Career / Life Complex

I've always been opposed to having a career; I'd much rather work many different jobs in a number of different places. It sounds commitment-phobic and this fantasy might reveal my aversion to complicated/stressful work, but I think such a life-style would be a rewarding adventure. But that's just fantasizing. That would never fly with my family, and I'm too attached to the idea of (relative) career and economic security.

That aside, I was thinking about how careers tend to influence how we are as people. Thinking of the preceding spiel actually didn't temporally precede what led me to think of this topic in the first place...

Today I got my hair cut. TFS, right? No, shush. Anyway, so I go to the hair salon with my brother and I'm up first. It's obvious Grace ajuma remembers cutting my hair before, as she asks me if I want it cut like last time. But the funny thing is she doesn't remember me; she just remembers my hair. Grace knows how long each area on my head was cut, and can remember roughly around when she last cut it, but she doesn't know a goddamn thing about me. In fact, she asks me if I'm Alex or David, and if I'm the one who just finished Law School.

Obviously it's understandable that she can't remember personal details about the dozens of people whose hair she cuts. However, what I found interesting was the extent of her knowledge of my hair. That got me thinking about jobs in the service sector, and how professionals must remember people mostly through the way in which they serviced them. Hair cutters remember hair, lawyers remember cases, dentists remember teeth, prostitutes remember penises (I'm only guessing so), etc.

Then do doctors remember illnesses? As someone considering a career in medicine, I felt a little depressed at the prospect of remembering people in my life by their ailments, benign and fatal. Tom? Oh the guy with heart disease. The woman paralyzed from the waist down. Leukemia kid. Tasty Coma Wife. I wonder if this is the path I want to go down.

[Edit: I forgot to add that nobody in my extended family that I know is David; my brother, who was with me at the time, is named Christopher. He graduated from law school at UC Hastings, not me. Also if you don't get the "Tasty Coma Wife" reference, I realize that sounds really offensive. Sorry to anyone with relatives who are in a coma.]

Broken?

So I'm finally here at college. Yay. It's turning out to be a decent amount of what I'd wanted and expected. Especially the freedom. But what I didn't expect was how odd I'd be responding to this new freedom. I almost feel anxious about having an unregulated, self-planned schedule. To have almost complete control about how one goes about one's day is kind of a scary thing for me. Today I decided to have lunch at 3 instead of at 12, the latter being the strict time that my grandma adhered to. And it was awesome. Now I'm going to go eat dinner, and I'm actually hungry, unlike usual when I'm just forced to sit and eat at the same time every night. But I still feel anxious for what I have--I mean want to do tomorrow. Hopefully this anxious feeling will go away and I'll be able to embrace my freedom better.

"The best rape whistle is your voice!"

This amused me, that's all. No special commentary or anything; it really speaks for itself.

-Sigh-

I want to meet the 17% who got this problem wrong -_-. 17% of 39,609 people is 6733.53 people. So 6733 people and 1 midget got this problem wrong. -Sigh-...

Something From Nothing

In econ this year (trust me this has a point so don't close the window or go to facebook instead -_-) we learned about something called the money multiplier effect. The money supply increases in a few different ways, the most interesting of them being by lending and borrowing in a credit system. By loaning out money lent to them by savers, banks artificially create more money.

This is actually sort of analogous (and me being me, I love a good analogy) to a principle I've strictly adhered to my whole life: don't take out your problems on other people. They don't deserve it, and it never makes your original problems any better.

It's like the money multiplier. Someone or something injects you with negative emotion, and you don't just pass that on like currency to the next person; it still stays with you but then creates needless negativity. Just like there's no tangible good behind the artificially generated currency, the original event never had anything to do with blow that was dealt to the victim of somebody's inability to deal with their problems. Perry told us it's like we created something from nothing. Whether it's pain or money, such a thing shouldn't happen.

To be or not to be

How sad. It's Saturday night and I'm laying on a couch in my underwear with my laptop resting on my stomach, and the most socially active thing I'm doing is blogging. Strangely enough, I'm not really sad. Of course there's going to be (and there has been all summer) that nagging, antsy feeling that I should be getting the most out of my summer, spending every precious moment creating outstanding memories with friends and working on self-improving.

I really hate that feeling.

But it passes. Not to say I haven't done some of that, but honestly I've spent a large sum of time sitting on my ass reading manga, playing farmville, and listening to my itunes on shuffle. Oh and surprisingly I haven't been getting that much sleep, but that's irrelevant.

Now there's less than a month of summer left. I'm not lamenting that though. I'm more beaten up that I wasn't more honest the last 4 years of my life. Just now I'm embracing and accepting how much I love lounging around by myself, just like how I love stupid movies unimaginable in the film canon and silly manga that don't have a shred of realism in them. All of the things I thought a respectable person shouldn't love doing.

I think I would've been much happier had I let myself be--Hrm, why do we have to be "ourselves"? People say not to be other people, or who you think you should be, or who you think other people think you should think you should be, or any other confusing combination

of clauses, and they say "be yourself". Well I think you sort of lose yourself when you consciously decide who "yourself" is.

So I say just be. I look forward to just being during the next four years of my life.

Disappointment and Despair

I tried uploading this gif to facebook for my profile picture and it didn't dance around. i was sorely disappointed. -sigh- maybe i just fail at the internet. who knows. but it's unassailably cute. trust me.

it's a snippet from this video i think:

Inadvertent Wisdom

I was watching a show where they make commentary on people who still think there are WMD's to be worried about. The character meant to be the caricature says "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence!" This was meant to make him sound trite and like a tool, but I realized in a different context that statement can actually mean a lot.

This all came up when I was thinking about a discussion Karthik and I had about agnosticism vs atheism, and how despite the critiques of others we still staunchly believe that we're not just timid atheists but truly are agnostic. Because the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

Dangerous

Cool

I read a catch-phrase in some manga today. I think it's awesome.

Hate the crime, not the fetish.

Surprise?

I spent the last week wondering if graduation would be uplifting or depressing. Turns out life threw me a total curve ball: my family succeeded in irking me beyond belief and making it possibly the worst graduation I've ever been to. And I went to one while I had chicken-pox, so that's pretty bad. You know life's out to get you when your family members are big enough assholes to make you feel bad about yourself on the day of your graduation.

But the fireworks were nice. And Mrs. Logan's pronunciation disability was funny.

Inspired by Julia Meng

From Omegle

Connecting to server...

You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

Stranger: hi

You: hey how are you

Stranger: good

Stranger: you?

You: well this is my first time doing this

You: so i guess i'm just kind of weirded out

You: seems like an interesting concept

You: why are you on here for?

Stranger: curiousity

Stranger: where you from?

You: southern california

You: you?

You: we'll try to keep specifics to a minimum

Stranger: England, 20, Male

Stranger: nice and broad

You: haha yeah

You: 18, male

You: are people overly concerned with pedophiles in england, too?

Stranger: yes

Stranger: we don't have the tv shows like you guys

Stranger: 'to catch a predator'

You: ah i wonder what that means

You: it could mean

You: 1) we have more pedophiles

You: 2) our pedophiles are more easily caught

You: 3) britain likes to keep quiet about its pedophiles

Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Connecting to server...

Looking for someone you can chat with. Hang on.

You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

Stranger: hi

You: hi

Stranger: asl

You: what does asl mean?

Stranger: girl_

Stranger: ?

You: ooh age sex language?

Stranger: lacation

You: i see

You: 18, male, southern california

You: sorry to dissapoint

You: not a girl

Stranger: yea, so fuck off

Your conversational partner has disconnected.

...the fuck?

Mindhead!

I was feeling very sleepy today. And I've noticed that when I'm sleepy I'm never at all in my right mind. That gets me thinking: if our psychological health is so strongly dependent on our physiological well-being, how do we ever know if we're in our right minds? If our mentality can be so swiftly tossed from side to side, flipped on its head by something as basic as a few hours of sleep, what does that say about the solidarity of our conscious minds or "soul" (or whatever one would call it)? As teenagers, we like to blame our emotional outbursts on hormone imbalances and the like, but at one point you do feel and think a certain way. Who's to say this isn't the real you speaking? Are you someone else for a brief moment?

and to top this off I have picked out a few more six word stories!

Popped. Couldn’t stop. Chronic heart disease.
Only liar. Truthful world. Infinite power.

Interpretation needed

Five zombies. Four bullets. Two zombies.

This was on www.sixwordstories.net . I interpreted it as the guy shoots 3 zombies and then shoots himself, but someone else on the site thought the guy used up all the bullets and then was bitten and became a zombie. The latter makes more sense if the guy didn't know how many rounds he had to begin with, but I like my darker and (arguably, to me at least) funnier interpretation.

Fucked Up Thing #1

So I realized the other day while talking to Maria that I have a lot of fucked up (but cool) ideas that I'm always telling her, but I always forget what they are later. And that's a shame, so I've decided to put them up on the old blog whenever I think of them! So here's Fucked Up Thing #1

No one really remembers themselves being born, which is interesting since it must be such a traumatic and scary experience. But what if one upped the ante? Would a baby remember being born under the most traumatic of circumstances? My idea for a horrible birthing scenario:

Have the mother hanging by her arms from a horizontal pole high above the ground. As the baby is born, it'll fall out of the mother. To make matters even worse, the horizontal pole should be put several meters above the ground so that the baby doesn't hit the ground, but instead falls down and then BOING bounces back up to smack the mother in the uterus (I have no idea how long or elastic umbilical cords are) and then back down and up and down. Simple harmonic motion like you've never seen it before.

Then the baby will swing around for a bit, its tiny little arms flailing about but totally incapable of doing anything. Then SNAP goes the cord and there goes the baby. The beauty in this is that babies have to come out head first, so it'll fall and land on its head. The baby's short limbs will be easy to tuck in so the baby spirals downward like a compact bullet. And the icing on the cake: ever heard the Doppler Effect applied to a crying baby plummeting down through the sky? I haven't, and now I'm dying to know what it's like.

Chaplin Snakker

Lasse Gjersten made a song based on the speech in Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator." The original clip is below.

The little things are fun to destroy

Being stuck in a rut isn't fun.

Here's one definition of a rut:
1. an annually recurrent state of sexual excitement in the male deer ; broadly : sexual excitement in a mammal especially when periodic

Unfortunately, this wasn't that kind of rut. It wasn't broadly sexual or exciting, and there were no periodic mammals in site.

I got stuck on a Sudoku puzzle last night. Then, I worked that damn thing all of this afternoon, and while stuck staring at my half-empty (you get pretty pessimistic in a rut) grid, I kind of just sat there waiting for an answer to come. But it didn't.

So I decided I'd take a try reading the instruction page in the book. Turns out they teach you a strategy that I hadn't considered before. I never thought of reading the instructions before. After all, I'd finished plenty of the difficult puzzles using the strategies I thought up.

I proceeded to finish the puzzle in the next 15 minutes.

The lesson here? I'm a genius. Just kidding. The lesson is that when you're in a rut, you can never wait and hope for someone to come pick you up; you've got to dig yourself out, and sometimes that means going back to the beginning.

Talent shown, talent spectated

Talent show. As much fun as the acts themselves are, I think my favorite part about talent show is going out there and seeing everyone. Seeing it the night of isn't better than watching it on youtube just because the audio quality sucks and it's hard to see recorded. Being there, talking to the people around you about how Young wore his cargo shorts (lol, talk about class) and hearing all of the obnoxious cheers is what really makes the night. 

However, I was a little sad at the end of the night since senior  year talent show had gone by and I hadn't ever been in one. There's a delicate trade off between the bliss from a performance well done, bonding with your fellow performer, and spectating freely without having to feel the anxiety and nerves of being on stage. This year, I had debated performing in talent show for a while, and obviously I chose not to. I'm still not sure whether or not I made the right choice, but it was an enjoyable night nonetheless. 

Hager wants our performances to be in some new auditorium or something so they can be at 16800 Shoemaker Ave. I say fuck that, because I'd really rather not be on campus on these special nights. 

and congrats to Maria and the other clubs consisting of cool people. You were great, darling (hah). 

Human, maybe?

They say you never truly appreciate what you have until it's gone. Well that royally pissed me off, because I don't want to wait all that time and I'd much rather appreciate that something while I still have it. What a shitty system! Darn you, life/God/whoever!

But then today something sort of cool happened. Well it's not cool in the sense that my dog grew wings, flew up to my window, and spoke words of wisdom to me or anything, but cool = good.

-context yay- So, growing up I've always felt emotionally hollow, like I was consumed in all of my own troubles, never really caring for anything out of my little sphere. I couldn't surely say there was anyone I really "loved," or at least such that I could deduce. I thought it was probable that I love my parents, but how could I really verify that? Doubt filled my mind as I was always forgetting their birthdays and never knowing what to get them and such.

I guessed I probably just didn't care enough. Me me me me.

It was a mystery whether love or empathy would ever be a part of my life, and as I grew older, the doubt and cynicism grew. It started to seem all too clear to me that people were incapable of real "love," that everyone is just delusional and feel the way they do for egotistical reasons.

Why do I love my parents? They constantly care for me and put me first. Evolution says I should treasure any kind of force that keeps me content and well, and same thing will go for my friends, lovers, whatever. That was the cold, robotic reasoning I made for myself.

And so -back to the present- I was sitting here doing some last minute financial aid stuff I had forgotten to do for a school, and the site asks me to type the ages of my parents. I was always forgetting their ages (another thing that made me skeptical), so I had to look at their birthdates and calculate them. They're both around 50. Then I started thinking about my parents becoming old and decrepit, and it dawned on me how soon this is going to happen. I felt depressed thinking of the prospect of losing my parents to age. And I cried.

This from the guy who thought he'd be that awkward son who wouldn't be able to cry at his parents' funeral. I actually started choking up, and (very unfortunate timing, I don't know why) I started to cry my eyes out while I was brushing my teeth.

Maybe I just think way too much. Maybe I do love my parents. I don't think I've ever really cried for anyone else. Or maybe it's the hormones. Either way, tonight, I feel a bit more human than before.

happy birthday hannah!
even though i missed the mark by 2 minutes...

yeah nothing else to say. hopefully veronica will post up pictures soon. rock band...rocks. damnit there goes my chance to be clever.

It's over!

After months of preparation and practices (which failed pretty hard), Maria's Debut finally comes to a close. For those of you who slept in and didn't come, weren't invited, or just didn't notice, nothing really worked out the way it was supposed to. In fact, "Debut fail" should be a common term for any disjointed and disorganized party. This might sound like a bad Disney film, but despite everything failing, it was a lot more fun than I had expected. You kind of had to be there, but here's the nice sparknotes version of it:

-Most of court was later than we'd planned. Karthik and I left my house at 8:50, but we missed an exit, ended up in San Pedro somehow, and got there at like 10:15.
-Waltz was alright. We actually maintained a circle. Good job, court! -high five-
-Will emceed, which made every awkward moment funny. "tables 13, 14, and 15...just pretend I said something funny"
-Zach played his sexophone, while Andrew...didn't. lol
-Maria's sister Michelle sang while her "gentleman friend" (as Will referred to him) played guitar
-Hannah's candle speech made me laugh. Frances' almost made me cry. And some girl's who Maria didn't even know made me feel awkward. She had humongous calves btw, but that's irrelevant.
-Modern was...I won't get into it. But at least we humored the audience =D.
-The DJ couldn't get the order right the roses dances because he lost the song list. -_-
-Paul did the Numa Numa dance. I laughed so hard I almost threw my heart up.
-I was Dr. Gregory House. Very hot.
-And then we danced the afternoon away. Until the The Reef employees started opening the curtains which made everything really awkward.
-At some point Frankie was in the middle of a circle and he danced like he'd never danced before. Meanwhile on the peripherals of said circle, some of us were doing the awkward turtle dance in response.

And I was too busy to take pictures with my phone. Except for this one:
Excuse the lighting. I said "smile, show us your teeth!" and that's what Christine gives me. And hi Cindy.

Oh and I almost forgot about this one. I remember Karthik hated it:

Ooh and random: so I was walking around Target the other day while my grandpa was at the pharmacy, and I stepped into the glasses room/section. I thought to myself, "Hrm, what kind of glasses should I get if I want to look like a douchebag? And I found these:
Actually the glasses are fine, but the kid just pisses me off.

Happy Debut, Maria.

Please, be gentle

So you may be wondering what I'm doing in the preceding picture. I am in fact begging Steve Jobs to gentle as he ass rapes me silly, because now I have a Mac. Which essentially make me Apple's bitch.

God I didn't realize how creepy this picture was until now. I apologize for that.

Oh and that's the beanie Darren got me for Christmas, amongst other things. I showed my appreciation for it by taking it with me to Mammoth and breaking the elastic in it. But now it's comfier, so I guess God or Jehovah or whoever is up there DOES have a plan.

Wait, where was I? Right so I got a Mac. Story goes:

Sister gets mac. Sister gets job where they give the exact same Mac to their employees. Sister keeps Mac for a while. One day a few years later personal Mac won't charge or work anymore. Apple store tells sister battery and hard-drive are defective, so Mac gets new battery and gets an upgraded 80 GB hard-drive because Apple doesn't make 60 GB hard-drives for that model anymore. Sister realizes little brother is going off to college soon. Sister asks brother if he'd like it for college, and brother says hell yes. 

So yeah, I'll probably spend way too much time on it, posting pictures and videos of stupid shit just because I can.  

Happy New Year's

When you say "Happy New Year's!", what are you being happy about? I had always uttered the phrase after the countdown, but I hadn't really thought about it until I was typing out the title to this blog.

'09 hasn't happened yet, so there's nothing to really be happy about that year, so the explanation that comes to mind first is that we say it because we're excited for the coming year.

But then I thought deeper into it, and as excited as I am for the rest of this year (oh and despite the lack of ^^'s and "whoooo!"s I am quite excited), when I wish a Happy New Year's I think I'm more saluting a good year goodbye. What do you think, friends?

As I clashed plastic cups full of Martinelli's with some chingoos when the clock struck 12, all I could think about was the good shit that happened up that point, not what could happen after. And that's all I have to say about the new year. I won't go on and on about how kickass the year will be, because you already know that.

BTW, I always found idioms with shrouded pasts to be interesting, like the whole story behind "rule of thumb" and such. In the future when analog clocks are a thing of the past, do you think our kids will have to ask us, "what does 'the clock struck' mean, daddy?" What'll happen when there are no more bridges made out of wood and rope? I'll say "don't burn your bridges," and my kids will look at me like I'm an idiot. Because in the future, nothing lights on fire except for books. Oh and double btw, I'm going to raise my kids so that they're so badass that rather than call me daddy, they'll refer to me as either "sir" or "master sergeant daddy".

And if people are wondering why I made the sudden relationship status change on facebook, it's because Maria and I have the green light from each of our respective parents. whoo!

this song makes me deliriously happy