For those of you who missed out on the classic paper turkey in elementary school, here are instructions. If you do remember making this as a wee innocent child, it’s worth doing again. Many of us are in such a hurry to be grown up that we lose our wonderment and delight for simple activities.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Justine made me this adorable video for my birthday. It’s a montage of a bunch of photos and videos of us together. I can’t properly describe how I feel about this. It’s wonderful, amazing, incredibly sweet. It brings back a lot of memories. It’s strange to think that we met on the internet more than 3 years ago. Justine is an incredible source of inspiration for me. See? Internet friends can become real friends.
Here’s a pic of us when we first met IRL:
So much silliness!
Every time this date rolls around I start to stress. Should I be further in my career? What am I doing with my life? Is this the right path? Am I happy? The thoughts, worries, second-guessings eat away at me for weeks on end. I am cranky, temperamental, and long for the days when I was younger. This year, these feelings crept into my life months before the dreaded date. This year, I decided to apply my nervous energy into working on the sub-optimal components of my life.
I now feel comfortable and happy staying at home while others go out. Gone is the creeping feeling that I am missing out on something if I am not constantly social. As of today, my credit cards are completely paid off, and I’d like to keep it that way for a long time. I am learning to willingly sludge through chores because they ultimately benefit me, despite my inclination to crawl into bed and nap. I guess this is what it means to be an adult. Those darn responsibilities. There is a long road ahead, and with society’s emphasis on youth, I sometimes need to remind myself that experience and maturity is far more valuable than physical beauty.
Despite all this growing up, I refuse to let go of youth. Youth in the sense of appreciating beauty, trying new things, enjoying simple pleasures. After so many years of feeling old, this is the first time I feel new.
Happy birthday to me.
Austin… what can I say? It was really weird. The story for Austin is full of silliness and definitely worth checking out. Watch episode 1 to get a taste of the absurdity:
Lost in America-Austin:cookies! (ep1) from Karen on Vimeo.
The other episodes are on my vimeo channel and a behind the scenes post about Austin here. Photos and more photos in case you’re not sick of us yet.
The biggest problem with having a limited paypal account is that they have the records for your credit cards. You cannot use the credit cards on paypal even if you try to pay as a guest user & don’t sign in. I wish there were something better than paypal (in functionality and ease of use, and at least close to equal in adoption rate). After several iterations to remove the swear words and condescending tone, this is what I sent to them.
____________________________
From: Karen Nguyen
To: Paypal
Dear Paypal,
I do not understand why you think my account is a nonprofit. Several months ago I sent an email to the support group requesting that my account be downgraded from a business account to a personal account. I do not have a business, and I no longer deal with finances for a nonprofit organization. I received an email confirming that my account was downgraded. Now, my account is limited and I cannot send or receive payments. I tried looking through the profile settings and did not find a way to change my account category. I also did a search and it did not have anything helpful to my situation. Could you please help explain how to fix my account?
Thanks,
Karen
——-
PayPal requires accounts within the charity / non profit category to provide us with some additional information regarding their organization. Upon a recent review, your account was identified as falling within this classification. Until we can collect this information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. Please take a moment to provide us with this information so that we can restore your access as soon as possible.
_______________________
And now, I wait some more.
For the last few months Justine and I have been running around together shooting videos for At&t. The videos for our Anchorage trip are finally up.
I’ve posted episode 2 below.
Lost in America – Hot Dog/Cold dog (ep2) from Karen on Vimeo.
Gotta say, I love video quality preservation on Vimeo. You can watch all the episodes here. Photos of the Anchorage trip here and here.
I always have a ton of fun working with Justine and this project was especially interesting. The Studio 8 guys wrote, shot and edited. I absolutely love those guys. They make a lot of videos and the videos are uncomfortably hilarious. Professional, organized, and adorable.<3
Although, Brock might be the unibomber...
Today is a new day. A wonderful, though bittersweet, day. Change is here.
The battle for gay rights continues. It’s not over yet, and I will not lose hope.
