{"id":1263,"date":"2008-02-27T20:02:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-28T03:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/blog\/?p=1263"},"modified":"2008-02-27T20:02:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-28T03:02:00","slug":"1263","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/?p=1263","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>always be free.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This is how it&#8217;s been. Every since my trip to San Francisco, I&#8217;ve been unstoppable. The same energy that was moving me last summer was coming through me, completely unapologetic. So I&#8217;ve played big, getting into people without trying, making things happen. If I can grab a person through their eyes, it&#8217;s like we have this link, and that&#8217;s when truthful things happen.<\/p>\n<p>Coming back home, I realized I don&#8217;t hate Los Angeles, I&#8217;m just bored here. I love my home, I love the area, I love the little pockets I&#8217;ve made familiar. I love that I can be a complete stranger. But what I want from it is this&#8211;I want it to give me a reason to stay. The biggest issue is that I just don&#8217;t have enough connections out here because so many times, I look into someone&#8217;s eyes and there&#8217;s no one home. &#8220;This human is on auto-pilot.&#8221; A deserted little control room still in mechanical operation like on Lost.<\/p>\n<p>But then I started thinking, maybe if I put out my energy, I can wake people up. So I&#8217;ve been walking around like I&#8217;ve got this fire trapped inside my inner-most compartment, just raging to get out and making me highly uncomfortable if I don&#8217;t keep expanding. I&#8217;ve been telling people how things are, not so much as words, but as realities. And they follow those lines. I&#8217;m always mindful that what I project is for their own good, or a positive step towards a collective benefit. Because at the end of the day, that&#8217;s the fiber of what I am.<\/p>\n<p>At work I&#8217;ve been a little war general. And we&#8217;ve got an uprising. But of course, I&#8217;ve come to terms that should the movement fail, I will be the one sacrificed. I volunteered myself because I am the only one who can afford it.<\/p>\n<p>So my brain has been completely focused on work, how to structure the exact reality I want there. I haven&#8217;t done much in this time outside of working, watching DVDs and going to the gym. Basketball and seeing those weekend morning guys has been a real pleasure and highlight. But outside of that, I limit all of my attention to work and listening to strangers for my next maneuvers.<\/p>\n<p>I was terrified of this WangCon trip. WangCon was basically this amazing Girls-to-Vegas trip some friends of mine went on last year to see Prince. Apparently, it was such a life-changing experience, it was an event that had to be recreated and shared with as many loved ones as possible. So somehow, the idea of a girls&#8217; Vegas trip expanded to the initiation of seeing a wang show. Apparently, some other girls had gone and swore it was funny and interesting.<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I don&#8217;t care for strippers. The door opens, you get this cheesy guy who still thinks it&#8217;s the 80&#8217;s. He brings his own gear bag and a broke-ass stereo. And five minutes later, he&#8217;s dancing as 20 middle-aged Asian women go scattering for the corners.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, this was my experience of male strippers from embarrassing family events.<\/p>\n<p>And ever since Sareet came up with the idea that you could get crabs in your eyelashes from twirling wang, I&#8217;ve been terrified for my vanity.<\/p>\n<p>But I really had a feeling that no was not an acceptable answer, so even though I hadn&#8217;t even been able to make myself pack yet with 3 hours to go before boarding, I had my coworker smoke me out, and I marched over to meet the girls for a trip I truly prayed I survived.<\/p>\n<p><strong>8:30pm Flight to Vegas<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I note that it&#8217;s a little bit awkward. We&#8217;re a tribe without form. It&#8217;s like the opening episode of The Amazing Race with the underlying fear that within hours, we may very well want to kill each other.<\/p>\n<p>We meet up with some other girls (no one shall be named). I had booked late (I was all about procrastination with this trip) so I separated from the pack to rows down. I wish I had brought my DVD player but was happy to have my iPod. Been listening to a lot of the Stones, the Animals, classic rock etc. I have noise-cancelling headphones. Still, I heard a woman loudly proclaim, something something &#8220;WEINER!&#8221; I took off my headphones and turned around. Of course it was someone from our party. I got their attention and said in a very severe tone, &#8220;Can you guys just chill it?&#8221; I made an open gesture at everyone seated between us. Sareet immediately told everyone to shush. &#8220;<em>Thank you<\/em>.&#8221; I said, shaking my head, making eye contact with everyone nodding sympathetically at me and who obviously had no idea I was with the same rowdy group. I whispered to a friend close by&#8230;&#8221;Just promise you&#8217;ll bail me out by Sunday. I&#8217;ve gotta be at work Monday morning.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We were very excited about having ordered a limo which came with a driver who would be bearing the sign, &#8220;WangCon.&#8221; They wondered what the guy thought about girls coming for something called WangCon, so I said offered to pretend I was a woman named Connie Wang and it was my birthday.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5171495920638806130\" style=\"DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_iCMEyfnxjU4\/R8TYI9sOyHI\/AAAAAAAAAGY\/FgQJzw1Caqk\/s320\/sign.JPG\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<p>We were very happy with the sign.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5171497054510172290\" style=\"DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_iCMEyfnxjU4\/R8TZK9sOyII\/AAAAAAAAAGg\/zSukMXpJOxo\/s320\/sign2.JPG\" border=\"0\" \/><br \/><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5171497166179322002\" style=\"DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/_iCMEyfnxjU4\/R8TZRdsOyJI\/AAAAAAAAAGo\/hP_AF7thwDE\/s320\/sign3.JPG\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I met a girl named Tinkerbell. You would not believe it, but she looked like her name would be Tinkerbell. Guess which one:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5171498755317221538\" style=\"DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_iCMEyfnxjU4\/R8Tat9sOyKI\/AAAAAAAAAGw\/zgLrUphnnjk\/s320\/group.JPG\" border=\"0\" \/>We had champagne and our own soundtrack in the limo which included this:<\/p>\n<p><object height=\"355\" width=\"425\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/qpQSvlPDZw8&amp;rel=1\"><param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\"><\/object><\/p>\n<p>This is now my favorite song. <\/p>\n<p>More later. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>always be free. This is how it&#8217;s been. Every since my trip to San Francisco, I&#8217;ve been unstoppable. The same energy that was moving me last summer was coming through me, completely unapologetic. So I&#8217;ve played big, getting into people without trying, making things happen. If I can grab a person through their eyes, it&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sbl5mn-1263","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliashih.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}