i am unfocused this week. i attribute it to several things: a hectic week and a half at work, me being bogged down with coughing and congestion, my hair and nails getting long and needing to be cut, j being away on a business trip, and the beginnings of autumn.

it might've just been a coincidence that i received 3 emails today about upcoming events in nyc. i liked this one the best and wished i'd been able to go to this one even though i don't know who sent it because it's from a friend of a friend.

"Autumn is floating in.

So the thought is, movie night on the roof can shift from summer dressed glasses of rose to hoodied cups of hot cocoa. The roof, love, and prostitution on weehawken street remain constant.

All are welcome, friends of friends and closer and vaguer. We hope to provide mugs of warmth at very least, brownies and pizza at our fanciest."

i don't receive many personal emails since i don't send many out anymore, but this is definitely one of the best i've received in a while. hot cocoa and pizza on a rooftop with a pretty prostitute sound good right about now. i can almost taste the brisk air.

i used to hate autumn in nyc. it was associated with going back to school and the days getting shorter and darker and colder. it felt like responsibility re-emerging after long lazy days of nothingness.

i suppose autumn has begun to show itself here in la. i sleep with two blankets now, wore a scarf when i went on a walk with a client this morning, and have the sniffles. despite having been in la for 5 years now, i still feel like i'm trying to find my bearings. i moved to la exactly one week after the 1st anniversary of sept 11.  i know other xangans are celebrating similar anniversaries (ahem, eurieka).

i've come a long way. just this week, i upgraded my status from "la hater" to "explorer." i'm not yet ready to consider being a "transplant." this upgrade occurred when i pulled into a strip mall in el monte yesterday that had several vietnamese businesses and restaurants. i walked into a restaurant that advertised "bun bo hue" and was thoroughly excited about the prospect of having a good and cheap bowl. this is my most favorite vietnamese noodle soup in the whole wide world - like whole wide world. unfortunately, the only other place i've found that makes it better than my mom was at a random truck stop in vietnam, in the city of hue where the soup gets its name. the restaurant in hue had rows of plastic tables and chairs occupied with people slurping their morning bowl of bun bo hue next to a dusty road. i happily slurped my bowl clean and then downed a warm glass of soy milk. my stomach rumbled and i made a serious beeline for the bathroom kicking myself for not realizing there was water in the soymilk. after a surprisingly quick and painless deposit in the potty that left my bowels intact, i decided that i'd just had the best meal of my young 21 years of life.

i was foolish to think that this moment could be recreated with this visit to a restaurant in el monte, but i definitely hoped for something in the ballpark. the soup was definitely tasty but i was more enamored by the sweet waitress who was attentive and actually nice to me. big revelation here: servers in vietnamese restaurants are pretty indifferent to you if you're vietnamese. in addition to being nice, she also didn't have the trappings of a tragic vietnamese waitress that can be intriguing to the social worker in me but can leave me feeling guilty and distracted with wondering what kind of shit she's been through in her life while i've spent mine quietly slurping my soup. fortunately, this waitress was so nice that i'll return mainly because my work in the field can be pretty isolating so a nice smile with a warm meal is always welcome.

most of my clients live in el monte and the san gabriel valley where i've been embarking on my part-time pho eating expedition. i don't have any qualms eating by myself in a restaurant. sometimes eating by myself allows me to people watch.

i’ve been exploring and people watching at the Rosemead Public Library on tuesday afternoons. i go there to get paperwork done while avoiding having to shell out money to feed the Starbucks machine and listen to a cooing norah jones. 

a large part of my work is listening to people all day. despite the human contact, it can get lonely at times as i crisscross the city along its numerical arteries: the 10, 110, 101, 605, 91, 710, and 405 listening to NPR in my silver tin box. these routes take me to people’s homes and into their lives where they share stories of grief, sadness, and small triumphs. my daily documentation notes swarm with clinical buzzwords: encourage, assist, praise, identify, validate, redirect, reflect, reframe, empathize, normalize, and acknowledge.

the library is a different place. i sit at a nondescript wooden cubicle with a small hutch and a taped sign that reads: No Food. No Drinks. Silence is Golden. this ordinary setting is an invigorating respite because it asks nothing of me, yet provides me a glimpse into what i, as a new yorker, remember to be humanizing – anonymous human contact. i sit next to a complete stranger who is reading some kind of reference book who sits next to two really annoying school age Chinese American boys who sit next to an older Chinese American man reading the LA times who tried to nonchalantly steal one of the boys’ seat, who sits next to an older white man looking at personal photos of a faraway place, who sits next to a much older Asian man who is reading a Chinese newspaper and looks like he’s been at the library since it opened - this morning. 

living in the city of angels, i miss my former life as a voyeur. i enjoy stealing glances and observing behaviors not intended for me. reading Harriet the Spy in the 4^th grade was like reading the autobiography i was supposed to write. maybe in some ways, harriet was also an explorer.

they're still here.

i wake up this morning and cautiously walk into the kitchen. my fears are confirmed as i hear the terrifying buzzing coming from the air vent above the stove. i had to kill one of the bees who managed to escape and was banging itself against the glass sliding door. i'm not proud but i feel like i had no choice.

i've called my landlord who says he'll come take a look this afternoon. my landlord's this septuagenarian JA man named joey and i wanted to be like "wear some protective gear and be careful to not get stung" but i already sounded crazy calling him early monday morning with, "um, there are bees coming into my apt through the air vent. i killed seven of them yesterday. can someone come by today?" 

i wanted the spraying rampage to stop, so i sealed the gaps in the air vent where i suspected the bees were coming in with tape. unfortunately, all i had was electrical or clear packing tape. the morning appeared full of terrible choices. after sealing the vent tightly with electrical tape, i went out to the kitchen several minutes later to check on it. good thing i did because there it was, this black mass of tape hanging limply leaving the gaps wide open for the next bee to come buzzing in and die in the line of fire. i tried the packing tape which wasn't so precise but seems to be getting the job done.

currently, i'm worried about two things. one, i'm worried about coming back to the apt later on and finding a thriving bee colony in my home. anyone who knows me knows how i feel about conquistadors. two, i'm worried that the landlord will come to do a perimeter inspection only to find no bees. they'll either have caught a case of colony collapse disorder and lost their way back to my makeshift hive or they'll be on their best behavior when he comes and be all dressed up and smoking a pipe casually on my couch and be like, "bees? what bees? no bees here, sir." and then send him on his merry septuagenarian way.

the honey bees in 35 states, five canadian provinces and several european countries have gone missing. scientists are baffled and farmers are worried since the bees are needed to pollinate their crops. although the bees may not have found their way back to the hive, they somehow found my apt.

i came home after a productive sunday morning of buying household stuff. i walk into my kitchen to put all my stuff down and notice what looks like a giant fly smacking itself into the glass sliding door. i start to wonder how a fly got into the apartment then quickly realize that it's a bee and it's not alone. there are several bees buzzing around near the sliding door and i start to freak out. they look and sound like they're freaking out too as they're desperately trying to get out. i think about opening the sliding door to let them out, but the thought of going near desperate bees freaks me out even more. in a weird coincidence, one of the things i had just bought was bug killer. i grab it and can't get past the child-proof nozzle because i'm starting to panic. even though i'm not standing near them, the bee buzzing seems deafening and terrifying. i finally figure out the nozzle, aim and spray them dead. i kill 7 of them.

yes, 7.

but the buzzing hasn't stopped. i search around for the noise and identify that it's coming from the air vent above the stove. i am completely freaked out at this point and all i can do is spray and pray that a swarm of bees have not built a hive in my air vent. i spray until the buzzing ceases and the vent is dripping in bug spray. in the concluding silence, i feel terrible and guilty.

the sad irony is that i had spent much of the morning trying to reduce my carbon footprint with careful deliberation about what kind of household cleaning products to buy and how to improve the life of my household plants, and then i go home to massacre missing bees. i imagine al gore and the queen bee just shaking their heads in disappointment.

here's an article in the latimes about the missing bees.

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-bees10jun10,0,1027860.story?track=mostviewed-storylevel

as you can tell from the date of my previous entry, i've not been writing much - well, at least not publicly. i have a nice orange leather journal that i keep near my bedside that has been collecting my thoughts lately and that's where i'd like them to stay, thank you for very much. but i decided to write something today that someone outside of myself might read when i got an email on a listserve requesting me and others like me to write to the Arclight Theater in Hollywood to screen Ham Tran's film, Journey From the Fall. if you don't know what i'm talking about, you need to stop reading now because chances are i don't like you, due in large part because you live under a rock and know no righteous vietnamese american - not that under a rock is where we congregate or anything... but i digress. 

i've been hearing and thinking a lot about Journey From the Fall ever since getting the email blasts about its opening two weeks ago. fortunately i've seen the film and so have my mom, dad, and sister. it's an amazing film and my sister and i shamelessly watched it faces red and tear-streaked and at some points seriously sobbing beside our stoic parents who were bewildered by our public display of gravity. the freeflow of tears and snot were definitely not abated by the fact that i shared the same name as one of the female characters who's dad is in a re-education camp. i'm stating the obvious here, but i seriously love my dad and imagining him in a re-education camp trying to desperately contact me even though i've fled the country is really much too much for me to stay dry-eyed for. the film has also been on my mind since i heard a piece on NPR yesterday as i was driving and i almost started to cry as they played a clip.

anywho, for some reason, the film is playing in a lot of cities but not in LA so  i decided to procrastinate on some serious work-related paperwork and wrote this little ditty to the Arclight. i felt rather smug and decided to share. i have no delusions about this letter meaning or impacting very much in the larger scheme of world events, but i had fun writing it and telling you about it.

Dear Arclight,

Don't turn a deaf ear to the enthusiastic and rave reviews from critics and movie audiences in New York, San Jose, and film festivals including freaking SUNDANCE who have declared that ***Journey From the Fall by Ham Tran*** is an amazing and worthwhile film! You must screen this film! In case you didn't notice as you slurped from your hipster $7.00 bowl of pho in Silver Lake, the Vietnamese are here in America and definitely here in LA and we are an audience to be reckoned with. Journey From the Fall had the highest per screening average since it opened 2 weeks ago. If you're deaf to critics and audiences, don't be dumb and ignore the box office potential too. If you wouldn't think twice about a retro screening of Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now or some trite Oliver Stone film about the American perspective on the Vietnam War, don't think twice about showing this film that shows a different view that's equally important yet never, ever, ever seen - what the Vietnamese really went through *after* the war. Yes, we survived and not to just put more pho in your bowl and write you snarky emails about showing a great but overlooked film, but to be recognized. Please show this film.