Day Three: Christina the Riveter, Food Journey Episode 1

6/18/15, 9:37 PM PDT

Today was an alright day. Woke up at 10 AM after finishing yesterday's blog entry at THREE IN THE GODDAMN MORNING.

Not exactly as pleasant as Mr. Star makes it out to be.
(via deviantart.com)

Speaking of yesterday's blog post, I forgot to add a few pictures from yesterday, so have 'em right now:

If the person in front of us were a little bit taller, we would've had
a nice MST3K-esque shot on our hands but we didn't.

Squad pic.

Christina, minutes after asking our waiter at Islands if they had
virgins available on the menu.

You know, that last picture kinda reminds me of something...

Oh now I remember, it reminds me Donovan!

So since it was such an obvious similarity and because I have too much free time on my hands...

It's been the motto of the Ho clan since their conception creation.

SO ANYWAY, back to today's events. My parents are notoriously safe eaters and they HATE eating at new places, so I'm trying to get them to explore what foodstuffs Mira Mesa has to offer. We've been here for over seven years and they only JUST tried stuff like The Boiling Crab and The Loving Hut this year, which is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE.

I say NO MORE Popeyes dinners, Dominos Pizza lunches, and McDonalds breakfasts. Starting this summer, I am gonna make my family explore the ever loving GOD out of Mira Mesa, whether they like it or not. Starting with Pho Ban Mai.

Even though it's right next to Seafood City, my parents have NEVER eaten here.
(via  jinxieats.com)

We ordered some nice salt and pepper chicken with butter and garlic, fried rice, pho, and boba to wash it all down and it was delicious. No pictures of the food this time, because this is a summer blog, not a food blog. I mean you already have to deal with the torture of seeing people's food pictures on Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram, I'm not gonna force you to sit through that kind of stuff here too. 

(Yesterday was an exception though, since it was Kevin's first time and we needed documentation)

Afterwards, we went to Target to burn off (some of) the calories we got from eating the delicious, delicious food. They have a "Summer Sale" section where they're selling pool/swimwear and grilling equipment on the same aisle. It's almost like they're trying to say something.

It's probably something along the lines of "eat the children."
(via amazon.com)

Vivian N was there and so was Allison H, who saw me absolutely fail at riding a penny board down an aisle so I'm probably never gonna live that down.

RFotD: The precursor to the inflatable bouncy castle was developed in 1959 by a man who was designing an inflatable cover for tennis courts.

Day Two: Sushi, Shooting, And Sobbing

6/17/15, 10:48 PM PDT

It's days like this where I wish that teleportation was a feasible, non-lethal way of transportation. Today's itinerary consists of the following:

1. Sushi at near Westfield UTC with my English group (the Hurly Burlies) at noon.
2. Filming at La Jolla Cove with Limbert and the Bang Bros (great band name, by the way) at 3PM.
3. Watching Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (for free!) at the movie theater with Kamichan and Sam.

Don't worry about the abundance of group names right now, you'll get used to them as the summer progresses.

So, first stop, Sushi Ki, for the much awaited Hurly Burly Sushiventure that Christina has been proposing for OVER NINE MONTHS.

Better be worth it if I had to wait an entire pregnancy
for this to happen.

But before we could even think about eating sushi, we had to deal with getting there first. And getting there was... scary. I initially told Kayla's grandpa (our main source of transportation) that I had to get home by 2, and since they didn't start picking people up from their houses until 12:15, we had to LEG IT to make sure we had enough time to eat everything. We probably went over 70 MPH down residential roads to pick up Angela, Christina, and me in under a minute, and a few times during that drive, I think we almost died because Kayla's grandpa decided to pull some risky maneuver that saved precious seconds of sushi-eating time in exchange for the safety and well-being of the passengers in his car. But because of a combination of his skilled Air Force pilot training and the alignment of certain celestial bodies, we managed to make it to the sushi spot in one piece.

So this lunchtime sushi trip would be the first time that Kevin T. has EVER eaten sushi, so we went pretty damn crazy with our orders. Here's an exact list of the stuff we ordered.

• The Crunch Dragon
• The Spicy Washington
• The Ki House Roll
• The Baked Salmon
• The Spider
• The Spicy Girl
• The Rock and Roll

Jesus. Those sound less like pieces of fish wrapped around rice and more like really painful yoga/bedroom babymaking positions.

"If I can't even do downward dog, how the hell am I gonna
be able to do the Spicy Washington?"
(via trish52newthings.blogspot.com)

The sushi was AMAZING though. I'm not much for food pictures, but just take a look at some of our plates.

Even before we started eating, Christina was calling out to her inner Ho.

Just imagine the best sushi you ever had, multiply it by fifty, and you'll start
to imagine how some of this stuff tasted.

And here are the people that I shared this delicious food with.

All Christina ever wanted was Angela's love. She'll have to wait another day.

Kevin chooses his sushi as if he's studying for his midterms.

About halfway through the sushi session, we figured out that the selfie sticks we got for free from the senior breakfast have threaded holes in the bottom of them. And since they had threaded screws on the top of them too, we tried to combine two selfie sticks to make one super long selfie stick.

And we succeeded.

I wasn't able to get a profile view of both sticks, but
just take my word for it. It was really goddamn long.

We didn't really have an opportunity to take pictures with it right there, but we did get this rare footage of me almost cheating on Samantha.

Given the circumstances, I believe she would understand.
(via Christina)

One last group picture...

Hurly Burlies for life.
(via Christina)

And then I quickly got dropped off home by Kayla's grandpa, changed into my prom clothing, and got a ride with Sam to La Jolla Cove. Where we waited for Toossi to come film us...

And waited....

And waited....

For a whole hour. They didn't get here until 5 PM, which was a lot later than we would have liked. But hey, we got to film with Toossi and his beautiful girlfriend, so it was worth it.

They'll make beautiful children. Hopefully without
too many defects.

Sam and I were running late already by the end of the shoot, so we didn't have time to change out of our prom clothes. Instead, we went to the early screening of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl looking like this:

Some people thought we were part of the movie because
we were dressed fancy, hah.
(via Christina)

We eventually watched the movie. And it was a BEAUTIFUL movie. Really funny. Really entertaining. Really sad. I would really love to discuss it here more in detail, but it hasn't come out yet officially and I really don't want to spoil anything, so just WATCH IT as soon as you can. It's got story, acting, animation, titties, it has EVERYTHING you could ever want in a movie. Watch it. Please.

Oh, and to close this entry off, remember that super long selfie stick we got from combining two sticks? Here are the resulting pictures.

The selfie stick's tip was like... 20 feet off the ground?

 

We're all smiling now, but inside, we were all scared that the selfie
stick would snap in half and destroy a phone.

All in all, a very good day.

RFotD: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl was acquired by Fox Searchlight for 12 million dollars after Sundance, which was the largest acquisition deal in the festival's history.

Day One: Runaway Dog

6/16/15, 10:47 PM PDT

Woke up at 7 AM today to drop Megan off at school. Even though we live a few feet from her school, it was decided that someone needed to accompany her on the long journey to the school to maintain her safety. Ironically, because I woke up early and cranky and didn't eat breakfast at the time, it was probably more dangerous for my zombified self to walk her to school.

Basically this morning.
(via cnet.com)

The only good thing about me waking up early today was the fact that I got to play fetch with this little guy for an hour.

Yes, that is my backyard. No, my family is not biologically white.
(via my dad)

Meet Mocha. He's cute. He's very smart. Very playful. And he's very furry.

Sounds an awful lot like my girlfriend oh damn!

We're dogsitting him for a few weeks and my sister and I fully intend on making the most of that time. We play fetch with him every day and we pet him and try to do things that use up his seemingly limitless supply of happy energy. Like just today, we went for a mile walk around the neighborhood (we would have went longer, but my sister's frail legs couldn't handle much more).

And at one point, Mocha almost escaped.

See that brown cotton-ball shaped thing in the picture above? That's his head. Or, more specifically, that's the fur around his head. His actual head (the part with the skull and stuff) is much, much, much smaller than that picture suggests.

Okay, so why am I mentioning this? Because at some point or another during that walk, he managed to SLIP HIS HEAD OUT OF HIS COLLAR.

It was just like a jailbreak. An adorable, adorable jailbreak.
(via gifbin.com)

Luckily, my sister and I had LIGHTNING FAST reflexes. We caught Mocha right before he was about to sprint into the street and we went straight up MIRA MESA POLICE DEPARTMENT on that dog. We tackled him into the grass and we wrestled that collar around his neck and we tightened it so it would never let Mocha go and it was totally, completely unnecessary.

A dramatization of the events that we went through.
(via cbssports.com)

I'm only kidding of course. Mocha, the nice little dog he is, didn't resist at all to putting the collar back on. He just stayed motionless, lying on the ground, patiently waiting for me to clumsily put his loose collar on so we could keep walking.

I love that dog.

A few other interesting things happened. The Skype group and I played Town of Salem, which is basically online Mafia, but with a Salem Witch Trials feel. Then Megan and I played Melee/Project M (which I only lost 50 stocks to her), and spent the majority of the remaining time planning out a little summer trip my family is going on. But where/what exactly that trip includes, I won't say. You'll just have to read it when it comes out in a month or two!

RFotD: In the four years I've known this dog, it has never failed to return the tennis ball when I throw it. Unless you know, you throw it some bullshit way, like behind something or underneath something.

Day Zero: Senior Breakfast, I Talk To Red Books

6/15/15, 10:07 PM PDT

(Note: I'm still getting used to the blog being back up again, so the first few days probably aren't gonna be too photo-dense)

So today, on my last day of compulsory, government-mandated school, we had our senior breakfast. For non-high schoolers or my readers in foreign countries, it's basically a breakfast with our entire high school class that's more or less an excuse to have the entire Class of 2015 do one last thing together before we go into the real world. The cold, cruel, frightening real world.

If it's anything like MTV portrays it to be, we're all screwed.
(via wikipedia.org)

I would say that it's surreal that today would be the last day of something I've been a part of for the past four years. I would say that it'll be strange to imagine not having to wake up at 5:45 AM every day, plow through six straight hours of school, pass out at home for a few hours, and start homework at 8 PM. And I would say that I'm gonna miss seeing a bunch of people on a regular basis.

But I skipped breakfast today and I was starving, so none of that was going through my mind. I was just thinking about the food. The delicious, delicious food. I didn't grab any pictures, but they had bacon, scrambled eggs, breakfast burrito stations, omelette-making stations, and some weird apple-cinnamon thing that looked gross but tasted delicious.

It sort of looked like this, except more syrupy and less appetizing.
(via guavarose.com)

And it was ALL YOU CAN EAT. Which meant my famished little stomach was very very happy.

They had a bunch of activities too. There was a photobooth (which of course, my friend group and I hit up).

It took me two pictures to realize that the camera wasn't
on the ceiling.

And a flipbook, which my friends also indulged in.

It's supposed to be an allegory to nature's inevitable triumph over mankind
or something.

There was also DDR, which we played, and karaoke, which we did not do because 90% of the time it was playing Nickelback and our requested song, Party in the USA, never came up. In hindsight, I think it was a good decision not to sing because if we did, we probably would have ruined the entire senior breakfast for everyone. Because everyone's eardrums would have been ruptured.

A cool thing they also had was this one dude promoting a movie called "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl" and it looks pretty damn good. I haven't really heard a synopsis or anything of the film, but based on the guy's mumbled spiel, the fact that it's a Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury/Audience Award winner (which Whiplash was also a past winner of), and all of the free merchandise we got, I'd say I'm pretty hyped about it.

And I mean it when I say we got a lot of merchandise. We got posters...

More to decorate my room with.

Shirts...

I'll be wearing this during finals week in UCLA then.

And this dumb looking box.

Unfortunately, it does not contain embarrassing pictures of Spongebob
at the Christmas party.

But what was in this dumb looking box? A FREE SELFIE STICK! AWWW YEAH.

Or, as the kind women at the convent call it, the Vanity Pike.

Here we have the lovely, Berkely bound Kurtland Chua demonstrating its length.

A natural born Vanna White, huh?

Pretty glad I got this thing. I'm probably gonna use it as a ghetto crane for films and stuff, as soon as I find a way to either make my hands less shaky or stabilize the camera. I'll figure out a non-selfie use for it someday, promise.

Later today, the squad and I (with "squad" being defined as Angela, Kayla, Christina, Gwendolyn, Samantha, and Nick) went to the movies to go watch Insidious 3. I think the scariest part about that entire movie was the fact that I drove there. I suck so much at driving, I swear. I can't wait until robotic cars are the norm, I hate driving so much. In UCLA, as long as I have public buses, trolleys, a scooter, and my own two feet, I will be a happy, happy boy.

We also hit up the local Barnes and Noble, as is standard in our film-watching escapades. A few days ago, Christina found this ritual online that involved a red book and allowed us to communicate to ghosts or spirits or Mexican demons or something. But basically, the gist of the ritual was that you'd grab any red-colored book, ask a question, flip to a random page, and point to some text and whatever you pointed to would be the spirit's response.

So we did that at Barnes and Noble with an assortment of red books.

The first red book we tried got some pretty tepid results. The demon we contacted didn't really wake up on the right side of the bed, so it said we couldn't play and we went on our merry way. It was when we got to this cookbook where things got interesting: 

It's red. It's bound like a book. It checks out.
(via simonandschuster.com)

You know, for a cookbook, it had very feisty responses. It started with an innocent "Are you a boy or a girl?" Then, one thing led to another, and eventually I figured out what she (it was a she-demon, a shemon) was wearing, I figured out that she liked it when I pressed her covers, and I landed myself a date with a cookbook this Friday. Sorry Sam, but I've got a hot date with a hot, hot demon.

RFotD: In a ranking by U.S. News & World Report, the Paleo Diet ranked last in a list of 32 diets. The traits used to compare the diets were healthiness, weight loss, and ease of following.

2015: Orientation

Hello, hello, wonderful people! As the school year comes to a close, with graduation just around the corner (tomorrow, as of writing this!), I will once again be continuing this blog for you guys. For those of you that have stuck around for the past... six years? Seven? I'm not entirely sure, but anyway, for the veterans, you all already know what to expect. However, for the new people, I'll give you a bit of a rundown as to how this is gonna work.

So I've been keeping a daily log of my summer vacations ever since 6th grade. Emphasis on daily, as in I will (try to) post a new entry every single day. I know I didn't exactly get to do that last year but if it hadn't been for the incredible lack of internet access in the Philippines, I would definitely have kept up. ANYWAY, the posts will normally come out the morning after the day it happens (as in the post for August 11, 2015 will come out on the morning of August 12) so it could be the first thing you read in the morning, kinda like the newspaper except hopefully more interesting and without an obituaries section.

The posts will all be nonfiction, as in everything I write will be absolutely true. I don't make stuff up about my life (hell, I'll have pictures to prove it on the entries), but I will exaggerate to make things more interesting. The ultimate goal of this blog is to entertain you guys. If a few of my entries could draw a chuckle or a laugh out of you, then I have done my job well and I can remove the mark of shame bestowed upon me by my hunter-gatherer ancestors. All of my past entries from the past two years are still here, so feel free to look at them to get a feel as to how I'll be writing. Or you can wait a few days and find out firsthand, your call, coach.

Sounds good? Great. See you guys on Monday!

Day Seventy-One: Mall of Asia; I Play a Little Ditty

8/23/14, 8:03 AM PDT

Today, we visited the expansive (and more importantly, air conditioned) Mall of Asia. Even though it sounds like it should be the biggest mall in Asia (or at the very least, the Philippines), it actually currently sits at third place. But sitting at 406,000 square miles, third place doesn't make it a tiny mall.

Even though a good 50% of it is owned by SM.

So first thing my cousin Mico (who also went with us) and I did was hit up their arcade. There were a few rhythm games on there (no Jubeat though) and I got absolutely destroyed by them when I got too cocky and picked the hardest difficulties because I thought beginner was "too easy."



Oh, and I played Just Dance with Megan too, but thankfully, no picture evidence of that exists.

After blowing I think 200 pesos in arcade games, we went around to take a look at the sort of stuff we could buy in the mall. And since I'm not a super materialistic person, the stuff that caught my eye pretty much consisted entirely of edible things. Like these ADORABLE mochi donuts.

At 40 Pesos ($1) a pop, no way was I gonna buy one though.

And I have to say, the Philippines absolutely OUTDOES us when it comes to their donuts. LOOK AT THIS. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle donuts?

Let's hope they're not turtle filled or else I'll be throwing them in the Shredder.

And Jesus Christ, this pinnacle of human achievement.

I need this. I need this now.

They also had some weird looking fish on display.

"I don't know man, you sure these fish are fine? They look pretty blocked up..."

This guy seemed to enjoy his job as a stock photo model.

Nothing says "Real Italian Food" like an anonymous
white male making out with his fingers.

And there was also this thing.

Sorry for the blurriness.

Yeah, uhh... go ahead and rub that on your skin if you want, but I'll pass.

They also have a Ferris wheel here.

Well, I mean it's no London Eye, but it's not terrible...

Actually, I lied. They have two.

And it's pretty

goddamn

massive.

Yes, we rode in it. And yes, it was a pretty good view.

Too bad we couldn't appreciate it because the pods were HEAT TRAPS under the Philippine sun. Seriously, there was absolutely NO ventilation in there, save for a really crappy air conditioner that was perpetually stuck in the "LOW FAN" setting.

By the time we stepped off the glorified pressure cookers, we were drenched in so much sweat that we looked like we just ran a half-marathon in the Sahara Desert.

But let's not let the heat take away from the pretty cool view we did get. Or at least, my camera got. I couldn't see anything because even my eyes were sweating.

Yeah, it was also right next to the sea, which was cool.

Downtown Manila in the distance.

Towards the end of the night, everything got a LOT prettier because of the lights. Check out how nice the giant globe they have out front looks bathed in LED:

It probably would've looked nicer if they didn't use it as a glorified billboard.

Even their marching band had Tron-esque LED trim!

Unfortunately, no Olivia Wilde in sight.

As derezzing as it was for them to leave, it was still pretty cool.

Afterwards, we went to Mico's house, where I got to use the computer (finally!) and played the piano for a bit. After a good two hours or so, pretty much every adult save for my mom was drunk to HELL in that house, which was pretty funny. They all had the stereotypical drunken slur and they would laugh at EVERYTHING super hard. And even though the smell of alcohol wafted in the air like a crippled balloon, I was pretty happy too. Because drunk people make excellent tippers for lounge piano players such as myself. Look at how much I made.

I had to give 40% to my sister though. Broker fees.

Not to be outdone, Mico also managed to make bank through his awesome bass playing. So lesson learned, everyone, beer is the ultimate cash extortion tool for the bankrupt high schooler.





RFotD: I will never drink an alcoholic beverage. Ever.

SGAT: None really.