Gnucash

I’ve finally surmounted the hurdles of installing (via Macports) and learning Gnucash (not to mention resolving QFX import issues), so this is the year I’m financially and maybe meticulously organized. Gnucash, somewhat a geeky miscegenation of Linux users and accountants, is a bit less intuitive than your Quicken, your MS Money, your Java-based cross-platform Moneydance yearning to breath market share, so I kinda had to learn Accounting 101 to get started (but I hope someday such knowledge may prove useful).

As of 2007, I even have my salary as split transactions (splitting to federal, state, pre-tax deduction accounts, etc). Right now, I have my FSA set up as an asset credited from pre-tax salary splits, but I’m not sure how to arrange the company contributions (per pay) other than in a (totaled annual credit) initial balance.

It’s February now, so let’s see if I can keep this up another eleven months.

Leaf Art

I was thinking of cutting up colored leaves and pasting the fragments like pixels. But that’s a lot of work — I’d have to sketch a scene and color code it. I’m back to the drawing board at the moment. I’m not really finding any particularly pretty leaves for that whole-leaf kind of esthetic.

My friend from L.A. kept commenting about how many trees and green were around when she was here in the summer, and I kind of thought she was an alien or something. (I gather there aren’t deciduous trees in L.A., or so she claims). I was imagining we could start a seasonal exchange program — I’ll send her autumn while it’s plentiful here and, I dunno, she can send me palm trees in the dead of winter.

Gravelly Point

he said, (17 days ago)
If you ever fly to Washington National Airport (Reagan, not Dulles or BWI), then be sure to have a window seat for the River Visual Approach. For landing, be on the left side for the view of downtown D.C. But be sure not to stand up during the approach or you’ll be considered a terrorist.

Oh, at the end of National Airport’s runway is Gravelly Point, which is where you take your date after hours to make out on the river as deafening airplanes land on top of you.

So, Sunday I cycled the [more than] Four Mile Run to Shirlington and from South Arlington up along the river, crossed the Key Bridge into Georgetown, and made my way to Dupont Circle. I took the Mount Vernon Trail around National Airport, and I must say Gravelly Point can be stunning in the day as well:

You pass a small dock and parking lot before you break out into this vast open field that overlooks the Potomac and monumental D.C. on the other bank. Pedal traffic on the trail is brisk and children on the field fill the aural void between landings with their spirited play.

As you round your bend, the aircraft rounds its river run, aligning you both in a sort of post-9/11 catharsis, and you have to brake to avoid collision with awestruck pedestrians paused mid-path with their own premonition of collision. When you’re a pebble’s throw from the safety decal on landing gear still in-flight, do you have the cerebrum to resent the media-frenzied image of your generation?

Gyopo TV

Yesterday my father was watching Korean television during my brief homecoming and it’s hilarious — the local tv ads are not polished in a national corporate PR/Marketing sort of way but rather in a badly lit amateur amagalm of English and Korean made on your home computer kind of way. They often use the token white person to say affirming things about the products. Or sometimes they just have the white person in a consumer situation abruptly really happy with the product; it’s so funny. The suburbs are so multicultural (and that’s also, btw, why we keep you white people around — you’re so affirming.)

Ctrl-C Copy, Rubber-Cement Paste

What if we were to carry on in nothing but home-made postcards?

No such wanton immediacy as email-enabled cellphone or MySpace commentary — our interpersonal Luddism exiling us back to an earlier, e-less era, save nothing but a photo printer strapped to our prelapsarian backs.

The retrosexual esthetics of pen, postage, and, uh, the photochemical processes that didn’t actually happen?

Half and Half

[In response to a conversation about gender-disproportionate interracial dating patterns:]

I have always thought that it would be cosmetically cute if a hapa dated another hapa in such a circumstance where their mismatched ethnic parentage would magically align. Like when she talks all about her mother, he can relate with his father. And vice versa. Everything he missed out on because he lacked that side of the ethnography, she would fill him in on. And vice versa. At their wedding, the in-laws would alternate the biracial rows down the trans-Pacific aisle (and vice versa) — the matrimony a mock simulation of multi-ethnic purity in a post-Sean Lennon world.

But, uh, when’s the last time you met a hapa who didn’t have a white dad? In my travels the ratio is still overwhelmingly a vestige of U.S. military intervention in postcolonial Asia. The racially-crisscrossed hapa-on-hapa action can’t happen until the ladies even up the score a little and take out the Asian lads.

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i wish i were a hapa said she to he.

youll always be in my target demographic said he.

i only want to be a hapa so we can get married said she.

i only want you to be a hapa for the racy hapa on hapa action said he.

앗싸!!!

Isn’t it great how the carton just has a picture of the tubby cylindrical drink as it is known and not, say, the eponymous fruit?

I’ve always wondered what’s actually in “banana milk” and now, thanks to the FDA (and its Canadian equivalent in French), I can read the ingredients. And, as I suspected, not a single banana was harmed in the production of what I’m somewhat relieved to know carries the warning “Contains Milk Ingredients.”

Gosh, but it’s good even in the environmentally-unfriendly form
factor. Now they just need to sell it at Union Station, and my pseudomilk-pacified stomach saudade will be sated.

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