the true meaning of halloween

In The Know: Has Halloween Become Overcommercialized?

no balloon, no party

www.mymomisafob.com
A collection of mostly emails from fob (re: fresh off the boat) moms to their english-speaking kids. Most of them are funny and cute. Because of my struggles learning how to speak french, I'm mostly sympathetic to a lot of their mistakes, and email is unforgivingly permanent. I think my parents made a smart move by making us converse only in Vietnamese with them.

Sometimes people send in photos of their moms wearing fobby things, which is funny but kind of mean (but funny!).


www.mymomisafob.com

Hi! Sandra,

yesterday a girl call Sophia from Nottingham gave me a ring. She wanted touch you,so I gave your email address. ok! take care.

Love Mum xxx

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you still virgin? you know…….no balloon, no party ok? ok

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Dear Children:

Attached the medical report. I know these article in Chinese you might not understand at all. The key thing is ” do not drink or eat the ice cold staff. Special for your breakfast, When you wake up and your body, stomach still does not warm up and function appropriate yet, and you give the cold food, it will cause the stomach muscle clamp. (Just like you get up from warm bed you jump in swim pool your body can not stand it.)

Gradually fail function and hurt your health in silence.

Having a warm health breakfast is very important for your health. Everybody seems knowing it but does not do it, special for your young generation. If you do not have good eating habit now then all kind health problems will appear early than your age

Doctor grandpa, he worked very hard for his life but he always ate right and enjoyed his food, slowly his pace not rushed and scooped food into his mouth.

Hope you guys could change your eating habits. Eating on time with health food, avoid cold staff, slowly and enjoy your food enjoy your life.

Love you all, Mom

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unrequited career-love: the saga continues

So today I actually turned down a job offer. This latest red herring began about 3 weeks ago, when I went to a career fair and was asked by representatives of a well-known insurance company, who shall not be named, whether I wanted to come for an informational interview about a job position called "financial adviser". Having not had an interview in 5 years, I said yes ma'am, because things are more exciting when they occur once every half-decade.

After doing some research, I found out that 'financial adviser' amounted to selling insurance of different types. Nothing wrong with that, except for the part where it had nothing to do with anything I was remotely interested in or good at. Still, I would be based in R-town, and also I was lured by the prospect of making a 6 figure income (5 figure as an economist, ain't nothing wrong with that either!). Surely I would be able to afford an SLR digital camera and maybe even a legitimate monthly bus pass, and that would keep me complacent and mobile for awhile. So I went into the interview with an open mind that harboured but two deal-breaker conditions: 1. that I not have to go to people's houses to make sales; 2. that it not be based entirely on commission (economists are naturally very risk averse; hence 1 and 2).

After a very long, informative chat and completing a very long personality assessment exam, it was pretty clear that this wasn't my sort of thing, although the lady who interviewed me was super nice. It was entirely based on commission and I would most definitely have to make deals at private residences, which is pretty creepy and would entail me buying a car before I can afford to get a hybrid (when are they going to start making Jeep Liberty hybrids anyway?). But somehow, the results on my personality assessment exam came back positive anyway (I have financial-adviser personality disorder - what can I say, I'm good at multiple choice questions), and the lady phoned me back to congratulate me and to set a second interview. I had to tell her that I was interested in pursuing other career goals, although it sounded rather foolish to my ears, since those other career goals didn't seem to be pursuing me as lustily, or at all, for that matter. Such is the nature of unrequited career-love: blinding and hopelessly optimistic. How long can this beggar realistically hope to be a chooser?

All is not lost, however. I did score a Starbucks card of an indeterminate amount of >= $5 for taking the personality assessment quiz, so all is actually well, maybe only because of all those awesome little text messages I've been getting from someone today. They make me feel as though my presently unfruitful life may serve some purpose, if only as a vessel through which random thoughtful gestures are registered and cherished. All is well indeed.


Those headlights are the cutest things.

i have trouble with transitions

Oh, the never-ending job-search.

Sometimes your path is marked in the sky
Sometimes you're forced to fit in between the lines
Sometimes all that you can do is say no
Darlin' do not fear what you don't really know

finite simple group (of order two)

One of the most endearing love songs I've heard.

The Klein Four (Northwestern U) - Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)

The path of love is never smooth
But mine's continuous for you
You're the upper bound in the chains of my heart
You're my Axiom of Choice, you know it's true

But lately our relation's not so well-defined
And I just can't function without you
I'll prove my proposition and I'm sure you'll find
We're a finite simple group of order two

I'm losing my identity
I'm getting tensor every day
And without loss of generality
I will assume that you feel the same way

Since every time I see you, you just quotient out
The faithful image that I map into
But when we're one-to-one you'll see what I'm about
'Cause we're a finite simple group of order two

Our equivalence was stable,
A principal love bundle sitting deep inside
But then you drove a wedge between our two-forms
Now everything is so complexified

When we first met, we simply connected
My heart was open but too dense
Our system was already directed
To have a finite limit, in some sense

I'm living in the kernel of a rank-one map
From my domain, its image looks so blue,
'Cause all I see are zeroes, it's a cruel trap
But we're a finite simple group of order two

I'm not the smoothest operator in my class,
But we're a mirror pair, me and you,
So let's apply forgetful functors to the past
And be a finite simple group, a finite simple group,
Let's be a finite simple group of order two
(Oughter: "Why not three?")

I've proved my proposition now, as you can see,
So let's both be associative and free
And by corollary, this shows you and I to be
Purely inseparable. Q. E. D.

rattle and burn

I'm no fan of instrumental music, but I've been listening consistently to Jesse Cook for over 5 years now, and he is still putting out good music. There are probably better flamenco guitarists out there, but I just really like his stuff.

Mario Takes a Walk: love the hook


Rattle and Burn: interesting percussion


Currently writing a bafrigginjillion cover letters.