Category: thisnthat

does it ever strike anyone that grown-up conservatives were those kids in preschool who didn’t play well with the other kids? because honestly: what do you hear from conservatives?

– “Why do I have to share?”
– “How come I can’t have more?”
– “But I don’t want other kids to play with my toys!”

okay, I know, I’m not being fair. i’m just whining about extremists. granted, there are liberal extremists too, and they’re no better than conservatives. It’s just that extremist liberals basically the same selfish logic and give it a pseudo-social bent. I think that contradicts the very ideas of liberalism: that everyone deserves a fair shot at a decent life. I didn’t say special treatment, I didn’t say a perfect happy life. I said a fair shot at a decent life. And you know, it’s up to a society to do its best toward that.

Anyway, I could write a whole thesis on that, but i’ll stop here. at any rate, it takes a certain kind of willfulness to be extreme in either direction, and for anyone to say that only one way is the way to go on all issues is… well… i’d say they’re not very educated. :(

education’s a good thing! knowledge helps a person better understand their world and can help them improve it. yay education!

haha, ok, i’ll stop! i’ll stop!!

…belated.

oh my gosh, I do *not* fare well without a computer/internet connection. >_<

thanksgiving was good! got to see my parents, got to hang out with my sister, see some of my friends, and do some christmas shopping and prep for the trip later this month. I can’t wait!! it’s going to be sooo hard concentrating on school knowing that england is right around the corner. I can’t believe it’s tenth week already, and finals week is right around the corner! <sob!>

anyway, home was nice. it was good to get out of LA for a little while, even if it meant leaving jer. I was so happy to see some of my old friends. everyone seems to be doing well, living at home and working or doing grad school. my old friends are such overachievers! hehe.

I got a backpack for the trip this weekend too! my parents and I went to the R.E.I. in Fremont (across the street from that awesome Fry’s on Durham) on Saturday and took a look at the inventory. I had no idea backpacks were sooo expensive. but then again, you could see the care that was put into designing each of them: most of them had loops for hooks and such, little side pockets, places to hang your gear, straps to bind things in place. there were 4500 ci monsters with detachable fanny packs, adjustable backs and so forth.. I decided those were waaay too huge for me and picked up a Moraine 3200. here’s a pic.

so yup. that’s the most exciting stuff of the weekend. I missed out on a lab proctor position at social sciences computing though, since I was at home and couldn’t get online. :( that was the bummer of the vacation. oh well.. maybe something else will turn up. :)

so I finally got blogger to post by using one of the alternate servers… well, actually they’re the main servers but I hate using them because they never display the date in the proper fashion. Most of the blogger servers render my date stamp in sentence case — November blah blah blah. The server that I normally use can actually render dates the way i like — all lowercase. so please forgive me if my pages look really really icky right now. it’s not my fault! *sob!!*

anyway, just a post about awful blogging business.

HEY so everyone who reads this blog and is good friends with me, please email me your mailing address so I can send you a christmas card/post card! email me, darnit!!

so onto more joyful business!!

I discovered several very happy-inducing things today!!

1. being the stationery freak I am, I have been completely enamored of a japanese stationery mart nearby. they don’t have cutesy sanrio stuff (which I don’t mind), but they focus on good ol’ stationery for students, etc. I’ve wandered into it quite often, but have often walked away empty-handed, nevertheless still content from the experience of being so close to so much cool pens and pencils and papers!!

but this time was different. :) last night, I rediscovered my old “campus” brand binder, the one I had picked up in taiwan when I last visited. it’s a small binder/notebook type thing – takes paper that’s about half the size of a standard copy size paper, has little pockets inside, etc. the trouble with the binder is that it takes special paper that has lots of holes punched in it, and it’s hard to find in the US.

this store carries that paper. :)

so today, I picked up a pack of unlined paper, a set of new dividers, took everything that was in the binder before and snapped all the new stuff in. first of all, everything fit (YAY!). second of all, the unlined paper was soo much nicer than the lined paper I had been using. I was going to be happy enough just writing on the fresh sheets of paper when….

I started playing with word and my printer. I found a paper size called “A5,” mused that the dimensions were about the same, and fed a sheet through my printer.

it printed perfectly. :)

I went nuts! I looked around in all my other applications and realized that A5 was a standard paper setting!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!

so now… i’ve finally got my excel address lists going again, with copies in my little binder. I’ve got my calendar in my binder. I’ve got my “wedding planning” list in my binder. My binder has use again!!!!!

Needless to say, I am thrilled to find a new way to keep organized. =) =) =)

2. And there’s a second thing that makes me happy today!! I discovered Irfanview, which is a supremely handy app for viewing/batch renaming your images. super handy if you’ve got a digicam and you want to rename all their names to numbers and such. I also got to play with Exifer, which is great for handling the exif information on your digicam images. It also makes it easy to add jpeg comments, which is really handy when you use JAlbum to create web albums of your pics. JAlbum automatically thumbnails and generates slides for your pictures for posting online. It can also import your jpg comments as captions and display any exif information you choose on the slides. freaking awesome. I was only playing with all of this today because I got my pictures from summer 2000 back from wolf camera. They made a photo CD from my negatives! yay! so now, half of my pics from the summer olympics are (finally) now online. the rest will be up after I get back from thanksgiving. :)

3. Dinner with jer at Houston’s. I managed to tear jer away from work and get dinner with him at Houston’s. They had the pork chop today! YAY!! It’s not always on the menu, but it’s almost ALWAYS sooooo good. ooh, and coffee afterward was tasty too. :)

*yawn* time for bed. :)

negotiating the awkward transition from ex-flame to just friends isn’t one that i’ve ever mastered. looking back, of the 5 guys i’ve ever dated, I only keep in touch with one, and it took a few years before we spoke with each other very much.

Guy number 2 called me a year after we broke up (just before I started college) to make sure I wasn’t going to his school.

Guy number 3 (the only one I ever loved) is probably very happily dating someone by now, and i could probably message him and say hi, I’m not online often enough to do it. I also don’t really know what to say. “hello, what’s new? i’m engaged now, how about you?” riiiight.

Guy number 4 is living with a good friend of mine (a strange coincidence), has a girlfriend, and only contacted me to get a CD back. Which I went to the trouble of retrieving from the actual person who borrowed it and proceeded to deliver it to his place of work myself because he couldn’t be bothered to actually think of a mutually beneficial solution. and of course, all i get is a curt “thanks.” whatever, you inconsiderate prick! rrrr!!

And then there’s guy number 5. We were never “officially” dating or anything like that, but there was an emotional attachment. Maybe it was one of those things of attraction that went awry. Who knows. anyway, I still think he’s a cool person, and it would be great if we could still be friends. But… I don’t really know how that’s possible.

how do you go from being ex-flames to being friends again? sure, it’s nothing impossible. it’s just that… there’s a guardedness there that wasn’t in the friendship initially. it creeps in because one remembers when they got burned a few months ago by the same person, and one wants to be strong to prove they don’t matter to you in that way anymore. Fear of being hurt again makes one erect walls in self-defense, that desire to be tough and strong keeps you from poking holes through it to see eye to eye. One is sometimes afraid they’ll poke your eye out, again.

it’s a funny thing. there are people you want to be close to and are cool enough to date … and it makes sense that if they’re cool enough to date, they’re someone you’d want as a friend too. but there’s not enough time to be friends with everyone. I mean this in the sense that people are very busy and don’t have time to spend with many people developing new friendships, but also in the sense that one doesn’t have time to wait out awkwardness to regrow an old friendship.

… and that makes me sad. I’d like to be friends with the people i’ve dated in the past because for the most part, they’re all really interesting people and made (before friends turned into flames) very good friends.

and of course, one always wonders how things might have turned out differently. what if the timing was better? what if something wasn’t in the picture? what would have happened had we faced this challenge together? if we didn’t? it’s somewhat idle pondering, kind of like skipping stones in a park while waiting for your friend to make the dropoff. (kidding!) the only difference is that this can make you sad looking back, feeling wistful of those memories where you shared some good laughs and some good memories…

short home movie clips in a photograph in my mind… the pictures crack a little bit, some of the colors have faded while others have taken on technocolor drama, and all are covered with that milky screen of memory. i’ll lock them up in my box a little longer…

and here I am now, having discovered a remarkable person with a mind that fascinates me and a spirit i can be so close to…

i’m ready to make some new memories…

blogger’s misbehaving and won’t let me post! by the time you read this message, the problem will be over. :(

Harper’s Index for November:

Ratio of Japanese killed in 1945’s U.S. atomic-bomb attacks to Iraqi children killed due to U.N. sanctions : 1:3 (see page 43)

Number of reports that President Bush referred to on September 7 as evidence of Iraq’s nuclear threat : 2

Last year in which the agency Bush cited as the reports’ author had new information on Iraq’s nuclear program : 1998

Number of “indications” the agency had then of “any physical capability” to produce weapons-grade nuclear material : 0

so pearl the tard is playing with her new digital camera and freaks out when she realizes one of the modes she’s been anticipating (called the “long shutter” mode) is missing. she goes through the manual, goes through various sites, and is immensely saddened by the thought that her new camera might be defective.

but THEN! she goes online and talks to brian, and he suggests that maybe the mode is only available when the camera is in manual mode. pearl runs to check this, finds out he’s correct, and is overjoyed.

I declare Brian Won to be Man of the Hour!! :D :D :D

so my best friend kipp’s fraternity brother chris auditioned for American Idol, and he passed the first few callbacks, so he’ll be on TV~!!!! WHEEEEEE!! I’ll keep y’all updated… i’m SOOOOOOOO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D heheheh. I haven’t been watching AI, but I guess I’ll start. :)

sparklehorse is ALSO out tour right now in the UK!!!

ok, enough with the awful news. onto something nice!!

woke up this morning and finished John Grisham’s The Painted House. This is only the 2nd Grisham novel I’ve read in my life, the other one being the firm, and part of me is wondering why I haven’t been reading more of him. He’s a surprisingly skillful storyteller, able to paint golden brown portraits of the Arkansas farm lands as he is in shading the figures he writes about. The dialogue was extremely well written, far from the stilted language of The Firm. He also paces the novel very well, able to languish in his descriptions of the rural life without sacrificing the excitement of the story, which is largely character driven instead of plot driven. fun read.

there’s nothing like curling up in bed with a good book. why don’t I do it more often? I’ve got all these stacks of books in my bedroom (because I don’t have a bookshelf for them anymore… long story), and I just recently went to marie’s bookstore opening last tuesday and bought even MORE books.

oh!! the bookstore opening! I forgot to write about that! so my old roommate marie recently started working for the new barnes and noble that was just opening up on Hawthorne in Torrance. And they had a friends and family night the day before opening to the public!! yay!! it was so awesome! got to see jen, marie, sue, crispy, and jen’s new roommate jen (I have no idea how that works), but I didn’t get to talk to them a whole lot. I was too busy running around the store! It was sooo nice! it’s sooo big! on top of the requisite bookstore, they also have a cafe and a music section that features the blue dot or red dot or whatever it’s called thingie so you can instantly sample music off any cd in the shop. freaking awesome! anyway, we didn’t get anything from the store, since it was all really overpriced, but we did get several books. jer picked up a few michael crichton books; I picked up a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories and a couple of travel guides for England and Scotland. the travel guides are really great: it’s doesn’t just talk about where to go in those countries; each also has a good history section, with the story being told by the people themselves. It definitely makes for interesting reading! and as for the Fitzgerald short stories… well, i’ve always been a stickler for Fitzgerald. :)

ok, so i’ve got LOTS to read. so what the heck am I doing instead of reading all those good books i’ve got?

1. gaming.
I’ve spent way too much time on NeverWinter Nights. Gosh, that game is evil. Worse than Diablo. sucks you in, and you just want to keeeeep plaaaaying! at first, I thought the story and the characters were kind of cheesy (having totally been spoiled by Blizzard’s too cool and eventually too hilarious characters — try clicking on starcraft or wciii units next time you play), but eventually, you just get into it. i’m developing an elven sorceress right now, and she’s really kick ass. granted, it’s because we cheated and gave her some kick-ass items (pearl’s determination, for one.. hehehe we get to name them!), but it just helps the story go along better. :) anyway, jer and I haven’t played recently because he’s been working a lot; hopefully we’ll play a little bit this weekend. :)

2. this stupid site
if you haven’t noticed, i’ve relocated my site AGAIN. thanks to thomas, I found out about a free public unix shell that offers webhosting for quite a reasonable price. and it’s a FREE PUBLIC UNIX SHELL!! I’m also having waaay too much playing with it. hehehe. it’s food for the inner geek. anyway, please update your links. i’ll be attempting to update portions of the site in the next few weeks (riiight), so there might be some dead links here and there. :( sorry!

3. going to school
it’s amazing how much better you do in school when you go. that’s my insight of the lifetime. -grins-

idlewild is on tour with coldplay in the UK!!! why aren’t they on tour with them heeeeeeeeere???
*sad*