who these people were,” I said. “It’s better than buying dead peoples’ things at a thrift shop, not knowing where they came from.” What’s fascinating is how quickly life comes and goes and how fiercely we hold on to the things we acquire, even when they gather dust. By the time I’m 90, if I live that long, I don’t want to own anything. Maybe a bed, some eccentric rings, some colorful boots. Maybe an ice cream scoop, but that’s it.

And now it’s El Dia del Amor, not that every day isn’t full of love. The kids gave me extra Valentines they’d made. I put their paper affection in my back pocket and forgot about it. That’s a metaphor, people.

Now that the moon is boiling
like the blood where it swims

the claw marks of those
who preceded us across this burning floor

- John Yau, from Borrowed Love Poems

Other than getting my teeth fixed, the best investment I’ve ever made is joining Boston Sport Boxing Club. D. and I completed our first personal training session the other night, which lasted over two and a half hours and has had me limping for two days. Pain before beauty, pain is beauty, what’s the expression? Whatever. Just as long as I can punch a solid hole through a solid wall without shattering all the bones in my hand, I’m happy.

In other news,

I keep having nightmares about octopus. The moral of that story is never watch your friend eat baby octopus — whole — at a sushi bar, or anywhere else for that matter. Last night’s dream was about a girl at a pet shop who took care of this one little octopus and loved it, but I bought it off her, then I didn’t take care of it, then it stung me and crawled on me, then it became a giant spider and the girl picked it up. I returned it to her, told her to keep it and love it because I couldn’t, I didn’t want it after all, it was a scary aggressive octopus for Pete’s sake. [Cue Zak Smith’s octopus drawing! Now!]

In self-oriented audio-visual news,
I still can’t think of a valid film idea, and my editor doesn’t want to do the 48-hr film project again, despite our win last year. I’m crying on the inside. On the outside, I’m just freezing.

We walked around Philly’s Magic Gardens, filled with trash and bike rims and teacups glued together, before beginning the drive home.

You should all contribute photos (yes, you in Hawaii, you in the City of Sin, you in New York, you at Harvard, you in South Asia) to Round’s Photoblog. The theme for the next two weeks is portraits. If you’d like to contribute something, email me so we can set you up with a login.

Thinking too hard about this, it almost makes me choke; now the bricks are swept clean first with a fine mist, then an unrelenting rain. We’re stuck under an awning again.

And I try various tactics to convince you to love this place as blindly as I do, which is like trying to convince a hungry man to eat. It’s pouring and we’re on North Second Street and my feet feel like sleeping dogs which,

when you eat octopus later, I have nightmares about. What now? I don’t have this city anymore, you don’t have your secrets anymore, we only have a comforting car ride in the dark during which we eat

too many chocolate donuts and sleep sideways with our skin pressed clean against the glass, where you make faces at other drivers and take pictures of their pretty spinning tires, their fast white lights.

Now an unfinished cartharsis is growing on our walls like a strong mold. The floor smells of it, the sink smells too, and in your room this and the stillness become thick as smoke; thinking too hard about it makes me choke.

I woke up to find C. sleeping on the couch. When you haven’t seen someone in almost seven years, it’s kind of shocking to discover them one morning passed out in your living room.

My infamous weakness of taking everything too seriously combined with my ridiculous photographic memory results, usually, in situations where I assume other people remember everything too, and that the last exchange I had with them, even if it was six or seven years ago, is as clear in their memory as if it had happened yesterday. Alas, this isn’t always the case. With some people it is: with some people, years and years pass, and then you see them again, and it’s like no time has passed at all, and you talk about the last time you were together as if it were a few hours ago. I know a few people like that. But then there’s blokes like C., friends of friends, someone you never knew very closely to begin with. And I’m caught, wanting to say hey, remember when we last talked, and we were sitting in that pub, and you said ___ to me and I said ___ and then we both moved away and stuff? And remember how the bar smelled, and how your apartment was always crowded, and the way you’d kiss all the girls on their cheeks as you were coming and going? I remember that.

But I didn’t say it, because I know I’m ridiculous and I remember too much of insignificant events and practically nothing of anything significant.

The past three nights the sky has been glowing an eerie grey-purple. It’s as if a ball game is going on at Fenway and they’ve turned the flood lights on in the smog, but no flood lights are on, it’s just February now and the sky is weird. “Look out the window,” I told the kids. “See how the everything looks so bright? The sky only looks like that in Boston. This is a neat city.”

At the end of the day, people who follow these figures tell themselves that even if the current leader isn’t up to par, the goal and message remain the same — religion, God’s word as law. When living in the midst of a war-torn country with a situation that is deteriorating and death around every corner, you turn to God because Iyad Allawi couldn’t get you electricity and security — he certainly isn’t going to get you into heaven should you come face to face with a car bomb.

Read Baghdad Burning.

Last night we attended State of the Union Bingo, hosted by my coworker. In a shocking testament to W’s speechwriter’s linguistic ability, I won with five health care, tax and terror references, diagonally. Let’s not discuss human-animal hybrids, or the embracing of natural energy research, or the cutaway of Hillary self-indulgently rolling her eyes. My God, what a great show.

In other news, do you know why us 30ish-year-olds can’t live like normal people? Because we’re the Indebted Generation, and it makes me want to bite things.