For reasons I won’t get into, I’ve been thinking a lot about karaoke lately. Mind you, while I’m southeast Asian and have grown up with a karaoke machine in the house, I do not actually view karaoke in a positive light. In the wrong hands, karaoke can be an evil thing. Take my father, for instance. He loved karaoke, but all he ever allowed himself to sing was one song. Just one. Again and again. Over and over. Unabashedly. Without…
I was working the day that Princess Diana died. The Saturday evening was slow, and all I needed to prepare was recorded captioning script for the replay of Larry King Live and network script for the CNNSI shows that night. Deep in my editing, I heard the CNN Breaking News theme song, and I immediately got out of my chair and took stock. One of the two captioners was in another room, alert and ready to take on an unscheduled…
I’ve recently been thinking about one of my past jobs—one from about 5 years ago, when I was young, stupid, overworked and underpaid. It was actually my first “real” job on my own … and probably also the best ice-breaker I have on my résumé. Before that, I’d been living at home and working part-time at a movie theater, part-time as a piano teacher, with maybe some writing on the side. Oh, and I’d also been working full-time at a…
Once upon a time, I was saved by firefighters. It was about 20 years ago. I was eight; my sister was three. The month was January — a time for rain. In Southern California rain doesn’t fall regularly, so when it falls it wreaks havoc on land not accustomed to soaking it in. This means flash floods and mudslides, or any number of other things. My favorite uncle and his family lived in Spring Valley back then. Whenever our family…
I watched Shrek yesterday, and one of the main characters is a donkey, opening the movie up for a lot of “ass” jokes. The jokes were hilarious, and they reminded me of a time I hadn’t thought about in ages… …I was 11 years old, and dictionaries didn’t have “bad” words like “fuck” and “shit” between their covers, as though by leaving the words out, the words didn’t really exist. Being the kid that I was, I looked in the…