What's in my Pockets?

If i had 25 dollars, i would buy...

Everyone has their 2% of them that should be locked up in the looney bin. My 2% craves office products. For my high, I need a pencil cup full of nice Pilot G2 7mm pens. Black. Not stirred. ooooooo! 

Awesome Afternoons

At 4pm I like to sproul out on the grass looking waiting for serenity. Today's method is a mid-afternoon nap, which is the closest ill approach to getting high on grass. I have three books and a mild breeze to keep me company.

Light lover's chatter drifts from far away, friends descend brick steps, and it smells like fall. It makes me laugh. Why? Because I have discovered what technology has long tried to emulate. The majority of my time spent indoors is devoted to staring at new amazing technology or gadgets that are *drum roll* trying to be pretty. Pixels, features, functions; they are all just fancy dresses on different flavors of distraction. One day I imagine they will make a HD-HD TV that will be completely "life-like". I imagine the conversations between the lead engineer and the manager to be like this:

Eng: We have successfully replicated sunlight, the colors of trees, grass, and landscape. The pixels are so small that the naked eye can't see the pixelation.

Mgr: What about smell?

Eng: Excuse me?

Mgr: I want it to SMELL like outside!

Eng: if you want smell outside, why don't you go out?

Mgr: Don't you get it? I want to be inside, and I want it to feel completely like I am outside, but I don't want to actually be outside. Duh.

traffic on the freeway

Morning arises. The sun breaks. Alarms warm me to a new morning. My stomache instead feels like I'm pregnant with rocks. This is the smallest of my pains. I am actually aware of my intestines. Normally my path of digestion remains covert to my conscious brain, but I feel like someone stuffed a 50in garden hose into my abdomen, turned on the hose and capped the other end. Its not pleasant.

Ah constipation.

Was it the cream pasta? Was it the sausage rigatoni? Was it the baker dozen of garlic bread? Perhaps my dietary sin lies somewhere among my many indulges of chips and salsa, ranch ruffle chips, and of course, Snapple. No matter the riches, no matter the stature, all men are brought low by the two terrors, diahrrea and constipation. Nice to know that all men will never get alway from the basics.

How do I free my self of my self-impass? Squatting over the pot with a bottle of water and a lot of time.

Ahhhhhhh mondays...

What I'm reading

"Where'd you find that book?"

Its true. I confess. I read books, and not for pictures. As my cousin so often points out "there is nothing but words in there, you know?"

Media Unlimited - I found this book skulking amazon.com. One of the more addictive features is the "users also bought". There is a one inch space on the website that displays more books, or more CDs that other hapless victims also bought. If all people follow the same buying habits, why not make it a terminal mass and buy the same similar products. Anyways, this little nugget of words popped up as a suggestion off one of my more maniacle choices: Dumbing us Down, and the Disappearance of Childhood. Both good books to spook any adult into a healthy fear of television, marketing, and advertising at large.

CandyFreak - this book has a more interesting story. Staving off summer boredom, I visited a friend in SF. Instead of wandering ikea or walmart, i opted to check out some used bookstores that litter the main streets of SF. I happened on a surprising "new" looking book called "Not that you Asked" by Steve Almond. I read my $2 gamble in a day, and loved style, and then bought his other book, Candy freak.

I often attract questions like "why are you reading that?" The question hopes to uncover some sort of purposed grand design for my mental muscles. 'Perhaps this "candyfreak" book will help him understand the psychotic and mal-logiced?' Sadly that is not the answer. No, reading is the same as any B-rated movie; you read it for the cheap thrills. Ironically, with movies, one would think with so many people working on the movie, that it would be obvious what will win you grammys, and what will chew up your career and leave you on late night cable. In comparison I would expect books to be full of grammatical trash, stylistic nonsense, and enough narcissim to surpass MTV. But from my experience, even the worst of books can beat out Terminator 5,6,7, infinity etc.

But how do you communicate the joy of reading to another? It would be like asking 'how i can get you to worship 'heroes' Tv series, or how do i get you addicted to 'arrested development'? You don't. You find the mind-numbing gravity of these dumb shows, and then slowly let them suck the life out of your companions. Its viral marketing, buddy sharing, or whatever you want to call it, but the same is with books. The only thing that is missing?

Patience.

Summary: Get some books. Get some patience.

The side effects of love

When you fall in love, there are certain expectations. Hand holding emerges, unusually placed smiles grow, and a lot of time is spent looking at the other, an invisible tractor beam linking eye to eye. Some of my friends have caught this disease called love. The side effects have left many a male friend in the middle of espirit, or the wrong section of AE outfitters. For some odd reason the guidance system on a regular pair of legs is debilitated. You will often find lovers bumping into one another in grocery stores or on wide sidewalks. I'm sure it's playful and intentional at first, but as they say, a little goes a long way towards an adulthood tripping your spouse.

Romance explains all, but haircuts.... ? Love leads you to trust another human more than others. She will not kill you, she will not steal from you, she general endures your cheese stench, and though she may make fun of your obesity, she in some miracle of the mind, loves you. As a result you may share credit cards, bank accounts, cooking secrets, and embarrassing body malfunctions. Why? because her love guarantees that you will not be ousted as the blight to society that you are.

Love may qualify you as a caretaker, compassion may qualify you as a investor, trust may permit you as secret holder, but what qualifies you to cut hair?

I assume it is especially dangerous because the Girl generally cares how the guy looks, and the guy more often than not has better motor skillls. Seems kind of backwards? Why should the one who has the greatest stake and least skill cut their hair?

My mom cut my hair. But i was 3 back then, and I grew hair like a chia pet feeding on rogaine. My haircut wasn't going to distract from my crooked teeth. Girls were the plague. Was there any GOOD reason to have a good haircut? And as i started to vacuum hair off the kitchen floor, if you had asked me if I was getting a 'good' haircut, I would have just shrugged.

Well hopefully your wonderful romantic trim doesn't result in the expression of the guy above.

Add some water?

As my skin turns to rubber, my memory fogs into a gray smog, and my muscles atrophy because of the internet, I refuse to change habits. There are some routines in life, intentional or not, that will never change. Showering in the morning is refreshing; showering in the previous evening creates morning hair configurations seen in Rock music vidoes. Eating heavy lunches creates heavy eyebrows in the afternoon; tasteless sandwiches leaves enough unhappiness and frustration to keep me working for the next few hours. (Added bonus, nasty lunches make dinner very tasty.)

One routine that i've had is to make the above dish with the blind precision of pavlov's barking. I can do it without a conscious thought. Yet, I don't make this dish very often. Why not? This is what happens: My brain will picture the delicious noodles and meat, but my hands sweat in rebellion. Why? Dealing with noodles in comparison to rice is like shipping from the 80's vs. shipping from the 2000's; it takes 3 times the energy. Noodles traditionally require two types of babysitting. First watch them boil like a witch in a cauldron, then you watch them fry with some seasoning or other taste incentive. Rice, on the hand gets washed once, and then is put in the rice cooker.

To the praise of God almighty, today I decide to try something new. Did you hear me? New. "New" is not something I easily walk into anymore. "New" has left me with green jackets, bright red pants, guitar Pajamas, and several expensive electronics that have never seen the light of day. There is a lot of waste with "new". I've become more cautious of "New" dishes, electronics, clothes, and whatever. Often times its like running into an ex-girlfriend, different clothes, some new interfaces, but ultimately the same processes under the hood. So, why bother?

And it pays off. Instead of pulling apart noodles with my Ogre thumbs and blunted pointer fingers, now I boil the whole pack, and the noodles come apart by themselves. Instead of 15 mins, it takes 2. I feel liberated from menial oppression. This must be the same feeling for the guy that invented defrosting with the microwave. I imagine for years he used the warm water method, or just flat out "held the meat till it went soft".

Maybe new isn't that bad.

Chicken Bake Noodles:
Chicken
Spicy Bake Mix (this is the literal name)
Bok Choi
Enough Garlic to kill Dracula
Any pack of Rice noodles

Instructions -
1. Cook everything separate with garlic. Cook chicken with Spicy bake mix.
2. Mix it all together

Secret
- When breaking apart rice noodles, it has a consistency of sunburnt patchy skin. In otherwords, the noodles don't stick together. The secret is to break up the noodle pack in to long chunks then boil them in water
- THEN fry liberally with oil

How to waste money

Ipod Touch : $300

Am I bad with money? Yes. How bad? Pretty darn bad. I was okay in the previous years, indulging in two orders of large fries, or chewing a whole pack of gum at a time. And all was well, my indulgence was an extra dollar here, an extra dollar there.

And then came music equipment. 

The cheapest guitar is 300 dollars. The good ones go for 600. The nice ones go for 1200. The ones i wanted? Much much more. I was filled with evils, false belief that better instruments = better musicians. And secondly i was just greedy. So I traded up, and traded up, and trade up, and now i have 3 guitars and a history of bad monetary decisions.

How do I pucker up? Well based on the photo, looks like i haven't got it figured out yet.

So, if you want to be like me, buy electronics. It's exciting opening up fancy packaging, dreaming of the frolicking with electronics or new car and the wonderful goodness of life that will congratulate you, "thank you for buying me". And for a moment, like a sped-read fairy-tale.

1 Ipod later. I'm still an asian male. I still have moderate grades. I still feel unhappy after a good meal, and find that hobbies that fall short. And now i have some electronics. Yippee. 

Do not forsake the Lord, or his precepts, his words. They and they only hold the words of power. The rest just holds well.... 32GBs of ways to past the time.

Late Night Ritual

"Don't touch me!"
"What you going to do?"
"Deeeeeennnnnnissss!"
"Yarrrrgh"
These are the sweet sounds that guide me to sleep at night.
The night isn't complete without one essential component: Sissy fighting.

There is no crime that isn't worth a couple of slaps to the face. Shoes put in the wrong place? A badly timed fart? Slap some retribution into your roommate. In this case the crime was : boredom. Ah, how boredom creates some of america's best time-burners. Television, internet entertainment, blogging, nachos, and of course the ultimate form : napping.

Still, watching these two go about it like monkeys fighting for a plastic banana, I can't help but wonder how parents keep their sanity. These two are college students, granted in this case you can't tell. I can't imagine dealing with this slapping fistycuffs in the movie theater, in the mall, at the restaurant. It is no wonder my mom has developed a voice that defrosts frozen chicken, and a finger strength of a pair of pliers. And lord help me, I will probably do the same.

I laugh when I think of the educational level I am at now, and eventually with my own little spawn, what educational level I will display!

"What the monkey is the matter with you!!!! This is not a gymnasium!! This is a restaurant!! People eat here!!!! Food is not for mashing into your brother's face!!!!! Yarrrrrrgh!!!"

Brilliant