adidav9

1337 feet

2012-02-23T23:06:00.002-06:00

girly-girl warning in effect!

These are not my feet. These are stock photo people feet.

today during our lunch hour, a friend/co-worker and i skipped the usual routine and went in to get pedicures done instead! we'd originally intended to get our little piggies nice and prepped for mexico this past weekend, but had to book a later date due to scheduling conflicts. (so yea, we went to mexico with nasty hobbitses feet.) well, that later date rolled around to today, and at noon we found ourselves excitedly hopping in the car and driving off towards the spa, debating which toenail polish color we wanted.

this was my first time getting any of my body '-cured' in any way and i was a skeptical, nervous, and excited all at once. we got to sit in massage chairs with our feet in running for the better part of an hour as the nail technicians trimmed, lotioned, and massaged us everywhere from the knee down. i wasn't expecting to enjoy the experience as much as i did - it was thoroughly relaxing and my trepidations about someone touching my feet (uh, ew) quickly faded into comfort and delight (ahhhhhh, i could get used to this). i chose a bright coral-y red color for the toenail colors and have been happily staring at and wiggling my piggies all day, excited for spring and summer and new bright fresh beginnings.

i think it's important to take time and pamper yourself a bit, especially to break up the monotony of a week or to get rid of the dull winter blues (not to mention duller winter skin!). while i definitely don't think i will make a habit out of getting pedicures, i could see myself going back for special occasions. who knew that something as simple as happy feet could make for such a happy girl?

power grid

2012-02-22T23:15:00.002-06:00

"damnit, i'm in first/last place again!"

this evening i played a new board game called power grid with four of my coworkers. well, "played" might be a strong word. i think we spent probably 90% of our time figuring out the game/evaluating decisions/goofing off/stuffing ourselves with thai food and the remaining 10% actually making moves on the board. and we only wound up passing through phase 1 of the game. and took two and a half hours to get there...to an outside observer, we probably looked like we were playing in slooooowwww mootttttioooonnnnnn.

yet despite the mollasses-like pace, i still highly enjoyed learning to play power grid. let me tell ya - that game is intense. it's reminiscent of a cracked-out hybrid of settlers (get resources!), monopoly (fight over a map for desirable locations!), dominion (buy the most souped-up cards!), and risk (fuck everyone else over!). as such, there is a whole lot of math, planning, and mental optimization that has to go into each turn. the analytical, economically-minded half of my brain got a real treat. i also loved that the more you were winning the game, the more of a handicap you had/vice versa - it really made the game more of a toss-up and it made being in last place actually a viable strategy for victory, something i haven't seen in other games.

there are a couple of drawbacks: it takes a couple of hours to onboard (no pun intended) a first-time player, and a full game even with experienced players can take something like 3 to 4 hours to complete. allegedly.

power grid is a game not for the weak of heart, nor for the short of patience. i loved learning it, although now i want to play for real! i'm not sure when the next time i'll have three hours to spend playing a board game will be. i guess there's always retirement.

thought of the day

2012-01-30T22:21:00.002-06:00

hearing enimem rap on the radio is like hearing inverse turrets

poop eye

2012-01-23T22:57:00.001-06:00

it all started sometime around september of last year.

itching, dryness, blurriness, and morbidly unattractive redness would plague my contacts-ed eyeballs. it began small - a bout of irritation here and there, or perhaps a slight pink tint to my eye after a long day of work (and a short night in a hotel room with the AC constantly on). slowly but surely, it became more and more frequent, until it became normal for me to walk around with teary red eyes at the end of the day. "poop-eye the sailor BA", "poopahauntas", and "all around scary-looking weirdo" became common nicknames for me amongst my fellow mature and compassionate thoughtworkers.

after a few weeks or so of these increasingly-severe shenanigans, i decided to see an optometrist. his words: "oh my god. it's a desert in there. this will take months to heal" i was taken aback. it was that bad? i'd worn the same contacts for the better half of a decade... surely my body couldn't have suddenly just... decided to reject them! this was blasphemy, people. BLASPHEMY.

but nevertheless, i decided to err on the side of caution. unlike shins or forearms or ankles or any of the usual body parts that can take a beating, eyes are a pretty sensitive part of the body. i didn't want to fuck mine up (more than they already were). so i reluctantly stowed away my now-allegedly-evil contacts and dug out my out-prescribed, wonky black glasses. i wore those (read: waddled my way through) for the better half of three months.

now let me tell you something: people treated me differently when i wore glasses. i treated myself differently when i wore glasses. i think that in general, i felt a tad smarter and nerdier and freer to be funny/vulgar/unladylike (i like to think i channeled tina fey a little, but in reality it was probably more drew carey than tina). oh and i didn't wear makeup or feel cute enough to dress up a ton, which was okay because the one boy whose affection i cared about thought i looked good in 'em anyhoo.

but i digress. as i wore my glasses, i could feel my eyes improving bit by bit, and weekly visits to the optometrist confirmed my progress. by the end of three months or so, my vision had gone back to normal. i got new glasses prescribed and a pair of trial contacts to wear - just a few hours a day at a time - and did a little jig. i was so excited to work out and be able to see the treadmill's numbers. or put on mascara and feel pretty again. or not have to squint at the screen at work. i was just glad to feel back to my old self.

i guess i got too excited, because i uh, did not obey dr's orders to the tee. while for the most part i stuck to just wearing those contacts for a few hours each day, a couple times (read: snowboarding) i wore those contacts for eight hours or more. and within two weeks my eyes were starting to show the same symptoms, but at an alarmingly quicker rate. so i cut back to one, maybe just two hours once every other day or so, but my eyes seemed to be getting worse and worse regardless of how much i scaled back. the new year came and i was at the same place i was before, with another diagnosis of severe dry eye and corneal abrasions. -insert napoleon dynamite-esque "idiot!" here-

it's been about three weeks and i'm still recovering and regretting not being smarter about my eyes. i'm seeing doctors, taking medication, following instructions (this time) and am 100% positive i can beat this darned thing. yet for all the inconvenience, time, and money this has cost me, it made me realize that too often, i take my health for granted and that it really does pays to take care of myself. i consider myself lucky that this eye thing is the only thing that's plaguing me, that i am otherwise blessed with a fully functioning mind and body. and hey, if it weren't for this i would never have learned about the benefits of fish oil. that stuff has so many benefits, it practically makes you superhuman. which i will be once i am back to 20/20 - eye-eye, cap'n!

Weekend in Massanutten. Also, friends don't let friends have children.

2011-12-26T17:13:00.000-06:00

My family and I are spending Christmas this year at a resort in Massanutten, Virginia. We usually embark on this trip along with approximately eighty five trillion other Asian families because it's organized by the Chinese school where my mom teaches. As a result, I've been surrounded by kids under half my age or adults over twice my age all weekend.

Despite the lack of fellow twenty-somethings and the really sad/borderline nonexistent ski and snowboarding conditions here in 50-degree Virginia, I've managed to have myself a pretty darn good time. I've been sleeping in, catching up on blogs, working out, negating workouts with massive quantities of food, studying Java, and settling Catan - what more could a girl ask for?

Maybe it's the fact that I've been around so much family, or maybe I am reading too many Mormon mommy blogs, or probably I'm just going a little bit nuts-o, but I've found myself casually pondering about the notion of one day having a family of my own. And after a few days of muttering to myself about it, I've concluded that I still for the life of me cannot really bear (no pun intended) the idea of having children.

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for marriage, I love my family and I like children fine. I go googoo and gaga over babies and yesterday I taught a bunch of kids how to throw and catch a frisbee. Heck, I even tolerate my sister. If that doesn't make me a kid person, I'm not sure what does.

But for me, the cons still outweigh the pros. And here's why.

(Before I start on my diatribe, I want to put the disclaimer out there that these are just the thoughts of a naive and slightly cabin-fevered 22-year old. I'm not trying to wipe out the human race here, people. I'm just explaining my personal reasons/viewpoint on having children in this day and age.)

It's 2011, almost 2012, and I firmly believe the evolved role of the modern educated upper-middle class woman clashes with the traditional family structure of two kids, a golden retriever, and a white picket fence. That setup suited an era of stay-at-home mothers whose roles in society were defined by and devoted their nuclear families. Today, that role has all but disappeared among the majority of women; as such, trying to adhere to that traditional structure is akin to forcing today's square peg into yesteryear's round hole (and expecting it to make dinner and tuck the kids in).

With my degree clutched tight in one hand and my ambitions nestled deep in my heart, I have no intention of pausing my life - my goals, my hobbies, my career - for months to years at a time to give the support a child needs and deserves in his or her first years. I also have no intention of a writing big fat check to somebody every month to fill that parental role while I'm at the office or in another city, wondering if my child has spoken his or her first word yet. I begin to wonder if this "putting my life before creating someone else's" comes off as a bit selfish, but when I think about it, I actually think leading a life devoid of children would motivate me to focus more on my surroundings and the society in which I live than otherwise. Because really, other than to please my baby-adoring mother...what biological obligation do I really have to procreate? It's not like the human race has a problem prolonging our existence in this world. We've pretty much figured out this whole survival-of-the-fittest thing as a race.

What we haven't solved is how play nice with so many of us around. As long as this stark disparity between the haves and have-nots continues to exist in our world, we have not succeeded in co-existing as a species. Why bring another person into the world when so many people who are already alive - children who are already alive - suffer day-to-day? If I can take care of myself and lead a fulfilling life, I know I'd be more likely to find the time and initiative to volunteer or do work for those less fortunate than me. If I didn't have a triage of mouths to feed, I could more readily take a pay cut for a job I truly believed in (e.g: spreading Chipotle across the world). If I somehow managed to balance the career I wanted and miraculously figured out a way of properly caring for one or multiple kids, I'd probably have to bid a reluctant farewell to pursuing my hobbies, much less doing anything for the "greater good".

I could go on and on about this - about what an individual owes to him/herself for personal happiness (for which many involves raising children) versus what an individual owes to his or her society. But I'll cut myself off and move on to the next point: that children are fucking expensive.

Yep. They are. Emotional and physical taxes aside (I won't even get into how horrified I am by childbirth...), having a child means giving up those dolla dolla bills, yo. Every time I see a beautiful baby smiling, a deep and sarcastic corner of my brain (ok, fine, my whole brain) wonders, "how many dollars' worth of diapers, organic baby food, and vomited-stained onesies were used to keep you happy, ya little bugger?" Every kid these days seems to require a laptop, an iPhone, Uggs, a car, and for you to set aside your life savings for a private university to rob eighteen years down the line. Again, sounds selfish but I would rather spend that money on enriching my life or of others around me - others who, once again, already exist on this planet and whose lives need enriching. But you cry, Rose! There are always other cases - scholarships! Selfless children who have jobs! Winning lottery tickets! - but it still seems that those are more the exception than the norm.

My last point: I think the "rewards" of having a child are risky and meager compared with the (sunk) costs. Babies, like puppies, are helplessly adorable and can be touted around for how cute they are. But they're not fully cognizant of everything. And when you reach that sweet sweet age when they do become self-aware... all those lovely human vices we're all born with - greed, envy, acedia, gluttony - must be stamped out and discouraged through repeated "no"s and "don't"s and "you ain't getting any dessert until you stop that, Timmy"s. Then when they really grow aware, at maybe nine or ten, and I acknowledge that I'm taking on a very pessimistic view here - so many kids grow independent and self-centered enough to no longer need their parents as anything but providers, and worse - turn against their parents or incur through life-long problems from neglectful parenting.

Think about it: the term "dysfunctional family" is ubiquitous. So are "daddy issues" and "rough childhoods". Nobody would ever bat an eye if you described your family as dysfunctional - television, the media, everything and everyone in our society has adjusted to the fact that we're should expect to have strained marriages, estranged family, arguments, angry teenagers, etc. It seems to me that as kids are inevitable harbingers of both happiness and unhappiness, but that ratio of good:bad is wholly unpredictable. Even the best-intentioned, most devoted parents can produce children who are hurtful towards their parents or who no matter how hard they are pushed otherwise cannot seem to find solid footing in the game of life.

I think the ultimate gratification or reward of raising a child comes from doing it right; I can imagine how seeing a child bloom into a good, happy individual must feel fulfilling and rewarding. And in one's old age, to have supportive, loving children (and grandchildren) is of course wonderful. But how many years of personal sacrifice, how many hours of anxiety or frustration, and how much money was put into creating that? And in the worst case, if the child doesn't come out "right" or grow into a functioning member of society, how does one live with that feeling of failure persisting for the rest of one's life?

For me in this day and age, the pitfalls of parenting are too great when weighed against the alternatives out there: life still left to live, places to go, people to meet, sights to see, lessons to learn, and perhaps most glaringly: people who are very much alive and who still need help. With all this, I haven't heard a convincing enough reason to box myself into suburbia and create more of my own critters. Adoption is something I'd definitely consider, but procreating, not so much.

...yet. But who knows? Perhaps in a few years, some biological switch will go off and I will change my mind and my uterus will start piping up. ("Um, hello? Gonna fill me anytime soon?") Or maybe it'll be a gradual warming up to the little buggers. Or perhaps as death inevitably creeps a little closer I'll seek that comfort of having kin to keep my latter years happy and fulfilled. In ten years' time I could very well be toting a mini-adidav9, re-reading this entry and laughing about how stubborn and close-minded I was. If there's one thing I've learned about life so far, it's that it takes unexpected turns and that I am an ever-evolving creature. Like a Pokemon.

AMAGAD

2011-12-21T23:03:00.002-06:00

I'm officially on vacation!*

When I plopped into my comfy awesome warm homey bed one of the first things I did was watch this trailer and have a serious nerdgasm. I haven't been so excited for a movie in years. In just two and a half wee little minutes, everything that I remembered loving about Lord of the Rings came back to me in a rush of giddiness and nostalgia. The music, the costumes, the cinematography...ohhhhh my lord. When they showed a glimpse of the Ring at the end, I seriously got the heebie-jeebies. I think I'm gonna have to re-watch the LotR series to calm myself down.

This break I look forward to catching up with loved ones, revisiting all my favorite places in Maryland, and eating until I black out. In other words, the same things I've been doing every time I've been back. It's weird - North Potomac is not really all that different from Plano. Both are suburbsy and safe and vanilla. But I sorta loathe Plano and I LOVE coming back here. I guess that mental association of "home" and "comfort" has a much bigger effect than I ever woulda guessed.

Gonna catch some shut-eye and hopefully sleep for a solid oh, ten hours or so. Then I'll wake up and chase Mochi around in my pajamas. I CAN'T WAIT.

*...Sorta. I still plan to do a few hours of work a day until Christmas. Eep.

nourriture

2011-11-28T22:01:00.001-06:00

judging by the strange and random cravings i get, you'd think that i was i crazy pregnant lady. well only one of those words describes me, and luckily it ain't pregnant and it ain't lady either.

edamustache, my movember facial hair

for as long as i can remember i've always loved savory, salty foods. kimchee, spicy ramen, preserved radishes...these are things i grew up eating and loving. other longtime staples - practically food groups in their own rights - include potatoes, butter chicken, and mayonnaise (which i used to scoop out of a jar with my fingers. yum) oh, and i also could probably eat at chipotle for the rest of my life and be quite content with it.

my food swings come and go. lately i've been on sort of a whole foods rampage. mainly because they carry a lot of brands and items that i wouldn't usually run into at another store (or would not willingly pay for when not on an expense account!). i also like their premade foods. cooking for one is sort of depressing.

here's some stuff i've been loving recently:

kashi strawberry fields cereal. oh dear god. if you eat special k red berries, heed my advice: get this the next time and you'll never go back to that cardboard crap. i first discovered this at bart mart at the university of chicago my sophomore year. since then i've always bought it wherever i could find it and have gotten several friends addicted as well. it's pricey, even for a cereal, but i think it's worth it as it's one of those cereals where i'll finish the whole bag instead of leaving the remaining fourth/dregs uneaten.

liberte yogurt. story of how i encountered this: i was at the yogurt aisle, pondering the mysteries of life when a gorgeous girl walked by and said to me in passing, "try the liberte, it's really good!" now this girl was skinny, athletic, and had perfectly smooth skin, so i figured it would be some low-cal watery atkins stuff. not so. a little container of this guy packs 270 calories. but by the grace of god, it tastes like ice cream, i kid you not. i've since replaced my ben & jerry's with this. it's not healthy by any stretch of the imagination but it ain't a tub of chunky munky either. these go for about $1.49 each, but are sometimes on sale if you buy 'em in bulk.

i heard about snapea crisps from elle fowler, who raved about them as her favorite relatively healthy snack. i picked them up and thought, why not? they taste good and are good for when you just want to munch on something while watching tv or feeling sorta lazy. like elle says, they give that satisfying potato chip crunch. at $1.99 a bag with 3-ish servings, they are also pretty inexpensive.

the other day, i was eating one of these at work when my coworker noticed and joked, "what are you, five?". i nodded and kept eating. i seriously think the half the fun of string cheese lies in the memories it conjures of a packed school lunch. these make a good mid-day snack because they are filling and portable. i have one with an apple almost every day around 3 PM when my stomach starts to make whale sounds.

last but not least... tea tea gee gee baby baby baby! as the starks like to say, winter is coming, and nothing quite simultaneously calms and warms me up as a warm cup of tea does. i've been having one every morning and evening and have been finding that it curbs my coffee craving quite a bit. i may or may not have reached into my backpack to grab my passport and accidentally handed the TSA officer a tazo packet of tea...just one time...

there you have it, a list of noms i've been obsessed with lately. give 'em a try and let me know your thoughts or recommendations. i am always on the lookout for new food to eat :D the weirder the better!

settlers of catan

2011-11-26T22:18:00.001-06:00

about a month ago, i played my first game of settlers of catan, a german strategy board game that i had heard of here and there but had never summoned the interest to learn. i'm not a huge board game person, mostly because they bring out the bossy and impatient side of me, but after my first game i was immediately, irrevocably hooked.

without going into all the rules, what makes this game fun is that it lets everyone have what i perceive is a more equal fun ratio than other games where it's very clear who is going to win at some point into the game. in settlers, nothing is inevitable and nothing is set in stone. instead of one conventional path to winning, there are different methods of procuring the points needed for victory, and it's also fairly easy to be sneaky about your progress in the game. there's also a much more human element of trading, which i immensely enjoy. in the past month, "sheep for a brick?" has quickly become a common phrase of my lexicon!

i've played with a bunch of different groups, people, ages, and levels of experience, and the consensus has always been that settlers of catan is an extremely well-crafted game that draws you in the more and more you play. if you ever get the chance to play it, definitely give it a shot - the learning curve is totally worth it. and if you want to own the precious, i recommend buying it on amazon, as that's the least expensive option i've seen thus far. happy settling!

gobbly mcgobblerson

2011-11-24T22:13:00.001-06:00

this thanksgiving i am grateful for

family
friends
a healthy and happy heart
a job that i (mostly) enjoy
having traveled to so many new places this year
helplessness blues
kashi strawberry fields cereal
*got spoiler alert!* arya still being alive as of 60%ish into a feast of crows (george r. r. martin, don't you dare kill her! don't you daaarrrrrrrrreeeee *shakes fist and glares up at the ceiling*)

i would list more but each line would get more ridiculous than the one before it and every other one would just be another food item i am currently craving. like string cheese. or more mashed potatoes. mmm, potatoes...my stomach says no but my heart says YES.

once again i am taking up the solemn, solemn vow to rekindle my creativity and start posting here again. i don't care who sees any of this, or who doesn't, because i feel that sort of apprehension about what an audience expects sets me back and makes me think things like "oh, that would be dumb to post", or "i know so-and-so might be reading this and don't want him/her to know how retarded i actually am" or most commonly, "i don't have anything to say today and therefore will not stretch my noggin to find something." i've come to realize more and more that if i don't write for myself, i won't write at all. which is not to say i am going to fill this blog up with complete and utter crap - just probably some crap - i will still try to maintain some semblance of quality control. but i will not care what others will think! (yes, easier said than done.)

i have started tinkering around with the css a little on here. i can't get the image of thundercat up top to "float" above the text and that little line that cuts across her exacerbates a twitch in my left eye. but at the very least, it is something that distinguishes my blog from the gabazillions out there with the same "simple" layout.css is sort of fascinating to me. i just started a few tutorials on it and have began to dapple here and there, nervously tweaking fonts and creating divs before resetting everything for fear of breaking allll the things. the gist of it is incredibly simple, but still to me it's fascinating to inspect every element of the webpages i love and uncover the ingredients that make up how they look. to a seasoned developer it's probably child's play, but to me it's kind of amazing, like having a digital easel at my fingertips.

in about ten minutes my best friend and her sister are going to pick me up. we're going to target - the one in Rio that i've known forever - to uh, buy DVDs and hopefully settlers of catan, haha. i sure as heck wasn't gonna wake up early and fight the crowds tomorrow morning so i figured a midnight escapade to target would be a reasonable compromise - i get to spend time with a friend and still maybe get to snap up season one of vampire diaries for $12.99? ha.

on that topic, i think i'm generally a happier person when there's a tv show in my life. not many, just one that i keep watching. for a while i was a snob about watching tv and deigned "arrested development" as the only shows suitable for my taste. but having recently watched the game of thrones series, i'm quickly realizing that there is a lot of well-made television out there, and that instead of equating everything on the silver screen to "real housewives of some place or another", i should really just do some research and find what's good. so far, my interest's been piqued in dexter, archer, the wire, and weeds. oh and vampire diaries, which isn't exactly intelligent television but would be a great time-killer 30,000 feet in the air. plus the girl in it is adorable. i want to her best friend forever.

watch out, usain bolt

2011-10-27T22:17:00.002-05:00

hey, i ran a 5k last weekend!

i know 3.1 miles is not very far. and my speed was ok, not particularly fast. but still, for somebody who was never able to run a less than 10 minute mile until this year... i'm proud of myself for this small achievement. i've never considered myself athletic or in good shape before, but having trained for and accomplished this goal has given me a confidence boost in an area i've long avoided out of laziness or fear of failure.

the race i participated in was called the "go go green 5k" and its proceeds benefited the peggy notebaert nature museum in lincoln park, chicago. it took place up and down the park on a crisp saturday morning, the kind that's perfect for an outside run. i was a little nervous because i wasn't used to running outside (i'd been training on a treadmill) or without my trusty gym playlist to zone out to, but all the buzz and excitement around me was definitely more than enough to get me pumped up and my legs moving!

as always, i had to be really careful to pace myself. it was definitely tempting to pass people or follow those who were passing me, but i knew those stretches of energy bursts would be short-lived, so i made sure to stay within my own comfort zone and really pay attention to my breathing/body. sometimes i made a little mental pacemaker - "one" step step step "two" step step step "three" step step step - to keep myself distracted from my labored breathing (isn't hearing your own heavy breathing so gross?) or to set a small mental goal to reach. it was only near the finish line and at the encouragement of my boyfriend that i picked it up into a full sprint - and to my surprise, finished in the best time i've ever ran, a 26:17.

one thing that definitely surprised me at the race was the diverse range of the runners. a 9 year old girl beat my time by more than five minutes. i was flabbergasted.. when i was 9 years old i was probably stuffing my face with popcorn and trying to level up my NeoPet.

having worked for and ran in a 5k, i think my next goal will be to run another one in a few months with a better time. i'd be really pleased with something less than 25 minutes, but i'll have to follow a strict training and resting schedule in order to avoid such wonderful things as shin splints and precariously loose toenails.

if you've never tried a race, i highly recommend it! it benefits a charity, it benefits your body, and maybe most importantly, it benefits your mind. trust me, if i can do it, you definitely can.

Ciao ciao!

2011-10-16T16:34:00.000-05:00

Last week, I took my first ever real (by real I mean more than 5-day) vacation since I've become a slave to The Man in the working world. I'd never been to Europe before, so a few months ago I'd jumped at the chance when my boyfriend's friend's girlfriend ('s dog's neighbor's kidney's aunt's best friend) invited us to join her in Italy and Ireland for a 10-day European-countries-that-begin-with-I extravaganza.

First stop: Venice (2.5 days). General impressions: woah, everything is beautiful and slightly run down. Obviously a beautiful city to get around by foot (and even more beautiful by boat!)...it was a pleasure to explore the streets, get lost in the alleys and cross the hundreds of bridges - some grand, others tiny - that connected all the islands making up the city. The city was also quite touristy, which I'd been expecting (though we did manage to haggle the obligatory gondola ride from 100 euro to 80 euro... I guess that counts for something?)

After Venice was a day spent divided between Maranello, where our friend got a surprise birthday present - a 20 minute Ferrari test drive! - Milan, where we drove around in some craaaaaazy ass traffic, and the airport. A lot of European flights are extremely inexpensive compared to domestic US flights, but the fines for too-large baggage are enormous in order to compensate for the low ticket prices, which was tricky to circumvent but we managed to foil the system anyway. We landed in Rome late that evening and collapsed into bed, exhausted.

Trying to see Rome in two days was a bit like trying to eat a Chipotle burrito with a straw. Rome was seriously, in my professional opinion, out of control. Walking down the street yielded so many sights, from ancient ruins to posh restaurants and hotels to freshly roasted chestnut street vendors (sadly, the chestnuts were not as good as they smelled. TRICKSY HOBBITSES!). We basically grabbed a map of the city and tried to bypass as many sites as possible within the time we had. We were pretty efficient at it too, with the exception of two incidents: one in which we wandered around the Domus Aurea ruins for about an hour in a stupid haze of lost confusion, another in which we started walking in the completely wrong direction after getting diverted by a set of ruins filled with adorable stray cats (we dubbed it "cat city"). We ended that night by grabbing a bottle of wine and tipsily weaving our way back through the city - not shabby, eh?

Although I loved seeing and hearing about the famous historic staples of the city, like the Sistine Chapel and the Colosseum, I still think what I'll remember most of Rome is the spontaneity of walking around her streets and finding beautiful architecture in the least expected places. That, and all the horrible parking all over the city.

We flew an airline called Ryanair from Rome to Dublin. It's a low-cost airline and in an effort to save every penny possible, Ryanair actually speeds up their planes instead of slowing them down during landing to maximize fuel efficiency. We hit the tarmac and literally bounced. When the stewardess announced that 90% of Ryanair planes landed on time, I was surprised that her sentence didn't end after "landed."

Temperature-wise Italy had been a hot and pleasant affair, with sunny skies and no precipitation whatsoever. Ireland was quite the opposite. Rain, wind, clouds, fog, terribleness... we were lucky to catch a few rays of sunshine during the few times a day when grey clouds would break overhead.

In Ireland we spent day approximately one day in Dublin, Galoway, and Cork each, and then back in Dublin again. My favorite part was definitely in Galoway, when we visited the relatively remote Aran Islands, famous for their wool sweaters. Everywhere we went, we'd see acres and acres of green grass, hand-built walls of grey stone, farm animals, and the occasional local, many of whom spoke the traditional Irish (Gaelic) instead of English. Our tour guide was an old man with a thick accent who spoke extremely slowly and deliberately such that the entire tour started sounding like a poem. "This church was built in 300 A.D. Yeeessss, threeeee hundredddd affftteerrr deaaattthhhh."

Everything in Ireland reminded me of either Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or Game of Thrones (I need to spend more time outside). Perhaps why that's why we have so many talented European fantasy authors - they don't have to look far beyond their back yard to see fantastic and beautiful landscapes. Another thing I found marvelous about this tiny yet beautiful country was its hospitable, kind people. Completely stranger were absurdly nice to us everywhere we went:

- a bus driver calling another bus driver to let him know that a directionally-confused girl was looking for his bus and that she'd already paid on his by accident

- a friend of our friend driving us around the countryside for two whole days, answering our n00bish questions about his country and taking us out for dinner & drinks

- a cab driver who stopped in the middle of the street to give us directions - and we hadn't even asked

- a hotel concierge that "took the liberty" and "hoped we didn't mind" that he'd made us lunch...again, without being asked, when lunch was not included, and after he'd spent 20 minutes giving us directions to the airport

Ireland, on the whole, felt like a cleaner, greener, and peaceful version of the American countryside. The only things I didn't love about the country were its weather and its food. Fish and chips, beef and guinness stew, full irish breakfasts (complete with black pudding, made of pigs' blood! Oink oink)... these things are good once in a while, but for three meals a day, noooooo thank you.

Overall, it was a beautiful and busy vacation, one I know I'll never forget. Having seen a bit of Europe, I'm eager to return and explore more of it, especially France, Spain and Germany. Ciao ciao!

Today I hit an all time low...

2011-09-22T20:46:00.002-05:00

The most ridiculous and pathetic thing ever happened to me today.

For a few weeks now, my eyes have been acting up a little. I'm convinced it's from the combination of constant airplanage, air conditioning, and bleach from the hotel pillows and towels. One eye or the other will start getting extremely red and irritated in a matter of minutes. I know - hot. I got it checked out by an eye doctor and he told me it was due to lacerations from dry eye and prescribed me some antibiotics to make it go away. Nonetheless, my co-workers have started referring to it as "poop-eye" and refer to me as such endearing terms as "poop-eye the sailor BA" and "poop-eyehauntas fangully".

Today, my right eye came down with a case of "poop-eye". It didn't look so great so instead of scarring the entire gym I usually go to, I thought I'd just use the treadmill at the Residence Inn's small fitness area. I went downstairs, took off my glasses, plugged in my earphones, and turned on my treadmill, ready to take on the world. It was a great workout. I did my best 5k time ever, sweated a gallon, and felt a ton better afterwards. As I was ready to leave, I suddenly realized that I couldn't find my glasses. I'd taken them off to run (because my sweaty nose makes them slip. I AM THE SEXIEST) and they were nowhere in sight - not in the cupholders, not in the ledge for MP3s, not on the ground, or so it seemed.

The catch is that "nowhere in sight" for me doesn't really mean anything because nothing is really ever in sight for me - I have horrible, HORRIBLE eyesight. As in -7.5 in my left eye and -7.0 in my right. So I was essentially standing in the Residence Inn fitness room, blind as a bat and unsure if my glasses really were missing or if I just couldn't see them. So I did what I had to do. I got down on all fours, Velma style, and patted around, looking for my glasses.

Let me assure you that I felt like a fucking idiot. There I was, crawling around like an infant, all sweaty and splotchy and panting after my workout. Oh, and also did I mention there was somebody in the ROOM with me this entire time? A nice-looking elderly Asian dude had come in about 5 minutes before I finished my run and bore witness to the whole thing.

But wait, it continues. I gave up searching after about 3 minutes of awkwardly shuffling around patting the carpet (which, goddamnit, was dark green). My plan was to run up to my hotel room, put on my contacts for a few painful minutes, come back down and find those goshdarned glasses. My plan was also to be unseen. Nobody else needed to know how pathetic I was.

So of course when I went outside the fitness area the first thing I did was almost collide with my co-worker.

Co-worker: Oh hey Rose! Good workout?

Me: Uhh, yeah, uhh -

Co-worker: What's wrong?

Me: (5 seconds of silence) I can't find my glasses.

Co-worker then helped me look for them, all the while probably secretly laughing/disgusted by how blind and helpless I am. He looked to no avail and half-convinced me I never even wore them in the first place so we parted ways and I ran up to my hotel room and put on my contacts and came back down.

Another few minutes of searching - and conversing with the Asian dude, who did turn out to be really nice and even searched his own treadmill for them - and I found my glasses all the way across the room, underneath a side stand that held towels. I guess they'd fallen onto my treadmill and had been shot back directly behind it. Thank goodness I didn't step on them.

Anyway. Yeah. That was a humbling and embarrassing situation. If I ever feel like I'm some hot shit ever again I'm just going to use that mental image of myself playing patty cake with the floor of the Residence Inn gym.

A letter that I, present-day Rose, wish that I could've written to myself and read about 18 months ago:

2011-09-02T23:02:00.003-05:00

Hey you.

It's 11 PM on a Thursday night. You're probably at the fifth floor of the Reg, buried in some econometrics book, holding back the panic that's rising in your throat because it's been three hours and thirty games of Robot Unicorn Attack and you still can't seem to come to terms with the ordinary least squares method that you'll be tested on tomorrow morning. Then there's that upcoming Mock Trial tournament this weekend and you cannot recite your opening without stopping midway to want to throw up a little. Oh, and you don't have a job or any prospects of ever finding one. And your hair looks awful, girl when was the last time you took a shower?

I know. Everything seems stressful right now. The world as you know it is being held together by a thread of sanity that grows thinner every day. Dinner for the past week has been Subway and outside it's a bleak 20 degrees. Your body has been vitamin D deficient for oh, approximately five million years.

Guess what, n00b Rose? It's all gonna be okay. In 18 months, your life will be completely different as you know it. You'll have visited new countries, met new people, seen new sights, discovered new facts, and most importantly of all, learned new things about yourself. All of what the next year and a half holds for you, both the good and the bad, will mould you into a person that is not who you are today. Sounds scary, yeah, but trust me. It's for the better (just look at Spider Man!).

Many of these life lessons you will have to digest and learn in due time. They are little nuggets of wisdom that require patience and realization to settle within you and become valuable to you. Most of them I cannot give to you right now, because they would either spoil all the good stuff that's coming, or because you simply wouldn't heed my advice. But there are a couple of things I wish you'd know:

* In order to sustain any sort of meaningful relationship, whether it's with a friend or a family member or a boy or a squirrel, you have to love yourself first.

* You don't have to be at every party or meet up or event. Take some you time and enjoy being alone.

* You look fine without make-up. Don't wear so much of it.

* Often times the mind is stronger than the body. What you can make yourself believe can have a huge effect on what you actually accomplish. As such, you should treat your mind well because it's your best asset. Start by getting a reasonable amount of sleep each night.

* Try to set goals for yourself. Start small, like cutting out soda for a week or scheduling a Skype date with your best friend. Always be working on something to improve who you are, how you feel, or what you know.

* Delete Angry Birds from your phone. Nothing good will come out of keeping that game.

* Stop getting haircuts that make you look like you have a mullet.

That is all for now. You're doing a good job. The days seem like they're going slowly and stressfully, but try to find something good about where you are. You are an incredibly lucky person - never forget that or take it for granted.

Good times are ahead.

Love,

Future You

Estes Park

2011-08-07T20:20:00.000-05:00

Last weekend I found myself in Estes (rhymes with testes, giggity) Park, Colorado, for a mini vacation in the mountains. A trip to cool, Rocky Mountainy Colorado was quite the welcome respite after being in scorching, fiery-depths-of-hell Plano (which translates to flat in Spanish).

The first and most noticeable change for me was the altitude difference. The air was dry, each breath brought a smaller oxygen intake, and I became out of breath more quickly than usual (which is pretty quick to being with). But the views were amazing. I'd never seen the Rockies in the summertime, and it was a world's difference from the snowy, grey peaks of Banff and Jasper.

While hiking we spotted a lot of wildlife, including a couple of elk grazing just a few feet away. The animals paid us no mind as we gawked and pointed. I even got video footage of an elk peeing and it was way rad.

Fatty mcfat fat

Tubby mctubster

Wile E. Coyote

I've decided I love mountains more so than any other natural uh, thing (entity? establishment? wonder? distortion of land?). Seeing them, especially those preserved as well as the ones in Estes Park, makes me feel happy and inspired and lightheaded (although maybe the lightheadedness comes from the lack of O2). When I am older and decide to be sick of Chicago, I would definitely love to live somewhere close to a mountain range. Also I am pretty sure that like Snow White, I can domesticate woodland creatures if I just hang out in them mountains long enough and sing the song that Fiona does in Shrek. That way they could do my cooking and laundry while I happily tumble through the mountains and over the hills.

the cascades

2011-08-01T23:27:00.000-05:00

one of the many reasons i love fleet foxes so so so much is because in addition to writing beautiful lyrics, they also happen to make fantastic instrumental music.

one of my favorite tracks from their first album is entitled "heard them stirring". it's got flavors of winter and edward scissorhands and mystery. it's what i imagine what i'd hear if i ever got lost in an ancient magical wintry forest.

"the cascades", off fleet foxes' second album helplessness blues is also entirely without words or lyrics, but brings to mind a very different flavor. the constant tickling and garbling of the background, with a simple minor melody layered over it, sounds to me like a song for fall harvest and the preparation of a long winter.

i think listening to their new album over and over again combined with the heavy doses of game of thrones i've been snorting has convinced my subconscious to live in denial of modern society/technology and instead to daydream all day of tumbling through the woods barefoot with a harp, strumming songs of olden times and weaving flowers in my hair.

...

2011-07-31T23:33:00.003-05:00

Allow me to share with you the weirdest and most revolting taxi experience I've ever had.

8:30 PM Central Time, Dallas Fort-Worth airport, Terminal E. I should've known I was stepping into a janky-ass cab when the trunk wouldn't close despite repeated forceful downward pushes. After about a minute of ill-executed karate chop-esque attempts at closing the trunk of his car, the cab driver retrieved a hammer out of his glove compartment, scurried to the back, pounded away at something, closed the trunk, and made a joke about it to me as he got back into the driver's seat and casually tossed the hammer into the passenger's seat.

An alarm bell may or may not have gone off at that point - "are cab drivers supposed to saunter around with hammers out in the open like that?" - but I figured I could outrun the guy if he decided he wanted to kill me with a blunt object, so I did my thing and kept my eye out for any weird signs during the car ride. There weren't any until I'd arrived at the Residence Inn and fished my wallet out of my backpack. The total came to $57-something. I told him to add $11 as I handed him my credit card.

A minute of fumbling around in the dark yielded the carbon copy paper on which to imprint my credit card information. Another two passed before he was able to find a new bag of ball point pens. With the assistance of his teeth, he was able to awkwardly rip it open and procure a writing utensil.

It took ten seconds after that for him to realize he'd lost my credit card.

I realized something was wrong as soon as I heard the nervous giggle. "...ahem...heh heh...ma'am...?" That's when I peered into the front seat and saw it. Saw it all, I should say; a discombobulation of napkins, broken glasses, water bottles, bandanas, wrappers, tissues, receipts, magazines, bottle caps, gloves, rubber bands, notepads, pen caps, books, and God knows what else. It was all junk, and it was piled in little heaps, an organized chaos that had Big-Banged itself in the front of this guy's taxi. And somewhere, in all of it, my gray little Chase United credit card had slipped out of view.

The taxi driver was taking his time. He searched all his pockets - pulling out wads of twenties, gum wrappers, coins, and more random slips of paper that tumbled to the ground - and then started picking things out of the car one by one and examining them like it was the first time he'd seen them, muttering madly to himself and occasionally giving me that nervous giggle. I wasn't sure whether or not I should interfere, so I remained quiet and let him search, but boy was it was pitiful to watch and then it grew painful as he started looking in places where the card was obviously not located, like in the car's glove compartment (???). Frustrated, I started making suggestions of places to look. When he seemed totally lost, I turned on my phone's flashlight feature and started pawing through the mess and looking too, which he didn't seem to mind. It felt weird and not at all sanitary to pick through this stranger's things, but I was intent on getting my credit card back. Eventually, I found the card wedged deep in the crack between the driver's seat and the middle island where the gear shifter knob was located. The driver offered offered one apology... and then had the gall to add the $11 tip despite having had his customer look for her credit card in his pigsty of a taxi for twenty minutes.

The experience was disgusting, pathetic, and left me totally grossed out. I'm no neat freak but I don't understand how people can live in that kind of filth either, especially when their job is to provide others the sort of service where basic sanitation and cleanliness are baseline expectations. I snapped a picture of the driver's seat that doesn't do the mess justice but you can start to see the chaos creeping in:

I guess the silver lining to this episode is that I'll know never to disrespect myself or my things to that level. I can be a total airhead sometimes about misplacing my things, but the day I let myself become that slovenly - especially when on the job - is the day when I renounce society, tattoo the lyrics to "Tik Tok" onto my face, and rampage off into the sun setting in the east.

I do not want kids.

2011-07-14T23:42:00.001-05:00

But if I end up with some of the nasty little buggers, one thing I know for sure is that they will read Harry Potter.

I'm not going to force them to play the violin or get a 2400 on the SAT or play a sport or any of that crap. No. I'm just going to just turn my brethren into Dumbledore's Army part two. I want them to relive the same experience I had reading the books - imagining the scenes in their heads, gasping at plot twists, picking out their favorite characters (Sirius Black), falling in love with Sirius Black, bawling when he dies, re-reading chapters to look for clues, changing their mind about what side Snape's on, debating the characters' religious symbolism, etc cetera. I want them to live, breathe, and bleed Harry Potter. I want them to know all of Dumbledore's middle names. I want them to recite their Horcruxes and hiding places/methods of retrieval better than they can recite the the star-spangled banner. I want them to run around my backyard on broomsticks throwing basketballs-painted-as-quaffles onto each other's faces. I do not know how to knit but I will take it up just to knit them ugly little maroon-and-gold sweaters with their names (Dudley Dobby, Hagrid Harry, Petunia GiantSquid) on them every Christmas.

This is probably why nobody should ever let me have kids.

photos from my phone

2011-07-10T23:20:00.001-05:00

Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park, Chicago. Having never been to Europe, I like to pretend I'm exploring ancient Roman ruins whenever I walk by these statues. This is probably a sign that I need more friends.

I see this sign when walking into my hotel every day and each time it makes me want to burst out in song and become this gay black man.

In other news, I am STILL obsessed with Rihanna. It's not even Only Girl in the World anymore (though I still listen to that at least 5x a week) - the obsession has spread to Man Down, Cheers (Drink to That), and What's My Name. I especially love the music video for the latter. I just want Rihanna and Drake to get married and adopt me into their fabulous grungy-chic city apartment and feed me Chinese takeout all day. Really, is that too much to ask?

Ok. That is all. Time for a little Game of Thrones and then nighty night time.

deboardin' the airplane-o

2011-07-04T23:20:00.001-05:00

It's true. Everything is bigger here. Cars, cows, cleavage. You name it, it's XXL.

Everything is also shiny and new down here. I'm used to walking around Chicago and seeing a smidgeon of grunge here and there (admittedly less so after my move from Hyde Park to Lakeview). But here in Plano, there are no homeless to awkwardly avoid eye contact with. There aren't abandoned houses or neglected alleys that serve as an eyesore in between beautiful homes. I don't even think there are dumpsters here.

Things here are built with purpose and resolve. The big-ass streets are what still get me - while Texas certainly has its fair share of weather problems, the roads make it obvious that snow is not one of them. I'm not used to seeing such perfect, uncracked, unpotholed pavement. It's unnerving, like seeing a face that's too symmetrical or beautiful. There are no flaws here, no points of interest to focus on, and as a result, not much to say about the locale.

I don't think I could ever live in a place like this, where life is uninspiring but easy and comfortable if you're privileged enough to have the money to live here. But I admit it makes for a nice getaway during the week. By the time I find myself longing for Chicago I usually only have to wait a day or two. Then an insane weekend inevitably sweeps me in with the current of the city and I find myself wanting nothing more than to be curled up with a book a thousand miles away, which is exactly the kind of refuge Plano offers. Then the cycle starts over: board plane deboard plane Chicago Chicago board plane deboard plane Texas Texas Texas Texas Texas. If my life were a Daft Punk song those would be the lyrics and it'd be an awesome song.

Game of Thrones

2011-06-29T07:39:00.002-05:00

I started reading Game of Thrones, the first in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series. I picked it up after having taken my time strolling through The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which was about the life and after-life history of woman whose cancerous cervical cells - "HeLa" - were scraped from her body without her knowledge when she was undergoing radioactive treatment and subsequently became the first to survive in cell culture. Going from a pleasantly-paced nonfiction about a poor black woman's out-of-control tumors to a full-on medieval labyrinth of fantasy where if I blink the main character has probably already died definitely feels like a weird literary swerve.

But Game of Thrones is amazing. Truly, it captures the elements everything a fantasy should - dragons! magic! noble royal families! sexy sexy men! - but what makes it stand out is Martin's fantastic storytelling. I can't remember being this engrossed in a book since high school. In a lot of ways it reminds me of when I first became obsessed with Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, and it brings back all those feelings of excitement and intrigue that remind me that I haven't gone so far into the real world or gotten so caught up with working that I can't enjoy a good ole fantasy story anymore - something that I'd been afraid of when I graduated about a year ago.

Another fun thing about reading Game of Thrones is talking to others who've read it. Last night at a cross-team dinner, a ThoughtWorker mentioned the series and I may or may not have almost leapt out of my seat out of excitement (my mouth was filled with fajita). It's just one of those books that inevitably lends itself to conversation, especially now that there's a critically-acclaimed HBO series about it as well. I'm only about 300 pages into the first novel - that's another thing I love, how long they are - so I have to earmuff myself a lot but nonetheless, it's a fun softcore cult to be a part of, similar to the Reddit or Arrested Development community.

If you've been hearing a lot about this series, I strongly recommend you pick it up, for your own sake. And a little for mine too, so we can obsess about it together until the end of time. Winter is coming!

exhausted

2011-06-26T20:56:00.000-05:00

if you asked me to describe my life or how i'm doing in one word, that's what it always is.

i just got to my hotel room in plano and face-planted onto my bed, muffling my anxieties along with my sweaty, dirty, makeup-run mug. i promised myself i wouldn't get up for anything other than the food delivery order i'd made en route to the hotel...but then quickly realized i was falling asleep, so i forced myself up and crawled to my computer and decided to write a blog entry (upon remembering getting berated this weekend by friends who complained of the lack of updates)

on the plane ride i thought of what i'd done this weekend and counted the hours that i spent NOT in the company of somebody i knew. the grand total amounted to four. FOUR measly hours spent alone out of approximately 78 - no wonder i'm going insane. here was my itinerary, as frantically and furiously typed out in a word document, friday morning at 6:00 am at gate E5 in the united terminal of dallas fort-worth airport:

friday:
- tour an apartment for a remote family friend
- go to the TW office
- dr's appointment at NMPG
- buy a mattress at sleep city
- gorge on sandwiches at DMK
- unpack unpack unpack
- roll around on my mattress until unconsciousness

saturday:
- brunch at sam & george's
- teeth cleaning at dental salon
- TW company picnic at jackson park
- comcast cable appointment
- grocery shopping
- dinner at the apartment
- drinks at the neighborhood saloon

sunday:
- cleaning old apartment
- white sox game
- fly to plano
- arrive at hotel
- pass out forever

i managed to do everything except pass out forever. stupid eggplant basil - come faster so i can fall into a food coma and dream about a world devoid of airplanes, apartments, and waiting for the cta.

Hello, Evo!

2011-06-12T20:51:00.004-05:00

Got my precioussssss last night. Have not been able to stop playing with it ever since.

Initial thoughts:

My phone is too cool for me. I've never felt incompetent compared to a phone until I got this one. It feels like (and I know I know - it's just the honeymoon era, this infatuation will die down) the phone is a magic genie, except it offers unlimited wishes and less facial hair.

"Import my Google contacts please?"

"I'd be happy to. Give me two seconds."

"Can you sync with Blogger so I have a mobile template?"

"Is the Pope Catholic? Done."

"...can you shampoo my hair?"

"Girl, I will shampoo, condition, and style with a blowout."

It's also HUGE. (TWSS) I feel like I'm holding a tablet. My feelings toward the new size aren't strong one way or another - there are obviously pros and cons on both sides there - but I do miss how Palm lived up to its name with its rounded corners and spin-ability. This one just sits like a hunk of expensive, whiz-bangy slab.

Performance is phenomenal. It's a pleasure to browse apps, surf the internet, and gallivant between my seven (yes, SEVEN) home screens. I daresay it's even "cooler" of a feeling than the experience of browsing an iPhone, but that's probably because I'm already familiar with the iPhone's flashy animations and tricks and have become desensitized to them, whereas I react to everything here by hollering "OH MY GOD LOOK AT THE SHINY."

The battery life already sucks, which I knew coming in. I'm doing everything I can to minimize sync, GPS tracking, WiFi, and updates when they are not needed. Nevertheless I can anticipate this being a relatively large pain point. But you win some and you lose some...and in the case of the Evo overall, this phone by and large already feels like a resounding victory.

A day or two ago, I ordered an HTC Evo 4g in black from Sprint. I have spent every minute since bouncing out of my seat, whether it be on an airplane or in my room, out of excitement for it to arrive. It should come in by the end of this week to my hotel in Plano. If not, Sprint will suffer the wrath of a year-and-a-half-Palm-Pre user.

I can't believe I've spent 18 months with the Pre. In that time I could've accomplished so much, like watch all of Dexter or birth two back-to-back babies. But no. Instead, I spent that time being tormented by my stupid phone.

It wasn't always so bad. I remember when I first got it (and blogged about it, even) back in August of 2009, the PP was relatively hot shit. It'd just hit the market, it was causing oohs and aahs because of the touchstone charger, and everyone and their mom was whispering about how it'd out-do the iPhone 3gs. It offered a lot of functionality that my old phone couldn't, like take decent pictures and fit nicely in my pocket. But slowly I began to realize what it couldn't do, and the annoyances started to eat at me and eventually drive me into a downward spiral of frustration.

For one, the app selection was pretty bad. I contented myself with things like Bubbles and chess for entertainment, but when it came to real apps I wanted, the plumbing just wasn't there. Many didn't exist in the first place, like an app for me to scrobble to last.fm or a RSA security token that would let me access my company's mail. Those that did exist rarely worked well - Facebook for WebOS, Accuweather, and Angry Birds are the only three that I use on a regular basis these days. The rest have been deleted.

For another, the user design/user experience is incredibly shoddy. I can't see the time unless I unlock my phone (minus five million points). I can't see the date unless I touch the time, which by the way, is TINY. I can't see the exact date and time of previous text messages if they are more than twelve days old. If I search for a contact, the option to text them is activated by touching the tiniest of speech bubbles - while the rest of the screen, aka valuable real estate, is stark and empty with incompetence. Don't get me started on battery life. There've been times when my battery is at 80% and two hours later, my phone kicks the bucket. I don't leave the house now without battery being 100%, because it seems like 100% actually means anywhere from 100% to 50% in terms of remaining battery.

Oh and then there's the device itself. To be fair, I have drunkenly dropped it on more than one occasion. But maybe that's because both cases I bought for it didn't fit properly. When I received the device, I noticed it'd shut down every time I snapped it closed too hard - some detective work on the internet made me realize the battery was often loose and needed some paper to be wedged in there to avoid the problem. A clever solution indeed, but one for a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place, in my opinion.

I know the Evo isn't going to be perfect either (that beautiful 4.3 inch screen? Yeah, its diet consists of batteries. And it's HUNGRY) and am not setting my expectations to be such. But based on my experience with other people's smart phones, I am relatively confident that this new guy will actively make my life better now that designers and engineers have been in the smart phone space a bit longer. Whereas the Pre delivered more functionality as something to throw at people rather than its offerings of "smart" services, I'm hoping the Evo will be something I can rely on and trust in lieu of all this travel and whatnot. And if nothing else, at least it makes for a larger thing to throw at people.

Plano

2011-05-21T04:51:00.003-05:00

I am terrified of Texas. My one and only experience there was when I had to spend a night at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. I remember thinking only two things, but I remember them very clearly:

One was "I didn't know people actually carried dogs around in their purses"

The other was "These women probably think I am a pre-pubescent panda named Ling Ling"

Plano prominently features everything everything I try to avoid in life - huge portions, prolonged exposure to the sun, slabs of red meat, Dr. Pepper, country music, Frito Lay, guns.

My flight is Sunday at 5 PM. I feel totally and woefully unprepared. A Calgarian winter followed by a Texan summer - very funny, ThoughtWorks!

Jesus, take the wheel.

I'm in love with Juda-as, Juda-as.

2011-05-09T22:11:00.004-05:00

Me: Hey, I'm going to sleep early. If any of our roommates come back and are really loud, can you please tell them I'm sleeping?

Roommate: I will punch them all in the face and tell them to shut the fuck up.

As of late I have developed yet another unhealthy addiction to a pop song. This time it's Lady GaGa's "Judas". It is indescribably catchy and plagues me day in and day out. Her video is typical GaGa - alien outfits, inexplicable settings, mysterious men, controversial symbolism, too much eyeliner, dancing in scant underwear. At one point she's Mary Magdalene washing a sexy sort-of-black Jesus' feet in a bathtub while Judas pours a beer on her butt.

The shit-wits that peruse and post YouTube comments are all up in arms about GaGa's use of religious symbolism. It appears that a diminutive-brained subset of GaGa's Christian fans have either decided to revoke their liking for her or are in a state of heavy mental confusion, a la "OH MY GOD I LOVE JESUS BUT HER VIDEO USES CHRISTIAN METAPHORS INAPPROPRIATELY WHAT DO I DO NOW????" Fierce, misspelled battles are happening in the comments section as I type.

You think I am exaggerating. I am not. Here are some comments that I am copying verbatim for your eye-gouging pleasure.

"ur makin fun of the bible not cool gaga !!!"

- Corinnestoddard13

"is this supposed to be a gay pride recreation of like fucking bible stories or some shit"

- Moodyjake17

"i dont see the big deal. i like the song the vide is alittle nutty but shes not goga for nothing jeez chill bunch of religus freeks it not god ya'll love its ya'll freeking religen. even jesus was agenst it. jeez. sicoz its days like this i regret being a chistion."

- MegaJoemen

"you people realize the illuminati control her, right?"

- Itachi9000ful

"i shud slap her with my bible!!"

- shelz146

"your opinion is faker than a pornstars boobs."

- JD917782908

"Dear, people who are christian just go back and read the bible and listen to the lyric again and be humble do not judge her. Luke 5:31 Jesus said "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." She acknowledges that. Ew!! This song explain how I feel. I love Jesus but I'm still a sinner. Ew!!"

- TalentBabe

I must stop here. If I continue to wade through this sea of idiocy I am going to vomit out my dinner. Good night.

EXtinguishing the Fire(fox) (lolwut at "Distinguishing...")

2011-04-22T16:30:00.005-05:00

My dearest Firefox,

We both knew this day would come. I've played the scene countless times in my head, imagining how my words will come across: how you'll be surprised, then angry, and then fall silent, save for the occasional sniff. How your little beady black eyes will quiver and glisten with dew. How every fiber of my being will ache with reluctance to tell you this, every keystroke a dagger into my heart.

But I must remain strong, and to be frank, I've already done the deed. This morning I quietly scrolled over your familiar orange curled form, cupped you in my e-palms, and gently moved you from your comfortable nest in my dock to the trash can all the way on the right, where you landed with a thud that resonated in the depths of my soul.

Believe me, Firefox, it killed me to do it. I was so upset I even ate an Oreo to make myself feel better. Then I ate three more because they tasted really good. Then I felt a little sick and went for a walk.

But I digress! Why did I do do it? Why, after so many years of mutual love and respect, did I cast you aside?

I found someone else, Firefox. I found someone else.

It happened at work, about three months ago. You couldn't support an application I wanted to run, and well, I had to find somebody that would help me. So while you were busy updating, I went to Google - yes, that Google, a longtime friend of ours - and he suggested Chrome. I gave it a shot. Thirty seconds later, Chrome had downloaded and was already up and running. I was impressed by Chrome's simplicity and speed - and I loved that I could Google in the address bar itself - but I got in, ran the application, got out, and returned to your familiar embrace.

But that night, Firefox, I couldn't sleep. I laid awake with my eyes open, fingers clutching the sheets, heart heavy with the realization that everything in Chrome had been harder, better, faster, and stronger. The small things, really - how downloads fall nicely to the bottom of my page instead of disappearing into a separate window. How my top eight appear every time I open the browser. Even how the bookmarks are compressed and can fit so much better! For the first time in my life, I'd stumbled across a browser that gets me for who I really am and for what I need in my online experience. And even you have to admit it, Firefox. You're cute as a button, but Chrome is clean and sexy - I can't even begin to describe how good it is or what it can do for me.

I'm sorry, Firefox. I'm really going to miss you. I'll always support your open-source distribution. I'll still cheer for your new releases and updates. I'll even stay in touch with your parents, Mr. and Ms. Mozilla. But I'm afraid this is the end of us. I regret it had to be this way. Please don't pull out tufts of your fur like you did that time I accidentally opened up Internet Explorer. It's not worth the drama and it grows back funny.

Goodbye,

Rose

Mountains Beyond Mountains

2011-04-19T22:57:00.003-05:00

Competing with Mother Nature for "Most Beautiful in Jasper". Think I'm in the lead.

This weekend, the boy & I forayed up to Jasper, Alberta for a getaway in the Rockies. Boasting a population of merely 2,500, Jasper sits on the edge between the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. It being 200 miles due northwest of Calgary translates into to a roughly five drive through what is considered one of the most beautiful highways in the world, Icefields Parkway.

I love road trips because they allow me to indulge in snacks, playlists, and naps. And boy, I had my fair share of all three. Friday morning, we hopped into our snappy little rental Ford Fiesta (very fuel efficient, and relatively kind to the environment) and began our journey up north. I'd been dreading the start a little because the forecast for that day had been a snow/rain/sleet mixture but the moment our parkade garage door opened, we were greeted with beaming sunshine and glorious blue skies. Suck on that, weatherman!

Along the way, we stopped at Columbia Icefield to check out the Athabasca Glacier. Unfortunately April isn't tourist season and a lot of the usual tours and roads were closed so we weren't able to actually step on the glacier as it's only accessible through a special route/bus tour. But we did manage to hop out and take some pictures and freeze our butts off.

Herro! I can't feel my face!

One of my favorite parts of the trip was where we stayed: a small bed & breakfast called The Glass House. Getting there was not so easy though. I'd left my notebook with its address back in my Calgary apartment and neither of us had a data plan in Canada, so we wound up knocking at what I thought was the right house for about five minutes. After a while we gave up and stood there quizzically and I gave the doorknob a turn just as a man walking his dog approached us from the sidewalk.

Embarrassing moment number one:
"Can I help you folks?'
"Umm...yeah, we're looking for a bed and breakfast called The Glass House?"
"Well it's certainly not here, cause that's my house you're knockin' on."
"...Oh. Sorry."

Embarrassing moment number two, with the same man:
"We're looking for someone named Tobi. He owns The Glass House, we think, and lives on this street."
"Tobi?"
"Yeah, I think it's short for Tobias." (at this point I'm envisioning a bespectacled man wearing denim cutoffs and covered in blue body paint)
"Last name?"
"Fenton."
"Oh, the Fentons live over there. And Tobi's a woman."
"...Oh. Sorry."

Tobi (the woman) and the Glass House were both all sorts of lovely. Our room, the Garden Room, had a huge round wooden window that reminded me of being in a hobbit home and afforded us a beautiful view of the tree in the front yard and the quiet street beyond. It felt just like we were in a treehouse. The other rooms in the B&B seemed pretty neat, too - the enormous master Loft had a jacuzzi (but no privacy :s) and the Solarium Room a lovely, sun-filled lounge. I still liked ours the best and would recommend it for anybody who finds themselves in Jasper. After the ridiculous Airbnb Live Mission Startup/Incubator in San Francisco and now this cozy B&B experience I'm definitely putting hotels on the backburner and more open minded about exploring alternative sleeping arrangements.

The town of Jasper itself was very touristy, but we did find some good information centers, neat restaurants (LOVED Patricia's Deli. Best sandwich ever, still drooling as I think about that cranberry mayo sauce, guhh) and paid a visit to the famous Jasper the Bear, who was the subject of a much-loved Canadian comic and serves as a conveniently-named mascot for the town of Jasper. It's pretty much mandatory to take a picture with this guy and we happily obliged in the spirit of tourism.

We spent the next morning exploring some nearby fields and hiking along Maligne Canyon, which was still slippery in places, very muddy in others, and had me huffing and puffing and feeling morbidly obese in no time. But the views were worth it!

Check out that pro fob pose...I'm already converting him into an azn.

We also saw our fair share of animals in the park, which is always neat. I'd been hoping for a bear or a moose sighting but unfortunately didn't catch any glimpses of either :s Oh well. I probably would have been terrified of a real bear anyway and pissed myself silly.

I am disgusted by what it I imagine it is licking off the ground

Bambi's mother before I made her into a zesty little venison sandwich

Elky elk elk in front of trainy train trains. One on the right is sprouting antlers, how manly of it to do so.

TL; DR: my trip to Jasper was incredible. Excellent views, food, sightseeing, lodging, and opportunities for outdoor adventures. The company wasn't bad, either :) More pictures can be found here. Check out Jasper if you ever get the chance! Woo Canada!

Dear San Francisco, I want to be in you forever. Love, Rose

2011-04-14T00:25:00.002-05:00

My coworker Bev, stopping for a photo op on the gluteal wrecking climb up to Coit Tower

I found myself back in San Francisco's sunny and welcoming arms this past weekend. Sigh. Words cannot describe how much I love this city.

My adventures began Friday morning, when I flew into SFO (in first class, no less! Thanks for the upgrade, United) to attend a User Experience & Design workshop led by my fellow ThoughtWorkers. The workshop itself was really fascinating and turned some gears in my mind that I didn't know even existed. Despite the wealth of new practices to which I was exposed (and I'm definitely planning on picking up a UX book or two or learn more!), I noticed that a lot of the thinking behind good design or how to ask the right questions when thinking about user experience are the same ones that normal, non-UX BAs should be asking. I guess at the end of the day, the key to implementation that brings value to the business is to have a strong understanding of that "Why are we doing this in the first place?" factor in the first place. I like that UX really forces out that question over and over again because of its visual and interactive products. Normal user stories can get trapped in a mire of acceptance criteria and lose sight of that crucial end-goal.

Anyway, business insights aside, we ended the workshop at around 5 and went to JonColins lounge for a drink and to catch up with other San Franciscan ThoughtWorkers. Afterwards, the party continued at Off The Grid, an outdoor food truck event made up of multi-ethnic vendors that reminded me of Taste of Chicago. The most ridiculous part? The Giants game had gobbled up all the taxis...so our cheapest option, at $10 a head, was to hop into a black stretch limousine. I always thought that after prom, my next time in a limo would be after my wedding. (With Viggo Mortensen.) But whatever, no complaints here.

At Off the Grid, I had Phillipino chicken tacos and satayed chicken and pork skewers, pictured above. I got the skewers because I was hoping they'd taste like favorite food in the world world, spicy Chinese lamb kebabs oozing with fat and seasoned with cumin/every strain of MSG known to man that are unfortunately only typically found in sketchy alleys on the streets of Beijing. The verdict: spicy sketchy Chinese lamb kebabs they were not, but nonetheless delicious they were. After dinner, we took the limo back to a lounge and stayed there for a few drinks before calling it a night.

The next day, we made the drive up to California's famous wine country, Napa Valley, for some breathtaking views and yummy wine tasting!

Driving down SF's famous Embarcadero, the name of which my coworker Hammer and I decided was just made up a long time ago by some white dude who was trying to say "Embark" in Spanish

It's not touristy if I took the picture at a RAD ANGLE!

Napa was, in a word, therapeutic. Everything was serene and calm and nested within rolling green hills. It was hard to believe we were only an hour out of a busy metropolitan area. Or that people still live in Calgary (it's snowing up a shitstorm here as I type) when places like Napa exist on the same planet.

I also had my very first wine tasting experience in Napa. At first I found it mindboggling that I could just walk up to a winery and ask to sample their wine and drink it at no cost. But I quickly got used to it ;) My favorite tasting took place at the beautiful Artessa winery.

I know you're supposed to spit the wine back out so as to not taint the palate...but I sure as heck swallowed that baby down (stop your snickering). The winner of the afternoon was a sweet dessert wine that tasted just like juice. Mmm, juice.

After we felt merry from the combination of sunshine and wine, we made the short drive over to the town of Yountville. Things I noticed about Yountville: everybody drives in either a BMW or a Mercedes-Benz and the most popular spot in town was a cutesey, $$$$$$$ bakery called Bouchon, where I found myself in MACARON HEAVEN. There was a macaron for every flavor under the sun. If it wasn't for the hefty price tag I would have tried one of every kind, but I ultimately went with Hazelnut and Espresso. Mmm, I'm salivating as I'm typing this/remembering how they melted in my mouth...

I call this "poop bread"

The next day, we explored a bit within the city of San Francisco itself. We kicked the morning off with a defuckinglicious brunch in Chinatown. As usual, I ate way beyond the natural limits of my body would allow and thought I was going to keel over and pass out on the floor. But the short walk over to the Coit tower proved to be an awakening experience. Mostly because all the streets were practically vertical. You guys remember that scene in Inception where the streets start folding up into the sky? Yeah, that was inspired by San Francisco. And yeah, I just made that up, but it may as well be true. My sore butt is proof.

We wrapped up the trip with a visit to the de Young musuem, where I checked out a very neat "Balenciaga and Spain" exhibit that featured over a hundred of Balenciaga's pieces. Some were beautiful and others were just, well, retarded, for lack of a better word for it. One of his dresses was called the "Catepillar dress" and consisted of three green cloth spheres stacked on top of each other. I don't care how prestigious the brand or haute the couture or expensive the piece. I would rather eat rat vomit than go outside wearing that dress.

As always, I left San Francisco yearning for more time. I'm excited to revisit the city at the end of April though, it'll be a nice victory celebration after eight long months in cold, cold Calgary!

God daaaamn it

2011-04-07T18:20:00.006-05:00

I came to Canada prepared for Celsius. I came to Canada prepared for Tim Horton’s. I even came to Canada prepared to hear Nickelback. I came to Canada, however, not at all prepared to be told that I had a Chicagoan – excuse me, I mean Chicaaaaagoan, eeaaaccent.

The first few months I brushed it off. South Park had taught me that all Canadians were delusional and had no idea what they were talking about. “I speak perfect English!” “You're adopted!” and “Well I hope your stupid Flames lose the game tonight” were my usual replies to people who dared to make these slanderous and treacherous accusations.

But it hasn’t stopped. The remarks, teasing mimics (“Stay “staff rates” again, Rose! Steeaaaaaaaaff”), and looks of skepticism that flash across people’s faces when I insist that my pronunciation is normal have only grown exponentially over time. Usually I just get it from co-workers but I think today was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I walked into Starbucks and ordered an Americano and allegedly pronounced it more as “Ameri-ke-anne-o” rather than “Ameri-cahn-o”. The new girl behind the counter flashed me a smile and asked me if I was from the Midwest.

“Fuck! No. I mean yes. Well sort of. I’m a Chinese-American US citizen from Maryland but I live in Chicago and I work in Calgary on the weekdays.” …I always have no idea what to say when people ask me where I’m from so I just blurt out my life story. Then it’s awkward.

But, I digress. I’ve never had an accent my entire life, except for maybe when I was five and first moved to the states. Growing up, there wasn’t really such a thing as a Maryland accent. I remember absolutely LOATHING Chicagoan accents when I first came to the UofC. I thought all Midwesterners sounded inbred and that I, with my parents-who-were-not-cousins, spoke in such a superior and sophisticated tongue by comparison.

But now that I think about it, I can’t even discern those nasally, drawn-out As anymore. I can't remember the last time I've paused or been annoyed from hearing a distinctly Chicagoan way of pronouncing something. I guess I too have become inbred, maebe.

Transition into old lady 90% complete

2011-03-29T07:42:00.001-05:00

Lately I have been what I call a real good "old lady" kick. I get home after work and do not socialize and go to the gym and take a shower and cook a meal and read a little and go to sleep. On nights when I am feeling frisky I might even write an e-mail or two. About once a week I'll venture out into the real world and talk to people, but for the most part my weekdays are spent in the silent comforts of my Calgary apartment while my weekends are reserved for booze and debauchery.

But I digress. The point of all this is that I've had the chance to start experimenting with some new recipes. I've been using Stonesoup, an excellent and free e-cookbook. (Get the pdf here) Each recipe uses five or less ingredients excluding S&P and olive oil and also promises the meal is ready in approximately ten minutes. The ingredients are more or less healthy, too. What I like about it is that because each dish is so simple, I have room to play around a little and make it to my own liking. Or on days when I am feeling really lazy, I just follow the instructions as-is and it hasn't let me down yet.

Today I chose to make the chorizo with chickpea and tomato dish, which can be found on page 74. I subbed out the chorizo for turkey sausage, a much healthier but still flavorful alternative, and added a small diced Spanish onion to the pan before browning the sausage. I also added a splash of lime, seasoned with banana instead of black pepper, and reduced the parsley to just a large pinch - I find that too much parsley makes me feel like I'm eating grass.

The final result? Pretty tasty! And as promised, it didn't take more than ten minutes to throw together either. I have enough left over for lunch as well, and then at night I might tackle the salmon with broccolini - stay tuned!

i can't quit you

2011-03-23T08:02:00.000-05:00

hi! just poppin' in to say hello and that i'm not quitting this blog/i have not forgotten about it/i have not died. life has just never been busier and while i sure am enjoying the ride, i have been relatively neglectful of a bunch o stuff, this bloggity blog blog included.

one good/bad (depending on how you look at it!) bit of news i can share is that my roll-off date from this client in calgary is scheduled for april 29th! that would put me at 8 months in calgary. i'm both hoppin' around with ants in my pants, eager to change things up (put me in san francisco, thoughtworks! i'll be your slave forever) and really, really nervous about leaving the people and the places and the memories i've grown to love here in calgary.

five weeks-ish left. i'm determined to make them unforgettable - and to share them here!

I'm pretty sure federal law would not approve though.

2011-02-26T09:34:00.001-06:00

My buddy Scott sent this to me because it reminded him of Fleet Floxes and he figured that I, being such a huge FF fan, would maybe like it. Well, I don't like it. I love it. I want to marry it. I want to take long walks on the beach with it. I want to have pillow fights and tickling wars with it and then in the morning I want to eat some motherfucking pancakes with it.

"I never win anything!"

2011-02-19T09:19:00.003-06:00

Yesterday was "Dress Like a Tacky Tourist Day" at our client site. My team made some rather half-hearted attempts at outfit coordination before realizing none of us actually owned loud Hawaiian shirts or gigantic cargo shorts or god-awful Crocs. (Which I think speaks to the classiness of our team. Go team!) We decided to go with just bright colors and summer accessories.

Not pictured: tackiness

Turns out the program-wide response to DLATTD was less lukewarm than we'd originally thought - there was only a handful of tech people who braved the minus 20 degree weather outside and dressed er, down - so by process of elimination we rather puzzledly accepted a prize that we didn't know existed in the first place for a free dinner + drinks at some restaurant that we also didn't know existed in the first place. But hey, no complaints here. I rocked out in Ray Bans and flippie floppies and am getting free food out of it. All in a day's work, eh?

On a tangentially related subject: one thing that bothers me to no end is when winners of anything, no matter how trivial the prize, scream and cry and then inevitably gush, "But like, I never win anything!!!!!!!!" Well...yeah. It is not at all unlikely or remarkable that you've never won anything, because almost nobody ever wins anything (or almost everyone never wins anything). That's the point. If we all won things all the time, all joy of winning would go away. "I never win anything!" is just about as insightful a remark as saying "Wow guys, I never get married!" at your wedding speech or yelling "Can you believe it?? I'm eating a sandwich!!" every time you're eating a sandwich.

In fact, I'd much prefer it if instead of the winner getting up and wasting everyone's time with insipid proclamations of undeserved surprise, everyone who didn't win would stomp their feet and pound their fists and stand up and yell, "God damn it, I never lose anything!" Which I realize makes equally little sense, but would at the very least make for a far more interesting event every time a winner is chosen (or a lot of non-winners aren't).

I was productive this weekend!

2011-02-16T00:55:00.006-06:00

Repost - for those who asked why I deleted the original entry, it's cause the first video got very out of sync about twenty seconds in. Apologies for the confusion, I know it stayed on my Google Buzz even after I'd deleted it - fail. But hopefully it should never happen again, as I learned the very valuable lesson that whenever possible, iMovie should be used for YouTube uploads instead of evil, evil QuickTime.

I spent an unplanned extended weekend in Chicago and found the luxury of some spare time.

So I drew a drawing:

I call this "7/8ths of an Elephant's Face"

And I learned a new Rural Alberta Advantage song:

I call this "Disregard the Goof-up in the Fourth Verse"

I hadn't done anything artistic or tried fiddling around with anything new on the guitar in a long time. It felt good to make something with my hands for once.

Also, this is totally unrelated but at one point yesterday I found myself smack in the middle of the UChicago campus to grab lunch with some friends. It was my first time on campus in a while and long story short, I nearly had an existential crisis in the middle of Hutch courtyard. It just felt so unbelievably weird to be walking around on the bustling quads with my friends - just like the good old days, except this time mumbling to myself, "I should be here. But I'm not. I'm flying to Calgary in two hours. A year ago I didn't even know Calgary existed. What the fuck."

I also kept mistaking strangers for people I knew. I'd see somebody familiar and excitedly ask, "OMG, is that so-and-so?" And get responses like "No, that's just an impostor", "no, that's a first year", and "no, that's a tree."

Then I ran into my friend who was celebrating his birthday by running around campus with liquor. We did a shot together in the middle of our student center and that made everything better again.

Tunes

2011-02-12T23:39:00.006-06:00

It's difficult for me to write entries about music because I always try too hard to sound like I know what I am talking about and inevitably reread the post and punch myself in the face. So in the interest of avoiding a black eye I will write about a few of my favorite songs at the moment and explain why I like them and when I listen to them. Simple as that.

5. Creeper by Islands

Why I like it:

It's called "Creeper."
The guitar riff manages to be lazy and sexy at the same time.
The band is Canadian and my six month anniversary with Canada is coming up in a few weeks.

When I listen to it:

When I'm creeping on Facebook
When I'm creeping at a club
When I'm in Canada

4. The Bleeding Heart Show by The New Pornographers

Why I like it:

Boy + girl vocals are soothing and wonderful. Sounds like my friends are singing to me.
When the chorus kicks into "we quit the room", the whole song changes.
When the vocals change into guitar and "helas, helas!", the whole song changes.
It keeps me guessing as to what the bleeding heart show really is and why they've arrived too late for it.

When I listen to it:

Anytime, all the time, everytime

3. Fuck You by Cee Lo Green

Why I like it:

It's satisfying and raw and naughty to sing, "Fuck you, fuck fuck you!"
It's a different cut from the kind of indie music I usually enjoy.
It makes people happy when it comes on.
Everyone can relate to it.

When I listen to it:

When I'm in the shower
When my cat jumps off my lap, abandoning me forever

2. Crave You by Flight Facilities

Why I like it:

A boy I once liked showed it to me.

When I listen to it:

When I think about that boy.

1.) John Wayne Gacy, Jr. by Sufjan Stevens

Why I like it:

It's about somebody who was really messed up. The lyrics capture some of the significant events in that person's life, like when he suffered a head injury as a child and when he dressed up as a clown and made kids laugh. But they don't glorify him or make him seem more complex or anything.
Sufjan's guitar, piano, and vocals are beautiful.
It is tangentially related to Chicago.
The narrator compares himself to John Wayne Gacy, Jr. That sort of parallel is shocking and reassuring at the same time because you want to view someone like JWGJ as a monster - how could he have done the things he did? - and put yourself as far away from as possible from someone from him. But Sufjan points out that everyone has floorboards - everyone has things they suppress from the world in an effort to appear normal and happy and well-adjusted, and even someone as fucked up as John Wayne Gacy, Jr could get away with what he did for as long as he did because he could put on a damn good show otherwise, the way we all do. I love the line, "and on my best behavior/I am really just like him/look beneath the floorboards/for the secrets I have hid."

When I listen to it:

Before I fall asleep every night, as it has earned a slot in my sleep playlist. Is that a bad thing, that I listen to a song about a serial killer at the end of each day? Then again, I like to think JWGJ would've listened to something totally bizarre-o and/or ridiculous before bed, like something by The Flaming Lips or Ke$ha. So I don't think that makes me exhibit serial killer tendencies, which is always a reassuring and positive note on which to end a blog entry.

:s

2011-02-09T07:50:00.001-06:00

I've been neglecting this guy a little bit in wake of a pretty hectic all-work-and-all-play schedule. I'm eons behind on everything from responding to e-mails to booking flights to figuring out what I'm supposed to do about my damn taxes.

Also, my bank account was shut down because some moron apparently tried to buy $30,000 worth of jewelry on it over the weekend. Sorting that out has been a hassle, to say the least.

I've made a promise myself to blind sight all social invitations, pick up some butter chicken, and get started on the chain of miscellany "to-dos" that I've put off for the past few weeks. And one of those will hopefully to write a nice, juicy, tender, grade AAA blog post. So watch this space cause in twenty four hours it should be replaced with something glorious! :)

Romance is Boring

2011-02-02T20:41:00.003-06:00

I'm pretty sure every girl fantasizes about living in Pride and Prejudice (or in my case, Lord of the Rings) times when men would gallivant about on noble steeds and woo their ladies with sweet poems and proclamations of undying devotion. And while Elizabethan tongues and corseted dresses are fun, I think the real romance lies within the mysterious and complex nature of 17th century courting.

Take, for example, a statement like "In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you." This is a quote from the epitome of Elizabethan gentleman himself, Mr. Darcy. In today's world, it would roughly translate into something along the lines of "But man I ain't ever seen an ass like hers/that in my mouth had me at a loss for words/I told her to back it up like burp, burn/And make that ass jump like szherp, szherp."

Pictured above: Aragorn secretly wondering if he can make Eowyn's ass jump like szherp, szherp.

Oh, the mystery! It's lost! In olden times your man would blaze off into the sunset and you'd have nothing left of him except perhaps a lingering whiff of unwashed hair. You'd wonder where he was until he showed up maybe three weeks later with another poem and even greasier hair.

Today, you just type his name into Facebook and his life unfolds before your eyes. You see pictures from prom, childhoods, drunken nights in college, etc. You see what he did last weekend. You see ex-girlfriends to whom you inevitably compare yourself. You see scarring school pictures that make you X out of Facebook immediately and order a restraining order against that person.

No mysteries to be had here, folks. Just a sad, sad fourth-grader.

It's an unfortunate fact that men who act overtly romantic or who talk about their feelings are labeled as "sissies" or just plain old "gay" in our culture. Technology may be great at speeding things up and fulfilling our seemingly incessant craving for instant gratification, but I don't think dating or courtship necessarily needed that speed-boost. Sometimes, it's nicer to be left in the dark for just a bit longer. And to be hailed as something just a little more flattering than "a lady in the street but a freak in the bed."

San Francisco, II

2011-01-24T21:07:00.002-06:00

I revisited the city of San Francisco, this time for a providential meet-up with my buddies from ThoughtWorks University. I'd spent time with subsets of our group before but this was the first time we were all together in the same place since our Bangalore days (which feel like light-years ago).

I accidentally an epic fail because I forgot to bring my camera with me (packing on Friday morning had been a frantic, hungover, and altogether unattractive affair), so I'm using my friend Sam's photos to abet me visually in composing this entry. All photo creds go to him.

One of the biggest highlights and defining features of our trip was where we stayed, which was an old warehouse in the Mission district that had been converted into an loft of insanity. It housed twelve regular tenants and slept a handful of visitors to the city. There were, among many other amenities, a net that could seat four, a couch suspended off the ground, a stadium-seated theater room, a pinball machine, Japanese-style shelf beds, a ladder to the roof, a tiki bar, and an infinity coffee table that told the time through its LED lights. Everything was made by tech-y twenty-somethings and blew my mind and made me feel horribly uncreative.

(The net, pictured above, had a lot of adorable teddy bears in varying shapes and sizes strewn all over it. I asked one of our hosts why that was, and he said that one of his roommates really dug Asian girls, who in turn really dug teddy bears. So he placed them to lure the girls there and so they could lie down together on the net. The funny thing is, we had this conversation when I myself was on the net, swathed in a fort of floofy stuffed bears.)

Our first night, we went bar hopping - first to the rooftop restaurant of Medjool which had a lovely view of the city's night skyline, and then to a seedier but infinitely more interesting joint just down the road. Ever since I watched that episode of Glee where Mercedes Jones leads her high-school cafeteria protest against the banning of tater tots I have been consumed by an overwhelming craving for the golden little fuckers, a craving that I could never quite fulfill in Canada. Well they were serving tots at this joint and I just about died of a combination of grease and happiness and alcohol poisoning.

At around one thirty in the morning I decided to call it quits because a.) I'd worked and flown earlier and b.) My feet were killing me from being in heels all day. Upon arriving back to our "hotel", I flung my shoes off as far as I could, plopped down on one of the comfy couches in the theater, and got my Mario Cart Wii on in the epic theater. I hadn't assumed my 'Daisy on the Mach Bike' persona since my second year of college and it was a grand affair, revisiting such familiar tracks as Mushroom Gorge (which used to be my best, but destroyed me this time) and Moo Moo Farm.

The next day I woke up to complete darkness, as our room was in the basement. I was completely awake and ready to go and quite pleased that the lack of light had tricked my body into sleeping past its usual hour...OR SO I THOUGHT, cause I quickly realized it was merely 7:30 in the morning. But there was no way my weird biological clock would let me fall back asleep. So I played pinball and read and swung on the couch 'til everyone woke up. We rode the BART to Powell & Market street and had quite the yummy spicy ramen lunch at Katayana. (I also ran into LUSH and stocked up. My collection is growing quite impressive) Then we rented Zipcars - a Mini Cooper and a Beamer! - and zoomed over to the small harbor town across from the Golden Gate Bridge and to Muir Woods, home of Cali's famous redwood trees, for some breathtaking sightseeing. Along the way we wound down Lombard street and got detoured by an anti-abortion rally. There were dreadlocksed people runnin' around with signs that read "We love babies!". And on the way back, while descending the mountains I saw one of the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen in my life. Oh, California.

After returning the Zipcars, we enjoyed a lovely Italian dinner at La Briciola. At this point I was still accruing a massive sleep deficit and was struggling a bit to stay awake in the cozy, warm restaurant, but two cups of coffee and a lot of "Rose! Wake up!"s kept me from faceplanting into my prosciutto. After dinner, we began our night with a couple of beers at a local dive bar (Benders? Truckers? something like that), where the boys played some billiards. Then we headed over to DNA Lounge, a club. I've never been much into the club scene and felt vaguely uncomfortable with the unseemly acts that were being performed on the dance floor, but I did enjoy seeing some of the costumes that our fellow partygoers (mostly male) wore. Let's just say they would've made Snooki's outfits look modest by comparison and put Lady GaGa to shame.

Oh, and a highlight of that club experience happened when I ran into a girl who was crying to the bouncer that some guy had accused her of being a transvestite. She had quite a bit of a strong jawline but her waist to hip ratio clearly indicated that she was not and had never been, by any stretch of the imagination, a man. Anyway, we had a bit of a chat which went something like this:

Me: "Are you okay? Don't listen to that guy, you're a gorgeous girl."
Her (in between sobs): "Was it my nose? I know it's kind of big!"
Me: "Your nose is fine. "
Her: "Was it my hairy arms?"
Me: "No, it wasn't anything. And look, I have hairy arms too."
Her: "BUT H-H-H-HE ACCUSED ME OF BEING A TRANSVESTITE! I BET YOU'VE NEVER BEEN MISTAKEN FOR A DUDE!"
Me (thinking back to high school): "Eh, you'd be surprised."

The details of how that night ended are still fuzzy, but suffice it to say that I plopped into bed, this time fully prepared to indulge in a good night's rest. Not so - I received a call from a coworker in India at 8 AM and began my day. This time we walked in the gorgeous weather from downtown through Chinatown and along Pier 39, a gaudy and tourist-ridden but relatively mandatory destination where we ate clam chowder out of a bread bowl at Boudin's and saw sea lions arfing in the sun. Then on the way back, all my hopes and dreams were fulfilled when we saw The Bush Man! My buddy Andrew tried to engage him in conversation but The Bush Man was hard at work and only replied with, "you blowin' my cover, man!" when Andrew stood too close by.

I flew out of San Francisco numb in the wake of my marvelous crazy stupendous bizarre exhausting exhilarating delicious delirious experiences. It was truly one of my happier weekends in recent memory. It's only been a day but I miss the sun. I miss the crazies. I miss you, San Francisco.

Tonight is one of those earmuff-all-social-events, break-out-the-spicy-ramen, run-a-bubble-bath-and-write-a-blog-post nights.

2011-01-19T20:24:00.001-06:00

I was only in Chicago for forty hours this past weekend. Which seems fleeting, 'til you have to spend it under the same roof as these beauties:

I also stumbled into the Chicago ThoughtWorks office and took some pictures of "the beach", which is where consultants go to do pro-bono work or teach themselves other programming languages or whatnot when they are not currently assigned to a billable project. People are constantly arriving to and leaving from "the beach" and as a result, a lot of amusing trinkets find their way there and never really leave.

Meaningful conclusion: I hang around weird people and weird things.

Canada is Cool: A Haiku

2011-01-12T23:26:00.001-06:00

My nose hairs grow stiff

As I wait inside the car.

Please heat up faster.

I think my favorite thing about the cold is that it's so darn extreme. Sounds weird but it's true - life is much more exciting when you are living under pretty ridiculous circumstances, and a real feel temperature of minus twenty four degrees (about minus 31 C for my metric friends) is what I consider a pretty ridiculous circumstance.

Sometimes when I tell people about how cold it gets here they get a horrified look on their face and say things like "How can you stand that?" and regard me in awe like I am some sort of medical freak who loves to roll around in the ice and eat fistfuls of snow. But the truth is, I'm outside every day for maybe a total of five minutes and the rest of the time I am indoors and wholly comfortable and usually nursing a hot beverage. Yeah it sucks to not be able to run outside or walk around with wet hair or open the sunroof of my rental car but life goes on and people find equally enjoyable things to do under a roof. Also we are less susceptible to skin cancer, hurrah!

I think that even though we all say we crave nice weather, our actual happiness is ultimately all relative to what we're used to. I'm sure Californians who wake up every day to balmy 73 degree weather get desensitized to beautiful weather and are always content with it whereas for me, a nice day is incredibly special and I experience a more concentrated spurt of happiness because I can appreciate it that much more. I think the ideal place weather-wise is somewhere that experiences all four seasons in moderate amounts - that way, life changes the most with each passing season and you get to really change things up, from what you do on the weekends to what color nail polish you wear :-)

Man, I can't believe I just wrote a whole entry and a poem about the weather. I am turning into an old geezer.

Hehe

2011-01-09T12:38:00.001-06:00

Thought I'd share today's Beartato cause I saw it first thing in the morning and it made me chuckle. All credit goes to Anthony Clark at nedroid.com

I am currently spending this weekend in Calgary in the delightful company of my best friend in the whole wide world. I would share the adventures we've had thus far but have no way of transferring pictures until I go back to Chicago this weekend. But the basic gist is that we frolicked about Banff National Park all day and all night and had ourselves a grand old time and even a few mouthfuls of elk for dinner - expect an more detailed entry soon!

Just looked up the weather and the real feel temp is -18 degrees F - baby it's cold outside! I'm all cozy and warm and snuggled under the covers right now, contentedly typing away and happily recollecting all of yesterday's details. Life is good.

A post in which I bitch about something that isn't really that bad but I feel like bitching about it anyway

2011-01-03T22:20:00.003-06:00

POP QUIZ!

What do Lord Voldemort and I have in common?

A.) We both fraternize with snakes in our spare time.
B.) We both want to seize control of the wizarding world and purify it of those dratted mudbloods.
C.) We were both reborn in a kettle using a magical concoction of blood from Peter Pettigrew, Harry Potter, and our dead fathers.
D.) We both have split up our lives into horcruxes within different locations and are probably en route to developing acute schizophrenia.

The correct answer is D. Whereas Voldy had himself split seven ways (he was complicated and had many layers, like an evil onion), I find my life divided between three completely different places (I guess that makes me a smaller, but probably more confused onion).

Parts of me - my passions, my interests, my strengths and weaknesses - are practically nonexistent in some places but define me in others. I do not feel 100% myself most of the time anymore and no longer have a sense of a base and no incentive to ever nest and invest in my surroundings - everything is fleeting, temporary, and leaves me craving for just a little bit more time. Not to mention the physical things that are haphazardly and inconveniently scattered across my three homes. For example, my camera is here with me in Calgary right now but the USB chord and charger are both in Chicago. Each of the books within my Millennium Trilogy series currently sits in its own city. I own anywhere between three to four identical instances of any article of toiletry. I use two phones, two laptops, drive two cars, play with two cats, fiddle around on three guitars, play on three chess sets, visit four different libraries, check five e-mail addresses daily, surf the net regularly on six or seven different networks, carry a dozen keys with me at all times, and have a partridge in a pear tree. I put time and effort into staying in the lives of people I care about but still end up doing a mediocre job across the board, so I pathetically suggest they read this blog if they want to check from time to time that I still exist somewhere on this planet.

The only things that are constantly actually with me at any given time are usually my personal computer and the documentation I need to board a plane. And a spare tube of travel-sized mascara.

Keeping track of all this stuff is confusing and exhausting. I don't know how Voldemort did it - sometimes I feel like I'm going to have an existential crisis and shatter into three pieces. Or that I need to invest in some serious cloning technology. Where's Hermione's time turner when you need it?

Consulting is like Inception

2010-12-30T21:23:00.001-06:00

Today I was having a chat with my sponsor at ThoughtWorks. We were discussing the fine nuances of consulting, in particular how to tiptoe the line between pushing for your opinion to be heard and acknowledging when to concede or just to let the client do what the client wants to do, even if you know it's not the best practice at the end of the day.

Him: yeah we see the problems
Him: and we know how to solve them
Him: but that's not how the world works
Me: *sigh* sadly not
Him: you gotta play their game just enough to get inside it and change it
Me: like inception

This "consulting is like Inception" concept is definitely not a novel one (I know because I Googled it and wiser consultants than me have ruminated the comparison all over the internetz), but it's an analogy worth restating. A large part of being a consultant is getting situated and comfortable within the client site before you're able to even attempt to enact any influences or changes. This includes everything from building trust from the client to getting used to their cafeteria food, and it is only after such a foundation solidifies that consultants can then effectively well, do their job.

Just like Leonardo DiCaprio and co. worked so hard to plant the tinest nuance of an idea in their target's subconscious, so do consultants dig themselves into the client site and attempt to enact change within its confines and limits. And just like the characters of Inception encountered unexpected obstacles and risks and had to pull out from time to time, so do consultants have to deal with letting go of their own ideas, as right as they may seem, for the greater good of keeping the peace and maintaining trust with the client.

(Gap analysis: their obstacles were cool, like avalanches and cars falling into water, and ours are significantly more banal by comparison. Also I haven't met anybody who looks like Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the job yet, which in my personal opinion is totally unfair.)

Potatoes are tasty

2010-12-25T18:10:00.003-06:00

Spicy ramen, eggs, guacamole, and potatoes are the four primary food groups that got me through college. Now that I am eating out pretty 80 or 90% of the time on the job, I am sick of restaurant food and find myself struck by pangs of longing for my staple noms. But cooking for one can be really frustrating on my weekends back in Chicago because that "one" cannot finish her leftovers the next day or hope that somehow her celery will make it through the next two weeks. So in a nutshell, I've missed cooking and it's lovely to be home at my parents' house in a fully-stocked, brand new kitchen.

Breakfast is always my absolute favorite meal, both to make and to consume. Especially when the house is empty and it's 11:00 AM and I have no rush to accomplish anything productive or meaningful for the entire day. My favorite breakfast dish? Potatoes. Lots of 'em. In my mouth.

To begin, I grabbed a medium-sized russet potato. I gave it a good scrub and then cubed it, leaving the skin on (ridding potatoes of their skins is, in my book, a sin against humanity).

While I was chopping the taters, I'd dropped two tablespoons of vegetable oil in a skillet over medium heat. I transferred the goods to the pan and tossed it around to coat all the surfaces as evenly as possible.

Next came the fun part - seasoning! I am too lazy and have too short term of a memory to know exactly what I throw in there and in what quantities, but it usually always turns out quite tasty anyway (except for that time I dumped half a spice bottle of rosemary by accident. Eight people had to pretend like they really loved rosemaried potatoes that morning). Today I ransacked my parents' kitchen and found the usual players: salt and black pepper, allspice. But then, lo and behold, out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed an old love of mine:

Words cannot describe how fond I am of Old Bay seasoning. Not only is it a delicious ingredient in it of itself, it also reminds me of one of my favorite things in the world - eating blue crabs with my parents. Such a Maryland, home-y taste to this spice! I also adore it on greasy boardwalk fries, so I figured why not add it to my greasy morning taters?

I usually add all spices about five minutes after putting the potatoes into the oil, just to give them a little bit of time to absorb the moisture. I then let them cook for more five minutes (still on medium) and then cover them for another ten before serving. This morning's tater accomplices: a nice thick chunky line of ketchup, an egg over (very, salmonelly) easy, blueberries and clementines, some nice smoked gouda cheese, and a mug of Mocha Cappuccino Swiss Miss hot chocolate. Needless to brag, it was a delicious breakfast (though I won't lie: it left me feeling rather stuffed and perhaps a little disgusted with my own gluttony afterwards. But it got me through five consecutive episodes of Glee!). Cheers to happy holidays and nomtastic nourriture!

Rihanna is the only girl for me, apparently.

2010-12-24T18:53:00.000-06:00

I have an enormous girl crush on Rihanna. She is fierce in every sense of the word and I love everything she wears, sings, and wipes her nose on. As of late my predominately male-vocalized music collection been gathering dust in the unloved corner of my iTunes library because I have only been listening to this goddess (and when I can, watching the gorgeous video) on repeat.

It's getting a little sad and I am starting to worry about myself. I am not sure it is entirely normal to take an hourlong bubble bath and have this song play 15 times in a row in the background (...and then to blow dry my hair to it afterwards). I've definitely become obsessed with catchy pop songs in the past and have always successful exorcised them from my brain by playing them until I vomit. But it's not working with this one - I just enjoy it more each time.

I never did like my forehead that much anyway...

2010-12-18T18:36:00.007-06:00

I've had long, long hair for an even longer time. Heavy, hanging, a curtain to the world - it's always been a part of me. I've nailed down a routine where I get it trimmed once every three months and occasionally curl it when I find the time. But otherwise I leave it as it is: long, lanky, unlayered, and kind of insane.

Lately it's been getting on my nerves. For one, I'm sick of finding long hairs in my food, in my bed, on my clothes, and worse, on other people's belongings. For another, living in Canada for 5/7ths of my life has reduced the ends of my hair to a pathetic and tangled state. So today, as I walked over to my salon for my usual trim appointment, I made the decision to go for more than just a trim.

Long hair - it can drive a girl crazy!

I am usually a giant wimp when it comes to haircuts and change in general. I quietly ask for one inch to be cut off and sit there crying silently when I see my locks fall to the ground. Also I've always sort of hated bangs on people, lol, for no rational reason. But today I quite contentedly plopped down, flipped my hair out from under my jacket, and told my stylist that I wanted four inches off, lots of layers, and oh, a fringe bang, if you will.

I am quite digging my new haircut, especially the fact that I can either leave it hanging as a fringe or push it aside for a more side-swept look. It makes me feel edgier and more put-together and I don't miss the old mop of hair I used to tote around with me everywhere I went. In these pictures I am not wearing makeup but I imagine it'll go well with some black eyeliner and mascara action for a very "city" look.

Fun at Fernie

2010-12-14T23:31:00.001-06:00

I spent my second weekend in Canada in a small city called Fernie which can be found in British Columbia, just beyond the bordering reach of Alberta. Fun facts about Fernie: hitchhiking is prevalent and encouraged by the townsfolk. The population is around 4,000. There do not appear to be any Asians in that population.

The lodge/cabin we were told about turned out to be more like a mansion atop a mountain. Amenities included an outdoor jacuzzi, a fully-stocked kitchen, and two pugs to play with, one of which was blind and would walk into walls and chairs, thereby inducing rounds of simultaneous cringes and "awwws".

I've decided that if and when I ever decide to own a home, the kitchen is going to be by far the most important room. Cooking in this place was, in a word, delightful. I was seriously channeling Rachel Ray as I made myself and a colleague omelets for breakfast on Saturday morning.

The players: green pepper, onion, tomato, Gruyere, bacon, S&P. Yummmm.

We passed the time watching movies (the extended Lord of the Rings films were on the screen in the living room the entire weekend. We'd zone in and out and groan when Legolas said obvious things), stuffing our faces, and playing board games. The first two I'd been expecting...the third, not so much. But as it turns out, one of my colleagues is a complete board game fanatic and had brought a subset of his collection of unique board games. We first played Last Night on Earth, which was a fun struggle between zombie and human players. The second game, pictured above, was called Defenders of the Realm and went along perfectly with LotR in the background - both that and Last Night on Earth were strategy games, similar to Risk but with way more intricacies. The third, Chicago Express, was my favorite. It was an investment game that involved a lot of math (go figure) and sneaky plotting.

We also bought and decorated a Christmas tree for the cabin. You know, to be festive and wasteful with our money, just like the holidays are designed to enable us to be!

I had a superb time in Fernie - it made coming back to work Monday morning all the more painful. I can't picture myself ever living full time in such a small town, but for a weekend getaway it sure hit the spot!

Things that I never thought I'd learn on the job but at which I am now relatively skilled to proficient

2010-12-13T22:00:00.001-06:00

- Driving in the snow. Actually, just driving in general...and mostly through trial and error. Due to the nature of consulting/traveling, I have engaged in polygamous liasons with many a rental car, some of which are well equipped for slush and snow, others which are more slippery and slide-y than your mother (zing!). I can now get to work and back when there is snow outside without killing myself or anybody else on the road. This for me is veritably, a Great Success.

- Trimming down my morning routine to 15 minutes on a non-shower morning. 5 minutes to trudge over to the sink and brush my teeth/wash my face, 5 minutes for makeup, 5 minutes for ransacking my closet for something that is not a burlap sack to wear to work.

- Writing fast, snappy e-mails. If I were to take my time and write well thought-out responses, I would be trapped in e-mail hell for the rest of my career. Also as long as I insert a :-) or a "Cheers!" somewhere in there I don't come off sounding like a giant bitch no matter the rest of the tone of the e-mail.

- Taking a 30 second breather. I open up my personal e-mail, Facebook, and sometimes a reddit tab or two and quickly glance through for anything interesting before resuming work. This activity, done once every couple of hours, serves as a good reminder that I have a life outside of the office. Or once had one. I dunno anymore.

- The entire Starbucks menu. I have mastered it as well as found my fallback/default order: a grande Americano with nonfat milk and one sugar. And an oatmeal when they have the nut toppings, a spinach wrap when they don't.

Oh, and a bunch of stuff on how to be a competent consultant/business analyst/communicator/team player/interface designer/product modeler/meeting facilitator, but those are all boring, eh? ;)

Tired & Tangled

2010-12-09T00:06:00.003-06:00

Just came back from watching the new Disney movie "Tangled" with a couple coworkers. The verdict: entertaining and a fun twist on a classic fairytale story, but nothing out of this world spectacular. In other words: you'll enjoy the movie as long as you don't go in with the expectation of seeing a Wall-E or Finding Nemo-caliber theatrical masterpiece.

I've had a pretty boring week, mostly because I've been getting home late from work and crawling into bed with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or a mindless episode of Gossip Girl before clunking out at like 9 PM...yeah, so hip, so fly. I think it's the whole waking-up-before-sunrise and going-home-well-after-sunset effect that's taking a toll on me, both mentally and physically. I am starting to feel and look and probably smell like a zombie. Mmm, decaying flesh - irresistible.

The coming weekend should be a wee bit more exciting though as a handful of ThoughtWorkers, myself included, are heading up to a small town in British Columbia called Fernie for a mountain getaway ski lodge trip bonanza event thingy woo I rock at English. I have never been more excited to do nothing with myself all weekend except get tipsy on red wine and pruny in a steaming jacuzzi. I may or may not have plans to drop a bath bomb in there and scare the living shit out of my colleagues ("SWEET JESUS WHEN DID THE WATER TURN PINK AND GLITTERY")

Oh, also I Google Imaged "Fernie" and found this picture:

This picture succinctly conveys what I look and feel like each day after work: wiped out, immobile, clutching onto someone's ankles. God only knows what kind of shape I'll be in after a day of snowboarding. Will definitely update with pictures galore, Wi-fi willing.

Hi, I'm a Mac.

2010-12-04T07:11:00.004-06:00

As of right this very second, I am a proud sort-of owner of a brand new 13-inch Macbook Pro. Sort-of meaning the computer does not belong to me; it belongs to the company from which ThoughtWorks leases our machines. But for all intents and purposes, it is now mine to use, to travel with, and to adoringly cradle and whisper sweet nothings to at night. I may or may not have already affectionately referred to it as "my baby".

The company laptop I was using before was a Dell Latitude E3400. And I swear to God: it was possessed by the devil. Over time, the fiery demon embedded in that machine only grew more ferocious and unwieldy - by the time I lugged the beast over to our IT department yesterday, my computer was afflicted with not one, not two, but THREE symptoms, all of which I am sure are trademarks of the devil:

1. The speakers were completely bust. Turning on any sort of sound would result in agonizing, scratchy thumps that resonated in my soul day in and day out.

2. My screen would physically react to certain web sites - specifically, Flash-based ones with dark-colored backgrounds. White columns would appear and begin to flicker - the more intense the site, the more the columns and the more their flickering would plague me. Not only did this give me a migraine, it seriously confused my colleagues who'd happen to walk by and see me typing away on a epileptic screen.

3. Sometimes, in the middle of typing anything - an e-mail, a blog post, an Excel document - the index would jump about twelve letters previous to where it was supposed to be, essentially splicing my sentences and words at arbitrary times. This was incredibly frustrating, as if I was not careful when typing for long periods of time I could easily miss a "splice" and wind up with words like "derPerhaps" or "whatfromever".

The IT guys made a few attempts at exorcising my Latitude of its inner demon, all to no avail, so when I half-jokingly asked "any Macbook Pros left?" and was promptly handed over this glorious aluminum beauty, it was all I could do to keep from jumping up and down and doing an ill-executed somersault right there on the spot. Well actually I was at ThoughtWorks so I probably could've done it and nobody would have cared.

I will probably spend most of today setting up and tinkering around with my shiny new toy. I love almost everything about my ba - er, new computer, except for the fact that there is no forward delete key. Or maybe I am too dumb to find it. But it's okay - I am too delighted to care.

LUSH LOVE

2010-12-01T23:23:00.002-06:00

This is a totally girly post, so to all you Y-chromosomers out there: I will discuss pink fluffy bubbles. You've been warned.

So...I've been working. A lot. The half-hour-to-hour commute twice each day, the ten to eleven-hour workday, and the constant traveling is bad enough; then tack on all the pressure we have to meet our milestones and I become one very stressed girl.

My favorite way to relax? Soak in a long, nice bath.

Here's my recipe for relaxation:

1.) Allot time. This is usually the most difficult part for me (hey, you try turning down drinks with your colleagues and saying "umm, I want to take a bath" when they ask why you're leaving). But it's imperative not to feel rushed! I always try to set apart one bath night a week. Usually 1-1.5 hours will suffice. Primetime is right before bedtime.
2.) Pick an album you adore to play in the background. Today's was Fleet Foxes for me.
3.) Find a combination of bath products that you love. Try mixing up bars, bubbles, soaps, oils, candles...whatever it takes! Today I used 1/4th of The Comforter bubble bar and a Keep It Fluffy (the purple one) bath bomb, both LUSH products.
4.) GO CRAZY!

I crumbled the bubble bar, a longtime love of mine, first under the hot running water. It filled my tub with glorious fluffy bubbles and turned the water a lovely baby pink color and laced my bathroom with a sweet cotton candy scent, yummmm. When I was done running the water, I dropped in the bath bomb, which fizzed into a lavender smell and turned the bath water purple - so fun!

I definitely love experimenting with different smells. In fact, I ramble on and on about "omg I had the best bath ever last night" so much to my colleagues that I've since persuaded a couple of them to try it for themselves - I've even piqued a couple of male colleagues' interests. But in all honesty, despite everyone's snickering, I firmly vouch that bubble baths are probably the most underrated things ever for adults. For just a few bucks and an hour or so of your time, it will do miraculous things to your body, mind, and state of being. And it leaves you feeling clean and girly and smelling like lavender. Seriously, what more could you want in life?

Journey to the South

2010-11-26T21:44:00.005-06:00

Last weekend I went to Arkansas to attend an office hour appointment with my favorite teacher in the whole wide world, Ms. Kaitlyn Wark.

My itinerary was simple -

Friday: Calgary --> Dallas. Wait an hour. Dallas --> Memphis.

then,

Sunday: Memphis --> Chicago. Wait an hour and a half. Chicago --> Calgary.

SOUNDS EASY, RIGHT?

It took an hour and a half to de-ice the Calgary aircraft (it was minus 15 F outside). They sprayed the entire plane down with fluorescent green goo. Why they didn't bother to do this before we boarded still remains a mystery to me.

I missed my connecting flight to Memphis but got put in a suite at the Grand Hyatt, which was on the whole, a splendid event. I slept for 12 hours and pranced around in a terry cloth bathrobe like a boss. Next morning's flight from Dallas to Memphis was the only successful leg of the trip. I talked to the cute guy sitting next to me (mmm Southern drawl yes please!), sipped apple juice, and actually arrived in Memphis ahead of schedule.

Memphis International Airport is not a very happenin' place.

I spent the next 23 hours frolicking about Memphis, Tennessee and Helena, Arkansas with Kaitlyn. We shopped like old times, ate like old times, and did our makeup while blasting Taylor Swift like old, old, gloriously old times. I had not seen her in half a year but it felt like nothing had changed since our Chicagoan days.

At night, we headed over to Beale Street, the Memphis equivalent of Bourbon Street, to go bar-hopping. We were having a good time until we encountered something really fucked up at Club 152: our elevator stopped at the second floor and we saw that it was blocked off by chairs and guarded by a large bouncer. He took one look at us and told us that we should keep going up to the third floor. Kaitlyn asked him what the chairs were for. And I quote, verbatim:

"To keep the blacks from crowding the elevator and going up."

We were stunned. Kaitlyn asked him to repeat what he said, and he did.

"So this is a segregated bar, then."

"No, it's just an invitation-only area on the third floor, where you should be."

What invitations?!#@#!@#$!

Both Kaitlyn and I were flabbergasted and repulsed by what we'd seen, so we called it a night and drove back to Helena to catch some shut-eye. The next morning we had pancakes at her friends' place. I was only there for an hour but there was something so therapeutic about sitting in a warm house in the middle of nowhere and being surrounded by kind, gracious people. There was a huge window where we ate and the view was framed by a stream of drifting orange leaves...it was all so surreal. I so felt like Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama, except with a hangover.

It was all downhill after I was dropped off at the airport. I walked to ticketing to check in and informed the United representative that I was going to O'Hare International Airport.

"O'Hare? Your plane is already here! RUN FORREST RUN!!!!!!"

She didn't say that last part, but it was all I was thinking as I rocketed through security, shoving innocent and bewildered peasants left and right. I rounded the corner to my gate and to my relief, stepped into a line of passengers still waiting to board. When I got to the front, the ticket collector looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

"You're going to O'Hare, miss. This flight is boarding for Denver."

Apparently United lady number one thought O'Hare was in Denver.

I popped a squat and waited for about 45 minutes for the real aircraft to O'Hare to arrive. Then, the intercom told me that the flight would be delayed by exactly one hour.

One hour isn't so bad. I still have a thirty minute window, I thought as I started a new game of chess against the computer.

Turns out, airplanes follow a very rigid takeoff schedule, and there exists only about a 10 or 15 minute window for each plane to leave the runway. Our flight missed its window and another one was unavailable for 30 more minutes. And thus my last ounce of hope was squeezed out of me, similar to the way that last toothbrushful of toothpaste is pried out, used, and spat out. My flight touched down exactly four minutes after my connection had taken off.

I needed to be in Calgary the next morning for an important meeting. I absolutely, positively, unequivocally had to be there. My only option was to take a 8:25 PM flight to Edmonton, which is about an hour north of Calgary, stay the night, and take the 5:40 AM flight from Edmonton to Calgary the next morning.

The Edmonton flight was delayed by an hour. At this point I had, in all probability, gone insane. I wandered around O'Hare with a giant thing of McDonald's fries, walking around listlessly and with no purpose in life anymore. I was in airport purgatory. During the four hours I spend there waiting, I managed to: 1.) buy a pair of Ray-Bans, completely on impuse, 2.) eat an extra large McDonald's meal, and 3.) bond with strangers from Australia, who invited me to play poker with them.

9:25 finally rolled around and I was finally on an aircraft. I sat next to a legal assistant named Wlad, who when asked what there was to do in Edmonton for fun, had to think for about five minutes before offering a couple of responses. I arrived in Edmonton at 1:00 AM, got to my hotel at 1:30, took a shower, crawled into bed (practically weeping) at 2:00, and woke up two hours later to catch the 4:30 shuttle to the airport. So essentially, I paid a hundred bucks for a quick shower and nap.

The Edmonton --> Calgary flight was only delayed by 30 minutes (you know your life is sad when a 30-minute delay is now prefaced with "only") so I got to Calgary around 7:20, hailed a taxi, and drove straight to the office - disheveled, luggage in tow, but present and ready and willing, huzzah!

TSA

2010-11-16T07:32:00.001-06:00

Lately, there has been a lot of hullabaloo about the TSA's screening procedures. Many people, myself included, feel that the "choice" between being stepping into a backscatter scanning machine (which renders high-resolution images of people's naked bodies) or being subject to a full body pat-down (self explanatory) is like picking between an electronic or manual invasion of privacy - whenever an officer presents my options, all I hear is "how would you like us to glean inappropriate knowledge of your body today, miss?".

In particular, one man's "If you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested" experience (link hurr) and recorded conversation with TSA officers has blown up all over YouTube and was even featured on the front page of CNN yesterday. It's an interesting story to read/view if you have a few minutes and I'm glad it's gaining national interest because for people like me who fly a ginormous amount, stickin' it to the man Rosa Parks style is not really a viable option if I want to keep my job.

I did have one pretty hairy encounter with the TSA a few months back. I'd arrived at the airport at 5:30 AM for my 7:15 flight to O'Hare, like I do every week, and had spent a grueling hour waiting at the customs line. I got to security and kid you not, stood in a non-moving line for 30 minutes as I watched a half-dozen TSA officers try to pat down a toddler who was throwing a fit and refusing to stop screaming. By the time boarding for my flight had almost ended, I'd finished with my pat-down and was going to make a break for my terminal when an officer approached me and asked to see my boarding documents. I asked her what was going on.

"I'm afraid your luggage has revealed a potentially dangerous level of toxic material."

I looked at my suitcase. It's bright and yellow and plaid and completely silly. It's contents? A pair of boots, some leggings, and some socks.

"What...toxic material?"

"I can't say for security purposes. But we'll need to rescan your things and you'll need to undergo another pat-down."

At this point I literally had five minutes before boarding closed. I was irritated and hungover, and while I'm not proud of what I said next, I still think that logically it made a lot of sense:

"Look. I've been standing here in front of at least 10 security officers while I got my first pat-down. Do you really think I grew a gun on a third arm in these past 30 seconds?"

Silence, as bewildered heads turned.

The TSA officer took a deep breath. "Ma'am, if you say that word again I will have to call the police."

"What word, GUN?"

Because a real terrorist would really fucking be yelling GUNGUNGUNGUN!!!!!! to a TSA officer at airport security!

She didn't call the police on me. (According to Steven Levitt, Asian females are the least likely demographic group to commit crimes, ha!) She made me turn around and gave me the quickest pat-down I'd ever received, then I grabbed my stuff and bolted for my flight. I wound up sitting next to some important executive from the American Bar Association to whom I relayed my story. We spent the majority of that plane ride discussing the legality of the TSA's security procedures. We agreed that I'd been pretty rude and that lady was just doing her job, but that on the whole, the TSA's efforts were unsustainable and bound to eventually stir up some sort of national outcry.

Well, it seems to be happening now, and I'm glad for it. Hopefully we'll see some improvements soon.

BAMFS at Banff

2010-11-12T21:49:00.000-06:00

Took advantage of the Canadian holiday yesterday (Remembrance Day) to go see me some mountains!

I found the mountains!

We rode in a gondola. It was only mildly terrifying and I am only relatively scarred for life and afraid of heights after that experience...no biggie.

Do not be fooled by our happy expressions. We were both actually peeing in fear.

I think the view was worth it, though - don't you? Never mind that it was -10 degrees Celsius (about 14 degrees Fahrenheit) - you don't see something like this every day! (Also my shitty Pre camera does these mountains no justice whatsoever...but I cannot find my camera at the time, so this'll have to do.)

I've been a little unmotivated to post here, but will hopefully have some weekend adventures to share soon.

A little bit of spontaneity (damn, that's hard to spell)

2010-11-07T10:09:00.003-06:00

My buddy Becca went all out with a cartilage piercing and a second set of lobe piercings!

Today, I went downtown with two girlfraaands and we had ourselves a shopping spree :) We'd just left with our goodies from LUSH (where we met the craziest saleslady ever. She literally squealed every time we purchased one of her "favoritest" products) and were walking down State Street when we neared Claire's. This prompted a discussion about how we've all always wanted second lobe and/or cartilage piercings. We then paused for a second, looked at each other, shrugged "why the hell not?" and then went in to get our ears done! We even held each other's hands during the procedures, it was that great.

I now have new little 3mm studs in my earlobes, about a centimeter away from my original piercings. Turning them feels a funny and satisfying at the same time. I haven't done anything girly and fun so this was a little sparkle of excitement (did I really just type "sparkle of excitement?" Jeez) in my week. And it's not even the piercing or the stud itself that I am the most fond of, it's the memory of a day well spent with people I care about that really makes me happy.

The only problem is that nobody will probably ever see my new piercing because my hair always inevitably covers my ears, even when I put it up. In fact, in college there was a running joke among my friends that I either a.) had horribly deformed ears or b.) did not have ears at all. The truth is, I do have ears and they are pretty normal-looking. But nobody believes me.

Daisy Dukes, Bikinis on Top

2010-11-01T00:03:00.003-05:00

11/7/10 - Edited with pictures!

I made my first ever visit to California this weekend - specifically in the lovely city of San Francisco. I've visited a decently-sized handful of major US cities before and have always remained steadfast in my belief that Chicago is the best and only city for me. But now I'm not so sure. Compared to Calgary, San Francisco felt like a slice of heaven - breezy, gorgeous heaven. Here are some highlights of my weekend:

* Staying at the gorgeous Sir Francis Drake hotel, located right downtown at Union Square, a hop and a skip from all the stores ever

* ...and so as a result, shopping shopping shopping! There is something about being in a new city that completely changes my take on spending money. If I'm in Chicago, say at the Macy's downtown I might see something and be like "meh". In SF that became "OHMYGOD I WILL DIE IF I DO NOT OWN THAT".
* In N Out. Oh god oh god oh god so good

Animal Style! Fuck yeah.

* Walking to said hamburger heaven and on the way, being scared out of our wits by a man dressed as some sort of creepy monster who burst out of a trash can as we walked by, to the amusement of many a spectating tourist
* Coming close to rolling down so many hills
* Meeting/talking to Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook
* Going to AsiaSF, a fine-dining experience that involves you being served by beautiful, well-endowed, scantily-costumed Asian women. Think Victoria's Secret + Hooters - everyone's dream come true, right? Yeah, except for the part where you find out these girls are not women, but rather, men (mostly post-ops) who look damn fine in corsets. Dancing on tables, birthday shots off various unmentionable body parts, what's not to love!

Not a girl, not yet a woman

* Seeing touristy things, like Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Cliffhouse was not at all annoying/painful. The balmy 75 degree weather didn't hurt, either ;)

* Standing on a crowded bus at 3 in the morning, listening to the teen next to me asking everyone for a "surface". His friend, who was in a garbage can costume, surrendered his lid. Before I knew it, the kid was rolling a blunt and smoking right on the bus. Nobody complained - they all just opened the windows nonchalantly like they'd seen this a million times before
* Seeing friends, old and new, and making a bunch of new ones.

San Francisco, you have charmed me with your exquisite weather and beautiful people and impressive display of organic produce. In the words made famous by the governor of your lands, I'll be back.

Will update with photos soon. Gotta catch some shut-eye if I want to wake up tomorrow and hit the gym!

Reddit rules my world

2010-10-22T20:44:00.005-05:00

A few months ago I'd blogged about the travesty known as Digg 4.0 and how I was considering making the switch over to its "rival", Reddit. Well, long story short, I did, and I am glad for it. Reddit is kind of like the quiet, smart, kinda weird lookin' kid in the back who usually goes by unnoticed until you get to know him. Then your world changes and your mind is blown and you wonder what you were doing with your life before meeting this person. Reddit can be a lot like Digg in that it generates and popularizes funny, unique, or inspiring stories - it just has a reputation for being way more elitist. But I've found that under the layers of pretense is a vibrant and soft-hearted core. Redditors have banded together and done some truly amazing, amazing things for causes they support - things I honestly never thought were possible.

One of the more recent acts of giving that may or may not have made me choke up ("why is there rain on my face!!") surrounds a 7-year old girl with Huntington's Disease who had already lost her mother to HD. Her neighbors - adults, mind you - posted pictures on Facebook of Kathleen and her dead mother with the grim reaper and with a skull and crossbones to get back at her family for not inviting them to share a moonbounce at a party soon enough. Key words: soon enough. It wasn't that the invitation didn't come, just that the text arrived late. This tiny little miscommunication led a grown couple to publicly mock and harass a dying 7-year old. They even hitched a coffin in front of Kathleen's house. A coffin, for crying out loud! I think this is one of those situations that can only be summed up by, "what the fuck is wrong with those people?"

But then, it branches out! Into choose your own adventure!

"What the fuck is wrong with those people? LET'S DESTROY THEM."

or

"What the fuck is wrong with those people? LET'S GIVE KATHLEEN THE BEST DAY OF HER LIFE."

Reddit went with the second option. They raised $17,000 in donations to create a perfect day for the little girl. Kathleen rolled up in front of a Redditor-owned toy store in a limousine that read "Team Kathleen", was greeted by a cheering crowd of volunteers, and got to pick out whatever she wanted in the store. The money went onwards to either Huntington's Disease research or to toys for sick children at the local hospital. As for her awful neighbors? Well, they've apologized. But nobody really cares about them - the focus of the story really shifted from their heinous actions to a greater, anonymous effort to show Kathleen and the rest of the world that good, caring people do exist in this world. Reddit really took the high road here.

Someone is starting to cut onions again, damnit. But in all honesty, if you haven't already checked out Reddit, you really ought to consider it - cause dreams really do come true there! *cheesy exit music*

Cat, Clouds, Canada

2010-10-11T20:41:00.002-05:00

I went home home for the first time in half a year. Nothing has changed much within the Fan Clan, except for my cat Mochi, who I am pretty sure doubled in size since the last time I'd seen him.

"Who's a big kitty! You're a big kitty!! Who wants a belly rub! Coo-chi-coo-chi-coo aw!!!!!!!!!!!"
- what I sound like when I am near him. Relevant XKCD.

He has the rather ridiculous habit of lying on his back at whichever spot is precisely most inconvenient for others to walk around. Belly up, paws splayed, always ready to party.

Mochi is actually Chuck Bass.

Moving on, and yes I know this is nerdy, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the epic cloud formations that drape across the Alberta skies. I have been told that even when the temperature creeps into the sub-zeros (Fahrenheit, mind you!), skies stay radiantly blue and clouds hang low and wide across the expanse of the city, huzzah!

And to end this post, here are a few pictures taken over the course of various flights:

Chicago, above and at ground level

Another Adventure Spawned from my Incompetencies

2010-10-08T21:25:00.003-05:00

These events are not nice when they happen in real life. In fact, they are terrifying. But they sure make for good blog material!

Here's what happened:

After work yesterday, I went straight to dinner with a couple of my colleagues. We went to Kensington, enjoyed a scrumptious sushi dinner, and washed it down with a bottle of sake. (I had three two-ounce glasses of it, so maybe the equivalent of a generous glass of wine). Afterward, we played pool for about an hour before meeting up with another ThoughtWorker and heading to a bar to see some bands play in its basement. We arrived just in time to catch the opening act, which I can really only describe as an old white dude, probably in his late 50s, acting like he'd swallowed a bottle of crazy pills that morning. His set was surrounded by candles. There was a purple paper-mache monster head emerging from a sheet of fabric behind him. He was wearing a shirt with a giant question mark on it. He was yarbling into the microphone, slapping his guitar and occasionally making a well-aimed kick to a bunch of chimes nearby, which clanged like the sound of bottles being smashed. I had to ask myself several times throughout his performance, "Is this real life?"

Anyway, that is not important. What is important is the fact that I offered to buy the next round of drinks, because that was when I made The Realization that my wallet was missing.

I immediately froze and thought I was actually going to have a panic attack - not of the usual Asian-ohmygodIgotaB-arm-flapping-and-high-pitched-squealing variety, but a full blown, legitimate, collapse-to-the-ground-clutching-for-air, P!A!N!I!C! A!T! T!H!E! D!I!S!C!O! A!T!T!A!C!K! I had a flight out early the next day to come home to Maryland and I kept going over the phone conversation in my head where I'd have to explain to parents and best friend that I would not be able to make it back after all. And be stuck in Calgary for the weekend with no money. And I'd die of boredom or starvation - I wasn't sure which would come first. Those three or four minutes of brooding were a real period in my life.

But then someone handed me a rum and coke and I downed it. As the warmth of the liquor rushed into my system I was able to relax a little and consider my options. There were only two places where my wallet could reasonably be: one, at my coworkers' suite where I'd dropped off my laptop, or two, back at the office. If it had been stolen at some point during the night, running off and looking for it now as opposed to later would not make much of a difference. We decided to stick around to see the show and then go look for my wallet afterward.

Fast forward to two hours later: it's one in the morning, the show has ended, and my co-workers are drunk as skunks. My own agitation has sobered me up and after we leave the bar I find myself clutching the steering wheel of a totally unfamiliar vehicle in a totally unfamiliar city in a totally unfamiliar COUNTRY with two gleeful, intoxicated men in the car with me. Oh, and have I mentioned that I am probably the harbinger of the stereotype, "terrible Asian female driver?"

A few precious snippets of conversation that came up as we drove towards the office:

"Rose, why are you so nervous? You need to calm down. Do you need a massage?"
"No."
"Why not?
(I feel fingers on my shoulders, I hit the brakes and shriek)
"BECAUSE I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE TOUCH ME!"

"Are you okay driving on the highway?"
"I"ve never driven on a highway before."
"You're kidding, right?"
(Pause) "Um. No."

"Do you have anything valuable in your wallet?"
"A couple hundred bucks."
"Anything else?"
"Two credit cards."
"Is that it?"
"No, I have all my week's receipts to expense."
"You can get those from your credit card statement. So you should be mine."
(30 seconds later)
"I uh, also have my social security card in there."
"A copy, right?'
"No, like the real card."
"Oh God."

We pulled up to the office at around 1:30 in the morning, retraced my steps, stole some other teams' candy, and found my wallet on the seat of my desk chair. Believe you me, I had never been happier to see that turquoise rectangle o leather. Nothing had been taken or tampered with, thank GOD. I drove home, ecstatic to have once again narrowly avoided disaster.

(The funny thing is, I drove considerably worse on the way back than when I was nervously heading to the office. I made big, deliberate happy swerves and swoops here and there that sent my drunk co-workers yelling in terror. We got back around 2 AM, took naps, and saw each other at the airport at 5 AM, looking like zombies.)

Now I'm back home the comforts of my real home, having spent a lovely evening playing guitar with my sister and eating delicious homecooked Chinese food. Weird to think that all this would not have been possible without last night's insane antics, eh?

Chess Night

2010-10-04T23:28:00.000-05:00

Tonight we had chess night at the Calgary ThoughtWorks office. And by chess night I mean me sitting around with some pizza, some beer, and three nerdy boys - two on either side of me, the last lounging on the other end of the board looking smug as the three of us - Team World - struggled and bickered and muttered amongst ourselves in our combined effort to defeat the terrible tyrannical Team Isa.

I know I am not very good at chess, but the way these guys played made me feel downright lousy at it. I made some good points at times but too often my suggestions were too clumsy, too rushed. But no matter - playing chess with some of my fellow ThoughtWorkers was a remarkably fun way to spend an evening. I feel so much better about myself now than I would had I wasted that time watching Gossip Girl or clicking aimlessly around Facebook all night.

I'm looking forward to next Monday's game already and to my own improvement. Maybe one day I will get good enough to take on Team Isa by myself.

For now though, the score is:

World 1, Isa 0.

I'm secretly misogynistic?

2010-09-29T22:27:00.001-05:00

Whenever I think about all my favorite writers and vocalists and comedians and actors and politicians and philosophers - basically, anybody whose work I admire from afar - I realize that they are all men.

Perhaps it's because the sample I am working with here is skewed to begin with - after all, and the male-to-female ratio in almost all those areas puts the fairer sex at a disadvantage. But still, it is uncanny how quickly I find myself being put off by anything from Karen O's shriek to Hilary Clinton's hairstyle. I think the underlying explanation for this is that women tend to be jealous, judgmental, and skeptical of women whom they see as above or more powerful than them, whereas men recognize, accept, and look up to their "alpha" peers much more easily. I am not a psychologist and I have no proof for that claim (in fact, as I'm typing this I can think about a billion counterexamples. But on the whole I still think it holds true.)

I have swell relationships with females all the time in my personal life. I always have and will love the strong women in my family, my girlfriends, and even my stupid cat, Bellatrix. But put some distance between me and an object of my affection, and its creator most likely possesses a Y chromosome. (Jamie Lee Curtis does not count.)

A few exceptions of females whose work I truly enjoy:

J.K. Rowling (...who went by a gender-neutral pen name in order to sell more books in the beginning of her career)

Tina Fey (...who usually opts to play the "frumpy and kind of manly funny woman" role)

Justin Bieber (...who is a strong, independent woman! You go girl!)

Ankles, Hotdogging, and a Strange Discovery

2010-09-26T21:39:00.001-05:00

Above: view from the cab on my way into the city from YYC. Despite its horrendously low winter temperatures, Calgary is famous for having beautiful clouds and sunshine year round.

I had a really lovely weekend back in Chicago. Except for the part where I sprained my ankle and had to hobble through O'Hare this morning (my gate was F13, which is literally the farthest away from security, of course) lookin' all sorts of demented. That is what I get for knocking back one too many whilst wearing high heels at a party.

We at ThoughtWorks regularly play a prank on each other known as "hotdogging", where when somebody leaves his or her laptop unlocked and walks away from its vicinity, the rest of us will invariably mess with its settings to "punish" the CPU abandon-er. I hotdogged one of my colleagues this past week by rotating his screen 180 degrees and he had the most awful time trying to figure out how to change it back:

I ate at a McDonald's today for the first time in Canada. And look what I found:

The presence of this maple leaf upsets me greatly. It looks like the golden arches are undergoing puberty and have grown a large and unsightly pimple on their face. I've been to McDonald's in Japan and India before and they sure as hell don't have silhouettes of uh, sumo wrestlers and Shivas on them. Who does Canada think it is, scarring our scared national culinary treasure like that!!!

First Flight Fiasco

2010-09-20T23:33:00.002-05:00

I knew that it was bound to happen sometime, but I had not expected it to be during my fourth week on the job.

My flight from O’Hare to Calgary was scheduled to depart Sunday evening at 5:47. I left my apartment at 3, got to the airport around 3:40, and somehow had passed through security by 4. I bought myself an iced tea, plugged in Human After All, and peeled through a chapter of Midnight’s Children before getting into the boarding line. I was one of the last people in line.

As I handed my boarding pass to the United representative, the scanner shut off and would not come back on.

“What’s wrong?”

“Ma’am, I’m afraid you are putting our flight over the weight limit. In the case of an emergency where we cannot land in Calgary, this aircraft cannot make it to the nearest accommodating airport with its current fuel supply. You and two other passengers will have to take another flight out tomorrow.”

“But-“

The representative had scurried back onto the plane to pull the other two passengers, who turned out to be a mother-daughter pair. They looked very important and expensive - I am pretty certain the mother’s haircut cost more than my net worth. Both were red-faced and shouting furiously at the United representative. Phrases like “We are elite members”, “this is not about safety, this is about DISCRIMINATION”, and “never flying United again” were thrown about at the gate. I stood there silently, praying that nobody would accidentally punch me in the face.

And of course, the piece de resistance in the conversation:

“So why were WE chosen to get off?”

“Ma’am, it is our policy to pull our lowest-ticketed guests first. Here is the list of how much each person on this flight paid. As you can see, here it says you and Ms. Fan did not pay anything.”

“THAT IS BECAUSE MY COMPANY IS PAYING FOR MY TICKETS, DO YOU UNDERSTAND? IF I CALL AND RECEIVE A CREDIT CARD STATEMENT FROM THEM, YOU’D SEE THAT 90% OF THAT PLANE WOULD GET OFF BEFORE ME!”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry. It’s company policy. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“I NEED TO BE ON THAT FLIGHT!”

“Ma’am, the flight has already left.”

Everyone had been so caught up in watching the tantrum that we had not noticed the aircraft pulling out of its dock. This spurned another round of screeching from the mother, while her daughter texted furiously on her BlackBerry, only stopping to look around tragically and say insightful things like “This is bullshit” and “I, like, have to be in Calgary!”

The next hour was spent with three United representatives scurrying around trying to find flights for Menopause Mom and CrackBerry Addict Daughter. I was invisible - I literally just stood there, avoiding eye contact with the duo, until one of the representatives looked up, realized I was still there, and handed me my vouchers and a boarding pass for a flight out the next morning. I probably could have gotten on an earlier flight had I made a fuss as well, but at this point I was too disgusted with both how childish Menopause Mom had been and how negligent all three United representatives had been towards me, the passenger who was in an equally sticky situation but who chose not to yell curses and threaten to “Yelp!” about their terrible business, to pursue the issue any further.

I spent last night in a ridiculous hotel room anyway, so really I don’t get to pout. I worked out in luxury, showered in luxury, and watched TV whilst lying in a king-sized bed and munching on a turkey sandwich. It was pretty glorious.

But all notions of comfort and relaxation flew out the window the next morning when I was waiting for the shuttle to the airport. I absent mindedly plunged my fingers into my backpack to grab my passport. Nothing. Oh, I put it inside Midnight's Children, which I kept in another compartment. But again, nothing.

I ran upstairs to my hotel room and turned it upside down. "Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!" No beloved orange dog-eared copy fell from the folds of my bed. I checked my backpack and my luggage, throwing clothes everywhere. "Thisisn'thappeningthisisadreamithastobeadream". Finally I admitted that I had probably left it at the gate and flew back downstairs, just in time to catch the 9:00 shuttle to the airport. I arrived at 9:17, precisely 30 minutes before my morning flight was to board, and spent the better half of the next half-hour running about O'Hare International Airport like a lunatic. At every line I would explain my situation ("PLEASEILOSTMYAIRPORTMYPLANELEAVESINANHOUR") and would be ushered through to the front by confused, sympathetic folks. It wouldn't have been so bad had I not run into so many people I knew, damnit. But I just kept bumping into (sometimes literally) familiar faces, including one fellow ThoughtWorker whom I'd met many times before but for some reason I stuck out my hand and shook his before tearing off towards the lost and found.

Then at security, I absent mindedly stuffed my sandals into my backpack and then thirty seconds later, had a bunch of bewildered TSA staffmembers searching the area for a pair of orange braided sandals. Yeah, my brains had totally abandoned me at that point. I think that pulling those sandals out of my backpack and seeing the expressions on the security guards' faces had to be one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.

I managed to get onto my flight about five minutes before boarding closed. I slid into my seat (United Economy Plus! Fuck yeah), relieved, panting, and clutching onto my Midnight's Children for dear life. Then, the dreaded words blared over the speaker:

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid we have a weight issue with this aircraft..."

But no, thank the heavens, I was not bumped again. In fact, I had a pretty nice and uneventful flight over to Calgary. Except for the part where I ordered a beer at 11 in the morning and received some skeptical looks. But I didn't care - I was pretty sure that out of everyone on that plane on that morning, I deserved that beer the most.

Traveling

2010-09-13T23:04:00.002-05:00

Traveling is expensive.

Traveling is time-consuming.

Traveling is fucking exhausting.

All of these I had anticipated. And after three weeks I can safely confirm that they are 100% true. But here are some other things I was pleasantly surprised to find whilst embarking on my adventures on the road/in the sky:

Flights are not bad as long as you have something to do on them and are looking forward to it. In fact, they can be quite relaxing if you are sitting in a comfortable seat (often times I get bumped up to Economy Plus on flights where those seats do not fill up) and have a novel to read, an album to explore, or some serious zzz's to catch. Lately I have been plunking down with my copy of Midnight's Children (still on this one, though I have made some serious headway) and plugging in my earphones (currently obsessed with Deerhunter's Microcastle. SO GOOD AH). When my eyes get tired of reading I usually take a nap or stare out the window if there are clear skies and interesting views of the land/horizon below.

Along the same lines, packing is not nearly as bad as I'd anticipated - as long as I have a checklist (either mental or physical) of the things I need to bring, it's usually a speedy and productive process. It forces me to be lean, practical, and organized about all my stuff. It also helps that I picked out a suitcase that I adore!

Taxi drivers are usually really, really interesting. For one thing, they are incredibly diverse and come from all sorts of backgrounds. For another, they know tons and tons more than you do about your city. And to top it off, most of them are really engaging folks who have open ears and would like nothing more than to share their stories with you. Sometimes I feel trapped in a social/work circle of professionals and students who all have tons of work and take themselves very seriously and stress out 24/7. It is nice to engage in a different sort of conversation and to see the world from another perspective.

Staying in touch, c'est difficile! It really does take effort and time and motivation to make sure I do not fall completely out of my friends' lives five days a week. But I have found that putting time into friendships and family is always worth it. Similarly, being away makes coming back that much more special - I now find that my weekends are much more busy/adventurous and that I am so much more glad for my room/friends/bed when I am deprived of them!

And perhaps, most importantly of all:

There are kind, funny, gracious, and smart people everywhere. You just have to try a little and usually you will see the brighter side of people. I am not usually one for talking to strangers - usually I am earplugged into my own little world - but I have found that beneath everybody's perhaps exhausted, perhaps grumpy, perhaps lonely expressions is just the desire to be happy and appreciated and respected. This is especially true of people who work at airports who have to deal with so many people who simply see them as invisible or annoying barriers - although I do not like how sometimes they are rude, I also find it hard to blame them for their unpleasant demeanor because I could probably not last a week in their roles. Often times a small smile or a subtle gesture of appreciation can produce wonderful results.

This past weekend at O'Hare, the security line was horrendously sluggish (tell me something I don't know...) to the point where the people waiting to get their passports and boarding passes checked in the previous line were all immobile, standing around the equally-bored looking TSA checkers at their stands. I was happily listening to the Beatles on my Pre and I guess I must have been tapping my feet or bopping along a bit too much because before I knew it, the elderly TSA Passport-checker had gotten up from his seat and was dancing next to me, hands in the ai-yar and all, and everyone around us was laughing because it took me a few seconds to notice what was going on. He asked me what I was listening to and I pulled out the earphones from my phone and "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da" started to play, so we started to dance together like idiots. (I was waving my phone in one hand, clutching my passport in the other). And then - get this - the guy behind me started singing along to the song. He had an awesome booming voice and some people started to clap and join in. So just imagine, a small Asian girl dancing with an old black guy and a huge lumberjack-lookin' guy belting out the Beatles while a small crowd of middle-aged onlookers with suitcases laughed and clapped along. I kid you not, this actually happened. It was such a Lifetime movie moment. And it rocked.

Home away from home away from home

2010-09-12T23:25:00.001-05:00

Long Hair

2010-09-08T02:54:00.004-05:00

I do not know why I thought it would be a good idea to order an espresso with my dessert this evening. Maybe because usually caffeine has no effect whatsoever on my sleeping schedule. Maybe because I was already pretty tired after a long day and needed a pick-me-up. Maybe because its strong bitterness perfectly offset my smooth, sugary creme brulee. I simply do not know. But I cannot for the life of me seem to fall asleep, and so as a result I am going to blog about long hair!

I have had long hair for a long time. And in that span of long time I have heard a bunch of "true facts" which are allegedly "backed" by "scientific research" about long hair, like how men are supposed to be more attracted to it or washing it every day depletes it of natural oils or how I must diligently and ardently protect it before applying heat or it will all fall off and I will be bald for the rest of my existence on earth. To all that I say: scientific research shmientific shresearch! I have not put heat protectant in my hair many a time and I still have a healthy crop o locks atop my head, whose properties I have found to be extremely useful in the following ways:

Brain Heater

When it's cold outside, long hair always creeps up to no.1 on my list of best friends! I wrap it around my face, neck, and ears and I find myself shrouded in a warm and nice-smelling shroud of keratin!

Extensions of this use: If my inner earlobes are feeling chilly then I just stick some hair in there and I'm all set. Tendrils of hair can also be shoved into nostrils to stop those annoying nosebleeds.

Instructor Separator

The above picture sums up my journey at the University of Chicago pret-ty well. I took many a nap knowing that my shameful slumbering face was securely shielded from my pesky professor's prying peepers. University of Chicago: Where Fun Goes to Die? Nah, more like University of Chicago: Where Fun Goes to Take a Nap Behind its Glorious Mane During Elements of Economic Analysis-2.

Extensions of this use: hiding from other annoyances in life, like dentists, bears, homework, Nickelback songs, etc.

Weapon/Harbinger of Justice

How do I, despite all my paranoid Asian mom's prophecies of doom and death, continue to survive in an urban environment full of bad guys who would like nothing better than to take my lunch money and buy THEMSELVES lunch? I guarantee you it is neither through wit nor physical superiority. Instead, my secret lies in the ancient weapon known as whiplash. One fast well-aimed turn of the head will send the meanest chump crying home, tail tucked between his legs and a nice imprint of my latest haircut on his face.

Extensions of this use: closing doors, making your dogsled team "mush!", punishing your siblings

H2o Storage

Nalgenes and Camelbaks bow down their inferior forms before long hair, the ultimate way to store, transport, and dispense water. As long as you don't mind a bit of sweat or shampoo or hairspray or dandruff in your beverage, hairwater is a guaranteed way to quench your thirst. Just wrap your fingers tight around your locks, wring hard, and listen to the sweet trickle of follicle nectar collecting in your vessel of choice. Pit-pat, pit-pat.

Extensions of this use: watering your plants, diluting your whiskey, baptizing small children.

If this entry does not make you want to immediately vow to never cut your hair ever again then I do not know what would. Have a nice day.

2010-09-06T09:51:00.001-05:00

Today, Becca and I continued to have great adventures.

Above: The Eye and the Cardinal. Taken while I was being harassed by some dudes...awkward.

Prospies beware: this is what UChicago girls look like

A cool-lookin' building on Michigan Avenue

Buckingham Fountain, in all its glory

Chicago Jazz Festival, also in all its glory

Back at the Shire - sushi + beer

I wore this shirt downtown and was unaccustomed to the stares. One old man started yelling "Tasty, TASTY MURDER!!!" as we walked by. Which was funny, except probably not to people who had not seen my shirt and only heard him shouting that in the street,

Our masterpiece

The exec chef, hard at work.

Weekend Pictures

2010-09-05T01:09:00.002-05:00

The Bean on a cloudy day in Chicago

Bellatrix recharging her dark arts

Ironic hipster? Or tragically stuck in the 60s?

Taken @ Urban Outfitters... of course

New bathroom rug! + my feet.

(Kk, if you are reading this, I tried sending it to ya on my phone but I had no service ever. Hope you like it!)

I am currently reading Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children*, an absolutely fantastic novel about magic and India and doctors and all sorts of great things along those lines. Rushdie is a brilliant writer - his sentences are short and understated but each word is carefully plucked, examined, and polished before it is carved into ink such that the scenes and dialogues become so vivid and colorful. This is the first time in a long time (maybe since Harry Potter! Oh man) that I have dreaded finishing a book - I highly recommend it to anybody with an interest/appreciation/penchant for magical realism, Indian culture of the twentieth century, or just general good storytelling.

*Oops. Corrected.

CRAZY

2010-09-02T23:07:00.000-05:00

Sometimes there are just days that I know are going to be absolutely insane. Tomorrow is one of them. Check out my schedule:

4:00 AM - Alarm 1 will go off. I will roll over, turn it off, throw my phone across the room, and resume my slumber.
4:30 AM - Alarm 2 will go off. I will roll over, realize my phone is not on the nightstand, mumble many curses, get outta bed, brush my teeth, and frantically throw everything I own into my suitcase.
5:00 AM - Hop into a taxi.
5:30 AM - Arrive at Calgary International Airport (YYC). Stumble my way through customs and security. Seek nearest source of caffeine once I'm at my gate.
7:15 AM - Board plane & takeoff! Pass out immediately on the plane ride, drool on my neighbor.
11:30 AM - Arrive at ORD, hail a taxi.
12:00 PM - Arrive at the Ramada Inn on Lake Shore to pick up a friend from high school, who has her Pritzker SOM interview in the afternoon and is staying the night at our apartment.
12:10 - Drop friend off at the Shire/get her settled/let her do her thing. Run to a CVS and buy a 30-day CTA pass. Get on the 2 bus to go downtown.
12:40 - Arrive at the Aon Center. Drop off everyone else's receipts (apparently I am now the Chicago office receipt mule) and start on my pile of expenses. Realize how much nasty food I eat in a week and become disgusted with myself and my body. Use any leftover time in the office to continue learning Java or help with miscellaneous beach projects.
4:00 - Reluctantly say goodbye to all the pub-night goers, hop on the 2 back to Hyde Park.
5:00 - Arrive at the apartment. Catch my breath & collect some friends. Pet Bellatrix Babystar.
6:00 - Go back downtown with mah peeps for dinner.
8:00 - Go to some other neighborhood for overpriced yuppie dessert.
10:00 - Get back home. Either pass out immediately or drink until I do.

I am tired from just writing about it. Then there's Saturday, which will require more sightseeing around the city, and after that, silly things like a haircut, going to the dry cleaners, booking next week's flights, setting up my scanner, etc, all while I am still home. I'm pretty sure this is interesting to NOBODY EVER but honestly I'm so freaked out about it that it's all I can think about at the moment.

One thing that's pretty awful about traveling is that I do not really get to practice the guitar anymore. Even if I had the patience and was willing to risk bringing my instrument back and forth every week, I don't think I'd have the energy or the level of concentration needed to properly practice it after each day of work...ugh.

One thing that's pretty GREAT about traveling is my new corporate suite. I just got the keys to it today and stopped by to drop some things off and was like, ohmygod, THANK YOU THOUHTWORKS. Pictures coming soon to an adidav9.blogspot.com near you!

Canada, America's Hat

2010-09-01T23:10:00.006-05:00

It's been an insane couple of days, but I've finally been able to catch my breath, look back, and form together a few thoughts about working here in Canada. I'll start from the beginning.

LINES.

And more lines.

I really should've known better than to book a flight out of O'Hare on a Sunday afternoon. I set out from my apartment at around 1:15, got to the airport at around 3:00, and got through ticketing & security by... 5. 15 minutes before my flight left...oops.

I flew by ways of Air Canada, which is operated by United Airlines at ORD. It was a tiny plane, but the seats were super comfy and the service was excellent. I spent the better part of the three and a half hour plane ride watching the very entertaining Catch Me If You Can, which I'd halfheartedly watched a long time ago at some high school party or another.

The first thing that hit me when I stepped off the plane was how chilly it was. I'd left a lovely, warm, and sunny Chicago for a gloomy, rainy, foreign Calgary...mmmmmmm. I sped through customs, got my work permit, hopped in a cab, arrived at my hotel room, threw down all my stuff, and plopped facedown on the bed, exhausted.

Above: View of downtown Calgary at night from my hotel room

The next morning, I got up bright and early for my first day of work! I spent the whole day Monday wandering around, being lost, and trying not to look so confused/dumb. I spent the whole day Tuesday doing the same exact thing. And er, today was not much different.

Although I am not at liberty to disclose who our client is, what I can say is that I've joined a small team of BAs within a much larger project at a relatively stressful/chaotic time. Instead of traditional story-writing, we spent more of our time performing data analysis and rationalization. There is a lot of information being thrown at me every second and it is awfully hard to absorb - by midday I feel like my brains have turned into giant fluffy marshmallows and my vision is blurring and my reflexes are rusty and basically I become a big confused blob of incompetence and dull-wittedness. But I know that while things are a bit crazy right now, I will get familiar with the domain (and it will be glorious!). And it definitely helps having awesome ThoughtWorkers around who're always willing to answer my questions, invite me to dinner, and basically help bring me up to speed as quickly and with as much support as possible - yay!

I haven't had much time to explore the city, but I did manage to walk around one day after work for about 30 minutes and snap a few pictures:

...yeah, really not too exciting in our neck of the woods (which is allegedly where a lot of retired folks live), but I've heard great things about plenty of other parts of the city, like the trendy 17th commercial street area and the fantastic Calgary zoo and the the hipster-y Kensington neighborhood. Then there are Calgary's many beautiful mountain ranges to explore - I absolutely cannot wait for a weekend trip out to see some breathtaking scenery.

I can tell that traveling back and forth from Chicago is going to be thoroughly exhausting, but at the same time it's really quite nice to get out and go somewhere by myself and experience a city in a completely new way. I cannot imagine how my colleagues who have spouses and children back at home do it, though - I can barely stand to be away from my silly cat for this long ;) Definitely looking forward to coming home on Friday and spending a peaceful Memorial Day in (warm and sunny) Chi-city.

It's 10:10, but if I want to wake up by 6 (which I do) and get eight hours of sleep (which I also do), I am already overdue for bedtime! Stop your snickering. SLEEP IS COOL, MAN.

Goodbye America. Oh wait, no, I will still be in America.

2010-08-29T12:55:00.004-05:00

Update: Arrived safe and sound! I am in my hotel room now soaking up the silence (a precious and rare commodity in a door-less room in the Shire).

Initial impressions of Calgary: it's flippin' COLD, everyone is actually really nice and polite, and French accents are bangin'.

This is random: I finished The Sun Also Rises on the way here. You know how sometimes you find out about things that you probably should have known about a long, LONG time ago but for some reason or another that information just slipped through the cracks of your education/upbringing? And then when you realize the truth you're like OHMYGODMYWHOLELIFEISALIE. That is what happened to me when I read about bullfighting in this book. Prior to today, I'd always thought bullfighting involved a man dressed in silly clothing waving around a cape and angering a bull that would run through the cape many times. And then that would be it! Ta-da! Clap clap clap, great show, encore!

...Yeah. I had no idea that matadors would actually KILL the bulls. That there were swords and steeds and trophies in the form of severed bull ears. Seriously, what the fuck? This is not a sport, this is a disgrace to mankind (and animalkind!) It's fucking ridiculous, pitting men and animals against an beast that has been bred to be aggressive, armed, and uh, HUGE. And for what! Just for a few claps and shouts from a fickle audience? There is no pride to be had in killing an innocent animal. I liked my PG version of bullfighting much better.

--

15 minutes before I set out on my Calgarian adventures! I am 50% nervous, 33.2% excited, and 17.8% sure that I will get lost and | or die before I ever set foot in the office.

I do not know how much time there will be to blog once the 10-11 hour workdays kick in. But I do have a small set of goals and regimens that I plan on keeping whilst traveling, and maintaining some semblance of blog posts is one of them. It does take a surprisingly large amount of planning, thinking and editing to make some of my "bigger" entries, so I may have to sacrifice quality/size for regularity...but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I am determined to make the very most of my traveling experience. Calgary might not be the most glamorous place in the world, but it is still a new city in a country I have never been to before. There are people to be met, beers to be drank, memories to be made!

But first, I must tackle getting on the Red Line with my stupid luggage.

Digg 4.0 needs to be buried.

2010-08-26T12:58:00.005-05:00

People always inevitably bitch about change. Whether it's for the better (Bush --> Obama), for the worse (Sears --> Willis), or for the homeless, change is always greeted by anything from mild skepticism to outright, disdainful rejection.

Our human tendency to reject change manifests itself in no better place than on the information superhighway known as The Internet. Each time Facebook reformats its layout, the angry masses respond with complaints, opposition groups (ironically, on Facebook itself...), and threats to quit. But come on, who among us has actually closed our Facebook accounts because of a change? Less than a handful, I'm willing to guess. For all our grumbling, we always wind up adapting to the new whatever anyway and within a week the world goes back to normal until YouTube tweaks a feature and gives us a new reason to roar "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!1!1" in slow motion-ed agony.

Over the years, I have become jaded by all of this and have grown somewhat skeptical of skepticism itself. I observe all the outrage from the sideline, roll my eyes, and wander off to find some tasty snacks.

But not this time, no. The snacks will have to wait, because I cannot stand for the new Digg and I am totally grabbing my pitchfork, smearing on my war paint, and jumping - no, catapulting myself upon the bandwagon of hate towards their awful new site.

Things that suck about New Digg:

The elimination of the word "bury" for Digging down stories. Come on! Digg was founded upon this whole "digg" vs "bury" notion of rating stories, not this new up and down arrow crap. That's like opening a store called "I sell hotdogs" and then selling fine jewelry inside.
I have to click "Load More" to see more than a couple of comments. This is the worst idea in the history of mankind. Digg's comments/community are probably some of the best on the Internet, and are definitely half the reason I have been a loyal user of the site. We Diggers all share a rare love for twisted humor, The Oatmeal, bacon, and sending Justin Bieber to North Korea. Without visibility to its users' comments and feedback, Digg would be no better or different from any of its rivals.
Responding to a comment opens up a text box in which the font color you type against a white background is...wait for it...baby blue.
Threads are automatically expanded. Annyong.
When a comment has 0 diggs, its contents are hidden but the thread still displays, "Comment is hidden." These take up a lot of space. Also, when a comment belongs to an owner whose account is deleted, it will say so, which also takes up a lot of space and benefits the reader in no way ever.
There is no upcoming stories feature anymore. This one just kills me.
The homepage is set to "My News" instead of "Top News". For Lurkers like myself who haven't integrated Digg with Facebook or RSS, having to click to the tab next door every single time is immensely annoying.

I feel cold and empty inside. I'm even contemplating heading over to Reddit to fill this void in my soul. Damn you, Digg. Damn you.

2010-08-24T13:32:00.001-05:00

I didn't shoot as much footage as I would have liked, but I made do with the snippets I did manage to capture and put them against one of my favorite songs ever. Hope you like.

And a couple of updates:

A huge thank you to everyone who has given me feedback regarding which laptop to purchase. I received some very helpful advice from all sorts of different perspectives. I've decided it might be wiser to hold off on taking the plunge for two reasons: 1.) My student loans accrue interest every day that I do not pay them off. 2.) There is a rumored-but-let's-be-honest-with-ourselves-it's-probably-going-to-happen Apple event taking place in the second week of September. If S.J. even hints at a processor upgrade for the MBP, I will feel infinitely better for not having purchased one now.

I finished reading The Winter's Tale, lol'ed through Barrel Fever by David Sedaris, and am now tiptoeing into Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which many claim is his best work. As is always the case with any Hemingway I pick up, I find myself already immensely annoyed by all the insipid and selfish main characters in the novel, but at the same time I am curious to see how the story unfolds.

<-- a typo made by my silly roommate when we were goofing off on my computer

I can now play "Epilogue" pretty well. Which is not saying much, because it's only like eight chords. I am still struggling a lot with barre chords, and the switch from the G chord to the B chord is pretty rough at the moment.

I am slowly teaching myself Java using HeadFirst Java. Yesterday, I programmed "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall." Today, I am learning about encapsulation. It's actually quite fun to go at my own pace - I can reread portions that I do not immediately grasp or skip sections that I already understand. The logic puzzles in the code are engaging and serve as good mental challenges. I find myself wishing more and more that I had given my computer science courses the time of day back in high school.

Project Shire Upgrade is going swimmingly. Last night, we framed a beautiful record and album cover set on our newly-painted walls. We're now waiting for a map of Middle Earth (hehe) to come in the mail - I cannot wait to frame and place it above our mantel.

Oh, also I may or may not be leaving for a project in Canada next week...!!!

Mellow Yellow

2010-08-22T00:18:00.000-05:00

Above: Summer 2010 Shire Family Portrait

Last night, our apartment threw a going away party for our roommate Anna, who is apparently too cool for domestic school and will instead be pursuing her studies in various parts of the world through UChicago's study abroad program. I cannot pretend that I am not jealous - after Bangalore, I have definitely been bitten by the travel bug (and a million other bugs, as the scars on my leg would prove).

We went all out for the festivities, dressing up, makin' food, and drinking white russians:

As if all that wasn't exhausting enough, today we got up, hauled ass to Ace Hardware, picked out a paint color, and got to working on our long-neglected and relatively-tragic living room. Here's the before:

We (rather spontaneously) picked a lovely marigold color with the very strange name, "Golden Bounty".

Painting took the four of us three hours. It was thoroughly exhausting - all the moving of furniture, spreading of dropcloth, taping of edges (and boy, we had a lot of those), and of course, applying of paint definitely wore us out. But I think the end result was worth it - I love our new living room:

It's amazing what a touch of color and a bit of rearranging can do to a room. Tonight we had some friends stop by and some of them even asked if we'd gotten new light fixtures because they looked so different (in a different light, perhaps? groan) with the new wall color.

It's late, and I am tired and making bad puns. Time to sleep.

Hodgepodge

2010-08-19T17:32:00.003-05:00

Hello. Two completely unrelated things:

1.)

Unless you are Amish or have been living under the sedimentary specimen that is sometimes referred to as "a rock", you already know that today's Groupon was quite the deal: for $25, you get $50's worth of credit at Gap retail locations across the country. What you may not have known is that this was Groupon's first real foray into the corporate world and that its success is raising some interesting questions.

As of approximately 5 PM CST, close to 18,500 Groupons have been sold in the Chicagoland area alone, making this the most popular offer in the history of Groupon by far. In fact, the sheer amount of traffic that the site received caused it to shut down for a solid chunk of the morning. I admit that I was among those 18,500 suckers who got incredibly excited and clicked that big tempting "Buy" button. Immediately afterwards, I asked myself when was the last time I'd actually shopped at the Gap. Eloquent words like "uhhhhhh", "durrrr", "I don't remember", "maybe never", and "I think I forgot to feed Bellatrix Babystar this morning" popped into mind, but I would've felt like a jerk calling in and canceling my order to some poor frazzled Groupon worker, so I didn't. And I guess I like some of Gap's stuff. (And I could always use the coupon for gifts. Or socks.)

But nevermind my (wasted) money - let's get back to the bigger picture here. Typically, Groupon gets a 50% cut of the margins from its partner. So in this case that basically translates into: Groupon is making a shit-ton of money and the Gap is taking a hit from its usual markup but will probably still end up doing just fine after everyone surpasses that $50 sweet spot and winds up purchasing their $69.95 jeans anyway. But what happens after this? Will Groupon return to its home-town roots and continue to feature local restaurants and businesses? Or has Groupon's appetite for the big corporate bucks been whet by this outrageously successful deal? What about its dozens upon dozens of imitators - what if they set up these mass-scale deals with corporations in light of Groupon's refusal to go mainstream? So many hypothetical questions that I suppose only time will answer - I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this one.

2.)

Yesterday, after a day of browsing through Ree Drummond's fantastic website and repeatedly having to wipe the slobber off my poor traumatized keyboard, I went home determined to make my ancestors proud by cooking up some sesame noodles. I altered a few bits of Ree's original recipe, but I think it came out pretty well and more importantly, required very little time and effort, so it was a winner!

Ingredients:

A handful of somen noodles, or any thin and preferably Asian noodles will work just fine
Some soy sauce
Minced garlic
Sesame oil
A tablespoon of sugar
A spoonful of water to dilute the sauce
A tablespoon of rice vinegar
Canola oil or EVOO
A dash of chili sauce
A half cup of chopped bok choy
An egg

To make the sauce, combine all ingredients (minus the bok choy, eggs, and noodles duh) in a bowl. I recommend adding roughly equal parts soy sauce, sesame oil, and either canola or extra virgin olive oil, but you should just make it however you think will taste best. Mix well and set aside.

Throw noodles into boiling water and keep an eye out on them - thin noodles cook real quickly! Add some more garlic and bok choy into a pan, drench in EVOO and soy sauce, and let cook on high heat for three or so minutes. When it's done, remove the bok choy, add a bit more oil, and crack an egg over the residual heat. I looooooove my eggs really runny (salmonella really makes it taste better, I swear), but you can cook it as thoroughly as you want.

Pour the sauce over the noddles, add the bok choy, and place your egg on top. Enjoy with a nice glass of merlot and you are all set for a nice and kind of healthy meal, I think.

Sorry for not taking any photos - I completely forgot :( But I know I'll be making this again soon, so I will try to remember then.

Decisions, decisions.

2010-08-17T17:05:00.011-05:00

I have, as of late, been spending a relatively ridiculous amount of my free time reading about laptops, especially during the early hours of the morning when I can't fall asleep. Dells, Macbooks, HPs, VAIOs - you name it, I've probably read up on it. And what did I learn from it all?

...that searching for the perfect laptop is a fruitless, unyielding activity and I should probably just stop stalling and pick one already, damnit.

The problem with buying a laptop is that the market offers such an overwhelming array of choices, features, and models that it quickly becomes nearly impossible to settle down on just one machine. I actually have to make myself stop browsing CNET sometimes because I start having problems thinking straight after poring over tables and tables of specs for hours on end.

(Yes, I'm aware that probably all the laptops I've looked at so far will probably do what I want them to do just fine. Yes, I acknowledge that computers go out of season faster than you can say "Leroy Jenkins". But at the end of the day, I get to be stubborn and choosy and shallow about things like this 'cause it's my money. You'd be surprised at how pissed off people get at others for buying what they consider to be "inferior" machines or ones of incongruent value to the purchaser. If it makes the user happy, then that's the point, right? To each their own! Laptop compatibility is in the eye of the beholder! Etc etc etc, hurrah!)

My current personal laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1420. My dad and I picked it out exactly three years ago, back before I'd even started school at the UofC. I still remember the conversation I had with my family at the time about which features we wanted to add:

Me: "I dunno. I just want to listen to music. And um, I like the color red."
Mom: "IT NEEDS TO HAVE A WEBCAM SO I CAN SEE MY DAUGHTER OVER THE INTERNET EVERY DAY TO MAKE SURE SHE HAS NOT BEEN STABBED."
Dad: (mumbles something about memory/processors that none of us understand)
Mom: "YES BUT DOES IT HAVE A WEBCAM"

also,

Dad: "Actually, how would you feel about owning a Mac?"
Me: "Aren't those expensive?"
Dad: (through clenched teeth) "Isn't your tuition more expensive?"
Mom: "WAIT THOSE HAVE WEBCAMS RIGHT?

In the end, my mom and I both got what we wanted - a red laptop with a nice webcam. Over the years, my Inspiron has served me well. It's been there for me when I've toiled through papers, it's the vessel through which I've made online friends, and it's endured many a party, download, water spill, and keyboard change. I would even go so far as to say that I love my Inspiron...but now it's just shitty and needs an upgrade, much akin to the lamp in this Spike Jonze commercial which never fails to make me laugh:

After my hours of research, I think I've finally narrowed it down to two contenders. They are: the HP Pavilion dm4-1065x and the Spring 2010 Macbook Pro. And they often engage in fiery faceoffs. I've documented one here:

Above: This took an hour and three image-editing programs to make

This chart may look biased, especially in lieu of the huge price difference. But to be quite honest I think that despite everything, the two laptops are still about on par in my mind (i.e., if the MBP were $799 I'd snap it up in an instant).

It's been a week and I have been mulling over this nonstop. My brain hurts because it has been forced to engage in activity for more than the usual 15 seconds per day.

Hipsters

2010-08-15T23:34:00.009-05:00

I spent a chunk of this weekend hanging out in Wicker Park, gawking at all the crazy types of people walking around that neighborhood. I've decided there are distinct factions that exist among hipsters here in Chicago. All of them kind share certain hipster-umbrella qualities (single-gear bicycle ownership, Pabst Blue Ribbon, a penchant for the unusual), but they are also different in distinct ways. The following are my interpretations (none of which should be taken seriously):

Hipster Type #1

The Woodland Hipster

The Woodland Hipster is all about nature and energy and love and peace. Perhaps the least pretentious of the bunch, he loves spending time under the stars, preferably with an acoustic guitar and in front of a crackling bonfire. Woodland hipsters don't think they're better than anyone else, per se, but they do sometimes engage in activities that may be offputting to the rest of society, such as breaking out in song at random times, eating with their hands, and not understanding the concept of shaving.

Likes: flannel, candlelight, vegan/vegetarianism, Fleet Foxes, human rights, Greenpeace, asparagus
Dislikes: razors, meat-eaters, Facebook, politicians
Closest stereotype: hippie

Hipster Type #2

The Beautiful/Trendy Hipster

The Beautiful hipster has been cooler than you since elementary school and will always be cooler than you. She is lean, mean, and maintains a scarily-low BMI in order to fit into her latest trendsetting outfit, which is usually a mix of vintage and designer clothing. The Beautiful hipster has little to no interest in anti-consumerism - in fact, she embraces and thrives on the thrill of expensive clothes and people who are equally beautiful. Out of all hipsters, she is the most likely to work out. Or de-tag herself in Facebook pictures. Or snort enormous amounts of cocaine. In fact, truth be told, the beautiful hipster is not really any different from the rich & popular kids from high school, except her dad might've loved her less and she owns 8 pairs of Frye instead of Ugg boots.

Likes: Alexander McQueen, being photographed at loft parties, Lady GaGa, buying expensive clothes that aren't supposed to look expensive but everyone knows they are expensive, black eyeliner, black nail polish, Ray Bans with the labels still on them, the Strokes, iPhones, backcombing
Dislikes: ugly people, fat people, Forever 21
Closest stereotype: "Plastic"

Hipster Type #3

The Intellectual Hipster

Oh boy oh boy. This guy has more knowledge about obscure literature/film/music than you could ever hope to accrue in your lifetime. He has a liberal arts degree from a small, expensive private college and will do everything in his power to make you acknowledge that he is smart, whether it's defeating you in chess or reciting an an eggplant-tuna-salad recipe to you or tricking you into joining an Ayn Rand discussion in which he will inevitably counter your every point, out-reference your every quote, and leave you mentally destroyed and prostrate before him with his stupid tie and stupid-er smile of satisfaction.

Likes: David Eggers, sweaters, Intelligentsia coffee, Tumblr, Datarock, The Economist, cats, Pitchfork Media, horn-rimmed glasses, chess, Woody Allen, maps, obscure historical periods, androgyny, Apple, Yann Tiersen
Dislikes: blond people, frivolous people, McDonald's, happiness, Yahoo! Answers, being called a hipster
Closest Stereotype: library nerd

Hipster Stereotype #4

The Batshit Insane Hipster

The Batshit Insane Hipster is determined - no, dedicated - to get your attention. To do so, he will wear outlandish outfits, perform outlandish activities, and generally confuse the fuck out of you. Out of all his hipster comrades, he always gets the drunkest and is usually slumped over in a seedy-looking girl's lap by the end of the night. He also enjoys removing his clothing at questionable levels of appropriateness. His real name is something boring like "William White" but he goes by something ridiculous, like Bazooka Bill or Dill Pickle Powaaaa!!!####@$

Likes: drugs, booze, women, Animal Collective, crowdsurfing, ridiculous eye makeup (if female), shag rugs, smoking all sorts of things, pornstasches, Fuck Buttons
Dislikes: sobriety, people who are hardasses about things, Yankees fans
Closest stereotype: stoners

Hipster Type #5

The Awkward Hipster

Hey! Um...yeah! So...I'm kind of awkward, but that's okay because I acknowledge it so it becomes really cute! Ha. Ha. Ha...I sort of maybe probably have some deep fears of real life but I express them by wearing lots of colors and accessories. The good thing is, I am loving and can be everyone's friend as long as you put up with my eclectic choices. What is my true hair color, you ask? The world may never know.

Likes: Michael Cera, indie pop, candy, DIY, Threadless, tie-dye, weird sandwich combinations, rainbows
Dislikes: mean people
Closest stereotype: punk/emo boppers

There you have it! Hope this doesn't offend anyone. To be honest, I like most of the things hipsters like too...but I also like other people, so ha.

Rockamole. Also, Chicago is beautiful.

2010-08-15T00:41:00.004-05:00

Wednesday night was girls' night. We made food and drink, painted our nails, and watched a delightfully awful episode of Jersey Shore.

One particularly fun and tasty appetizer we made was Nigella Lawson's famous "Rockamole" - that is, guacamole made with Roquefort (blue) cheese. Yeah, it sounds weird - I was definitely skeptical at too when my friend Stu from TWU first raved about it to me. But now I think I'm a complete "Rock" convert:

Here's the recipe we used:

4 ripe avocados
1 plum tomato, diced
1/4 red onion, diced
Salt & pepper to taste
3/4 cup blue cheese crumbles
1 lime, squeezed
1 clove garlic, minced
1 dash paprika

Peel and pit avocados. Place in a large bowl, and mash 'em real good with clean hands! (But leave a few bits chunky, we don't want guac soup.) Mix in uh, everything else, and serve with corn tortilla chips. Soooo easy, and serves four.

---

The other day, I was walking out of the office, strollin' down Michigan Avenue with some of my coworkers like I have done so a million times before when I was rather suddenly taken aback by how incredibly awesome the buildings looked. Maybe it was because the day/blue backdrop itself was so beautiful, or maybe I was just tired and in a crazy mood, but I felt the urge to take pictures like a lame tourist in my own city.

Above: Wrigley Building (left) and Chicago Tribune tower (right) at Michigan + Wacker. Also, a limo!

Trump Towaaaa!

South-facing view from The Point

I have never been to another downtown district that has been as aesthetically pleasing to the senses as Chicago is. Here, the buildings are white and gleaming, the streets are wide and clean, and unlike many other places, the air smells quite good. The kind of sad thing is that it's very easy to stop noticing these things after you live in a big, busy city for a long time. It's easy to overlook our incredible skyline or our painstakingly-kept parks because we've all seen it so many times before. It's easy to sneer at that too-oily pizza at lunchtime because we're used to deep dish that takes 40 minutes to perfect. And it's easiest to ignore homeless people and dorky tourists and sharp-dressed businessmen because most of the time, everyone ignores you back. Now obviously there are exceptions, I'm not saying nobody talks to each other ever here. In fact, the Midwest is probably one of the friendlier metropolitan areas in the U.S. But still, on the whole, everyone walks around briskly with big sunglasses and earplugs, in their own bubbles, following their own agendas, most of which do not involve you whatsoever.

I dunno, most of the time I really am quite content with just walking around, pretending like I'm invisible and enjoying the chance to people-watch and indulge my creeper tendencies. But then I realize that to them, I am invisible, which is kind of depressing. Whereas in India we were blatantly stared at ALL the TIME, here I feel like a nothing, a nobody on the streets. I don't know which situation I prefer to be in - both get pretty old at times. Guess the grass is always on the other side, eh?

Courage

2010-08-12T23:34:00.000-05:00

I wrote something for my cat:

~*bellatrix babystar*~

small picky grey paws

patter on wood; soft but true

crazy little bitch.

After you recover from that mind-blowing haiku, you should read this.

http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1

aaaaaaand check out today's Beartato. It's grand.

www.nedroid.com

Come on!

2010-08-10T23:34:00.001-05:00

I may have reluctantly scrubbed the last of the henna off my ankles, but my fond memories of TWU, Bangalore, and all the friends I've made in India are far from fading. If anything, they have only grown stronger.

I have been home for a week, and while things are really wonderful here - and I mean that wholeheartedly - I still find that the little everyday things that I associated with ThoughtWorks University keep coming back and opening the bittersweet wound of my experience abroad. The feeling is akin to that of trying to get over an old boyfriend - on one hand, you want to savor in the good old memories and experiences, reliving them over and over again in your mind, but on the other (more practical hand), you realize that time does not stop for you to indulge in silly nothings that will never again happen.

It bothers me that this bothers me.

Rose's Rambunctious Risotto

2010-08-07T01:02:00.002-05:00

The previous night, I made a chicken & mushroom risotto for a few guests and it turned out to be very easy and (dare I say it?) kind of tasty too! It could have used a little more salt but I'm quite pleased with myself on the whole for not botching it up.

I made it according to a weird amalgamation of recipes I'd found online, but the gist of it was: cut up a lot of stuff, throw it all into a pot over medium-low heat, add chicken broth, stir. I've reached the conclusion that risotto is simple, elegant, and best enjoyed with the favorite crew and local brew:

R is for risotto. And revenge.

M has green hair.

Oh, how good it felt to be reunited with Goose Island products, at long last.

On another note, I am learning to play Epilogue on the guitar. It's a lovely song - definitely in my top 3 off of Hospice - but the lyrics are horribly depressing and not campfire sing-a-long material at all (unless your campfire is in a cancer ward). I am determined to get the chords down and add this song to my little repertoire collection but after this I am definitely going to learn to play a frivolous and happy song, like one by The Beatles or the Red Hot Chili Peppers...or Justin Bieber.

Exit, pursued by a bear

2010-08-05T07:01:00.003-05:00

Image source

I found a copy of The Winter's Tale that had been lying around a nook in the Shire. As usual with everything in our apartment, I haven't a clue as to whom it belongs, but I hope its original owner doesn't mind that I've started bringing it back and forth to work.

Sometimes when I read works by really talented authors I start to feel dejected about my own writing and how it will never be as great as theirs. It's like when I used to hack away at the violin for hours and hours, scrutinizing over every inflection of every note until the perfectionist in me would get too frustrated to continue. My masochistic self would then go onto YouTube and watch a video of Heifetz playing the song like it was child's play - eyes closed, head a-jerkin', lips arranged in that sort of half smug, half bemused smile, the kind that only world-class violin virtuosos get to wear as a badge of unattainable perfection.

The great thing about reading Shakespeare is that his literary genius doesn't stem from his ability to play with words, per se. Instead, the guy makes up ridiculous new terms and expressions, assigns meaning to them, and basically announces to the rest of society, "Here, add this to Webster's. It's legit now." To me, this inventive quality of his, this stepping-out-of-the-box-and-running-a-mile-away-and-turning-around-and-blowing-a-raspberry-at-convention approach to writing is wonderfully fun and inspiring.

I haven't made it very far into the play yet, mostly because I felt compelled to read through the five million introductions (bad idea, spoiled everything ever) but here are a few of my favorite quotes so far:

"One good deed dying tongueless slaughters a thousand waiting upon that." (I.1.2 93-94)

"Would I knew the villain, I would land-damn him." (II.1 142-143)

"Happy star reign now!" (I.1.2 362)

Sometimes when I'm reading Shakespeare's more outlandish verses I imagine what it'd be like if I burst out in Shakespearean tongue from time to time. "Yessss there's pizza leftover in the kitchen! Happy star reign now!" Then I laugh out loud, usually on a crowded bus full of exhausted crabby people. Then it's awkward for the rest of the ride.

Pan's Labyrinth

2010-08-02T21:17:00.002-05:00

is what I'm currently watching as I type this entry. What a brilliant movie. I remember watching it for the first time back in senior year of high school and being simultaneously horrified and fascinated by Guillermo del Toro's monstrous, fantastic universe.

Today was the first day of work. Boy it was weird, walkin' around downtown and seeing all them pretty blond girls wearing pencil skirts and clean-cut boys in their boat shoes and pressed pants. I can't believe these people (and I am one of them!) exist in the same planet as the type of pedestrians I'd see in India. Besides the obvious physical and socioeconomic differences, I think what sets these people apart the most from those in developing nations is our sense of entitlement. Young urban professionals know they're entitled to the best jobs, the best educations, and the best pampering because they (we! so difficult to keep myself in check here) have been used to it from day one. We have choices, and as a result, we walk with a spring in our step that announces to the world, "Hey, I'm here. Watch out."

The average Indian pedestrian, however, is probably a young male with just enough education to get a decent salary to bring home to his family. He works long hours in a position he's had for years and years and has no intention of quitting. The choices he faces - both day-to-day and in the long run - are much fewer in number, and his priorities are simple and straightforward: support his family, find a good wife, honor his gods. The focus of his life is set on those around him, and not himself as an individual. I think that beyond the material wealth or luxuries, it is this sense of individuality that money breeds - and that that's what gets out of control the fastest - the expectation that life will continue and only improve at this privileged pace.

Fuuuck, the bottle scene just happened. I looked away but the sounds were still crunchy and horrifying. On that note, I'm going to close my laptop and stop being antisocial, my roommates must think I am craze-o.

Hi, I'm back.

2010-08-02T00:36:00.001-05:00

And it feels soooooooo good.

Almost.

It's a bit strange because I came back to almost the exact same Shire that I'd left six weeks ago. We had a dinner party with the same delicious food, the same old friends, the same circle of inside jokes and shared memories that has united and kept us together as friends all these years. It felt like I'd never even left the cozy comforts of my orange dining room. And yet, my thoughts were as far away tonight as they had been the last time. They were with the new friends I'd made over the past month and a half, the new jokes, and the new experiences, most of which I know I will never ever have again - or at least not for a very long time.

I know that this longing for the way things were will pass quickly. There's no real point reminiscing about the past and thinking futile thoughts anyway. Just gotta let time do its thing and enjoy the present state of where I am and who I'm with.

Going abroad has definitely instilled a sense of confidence in my ability to adapt to new situations and learn new skills. Over the course of my six weeks in India, I found myself vowing to start this or improve that or restart blah many, many times. Here they are:

- Read more books, and not just novels
- Improve guitar skills and find the courage to play in front of people
- Learn a programming language
- Or at the very least, learn CSS/HTML/Javascript
- Play around with more image-editing and design software
- Try to make risotto out of pizza box ingredients (lol)
- Take more interesting pictures and figure out a way of storing and sharing them effectively (this weird Flickr/Facebook combination is not working out)
- Blog more
- Figure out what the fuck happened in Inception

Reading should come easily, as I have a 40-minute commute every day. I'm hoping to set aside an hour each day for the guitar, but I already know that's a relatively ambitious and unrealistic amount of time. I'm going to get started on those two for the week and encourage myself by blogging about them.

Waking up in seven hours to go back to ThoughtWorks, only at a different office. I'm determined to make this jetlag my bitch.

no sleep ever

2010-06-27T21:18:00.000-05:00

i have resigned to the tragic conclusion that my body refuses to let me sleep for moar than six hours a night. no matter how hard i try, how tired i am, or how late i go to sleep, i inevitably wake up after six hours and am wholly unable to catch another wink of sleep.

thankfully, six hours is enough sleep to function on. my eyes get heavy around mid-afternoon but i have found that doodling is relatively effective at holding my attention long enough for the sleepy spells (lol) to pass. unfortunately, i sometimes get so into my drawings that i stop paying attention to what's going on...but i suppose that's still better than nodding off and making it explicit that i am not paying attention to what's going on...

not really digging this whole bangalore blogging thing right now, i don't know why. it's hard to make each entry sound different from an entry that any other person would write. maybe i will take a small break until i get reinspired...

bought a copy of amartya's sen's "the idea of justice" from a street vendor yesterday. excited to read it...hopefully i can sneak out at lunch without anyone noticing.

know what's weird?

2010-06-21T20:35:00.002-05:00

interacting with people your age who're basically in the same "place" in life that you are - who've completed the same education, who are roughly in your same socioeconomic class, who find the same things and events and people and music and activities interesting - and not being able to make the jokes or comments you'd normally make because oh yeah, you're a working professional now and they are your co-workers first...

that's how i've been feeling about the fellow thoughtworkers. i've been spending a LOT of time with them, and they are all sorts of great, but i keep having to stop myself from blurting out such elegant expressions as "OMG A PUPPY" or "that's what sheeeeee said" or "dumb dumb! god!" or "sometimes my cat's name is kitty meow meow"

well, to be fair, i guess a lot of those barriers were taken down last night after we got back from a bar and played king's cup. (at one point i excitedly yelled "PUPPY WAR!" out the balcony when we saw two strays fighting) but i still felt weird - although we definitely wandered into some foreign territory last night (why does that sound so wrong), i could not shake the whole "wtf, really? i'm playing never have i ever with my coworkers??" feeling...

perhaps it's because i just associate these things with the american college experience too strongly. and technically our training program is called thoughtworks university, so maybe i have an excuse to keep on jiving when i pull a five, at least for the next few weeks...

Millennium Park

2010-06-15T00:29:00.001-05:00

has never looked so small...

Left: view of Grant Park from the twenty fifth floor of the Aon Center

As alluded to in my previous entry, I had my first day of work today. Just like graduation, it felt surreal and I got slightly queasy when I thought too long about the fact that this was neither an internship nor a dream.

But orientation was really great - much better than I'd expected, and relatively awesome. Everything is good. There isn't really much else to say about it at the moment - perhaps I will elaborate moar later.

The minute I got back in Hyde Park though, my stress levels just went through the roof and my energy levels came plummeting deep, deep down. I was in zombie mode for pretty much the entire evening, milling around as all my friends came for dinner, and now, even after we've cleaned up and everyone is gone, I am still feeling panicked and nervous. I think that my body is so used to being constantly freaked out that it now refuses to relax, like permanent rigor mortis...creepy.

I've been trying to pack, but as of now my absolute priority is updating my MP3 player with enough music to get me through the next six weeks, as I'm fairly positive we are not supposed to uh, obtain media for free while we're on the hotel/corporate apartment website. Some new-ish stuff on my Pre: Mumford & Sons, Band of Horses, older Animal Collective stuff, The Dodos. I am really digging weird indie bands with multiple vocals as of late.

As glad as I am/proud of myself for updating, I still feel like this is a relatively shitty/boring entry and that as a result, I should stop blabbering. Alas. I am too tired to think inventively or humorously... all I want to do is crawl into bed and put on my Sennheisers and listen to Hospice forever.

My next update will be on my other blog...woo! Let's hope I do not have malaria by then.

This past month

2010-06-14T02:21:00.006-05:00

has, without a doubt, been the busiest month of my life. The highs have been skyscrapingly deliriously wonderfully high, and the lows have been horrifyingly soul-stompingly low. But I am here, now, and things are good. Great, even.

I graduated from the University of Chicago yesterday. ISN'T THAT CRAZY?????? The reality hasn't really set in. I cannot accept the fact that I am no longer going to be able to walk into the Reg or Ratner anymore. And it's not even like I would want to go to the gym, but it's still nice to have it as an option, i.e. something that I deceive myself into promising I will do when I am gluttonously stuffing my face with tasty treats.

Everyone always asks me if I feel different, being a graduate and all now. While I don't feel drastically different today than I did on Friday during my last final per se, I definitely do think these past three years have changed me quite a lot. I am in so many ways an other person than my weird first year self (although, I have been told I am still weird, just in different ways...) As hideously cliche as it sounds, college has really opened my eyes, both to the outside world and to my own self. I don't know if it's a product of just this age, when we mature into adults and stuff, or if it's just because the Magnet was an exceptionally opaque shield from real life - probably a combination of the two - but I just feel like I "get" things so much better now, and that I am very much more of my own person. It's good - great, even.

O K, that is enough reflecting for now. I have orientation/my first official day of real, full-time employment in... 7 hours...shit's crazy right now!!!! Also, I need malaria pills from someone, anyone. Also, I have not packed for India at all, mostly because I have no suitable clothing (apparently everything I own is too slutty). I am pretty much drenched in yikessauce...mmm, sauce.

Moving on, I was talking to my roommate about this earlier, and we agreed that Facebook sometimes kind of sucks these days. Well, it's great for peripheral purposes, like stalking attractive people or keeping in touch with old friends, but it's not great in terms of sharing information with people you actually care about. And I think it definitely stifles creativity because it "nutshells" everyone and we get so used to it that we forget there are other ways of interacting with each other. Here are all my past jobs! I love Justin Bieber and Crystal Castles! I can fit on a couch cushion! I look awkward at graduation! Ta-dah!...no.

In an effort to end this mindlessness, I am making the following Half-New-Year's-sorta-resolution: instead of diluting my life into Facebook through 100s of pictures that don't really mean anything to most people, I will instead devote that time towards this blog, writing about the events in more detail/posting only the most important or fun or relevant pictures and sharing them with people I truly care about. That is not to say I am swearing off Facebook or anything, but I definitely think all that time tagging and captioning unexceptional photos would be better put towards making entries here. To that end, I secretly am hoping that all my friends will make blogs too so we can form this awesome cult of bloggers and read each others' insights and share music and tell each other all our innermost secrets and spoon together at night time.

Oh, and I realize the irony of going on and on about posting pictures when I haven't posted the ones from the previous entry, but that's only because my cousin who is visiting me is sleeping in my room and I do not want to grab the USB cable/wake her up. I will try to get them up tomorrow night, along with a new entry.

I also realize that I spend more time talking about how I am going to improve this blog than actually writing in it. BUT that will change. It'll be good - great, even.

my new room

2010-06-09T01:56:00.002-05:00

Edited - added some pictures! Enjoy.

So I am officially mostly kind of moved into my new room! And it is sort of really awesome, sort of really crazy.

Long story short, I elected to move into our apartment's sunroom. Perks of the sunroom include: lots of sunlight! It is a single! I do not pay very much! Non-perks of the sunroom include: maybe too much sunlight, no real door, and no closet. However, all of the shortcomings are fixable in the long-run (lots o curtains, accordion doors, dresser/use of other closets in our apartment) and I am determined and excited to really make the most out of this space.

Today, my roommates and I tried to move my old table from my previous room to the sunroom. Sounds simple enough, but my old table is not just any table - it is a gargantuan solid hunk of wood - you know, the kind that snooty CEOs probably use to prop their Armani-clad feet upon - and it absolutely refused to fit through the doorframe of my old room by about half an inch, no matter how we tried to position it. We were thoroughly defeated by that thing :(

So that was kind of sad - I'd been really looking forward to using that desk - you know, propping my Old-Navy flip-flop clad feet upon it - but I'll live. It's another excuse to buy something from Amazon, which has quickly become my favorite pasttime.

I am currently imagining a tree-like "theme" for my room - my giant curtain thing already has a tree on it, most of my furniture is wooden, my circle rug resembles a tree stump pattern, and the color scheme should be green & brown after my curtains and all that jazz arrive. So pumped to do something creative and DIY-esque :)

I will update this post with pictures sometime soon...

this doesn't count

2010-05-26T01:53:00.002-05:00

i changed the layout. i was getting bored of the old one and this one is so much cleaner and leaner. i might wake up in eight hours and change it back, though. the world may never know.

i also made another blog to document my travels in bangalore. i really wanted the blog name to be bangalorelore but it was already taken so i had to settle on jadorebangalore. oh well, worse things have happened.

i think i'm going to make that blog public (public as in i put it on my facebook...SO SCANDALOUS) and take away the profile feature so that it doesn't show the link to this one. this one is just too sappy/dumb to display, at least right now it is. but i still loves it here and i will endeavor to continue updating both...maybe...hopefully.

it's almost 2 am. how time flies. i have so much work to do that if i think about it too hard i can feel my brain start to combust and stuff, it's an interesting feeling.

Weekend withdrawal. Now

2010-05-24T23:22:00.003-05:00

I am left with

$8.11 in my checking account
A renewed desire to read
Random bruises all along my back, probably from when I decided to hang out in a closet for a long time on Saturday night
Fascination & nostalgia & gratitude for the things that make my life a good life
A little more faith in humanity

Three weeks left, and then I am no longer a University of Chicago student, but a ThoughtWorker instead...whaaaaat.