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Tonight was one of those nights that will reverberate in memory. When the hours melt into minutes and the conversations mull into a delightful drink that is always full and never empty. You touch upon every subject that you love and with people whom you come to love. You’ll part ways in the end, but even if you never see them again, you’ll know that this encounter is here to stay. And when you walk out into the cold with the rain on your back and your slippered feet dodging puddles, you remember how good it is to be alive and remember why you love this place called Brown.

“Come on,” I silently breathe under my breath as my fingers repeatedly press on the power button. The screen to my HP Officejet 7300 All-in-one printer is black tonight. The green light is lit, but no one is home. I reach around to the back of the printer and feel around for the power cord. The machine is too close to the wall, so I angle it toward me. It shifts easily. I pull out the cord a quarter of an inch and then push it back again. I wait for the sound of my printer powering up. Silence.

A thought flashes across my mind that this might indeed be the end. The printer is old by computer standards, bought almost four years ago in anticipation of my freshman year, and it has survived three grueling moves without the protection of Styrofoam padding. Yet in all the times I could nudged it off a railing sending it plummeting down several flights of stairs or tripped over the power cord and hurled it toward the floor, why now? No reason, no cause, just silence. On most days I would be annoyed by the thought of my printer puttering out on me, but at this moment I am just sad.

I am racked by the senselessness of it. There was nothing visibly wrong. It worked fine the other day. I didn’t even notice that it stopped working. How long has it been sitting on my desk dark and silent? This printer has shared my room with me for the last three years. It is on 24 hours a day, yet I take no notice of its existence.

In the back of my mind I know it is not really about my printer. The printer is an object, a thing, something to be replaced after death. The mourning of my printer is an expression of the thoughts I cannot express. For the friend who has cancer and the great-aunt in the hospital. For the fragility of life that shatters when someone close to me is hit by a car. They are what matter to me and they are what weigh down on me at this moment. And death…

Bebeep!

I lose track of my thoughts as a series of beeps emits from the printer. There is life in it yet. I laugh at myself to think how worked up I was becoming. The menu screen is brightly lit, and I smile into it. As I leave the room, I say a silent thank you to whoever is listening for my printer and the three individuals who are also still alive: one in California, one in Seattle, and one in Providence.

New Year resolutions are in order, but this year I will forgo the resolutions in lieu of a single promise. A five year promise to be exact. I had a series of dreams the day before Christmas, and when I awoke and tried to recall them, I uncovered a story. I don’t want to say too much since this is the Internet after all, but the story follows three bi-racial sisters and touches on themes of motherhood, identity, community, sexuality, women’s rights, education, class, and language barriers. I’d be happy to tell you more about it in person if you’re interested and hope to post related writing here as the novel progresses. My promise, in case you haven’t guessed it, is to write this story and send it to publishers five years from this day.

Before I left Providence, I had my friends gather together for an end-of-the-year party. While they nibbled their cookies and sipped their cider, I asked each of them to reflect and write down a favorite moment from the past semester. The reflection was also a bit of a test run for Project Wall-to-Wall. You can view the results above.

As 2008 draws to a close, I wonder what each of us will remember from this past year. A recent peek at Facebook revealed some sad and joyous moments: a friend engaged and another diagnosed with cancer. Life dolls out both in equal amounts. It’s been an atypical one for me, and I will remember trotting back and forth across the Pacific in search of myself. I will also remember the simple things like seeing a sea turtle poke its head above the water, photographing the sunset from my grandparents’ roof, visiting my great-uncle in the hospital, rescuing a gecko from under a surinam tree, beating my mother’s cousin and her friends at mah jong, walking the dog down to the lake, comforting a student who shed tears for his grandmother, chatting on my cell phone whilst a hummingbird hovered in front of my face, skinny dipping in Lake Washington, watching a lightening storm from my aunt and uncle’s porch, getting lost going to Boston, cooking my first turkey, delivering cookies to my friends, waiting with my friend at the airport, and getting sick in a restaurant bathroom back home. It’s a year full of memories, and I hope next year will be just as bountiful.

Well, now that you’re reading this, the title stretches the truth a bit…well maybe more than a bit, but had I been in Hawaii this winter, I would have been invited to a Christmas party just a few doors down from the Obamas’ vacation home. I’m talking walking distance! And since the beaches are all public access, there’s a good chance I could have run into him on the sand. You never know, he could be friendly with the neighbors and stop by for some holiday cheer. I realize that this sounds rather pathetic, especially since I’m sitting at home in California right now just 3,000 miles shy of such a meeting, but a girl can dream can’t she?

Normally, I don’t pay attention to frivolous details such as where the president elect spends his Christmas vacation (though after reporting on Obama’s spam musubi, I’m not sure if you’re likely to believe me). In this case, my mom started going on about how her cousin recently purchased a house in Kailua where the Obama family is staying. That’s interesting since 90% of my family in Hawaii lives on the western side of Oahu, no where near Kailua. The skeptic in me still didn’t feel the need to get riled up over this since Kailua is still a pretty big place. Then my mom got off the phone with her uncle in Hawaii, and she called me over to look at Google maps. I won’t say anymore, but you can look below to feel my agony:

View this post and others at karinko.net.

It’s been a while since I’ve written any updates for Wall-to-Wall. Brown is now on winter recess, and I’m currently back home in California for the holidays. Despite this, I do have some updates:

1. The video spot that ran during the VISIONS release party at the beginning of the month is now available both on Facebook and YouTube. You can also view it down below. If you want the text to it, a rough script is also available.

2. I’ve been in touch with a couple of administrative people at Brown to get permission to paper the bathrooms for a month. They’re also on break right now, so I probably won’t hear any more news until after the 5th.

3. I updated the project description, so if you haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, you should check it out.

That’s all for now, but while you’re waiting for more updates, watch the video:

Find out more about Project Wall-to-Wall.

This holiday season sales are down in just about every industry, except the craft industry. That’s right, in order to make their dollar count, consumers are turning from ready-made to handmade and bumping up the sales of stores like Michaels and Jo-Ann. I suppose you could count me among those jumping on the craft bandwagon. I’ve been beading for a little over two years now and mostly use the reserves in my bead stash, but occasionally, I’ll need to make a quick dash to the store to grab something I’ve run out of. I haven’t yet noticed the increased traffic at my favorite shopping spots, but if this report holds true, then none of them should be going out of business anytime soon.

Above, you can see the latest of my holiday creations, a necklace designed by me with beads from the Bead Fetish in Sacramento.

Long before the mainstream media started reporting on Barack Obama’s lunch menu, spam musubi was a favorite among Hawaii locals and Japanese Americans. I grew up watching my mom fry up the spam on the stove, and then we’d lay the marinated meat over a bed of rice, pile on some more carbs, and press it all down into the plastic mold. I’d take my ethnic version of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to school for lunch and eagerly scarf it down. However, some of my friends could never get over the fact that I was eating spam.

But we are in a different age now. If America’s next president can come away from the glitz of Washington to enjoy a lunch of spam musubi, then all the elitists out there who think of spam as poor man’s food will have to think again. Moreover, with the economy the way it (and not likely to change anytime soon), what is more cost-effective than spam and rice (well, the dried seaweed might set you back a bit, but let’s not harp on the details)? Just in case you need one more push before you dive into the wonders of spam, I’ve conveniently included several links to spam musubi recipes down below:

spam musubi recipe from SeriousEats.com
spam musubi recipe from AllRecipes.com
spam musubi recipe from WhatsCookingAmerica.net.

Links courtesy of Huffingtonpost.com

Enjoy!

I knew when I confused my friend’s shout out of “I’m done!” for the popular brand of instant noodles, Indomie, that it was not just my stomach talking. A few Google searches later, my suspicions were confirmed when I came to this page hosted by the University of Cambridge. The following is a piece of text, commenting on letter order and word processing, which started circulating the Internet in 2003:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

If you didn’t get that, the text is supposed to read,

According to a researcher (sic) at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole.

It is important to note that this isn’t entirely true. Since my background in Cognitive Science is rather weak, I won’t go into all the details, but one bit I found interesting in the analysis of the above claim was the idea that word shape influences reading. The typographer in me is inclined to believe this statement even before reviewing the hard evidence.

First let us revisit the offending text:

If we take away the swapped “M” and “N” and the “I” (since it only appears in “Indomie”), we can see the middle and ends of both words are visually identical.

Add in the fact that “M” and “N” are structurally similar and that the thin profile of the “I” tends to disappear when wedged between much blockier letters, and you do what I did, begin to see food in places where it doesn’t belong.