Kat's LIA Blog

My friend came to visit today. But that is irrelevant.

I feel incomplete. I didn’t feel extreme sadness after the graduation today, which I normally do when I say goodbye to friends and loved ones. I’m talking life shattering, tear bearing sadness. I hate goodbyes and tissues boxes are not sufficient in soothing my extreme emotional discomfort. Today, however, what I mostly felt was fatigue. A need for sleep. The other interns, namely Sasha, gave me the warmest hugs, and I didn’t feel warm at all. I didn’t feel empowered or connected or loved. I just felt tired.

I will miss them, that’s for sure. I’m not at all saying they weren’t important to me. The LIA interns changed my life, mostly because I came back from the other conference feeling detached (that’s another story within itself) and walked into this internship and felt interconnected, intertwined, at home. It always felt like home—a place where I didn’t have to small talk or pretend to be someone I’m not. 

I wish I said better goodbyes and told everyone how so important they are to me. I really hope I’ll continue the friendships I’ve made with them this summer… so that my shitty goodbye won’t be the last thing they remember about me.

Leadership in Action 2011 <3

And ignoring my tumblr. Such interesting articles that show up on my feed. By the time I’ve figured out how to mash my thoughts into less than 140 characters, I’m too tired to post about it on tumblr. This maayyy be because my internship is exhausting. Well, was exhausting. Today was my last day.

My days will no longer be filled with advocating for the LGBT community within the API community. A part of me just died a little thinking about it. I love my APIEQLA family and I am going to miss it more than I can express in words.

as seen on personal tumblr.

Brian’s poking stick. The gentle nudge that precedes, “Hey, hey you! I need help!!”

Just kidding. Just another inside joke between me and my community organizer. :(

thing I will miss most. honestly? hanging out with Brian, the other interns, staff, and the lovely volunteers of API Equality-LA. I was in the presence of such beautiful, strong community leaders on such a daily basis; being treated like an equal gave me strength and the belief that I could one day be as great as they are.

I’m going to miss that.

also. there was food at every meeting. college organizing is DEFINITELY not like that. WHOMPWHOMP.

Brian invited me to come and intern in the spring if I can work it out with school and whatnot. Irresistable offer. If not, I know that I will continue to volunteer with APIEQLA in some capacity or another because this summer has absolutely changed my life, and I’m not ready to give that up!

mariamiscellany:

and I don’t wanna think about it.

:’(

the end is near. LEAP employees will have to drag me out of the API Equality-LA office, because i’m going to grab on to Brian’s leg and NEVER LET GO.

just kidding.

I love my internship. Why does it have to end? :(

So last week Brian gave me rebranding as my newest project. Oh my god, it sucks. Just kidding, it’s actually really interesting—and who would think that they’d entrust an intern with such a huge task? With Brian’s help, I’m redesigning the logo (really just tweaking), picking APIEQLA’s font, making business cards—basically redesigning all materials that the public would see.

I’ve always been a techie, so I thought this would be EASY-PEASY. Not. Wow, I totally underestimated this project. all my editing skills exist only within Adobe Photoshop and this project calls for ILLUSTRATOR, which is a program made probably only to make people feel small and stupid. Not joking. I have never worked with Illustrator before, so working with it this last week has definitely been a challenge. It took me about three hours just to figure out how to move one object without moving another. And, another thing—all my tech skills I learned in high school and they’ve since gone to waste. Most of the time, I’d rather edit a picture on Picnik than load up photoshop and work on a photo for hours. Whomp.

But ANYWAY. Rendering the logo from a raster image to a vector image took a lot of work, even though in reality the logo is really simple and it shouldn’t have taken as much as it did. Again, Illustrator cripples your self-esteem. Then I went on to redesign logo (made like 20 different version for the steering committee to look over) and then I redesigned the T-shirt and 3X3 inch stickers that we pass out at outreach events—that wasn’t all too difficult, seeing as I’d already clocked in probably 6 hours working with Illustrator.

The struggle narrative began again when I was assigned to re-design business cards.

The first one I made was super simple—your standard business card.


Brian thought it was boring (which it totally is), so I wiped away my tears and went to work again. After brainstorming, we decided to try a portrait style instead. I made another boring portait style card before I decided that maybe the background need a little color:

Still, something was still off about this business card. It was still too plain and now we were getting into the discussion of fonts; in the landscape card, the font is all century gothic, but Brian and I thought that it might be nice to try changing some of the text fonts to make the card look more dynamic (this conversation is still in process, we’ve not yet picked one).

This whole time, we’ve been marveling at other business cards—specifically NQAPIA’s business card. It is SO PRETTY. Who ever thought a business card could be pretty? Anywho, the NQAPIA card has a faint background graphic that transforms what would otherwise be any other boring business card into one people marvel.







And then today I had the brilliant idea to add texture to the background by adding in continual circles within circles. I TOTALLY DID NOT REMEMBER that circles within circles are also referred to as target circles or moire circles, so i kept googling circles within circles. Kat fail, I know. ANYWAY, I just spent four hours trying to make perfect circles and aligning them manually because I totally forgot that I learned how to align things in Illustrator just two days ago. I live a big life of fails; I’ve come to terms with that. Here’s the most recent prototype. I’ll probably hate it tomorrow. YAY FOR BLOGGING.

posting regularly on this blog is super difficult.

in other news, I made a twitter! a friend recommended it to me because I was complaining about how my googlereader would have thousands of unreads after just a day. turns out, I like twitter! oh my god, the news i’m getting at such a constant rate. it’s wonderful. i’m following the deficit debate and i’m all tweaked out on politics. magnifico! my rule is, however, to only tweet about politics/important things/things not my personal life. NO ONE needs a live feed of my life that constantly updates. I don’t even need that. My personal tumblr blog is enough vanity for me, though even there I really post a lot more about politics/political views/progressive shit than I do about myself. I fail at life.

work has been fun. I worked at home on Monday, which meant that I didn’t see Brian Thursday - Monday! so sad. on tuesday, though, for the majority of the time it was just me and him in the office. it was nice and quiet, which can be quite pleasant from time to time.

today, the APIEQLA/KIWA interns (or really just Iris and Martin) came to the Faith Committee meeting (which, btw, is actually a lot of fun!). I hadn’t seen them in close to two weeks, so it was nice to sit and laugh with them again! they’ve been working out of KIWA because they’re surveying Korean youth on their feelings towards LGBT rights; they’re going to be at KIWA for the next three weeks, it seems, which means I won’t get to work with them really at all! that really blows. i love them! (jaejin and john too!)

our tumblr is coming along really well. to be quite honest, sunday night I was pretty afraid we wouldn’t have any submissions aside from the one person who answered a question I posted. HOWEVER, we’ve been getting a few and everyone else is also starting to post on the tumblr! WHOOOHOOO. we have over 100 followers and people seem genuinely interested in the blog (including a few of my friends, some unexpected). I’m glad that our tumblr isn’t bust, which was a small fear of ours. I really really realllyyy want to open up a space for APIs to explore their identity in all shapes and forms. I think just having that space available will cause APIs and all individuals who view the blog to consider their own identity and what it’s made up of.

okay, enough for tonight.

I am working from home today. I went to work at a Starbucks earlier because working from home means having the cutest kitty ever to distract me. Must. escape. her. insane. cuteness.

Im making phone calls for APIEQLA’s program Crossroads, which deals with the intersectionality between API and LGBT civil rights. Pretty cool stuff. Unfortunately, I won’t be back in the office till Monday. :( No Brian for so long! Who could ask for a more amazing community organizer?

Tomorrow is the awards dinner. I haven’t really figured out what to wear yet. It will prove to be a loonnggg day, I’m sure and the last time I wore my favorite heels, my heels turned purple. Scary stuff, man.

Yay.

is it completely wrong to be jealous of Maria for having super activisty friends?

Back to relevant stories. Last week on Thursday, I went with API Equality-LA to film Tak Yamamoto, who is a big API/LGBT activist. He was at the Salt Lake City JACL conference where JACL voted to support same-sex marriage—making them the first non-LGBT organization to come out in support. Amazing, right?

Tak was refreshingly pleasant and lively, despite old age. He was humble and oftentimes made it clear that he spoke only for himself and his experiences, rather than for the whole.

Cathy Huang, director of OUTfest’s Tales of the Waria, was the filmographer and she, too, was also amazingly humble. She cleared her schedule, despite moving to New York in two weeks, so she’d be able to come and help us with this filming. I should mention that Tak’s interview is the first in APIEQLA’s project API Pioneers.

Sorry this blog is so all over the place. I got food poisoning (mild food poisoning) at work today thanks to the sushi place not too far from the office. My fault for wanting Spicy Tuna! :( More to come later :)