8.3.05-- This update is me bragging about how famous I am.

Friends, countrymen! I have come to boast!

Head to your newsstand right now! And look for me! I'm in a feminist pop culture magazine. BUST! Woo woo! A teeny article with a little picture. What I am most proud about is that this is the "Men We Love" issue. Colleen, who wrote the article says it would have been a longer article except because of the issue's theme they had to SHRINK me. The patriarchy is always working against me-- I tell you!

The article outs my age, which is ok, I needed to stop trying to pass myself off as a 16 year old at auditions anyway.

Here I am with Colleen who wrote the article. While I was in NYC, we hung out in the East Village at night. We ran into some guys she knew while walking around the street and went up to their place, then I passed out and started drooling on Colleen. People tend to like taking pics of me while I'm passed out. That whole night was nuts. I took the subway back to Sunshine's place and could barely keep my eyes open. Someone had to wake me up at the station so I could get on the train.

I am in a book called "The Asian Mystique."

It's written by Sheridan Prasso. You can buy it here. In it is a pic of me beating the crap out of my old boyfriend Ben and some commentary on my work. Sheri's cool. I got to hang with her in NYC (See above). And she reports my age as two years younger than BUST does so that's why I like her so much! Keep me young Sheri!

More press!

Here I am in another magazine that the kids at UMASS Amherst put together. Nexus! My article is not up on their site but maybe it will be one day. Anyway, the whole point of this is for me to brag right? All the stuff in the interview is probably crap you already know about me from reading this site! The interview is printed in Instant Messenger format. One day I'll put it on this site. Until then you will just have to look at the picture of the cat trying to read it.

New shows in the works

I haven't really been talking much about what I've been up to. I thought this was going to be a chill summer, but it's gotten pretty nuts pretty fast. I'm juggling this graduate work, but I've been working on two shows.

I've been rehearsing for this one person show called "American Voices"-- a one person, eight character show that tours through "Will and Company" to colleges all over the country. It's a big change for me from the self-written conceptual stuff I am used to. I feel like a real actor (as opposed to a fake one?)! I spend my days memorizing and reciting lines, and I go into the studio to rehearse with the director. I am having so much fun playing characters who are men and women, and are all different ethnicities. One of the characters is a skinhead! I am even learning sign language for one of the roles! So much fun! It's not as hard as I thought it would be to learn-- it's such poetry. Unlike my solo shows, all I have to do is focus on being the best actor I can be, as opposed to what I am used to when I do a show-- getting embroiled in contracts, negotiating fees, booking plane flights, driving rental cars, and all that other crap that totally drags out the fun of doing a show!

As soon as I got back from Rochester, I started the HOTHOUSE residency at UCLA where I started baby stepping for my new solo show "Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." It's a show idea I thought of last year when I was doing a mini-residency at Wellesley College. Remember when I thought I had ADHD? I was thinking about mental illness in general. How many people I know who are in therapy and on anti-depressants and I was really beginning to think how mental illness may not so much be about chemicals in the brain that are imbalanced, but a world that's crazier than we are. Plus there has to be more than a few cultural and political factors that are putting young Asian American women at the second highest rate of suicide. Anyway, so that's the premise. What happened in the two weeks I was workshopping the show was basically a huge mindfuck where I brought in different artists to come talk with me and we discussed the huge prism/ matrix that is our psychology. Sometimes we'd just talk in circles or just start crying about our parents. You'll hear more about that show in the upcoming year.

I am going to Korea in October!

I was selected to be a participate in the Korea Multi-Cultural Leadership Program. So I've been doing research online to figure out what to eat while I am there. I'm a vegetarian you know. Unless I can get to the "Buddhist Street" in Seoul, I'll be really scrounging for food to eat. I found this site to learn basic phrases in Korean. It's so cute and has flash animation. I laughed during the restaurant lesson because it tell you how to ask for a fork and ask for the food to be less spicy-- for the haoles. Unfortunately there is no lesson teaching you how to say, "Have you seen Rick Yune?" or "Take me to where all the hot Korean guys hang out at."

Funny story about Internet Porn

Anyway, today's funny story unrelated to how famous I am has to do with me going to the Genius Bar to get my airport on my G4 fixed. I've been told that you should back up your stuff when you bring your computer in for servicing at the Apple Store. Anyway, so I was frantically throwing out all my embarassing video files downloaded from Limewire into the trash. That would be the Paris Hilton Video (come on, like you haven't seen it), the Britney and Kevin "Chaotic" episodes (so horrifying, and yet, I couldn't stop watching), oh yeah... and some "personal research" mpgs...ahem (Hey! It's post feminist....). Anyway, I wanted to delete those off my computer so that the Apple people wouldn't find it. So all day today I was frantically burning and throwing out all those naughty embarassing files. And when I get to the Genius Bar, I ask this cute-ish Asian guy to help me and then realize that I didn't empty out my trash! I tried to empty the trash before handing it off to him, but he snatched up my laptop from under me and said, "I'll be back."

He disappeared in a backroom. I began imagining him going through my trash to figure out what went wrong with my laptop, seeing all my mpgs thrown there in a panic. Would he watch them? Laugh at me? Or worse-- judge me!? He came back like 15 minutes later and said, "Ok, it works now. I had to clean your computer for you, no offense, it was really dirty."

I gasped. And my face turned red.

"Yeah, your screen and keys were really dirty. So I cleaned them for you,"

He was right, they were dirty.

Love,

Kristina