obsessions

i have an unhealthy obsession for fleece, string instruments, chamomile tea, and tacos...among other things. so a perfect day just might entail me bundled in fleece, eating tacos and sipping tea, while blasting david garrett, edgar meyer, yo-yo ma, joshua bell, and bond.

what it was like when the whole world was only a two foot radius

i had some extra time in korea so i decided to head over to japan for a package tour. fastforward to the plane. extremely sleep deprived, i decided i'd nap on the flight over. a relatively short flight, the minutes were precious. as soon as we passed crash altitude, i dropped the tray table and passed the heck out. ten minutes in, i woke up to the sound of a shrieking banshee. you think i'm kidding, but had you been there, you would know i'm being modest. satan's reincarnate was one seat front, one seat right of me in the form of a two year old child. tired enough, i soon knocked out again. again, shrieking banshee. i wanted to punch the child in the face, bite his ear off, stick his head out the plane, and then lock him in the lavatory. then this tiny face pops over the seat in front of me. my urge to play whack-a-mole quickly dissipated. cute kid. we'd land, part ways, and all would be well. well, this family happened to have signed up for the same package tour. !@#$

unable to control the child, the parents bought the kid a toy truck. one that would play music audible to the deaf. we were stuck in a bus all day. together. for the next four days. this child pushed the play button on the truck over and over and over and over again. every passenger without fail memorized the tune, and i'm sure it's seared in our memories lest we seek aggressive therapy. we all prayed that the batteries would die. the parents tried to take it away and the child would have roid rage. it was quite an ordeal. i have never seen a person look so consistently fatigued, but the father looked like he wasn't sure whether he wanted to throw himself onto the train tracks or into a boiling pit of lava.

communicate please

one of my favorite quotes is from george bernard shaw. "the problem with communication...is the illusion that it has been accomplished." we haven't quite achieved mind reading yet, but with the progress of bionics, i really do think it'll be possible. but in the meantime, we actually have to open our mouths and verbally convey our thoughts.

imagine that we are mentally on the 5th floor. we chat and shoot the breeze, and go our separate ways. while you are away, something upsets you and it festers and you are on a different mental level...say the 13th floor. so when we reconvene, i'm still on the 5th floor and you're on the 13th floor. i'm like, wtf? we're on two completely different floors and we can't be level with each other until you help me get to the 13th floor or you come back to the 5th floor, or maybe we even meet on a different floor.

the point being, we need to communicate to understand where the other person is at. i would bet my left [insert paired body part] that this is a MAJOR cause of failed business and relationships.

remember, if you're ruminating, you're probably drifting off to a different floor. so for the love of god, please communicate.

proselytizing

proselytizing kids should be illegal until they turn 18.

forever froyo

generally being up throughout the night, i hate that just about everything except foreign stock markets are closed. this is particularly painful when i'm craving certain foods. on countless occasions, i've counted down the minutes till a restaurant opened at 5, 6, or 7am. but i'm slowly adapting thanks to the freezer.

stock up on your favorite foods and freeze em. i just got back from froyolife with a week's supply of healthy froyos to sate my nocturnal needs.

monday morning art project

the need for insight...i mean intelligence...i mean checkups

imagine that you are flying from los angeles to paris. if you're fortunate, you might have made the journey before.

anyway, the trip is about 5,588 statute miles each way. imagine that your pilot is a complete wanker like your typical patient who doesn't go in for checkups. so the pilot sets course for paris and doesn't bother to check the bearings for the entire trip. unbeknownst to the pilot, she has been off by one degree. a single bloody degree. over 5,588 statute miles, this one degree manifests as 97.5 miles off course! all because the tool of a pilot didn't check her bearings, you end up spending your vacay bobbing about somewhere in the celtic sea between london and paris. if you're an optimist, at least it wasn't 9 more degrees, else you might be in the middle of a libyan firefight, praying for hillary to come save you.

don't be a wanker. get a checkup.

the shoddy statistics of parking

parking sometimes can seriously be a bastard shrouded in utter frustration, wrapped in used toilet paper, burning in hell while being used as a pin cushion.

think about looking for someone. we learn when we're 3 - or for the slow ones, at 15 - to stay put when we get lost. imagine a 100x100 matrix...and overlay it on disneyland. each cell will represent one section, or one ten-thousandth of disneyland. if you get lost and you stay put, there is a one out of ten thousand (1 / 10,000) chance of being found. throw in some variables like rationale and sensibility and the probability increases. but imagine now that you are the world's stupidest statistician and you start wandering around. now, at any given moment, there is a one out of one hundred million (1 / 100,000,000) chance of finding your worthless face. go buy a lottery ticket.

now think of looking for a parking spot. on a single street of metered parking, the chances of everyone having parked at the same time is fairly small. and in the event that they do, the chance that they all leave at the same time is equally, if not far more unlikely, UNLESS they are all part of the same entourage (carpool you baboons). anyway, people are constantly coming and going thanks to life's bustle along with the fear of a $50 ticket. thus, it would behoove you to sit tight for a second to wait for a spot because someone will eventually leave. the chance that you will come upon a spot as someone is leaving (two favorable incidents coinciding), is pretty small. but you might halve that denominator by staying put.

so i have summed up this entire concept in a haphazardous phrase: lawrence's ten minute rule. every ten minutes or less, someone will leave. if there are no meters or limits and the cars are covered in leaves, layers of dust, and bird poop, you might want to grab a laptop and a few movies.

we could sit around and make an algorithm, run some modeling, plug in as many variables as comes to mind, integrate supply-demand equations, and run integrals on these, but you're probably better off parking a mile away and burning off your big buns in that time. :)

bump, for your thoughts

some of you know what bump is. for those who don't, you can basically bump two iphones together to transmit/share a variety of media including contacts (i.e. business card or someone elses), photos, music, and so on.

a lot of times, verbal and written communication generally doesn't cut it for me, so sometimes, i just create awkward pauses. i have difficulty conveying my thoughts because most of them just can't be conveyed into words and my mind is reeling with countless thoughts colliding with each other in creative and absurd ways. they are spatial arrangements, complex algorithms, and other inanimate formations for which there aren't words to describe. think of our verbal simplification of complex feelings and emotions. we've managed to dumb down nerve signals to "ouch!" for mild instant pain, and "(insert expletive) this hurts like hell!" for greater continual nerve transduction, "i love you" to sum up a gamut of emotions and chemical reactions, and a hodgepodge of colorful words to sum up anger, frustration, irritation, and hate.

my point being, i don't even have the luxury of a term or an arrangement of terms that sums up my thoughts and thought processes at times beyond "complex." so it would be terrific if someone invented bump for thoughts. bump your foreheads together to transmit thoughts, emotions, etc. if that's too primitive for you, maybe we can just develop esp helmets. and then we can finally have an interface for my download crap to your brain software so that i can learn astrophysics and russian while i sleep.

also, while on this train of thought, someone needs to start fictitious technologies, inc. to develop all the tech we read about and see in movies. because i know j.k. rowling had something close to 'bump, for thoughts' and god knows what we can accomplish with a bloody flux capacitor! anyway, i'm sure star trek is a fairly good place to start if you're up for the challenge.

ching chong ting tong ling long

means me grow tall some day. no, not really.

so my parents were a bit dismayed by my height after seeing my cousin. but since i'm a lactard, they decided to buy me a case of soymilk.

my momma didn't raise no fool - and since i'm generally wary of information - and since i was dubious as to the content of calcium in asian soymilk, i set out on a mission to debunk this spurious notion correlating soymilk and growth.

i preliminarily found that soymilk is not only noncontributory to growth, but it may also stunt it as it hinders the absorption of calcium and zinc. so lots of soy = brittle little asian people? maybe. just maybe. on the upside, soymilk estrogen won't give you breasts. clearly. kidding. ;)

of course as soon as i stumbled upon this tidbit of information, i phoned my parents to rub it in their faces (very lovingly) that they were wrong. my dad then sided with me joking that midget bean plants would clearly stunt your growth.

myth busted. is that copyright/trademarked? myth debunked.

licking stamps

yep, i know some of you odd ones out there specifically request the minted stamps just so you can lick them. everyone else is using the stickers or online postage. but...what if you couldn't get on your postage server? yes ladies and gents, i couldn't login to my stamps.com account today. sacre bleu.

fortunately, there are still 20th century methods still available. but it got me thinking, what if an emp went off today. what would i do?

no electricity, no satellites, no laptops, no cell phones, no pdas, no fax, no email...ok, i hope i'm not making you hyperventilate by now. i guess the best approach would just be to say eff it, leave the dog in the oven and the kids in the pool, go into the garage, manually light the pilot light, fill the tub up with hot water, light 38 candles, grab a snorkel mask, wrap a book in several ziploc bags, and read underwater.