Category: thisnthat

bel air camera for developing digital camera pictures. the paper is of an excellent quality, and the color looks very nice. definitely superior to ofoto, and for the same price. plus, no shipping fees cuz you can walk your ass down to bel air yourself and pick ’em up. :) i am now a believer.

… or monterey park. whatever.

went to get dim sum with some folks from my sometime-fraternity on sunday morning… it was kinda cool to see that there are some nice new people in aphio. didn’t get to talk with them a whole lot, but they seem pretty cool. we parted after lunch was over, though — jer and i had to do a ranch 99 run to restock the cupboards. aaah! it’s been so long since i’ve done a real ranch run!! picked up some mushrooms, veggies, noodles, soy milk, dumplings, a steamer basket, and a bunch of other tasty-yet-non-essential items, like some tang-yuan and chocolate covered muscat gummies. those are my favorite!! kekeke. ooh, and we also got those super-yummy custard filled cakes no place else seems to sell. hooray for ranch 99 in san gabriel. :)

monterey park is so far away though. =( it feels like a day trip — an hour to get there, a whole day spent there, and another hour getting back. it’s no wonder we don’t make the trip out there very frequently.

oh well. at least we are restocked now. i’m eager to try some recipes from the cookbook i got last week.. and maybe improvise a few too! we’ve got the materials now. i am so ready!! woohoo!!

so one of my professors used to know someone who was George W. Bush’s former roommate at Yale. This guy was part Cherokee Indian, from Georgia, very poor, at Yale on scholarship, and he hated GW so so much because the current US president gave him plenty of grief, was drunk all the time, and so forth. basically, GW was an asshole frat guy. my professor remarked that he must have had a nervous breakdown upon hearing that his hated former roommate was running for president.. and hey, not only ran, but won!

and on another unhappiness-with-Bush-note, one of the TA’s for my anthro class had served during Desert Storm and is being excused from the current conflict because of grad school. Anthony Camara’s roommate, part of the Marines reserve, is now stationed in Iraq. I met someone else on the UCLA message boards who is supposed to be in Iraq right now, but was held back because he needed a physical.

so yep.. this war it is a-coming, and if affects each and every one of us in some way…

forgot to mention this earlier. I saw this on one of the sites i visited yesterday as I was bouncing around. it went something like:

“all girls are evil. their evilness is directly proportional to their apparent sweetness. that is, the sweeter they appear to be, the meaner they really are!”

certainly this is not true in every case, but boy have i found many cases of this to be true. -shakes head- girls, you know who you are!!! >:O i have no patience with you sickly sweet insincere girls! gah!!

I’ve tried to be more tolerant, but I’ve learned the hard way that I’m not meant to be friends with everyone. :(

so first, I got my anthro midterm back. I got a B! It’s not too great, but I expected faaar worse from how I was feeling when I walked out of that thing. so a B is cause for happiness. :)

secondly, I went to office hours for my history of california class. we had a really awesome discussion… and plus my professor remembers me! heheh, or at least she humors me into thinking she does. :)

thirdly, I ran into a bunch of people on campus today: jason kwong on bruin walk, cindy lee from my building freshman year, and anthony camara. anthony camara has always been one of the most interesting people i’ve met since i’ve been here. he’s always steady, yet he always makes time to read some very intriguing books and listen to great music in spite of doing massive amounts of work for his majors in biology and english. madness. anyway, got to talk and catch up with him this afternoon. it was so nice to see him again!!

Anyway, tonight, jer and i were going to go help bobbo celebrate his birthday, but jer had to work late and we couldn’t make it to dinner in time. so we stayed in, picked up some Fatburger (baby fat, king fat, and chili cheese fries!! whoohoo!), and cozied up with The Bourne Identity. The whole time we were watching the movie, I was trying to figure out what the hell Julia Stiles was doing in it. She was doing a part that any young starlet could play, that wasn’t any sort of stretch at all, and didn’t require her star power to illuminate the role any way. in fact, her being Julia Stiles overshadowed the very marginal role she had. (I have a pretty dencet respect for Stiles — She was terrific in “ten things I hate about you” and “state and main,” and i hear she held her own opposite stockard channing in “the business of strangers.”) But the other actors were very good. I really like Franka Potente, and she’s the fire in the story. She’s much sexier than Matt Damon, hands down. Chris Cooper turned in another good performance (his previous one was as the military man neighbor in American Beauty)as the man in charge of the secret government program responsible for Bourne’s super-fly spy skillz. The movie itself was all right. Maybe it’s something I should have seen in the theater, since it’s not terribly impressive acting or storyline-wise. The story was intriguing, but it didn’t really feel very satisfying. Just kind of… “eh.”

Tomorrow should be fun.. get to celebrate anthony choi’s bday!! woohoo~!!!

i was flipping through (would you call it flipping through? hmm) people blogs/webpages and just kind of bouncing about from site to site, and i found a couple of interesting things.

1. EVERYONE seems to have a blog now! Whether it’s just a page of HTML or done through blogger or done with MovableType (which I’m still interested in switching to sorta) or LiveJournal or Xanga, everyone seems to be on the weblogging boat. It’s amazing how it’s exploded so quickly recently! … Or maybe I’ve only just noticed. *grins* But I mean… I still remember when I came across faithy’s blog a couple years ago and was inspired to start one of my own. (thanks, faithy!)

2. And for the people who do blog, Xanga is apparently the program of choice, especially among aphio folk! I knew some people with Xanga blogs before (up at stanford and cal primarily), but I guess it’s made its way down here. Xanga makes it easy to start and maintain a blog, that’s for sure. But what’s really sneaky about what they do is that they make you sign up with Xanga if you want to post comments. wtf is that?? and plus, that makes it easy for a person who’s new to blogging to just up and choose Xanga just cuz they have an account, even if LiveJournal and Blogger are similarly easy to use. Hehe. The recovering web designer in me raises an anguished voice and says, “why do people not wish to have more control and design their pages more??” Then I realize that hey… it just matters that they’re blogging, and not necessarily how they do it. And so I am calm.

Rich just posted up a ton of links to other folks with blogs… and like i said before, many are Xanga blogs with links to other Xanga blogs, etc. aaaah!! Xanga is taking over the world!!!! *sob!!*

*clings onto Blogger ever so tightly!*

i’m back on my awful pre-britain sleeping habits. >_

… and I got an A!! whoohoo~!!! -does a dance of joy-

julie got us tix to the premiere and afterparty of old school. click here if you want to check out my pictures.

just a couple of years, and everything changes so much…

i went to my second aphio meeting this quarter! I don’t go very often anymore… didn’t go for a long time. I didn’t really feel like i knew anyone there, and those whom i did know, well, i never really developed very good friendships with them. It’s a shame because I think they’re all great people who are lots of fun to talk to in the “haha” way and the “hmm.. interesting…” way. But I’m boring! I just do school and bum around. :) I live a much more simple life than I did compared with even something as recent as just last year. I’m not running around to concerts every week. I’ve quit my jobs. I’m not going out and partying much anymore. My stories aren’t “omg, i got so trashed last night” ones, they’re more like, “Hey, I leveled my character in Neverwinter Nights! hyuk hyuk hyuk.”

Not that I necessarily mind. It’s just… different — different mindset, different kind of attitude, different ideas of normalcy and exciting-ness. And while I desperately miss my friends and all the people i used to hang out with, I think maybe something slightly quieter might be good for me. Although a good party every once in a while is always a good thing. ;o)

In some ways I feel a little bit old. After all, I’m a fifth year, I’ve got kind of a bad attitude now, and the same things that were so exciting and fresh and new to me two years ago just don’t seem so amazing now. Other things occupy those spaces these days. but I still remember a time when i thought it was high fun to run around in a 24 hour supermarket with a bunch of your friends and setting up a makeshift photo studio of beach toys and giant bags of dog food in Aisle 12 was pretty amusing. I still think it’s amusing, but it’s not as new and novel as I once thought it was…

so i’m feeling a little like i’m having a hard time relating to other kids who are going through what i did a couple of years earlier. That thrill of discovery. That sense of throwing your cares into the wind and throwing yourself into the nurturing arms of your friends. That sense of safety and vastness as you explore more and more parts of this new world opened up to you. It’s a singular experience, and it’s not one to be taken away from anyone. and I especially don’t want to be the one pouring cold water on another person’s good times. It’s their time to be free…

:) hooray for college.