"Our gym teacher always gets mad when we don't wear our gym uniforms but the shorts are made of this material that makes me sweat a lot."

The kid took a bite of her $11 avocado toast as she explained her predicament to her friend. Green smear stuck to her cheeks. Bondi Harvest, a hip Santa Monica cafe hidden between a Tastemade and a magnet factory, was filled with people willing to wait 30 minutes for a breakfast bowl, including us. A couple walked by with their leashed pet pig.

"So are we doing this play date today or not?"

Everyone looked so cute at work wearing their autumn outfits. Sweaters, layered jackets, cradling coffee mugs with two hands.  It's 80 degrees in Los Angeles but they say we are dreamers.

I'm pretty sure I only write when I drink. I'm pretty sure I only doodle when I am half-watching whatever is on the TV screen. 

Today it's Malbec. It's always Malbec. Josh and I can't tell a good wine from a bad one (unless it's blended, then yuck) but it feels sophisticated to have a preferred wine type. It's also easy to pronounce. We also like Beaujolais. I can't show you what my face looks like when I say Beaujolais but know that my nose is all the way up.

I hate that I turn red when I drink. But I'm also glad that I do. I wonder, if it didn't show in my face would drink wine at work? I think this is alcoholism. 

I hate that I could probably lose weight if I stopped drinking. But I won't. 

I like that it's the only thing that stops me from working. 

Crazy Rich Asians not only gives me hope for more diverse representation in Hollywood, but also for the resurgence of romantic comedies. 

But first let's talk about eyelash extensions. Akin to the popular double-lid surgery, eyelash extensions became popular in Asia in the early 2000s, more recently making its way to the United States. The extensions were a more cost-effective way of making eyes bigger and compared to "surgery" it felt, to me, less like a blatant admittance of wanting to look more caucasian. While eyelash enhancement has been around since the 1800s, it makes sense why it became popular among Asians. People (even today, to my face) have described beautiful people as having big eyes. Symmetrical face sure, healthy sure, pimple-free sure. But big eyes is very specific and cancels out a good portion of the population, mainly Asians. In the movies and tv shows I'd watch nobody ever looked like me. The closest I had was Kristen Kreuk who is half Chinese but white passing. I thought, maybe I could at least look half Chinese? 

What's weird is that when I was a little kid I thought I was super cute. Like I saw an ad for GAP that said they were looking for their next group of GAP Kids models. In my cute little bird brain I thought yeah I could do that. That was before I started watching romcoms. 

So when I started getting my eyelashes done in my mid-twenties somewhere deep down I knew I was giving into westernized beauty. My coworkers said it's a slippery slope to botox to which I replied, I'm Asian, we don't crack until 70. Beauty goes both ways.

By then the romcom had died. And I still look Chinese, just with longer eyelashes. 

Remember when there were two friends with benefits movies that came out at the same time? Poor choices for Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman but they both looked great in oversized boyfriend (or just friend?!) button downs.

Mindy Kaling said "the genre has been so degraded that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity."

"The RomCom's cause of death is not just the death of willing (or talented) stars, studios and audiences, but the fact that there are no longer obstacles to nuptial bliss for the budding couple to overcome. New complications must be invented, and test-driven - which nobody is invested in doing anymore." -The Atlantic, 2014

CRA roughly mirrors "my boyfriend turned out to be a prince and I don't know how to deal with that information" narrative. But the main difference is it's told through a fresh lens - one that is culturally relevant to many (but not all) Asians, but can still be thematically relatable to a general audience. As far as I'm concerned I'm done with the Katherine Heigl romcoms. New perspectives and voices are welcome. Give us new budding couples with varying eye shapes. Give us new obstacles. Because you're not going to get a sharp mahjong scene with Kate Hudson. 

Romcoms miss out on a lot of things. Like diving into the pain and suffering of a repressed community. But they do something great, like allowing us to escape, hyperbolize and romanticize. To stare at abs. To believe in the grand gesture. With more representation in the romcom genre we expand the category of who is capable of love. And with how the world is going we can definitely use more of this than the anti-hero, the dramedy, or the dystopian mirror.  

Hollywood, please give us more romcoms. I want to cry my fake eyelashes off.

For the last two days I've sported an airbrush tattoo of a puppet on my forearm. It's stupid but I strangely feel a lot cooler. I look down and there it is. Shining in its badassery. A puppet face in matte black. The color of our guest bathroom hardware. 

Getting a tattoo was never something I felt strongly about. Except during that one phase in college when my high school boyfriend and I had just broken up and I thought it was the perfect time to get some sort of latin phrase scripted on my wrist. Luckily I was too poor and chicken to go through with it. 

But now that I have this puppet blocking a third of my forearm I think I'm ready to take the plunge. Josh suggested I get the face of Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard because she's my role model (rich and cranky). Unfortunately her taut, angled face frightens me and I don't need to be spooked for the rest of my life.

The security guard at the speakeasy said tattoos should be meaningful but I shouldn't think too hard about it. He had a fleur de lis on his neck. Maybe he's from New Orleans. Or maybe he thought it was pretty. How hard did he think about it? 

Are tattoos like dreams? You find your own interesting but for everyone else it's a laborious story that they're forced to listen to because you're friends and it would be rude to say I don't care. Is it worse when it's a hypothetical tattoo?

When I volunteered to work at a raunchy puppet tattoo parlor speakeasy tonight I didn't consider that I'd be missing my second favorite HGTV show, Love It or List It. 

The speakeasy was set right in the garbage heart of Hollywood. I'd list it on location alone.

But the puppets were great. 

A couple days ago I was in the waiting room at a women-dominant tech company. I went to sit on the couch and saw what I could only assume to be a faded period stain. I thought, is this what progression looks like?

I miss writing

I found an old Tumblr of mine called The Bedroom Pantry. It was a darling, sometimes cryptic, look into my life after high school. Previously I had kept private journals where I'd rank classmates' outfits, humor, and overall appeal, as well as manufactured my own magazines where I was the editor-in-chief and my friends were all celebrities. But Tumblr came along and I had a public platform to dramatically blog about college, first job, first solo apartment, being single... It was sweet and sincere and you know what, I would have dated myself.

I had another blog. I won't name it because I don't want you to search for it. It's too embarrassing. It's when I went through what I call a provocative (?) stage. I tried to write about topics that, at the time, sounded sexy. I think my dad found it and had a hard conversation with me. 

My third blog was a collective called Sweats And The City. My girlfriends and I were bored and we wanted to talk about adulthood. Like crafting, bikini waxes, and dinner parties. You know, stuff people in the Money Diaries comment section would tear apart. I had fun but everyone stopped writing as their lives got more exciting. 

Then I stopped writing all together. I'm now dating someone who is a writer by profession. So I picked up doodling instead. 

But here I am. 29 and realizing I miss writing. I miss pretending I have a vast readership who thinks I'm hilarious. I miss rambling about the mundane shit that happens in my Jeopardy! at 7pm life. This isn't for you. This is for me.