merry christmasss from suburban los angeles. ~ PETERmode.

hello journal...been a long while since i've written on you.

US Bank Tower with Christmas colored lights and fog passing by (rained the whole week of xmas).

well today is christmas eve, but it's not really celebrated in my household. i don't really care anyway as long as my family lives long healthy lives. we did use to hang up lights outside when i was a kid but my dad always did such a crappy job compared to everyone else...so why bother anymore...i do love the festiveness of christmas though. both my parents worked today (my dad has been working on and off with my uncle...i think) which is sort of sad but i'm an adult now so it's whatevers. i remember when i was a kid, my mom gave me money so my brother and i could go watch a movie on christmas eve or christmas before. we watched this cartoon movie with adam sandler's voice as the main character...that movie was...alright. i woke up at 3:30pm and found that my mom just came home from work. she asked me if i could go buy chicken because she didn't know what to cook and was sleepy so i went to KFC and then went to wendy's to buy myself some "breakfast"...technically my breakfast was a boiled egg and water but yeah...*rolls eyes*

dentist appointment (check up and cleaning friday before finals week)

so i thought it was a little depressing when i went to the dentist and told the assistant that i don't really celebrate thanksgiving or christmas when she asked if i was excited for christmas. i was also kind of depressed since i didn't really want to keep seeing the dentist every 3 months. i asked if i could make it 6 months instead because my dad isn't working right now and she said if i really had to, the farthest she could push it back is 4 months and if i really must, then i should cancel an appointment rather than not schedule one. but since insurance covers my next visit, she told me not to worry about it now and see what happens later. apparently the back of my mouth has deep sockets (?) because i haven't been keeping the area clean enough. i knew something was wrong anyway because it hurt more than usual as he was cleaning the back of my mouth and the dentist said to note some bleeding -___-. the assistant did make a point that having me sacrifice 80$ of my own money for cleaning/checkup was better than having surgery to reverse the problem...

the week after...i had finals AND work...so i had a lot of cramming to do. i didn't really expect much gifts from my students either because i don't know hahah i feel like i'm too hard on my kids so they don't appreciate me because i'm not "fun". these are the only gifts i really received for christmas...and they're all from my lovely students and their parents.

i feel appreciated lol~ and now my sticker picture frames will be covered by some christmas cards that only have my students and not their families lol. i have a mini jenga COMPLETE WITH 6 SHOT GLASSES LOL =__=. i also now have a shower radio i wish i had 10 years ago, a red envelope with 20$!!!, 35$ worth of coffee in giftcards, random CDs, and a giftcard to chili's...never ate there before.

my poorly decorated classroom

...i'm weary about my grades from fall semester...and i won't know them until after break because it isn't due from the professors until january. i still have a paper due actually but i'm been so lazy that i haven't finished it yet. i'm going to finish it tonight, at the latest tommorow, and then email my professor. i'll probably email all my other professors for my grade too...like japanese...incase i need to retake it, i can atleast drop some classes i signed up for already and retake it. i regret not trying to learn it before hand like i have with korean...it'd be SO much easier. my grades weren't exactly bad but i'm freaking that i might get a D. *sigh*...atleast i know i got accepted to a calstate lol.

on the day i found out i got accepted to CSU LA as a political science pre-legal studies major, i went out to dinner in celebration of my boss's birthday. he turned 34? 30 something...we went to wokano in long beach. it was pretty fun, he got really wasted. he was so wasted that when i said i was going to go home from his house, he thought i was impaired myself when i didn't drink at all. i was tempted to take some shots with some friends too...haha...but my boss was pretty drunk already and i never got to take some because we were all suppose to take the shot together. my friends and i were just walking around the block because it got really boring sitting inside with the music going, no dancing, no food.

it later got kind of cold because of the marine layer that came in so 2 friends and i sat in the underground parking lot playing who wants to be a millionaire mobile on my phone. with our 3 brains put together...we still didn't get to 1 million. it was funny while we were walking outside and one of my friends asked like "if you could change the city we live in, how would you want it?" and i said i wanted more high rise buildings and more rails, while my other friend said more grass and nature-y stuff, and i forgot what our 4th wheel said. it was funny because my friend said like...based on the way we dressed, our answers were so obvious. apparently i dressed very "modern" or urban, while my other friend dressed with like a plaid shirt/abercrombie kind of thing, and the 4th wheel was a weird mixture lol.

i do love the city though. it's 20 times larger than the island of manhattan...it can be the next great american city...but probably after my lifetime...after all the crazy conservative rich white people pass and some legislation is changed.

on monday i went out with lisa to eat ramen because it's "perfect ramen weather". i made us take the rail because driving in the rain is no fun and a little more dangerous anyway. i also wanted to see where my hair salon appointment was and i was glad to have done it beforehand with lisa. in the age of cheap cellphone data and the ruling smartphones, it has certainly made life so much easier. we boarded the light rail to little tokyo and then i used google maps on my phone to get walking directions to orochon ramen. awesome shit.

took the subway to koreatown and i google mapped my salon (which i'd be going the day after) and we walked around the city center for awhile. we went into thefaceshop which had 2$ nail polishes that lisa seems to really like and the zion market which had a little food court that sold 3$ kimbap that came with soup and pickled raddish. they also sold 6$ unagi sushi which was effin' delish ahhh

stopped by hollywood and highland to do some window shopping. H&M sucked and nothing at Zara was on sale...and i was JUST ON their website and saw this really nice messenger bag from there on sale for 30$ AUGHHH! i hope i can find it in store after tommorow. if i do, it'll be like my last bag...my other 2 dunlop ones are even cheaper on ASOS now...*sigh* but at the same time, i wouldn't have been able to carry my DSLR and umbrella and junk to get my hair done if i had bought it later.

...one of my last few friends from highschool and coincidentally we dressed somewhat alike.

it's funny...i always say i have no friends, i even tell my own mom i have no friends, but if i had a choice to go back and somehow make lasting friends or stay the way i am now, i'd rather have it the way it is now. i use the term "friends" really loosely. i meant REAL friends (there are a select few) but anyway, life goes on. the next day i went to get my haircut by myself but it didn't start off very bright. my mom comes knocking into my room and asks if i have any plans (when i told her within 12 hours ago that i would be going to get my haircut in koreatown) and i said YES I DO. she says how the car's tire is deflated again and hinted that something needed to be done. i dressed up quickly, put on a beanie and my rainboots, and was like "now what?" "if you want to get the car checked out, please drop me off at the rail station so i can get to the hair salon without being late" but my dad just told me to take the car and inflate the tire and wait until the next day (probably because he didn't want to do it himself). i was glad my dad was home that day too because my douchebag brother took the other car and if my dad had gone, then i don't know how the hell i would've gone home. i drove to chevron to inflate the flat'ish tire and drove to the metro station, parked my car, quickly got a ticket, and waited for the next train because the train had already closed it's doors. the operator noticed after awhile, opened the doors again, and "announced the last boarding before departure" so i quickly hopped in and headed to union station.

on the train ride to union station i texted lisa that if my tire ended up flat when i came back to the parking lot, if she could get me a tow truck in case since she has AAA. i didn't get a reply but she got the message. upon reaching union station i quickly hopped on the next subway train until i got to the transfer point for the line i needed to go on.

i actually got to city center only 5 minutes late for my appointment but i ended up waiting like 30-40 minutes after that anyway...it was sooo boring. the assistant of the stylist gave me some magazines to read but i just ended up looking at my phone and read news on google, or go on facebook, or discretely take pictures as all i heard was people speaking korean left and right.

i felt like such an alien. a hairstylist walked up to me and asked me if i was like ji-something *lots of korean* and i was like "-_o...who?...no?...i'm not?"...so awkward lol i don't know enough korean to save my life. my stylist's assistant finally got me ready and i headed to the dressing room to drop off my bag and take off my jacket and junk so i could be put into a robe and off to get my hair washed. i got my hair washed and then the stylist came to talk to me about what i wanted. i basically just said i liked my hair to be medium short with flat sides and he just started chopping. i was hoping for something kind of young and trendy but the stylist wasn't even that so i didn't really expect much. i got a pretty typical cut...but i actually like it a lot.

you can see the cut on the top left.


a bit more detail...from yesterday.

bangs up?...today

yeep! feels so nice to have my hair cut so well with mainly shears. it costs 35$ (usually 30$ for men but i opted for a senior stylist) but i thought it was very well worth it. i had my head washed and massaged twice, my cut took about an hour, styled, i wasn't offered cookies or drinks but they usually do that according to yelp. and if some guy can buy like 6 mustache wallets from urbanoutfitters to give away on tumblr, 35$ to get my haircut is certainly a better investment because getting a shitload of reblogs and followers does not have any gains in capital at all...especially when tumblr isn't even ad driven lol.

i would definitely try etude lounge again...maybe with a younger hipper stylist though.
after i paid 40$ for my haircut, i went down to the zion market to buy more kimbap from yesterday and the ajumma there was like all sweet and speaking korean to me and i just smiled with one eyebrow up because i had no idea what she was saying. and right when i was about to say,
어...저는 중국인 이에요... (uh...i'm chinese)
한국어 조금 알겠어요... ([i] only know a little korean)

but she started speaking some engrish and i was like "oh thank god" in my mind. after buying some dinner for myself, i headed home. walked back to the rail stations and drove home...yayaya.

i've kind of run out of things to recap on so here's a bunch of random pictures.