I'M GONNA BE AN AUNT!

I didn't post this in my last entry because I didn't want anyone ruining the surprise for my sister, who didn't know I was coming back to California - but last weekend I attended my sister's baby shower!

I'M GONNA BE AN AUNTIE!!!

She's having a bouncy baby boy (by which I mean the baby will be amab; idk how it's gonna end up identifying as an adult) and I could not be more excited. Honestly, I think I'm more excited to be an aunt than I would be to be a parent - I get to do all the fun parts and then if the baby shits or cries I can hand it back to my sister. Also I cannot wait until this kid is old enough to visit me in NYC, so I can take them places like Coney Island, the Children's Museum of Manhattan, and the Sea Glass Carousel!

And you just know that as soon as he is born I will be posting baby photos!

Congratulations to my beautiful sister. May she and her baby have nothing but happiness together.

-Nym-

There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays

The weird thing about visiting my parents in California for a week is that sitting here in my big comfy bed with my orange cat Momo laying by the foot of it snoring, the heat running without me having to worry about paying for it... it honestly almost feels as if the past year and three months of living on the East Coast never happened. As if it was all some long, crazy dream.

I've had a lot of fun the last few days, and if I'm being completely honest with myself, there's a part of me that doesn't want to go back. Seven days hasn't quite been long enough for my emotional brain to remember that living with one's parents isn't quite as fun as having them spoil you for a week because they never see you. Despite my logic brain trying their best to remind my emotional brain, emotional brain just drowns out logic and sings:

Oh there's no place like home for the holidays... For no matter how far away you roam... If you want to be happy in a million ways... For the holidays, you can't beat home sweet home...

Look, I know no one does Christmas/Hanukkah/Yule/What have you like New York City. But the truth is, California will always be my home in my heart. You can keep your White Christmas - give me 65-degrees-farenheit all December, please. The Silicon Valley is the Valley of my Heart's Delight, and if I had it my way, I'd have taken a month off to visit rather than just a week. A week just isn't long enough to do everything I want to do, to see everything I've missed and some things I never got the chance to see. I'm already counting down the days until the next time I return to the Bay Area (next June for my high school reunion) and I don't even fly back east until Sunday!

I do miss my three-legged cat back in New Jersey, though. 

At the same time, though, New York is consistently in the back of my mind. San Jose is just as sweet and quaint and cool in its own way, but I've changed. I'm less of an easy-going pushover now. And okay, I'm a little more snobby sometimes - there has been more than one stop this trip where I've been like, "okay, it's cute, but in New York we have this similar thing that's so much bigger!" Honestly, I don't know how my family doesn't think I'm completely insufferable.

I can cook a lot better now, too - look at this fondue spread my mom and I made!

 I think, on some level, I will be happy to return to the East Coast. I do want to go to Hamilton Grange next weekend, I am curious about the axe-throwing place they just put in Brooklyn (expect my Viking ass to do a future entry on that), and I am eager to take my GRE and get a head-start on working towards the future that I moved to the east coast for in the first place. I just... don't want to leave California yet.

Honestly, if I had it my way, I'd live half the year in New York and half in California. Perhaps do spring and autumn in NYC and winter and summer in the Bay Area. But unfortunately, I'm not rich, that kind of lifestyle is just way beyond my means.

Anyway, I'm just rambling about how happy I've been the last few days, compared to the last few months (I had been, frankly, quite miserable for the latter half of October and almost the entirety of November and December - Seasonal Affective Disorder, you guys. It's a real hell and a half). But if you want, read on for a day-by-day summary of this little week of heaven. If not, I'll see you all in New York!

Do You Know the Way to San Jose? (On Homesickness)

First off, before I begin answering the "WHERE HAVE I BEEN FOR OVER A MONTH" question (the short answer is "having a month-long existential crisis"), I'm gonna request you all listen to this classic song:

If you substitute NYC for LA, that's just about how I've been feeling for the entire month of November. I mean...

"Dreams turn into dust and blow away
And there you are without a friend
You pack your car and ride away
I've got lots of friends in San Jose
Do you know the way to San Jose?"

Let's back up just a bit, shall we?

15 Places in the Bay Area I Never Got to Visit

I love where I live. I love it a lot. But lately, I've been getting pangs of severe homesickness. I miss San Jose. I miss the Winchester Mystery House, and Kelley Park. I miss eating at La Villa and Chaat Cafe. I wonder constantly - Did Sarah Winchester ever get homesick for New Haven? Did Alexander Hamilton ever get homesick for Nevis or St. Croix?

I have an advantage that they didn't have, of course. I have the internet. It allows me to at least look at photos of these places I've loved and left behind. But this, too, is both a blessing and a curse. Because the internet, you see, also allows me to discover places that I never got to see in person. Not just in San Jose, but all over the Bay Area, which will always be my home, even as I make a new home for myself in New Jersey.

This list is meant to serve not only as a place for my wistful longing, but as a plea to my friends back home who are reading this. I never got to see these places, but I encourage you to go look at them! Take lots of photos and send me photos, tell me everything, let me live vicariously through you!!!

Merry Christmas, Sarah Winchester!

I've been very busy lately, and part of that business came from the fact that I was planning my vacation! That's right, I'm on vacation - my family paid for me to come back to San Jose for a week to surprise my siblings! (And oh, how I wish I had filmed the look on my sister's face when I walked into my old home and screamed 'what's up, bitches?!')

There's a lot I wanted to do this week (and I still have a few days in California to do some of it), and one of the things at the top of my list was to visit my old workplace, my ever-beloved Winchester Mystery House. This is a great time of year to do it, too. The way the staff decorates the House for Christmas is always beautiful - last year, it was my favourite time of year to be at work, and this year it was just as beautiful.

Of course, I wasn't expecting to take a Christmas tour. I just wanted to stop in and say hello to everyone after hanging out with a friend/former coworker for a chunk of the day. But then I found out I could take one for free (hooray for worker perks - tour guides get passes to give to who they choose, so I used my friend's pass) and, well, I had to! And this year, unlike last year, guests were allowed to take photos in the House. Which means I can now post photos of the big, beautiful building that still owns a big portion of my heart...

What's Going On In My Life

A recent entry in my journal

I don't expect this to be one of my more popular entries, but I figured for those who were curious I'd just give a quick update about things that are happening in my life right now...

• Sarah's last day at work was Monday, and she flies out of California tomorrow. She doesn't know yet if she plans to come back next summer or not. It's easier this year than it was last year, knowing I'll be with her in only a couple of weeks.
• My last day at work will be on 31 August. I cried when I gave my two weeks notice.
• I went out recently to the San Jose Museum of Art with a girl I met on OkCupid. (Yeah, I gave in and reactivated my account...) I had a great time and highly recommend the museum's current exhibit if you can get to it! And now I know I can meet people online in person and do well.
• Hung out in downtown Willow Glen with Sarah on Wednesday. We waited in line for an hour for an ice cream place called Icicles. It was good, but not 'wait for an hour' good. I expect this to happen to me at least once in New York.

•  Last night, I went to an early showing of "Kubo and the Two Strings". It far exceeded my expectations, and I cannot recommend it enough. Go see it!
• I've officially applied to every paying museum position that I qualify for in all five burroughs of New York City - including Staten Island! None of them have gotten back to me yet other than automated 'we got your resume' e-mails, but it took my current job a few weeks to contact me so I'm not too worried. My mother wants me to apply for some dental positions just in case.
• I've got a couple apartment viewings scheduled in Brooklyn so hopefully I can find a place to stay soon. If not, there's always AirBnb for the time being.
• Regina Spektor has a concert in New York in October and Sarah said she'd go with me. I hope tickets don't sell out before I get my next paycheck.

So that's my life lately
-Nym

Project: Wonderland (A Concept)

A few years back, over the summer I began to write a script of a webseries that was meant as a retelling of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (one of my favourite stories of all time, as long-time readers know), a personal psychological study, and a love letter to favourite spots in the Bay Area. Alice would meet the Mad Hatter at a local San Jose tea shop, for example, or the Cheshire Cat in Kelley Park, or the Mock Turtle down at Natural Bridges beach in Santa Cruz.

This scene would have taken place at the San Jose Rose Garden, for example

 It was a cool idea in theory. I still like the story I wrote for it. But let's be real, I was never going to make it. I have neither the time nor the funding to shoot a webseries, and where would I find other actors willing to trek up and down the San Francisco peninsula for 6-minute webisodes in funny costumes?

It was earlier this year that I begun to wonder if maybe, instead of something ambitious as a webseries, I turned it into a photography project? Instead of having to shoot and reshoot around tourists, I could snap photos and edit them in Photoshop? Art for art's sake, you know?

However, this still doesn't take care of the fact that I have neither time nor money to do so. I have equipment. I don't own a video camera or a boom mic or good editing software, but I own cameras and photoshop! But when I'm working to earn a living and saving for a cross-country move, I just can't afford to do a photography project all over Northern California.

So the solution that presented itself is obvious: If I ever do choose to do this (and that is a big IF), I'll have to do so in New York. Thus, I began the task of picking new locations to match the aesthetic I need...

(Photos included are either my own, or labeled for noncommercial reuse and used under creative commons license)

Thirteen Things I Still Need to do in California

This is a companion to the last post.

Where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars...

Those of you who know me in real life may remember that time I tried a project called 'The Bay Area Bucket List', meant to be a blog detailing my efforts to visit all the cool places in the Bay Area before leaving it, possibly forever if I may be overly dramatic for a second. It failed for a few reasons. Not least of which being that I just don't like Wordpress that much. (I know a lot of bloggers prefer it but there's a reason I moved back to this blogging platform, which suits my needs much better!) Other reasons included lack of money, lack of free time, and the fact that writing the same type of entry over and over is exhausting and not particularly rewarding.

But that doesn't me that the 'bucket list' itself doesn't still exist. I still have the list of all the things I had hoped to do, and I've picked out the 13 I want to do most. (Though the last two, being so far away, will probably not be done before I leave. Oh well. I can dream.)

Just like the last list, there's no particular order to this list. Just like the last list, these are all stock photos or labeled for noncommercial reuse.

I Took An Adventure Yesterday

This is a very photo-heavy post beneath the cut. Just warning you.

I've been compiling a list of the most beautiful places in Santa Clara County - I'm picking places that are buildings or formal/manicured gardens, not natural beauty (though there's certainly a lot of that around here; I just want the list to be manageable). I'm also not including restaurants or shops.

And yesterday, I got the opportunity to visit three of the places on my list.

The San Jose Municipal Rose Garden, the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment, and Mission Santa Clara. While I did visit them on crutches (and thus I could not walk the labyrinth at the CSE) I got a lot of photos...

So You're Going to Visit The Winchester Mystery House...

By now you all know very well where I work.

 
I love my job, okay? I absolutely adore it, despite my antisocial tendencies. I love the history, I love the architecture and decor, I love the beautiful gardens, I love the creepy legends, and I love my coworkers. My biggest complaint tends to be the guests on my tours.

Which is no to say I hate everyone on my tours. On the contrary. Most people are great. I still rave about the really sweet man with the orange beard who bought his own flashlight on Christmas Eve (still one of the best guests I've ever had on one of my tours). Last weekend I had a pair of "Gravity Falls" cosplayers (my favourite show of all time) on one of my BTS tours and they were delightful and I genuinely wish I'd had more time to talk with them!

But occasionally we get the one crotchety person who ruins the whole fucking day even if everyone else we meet that day is amazing and wonderful.

That's where the idea for this post came from. But no one wants to be lectured of course. And often people find out I work here and ask me "Is it worth going? What should I expect?" So I decided to combine these two ideas into one post.

So you're going to visit the Winchester Mystery House? How can you get the most out of your experience and be the best possible guest you can be? Here are 10 tips!

A Not-So Recent Trip to Ainsley House

As anyone who knows me knows, I love the 1920s. I dressed as a flapper for my high school senior prom, I included a character from the 1920s in my most successful fiction work, I have a '1920s' tag on my tumblr, I regularly imagine myself and Sarah as flappers in 20s New York City, and I cut my hair in a bob style in honour of the flappers and bright young things of the roaring twenties.

I also love local history. Wherever I am in the world, I seek out the stories and monuments of local events and characters. Considering what my job is, this should come as a shock to no one.

There is a place in Campbell, not too far from my work, which combines these two interests, that I had to see one last time before leaving California. And that place is Ainsley House, which I went to visit not too recently - actually, on 22 April.

This is going to be a photo-heavy post, not a text-heavy post.

Mexican-American History in Downtown San Jose

Finals is coming up quickly - my last finals season as an undergrad, and in less than three weeks I'll have graduated! Yikes! - and because of this I have been absolutely swamped with schoolwork. Thus, this blog proooobably won't update again until after finals. (I'm still in shock that they're already here, to be perfectly honest.) I do have ideas for future blog entries, though, including one about a recent trip to Ainsley House, so hopefully I won't take too long to write that one up!

Luckily for me, at least one school assignment translates rather well to blog format. Because recently for a history class, I was required to take a self-guided walking tour through downtown San Jose and visit spots picked by my professor that related to local Mexican-American heritage. (And please do excuse the dorky selfies - believe it or not, they actually were part of the assignment.)

Now, one thing I'm looking forward to immensely about New York is moving to a place with so much history, but that doesn't mean San Jose is without its own equally fascinating history! The Mexican and Spanish presences here go back to the 1770s, back when New York was still paying taxes to King George III. And so I actually was pretty excited about this assignment, even if it is not my own culture. Hopefully at least one person out there is just as excited about what I discovered...

Into the Labyrinth

Last week one of my classes was cancelled so I went to the nearby reservoir. Since California is in a severe drought, it's lower than it used to be when I first discovered it as a teen, but due to recent rains it's not completely empty. It's a peaceful, lovely place to walk around. And... as pictured above, it has a labyrinth.

Here's something about me not everyone knows. I fucking love labyrinths. I doodle them all the time (7-circuit classical style, not Chartres style). I love the myth of Ariadne and the labyrinth of Crete. The movie "Labyrinth" is my favourite movie of all time. And whenever I see a labyrinth of any kind, I have to walk it. I just have to. It's like a compulsion. Something about walking all the circuits to get to the centre just gives me such joy, I can't really explain it.

10 Things to do in San Jose

This is more serious than my last list post, I promise.

It's Easter weekend, which I was completely unaware of until someone at work told me to explain how damn busy we were. Since my place of work only closes on Christmas, we're going to be busy as heck on Sunday. (I work that day. Of course I work that day.) I don't blame the guests, of course. When someone has time off and people visiting from out of town in San Jose, the first place they think of going is the Winchester Mystery House. When you're visiting San Jose, you do that and the Tech Museum and maybe Great America, and then you drive up to San Francisco. Our tourism industry in this city is a joke, to be honest.

But it's my spring break, too, and I'm too poor to travel up to San Francisco. There are other things to do in San Jose, and in the spirit of... much better bloggers than me, I'm gonna do a top ten list! But because I'm shit at thinking of the order of things, it's in alphabetical order. Enjoy! And do consider taking your out-of-town friends/family to one of these places.

What a Nunderful World

When I was a little girl I wanted to be a nun.

I knew nothing about nuns. My entire knowledge of nun life came from the "Sister Act" movies and from a library book that I can't remember the title of now about a young girl in medieval times. I knew that they got to all live in a convent together and they didn't have to marry men, facts which were very desirable to my young gay heart. (I didn't yet know about the lesbian nun Benedetta Carlini, but I guarantee you if I had it would only have furthered my desire.)

"It's okay to kiss a nun. Just don't get in the habit." ~ Sarah.

I eventually came to my senses (the whole giving up all my material possessions thing wasn't very exciting for an 8-year-old, and a week later I decided I'd rather be a mortician. Plus, you know, I'm not Catholic.) but for that short time period nun life was just fascinating, and some small part of me has never fully lost that fascination.

So when a coworker told me there happens to be a monastery just a couple miles down the road from our work, I knew I had to visit...

So follow me through the pink doorway and under the text cut for a lot of pictures of this beautiful little hidden gem of Santa Clara. As long as no one finds out I'm a non-Catholic lesbian, we'll be nunstoppable!

(I refuse to apologise for the nun puns.)

Tea Time With Sarah Winchester

DISCLAIMER: This entry is a work of fiction based on where I work; it is not an actual paranormal experience I had while working there!

Sometimes, when it's slow at work, the tour guides (like myself) will be sent in the mansion to do some minor cleaning. So it didn't strike me as unusual at all when, after my lunch break one Friday, I was asked "can you go clean some windows?"

When I'm sent to clean windows, I always go the same route I've created for myself that hits the windows I always see most smudged: From the cleaning closet, I pass the aviary, go through the laundry room and pre-1906 kitchen, into the Guest Reception Hall to tidy the parlour windows, up the main staircase, and then through the second and third floors and back down to the cleaning closet. Imagine my surprise when, on my way through with a spray bottle and a rag, I spotted a small and dark figure in the locked-off front parlour through the window...

(The window on the far right of this older photo)

5 Things I Will and Won't Miss About San Jose

This post is not an entirely serious post.

'Occultism Lite' in Downtown San Jose

I've never made much of a secret of my lifelong interest in things that fall under the umbrella I call "unreality". (Though how real or unreal many of these things actually are is something I waffle back and forth on - what really is 'real', anyway? The label is more or less for aesthetic purposes rather than any judgement as to what I feel is real or not.) Things like the paranormal, the supernatural, cryptozoology, mysticism, magic, occultism...

Some of it I believe in whole hog. The universe is too big for extraterrestrial life to not exist, for example, and I've definitely had experiences with ghosts and what some people would call magic. I am a spiritual person, in my own way that I don't feel obligated to explain on this blog. Some of it I'm skeptical of. Though I've visited the Bigfoot Museum and Loch Ness, I don't exactly buy into tales of sasquatches and lake monsters. Some of it I'm unsure about. But the interest is there no matter what.

And I live in a good place for it, even if I am looking forward to what New York City has to offer in this, too. San Jose has both the haunted Winchester Mystery House, and the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum with its alchemy exhibit and occult library. There are multiple urban legends about local places such as Dottie's Pond, Hellyer House, and Hicks Road. There have been some alleged local UFO sightings and there's a nice space observatory and a NASA centre, and we're not too far from Santa Cruz/Felton with the Bigfoot Museum and the Mystery Spot. San Jose hosts Pantheacon, and there are metaphysical shops in Campbell, Willow Glen, and Mountain View.

And then there's the Martin Luther King library downtown, the largest library on the west coast.