make-a-flake

This site is highly addictive. This is my third attempt, it takes awhile to get used to the scissors.

lol --> "Please help us keep the snowflakes clean. Report offensive snowflakes when you click the snowflake."

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

-------------------------------

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.

fame is a footnote

I suspect this is probably as good as it ever will get.




So now would be the time to salute my awesomeness and/or offer me your humble services. Don't let this opportunity pass you by.

p.s. You're welcome to Google for the paper in its entirety, I didn't feel like linking the pdf lest a certain author and potential reference of mine be keeping tabs on who links to his papers. Not that I have anything bad to say about him (nice man, really), it's just weird if he's reading my views on abortion and bruised bananas, you know?

this week's controversy piece

I've come to the conclusion that Pro-choice is definitely not, at its core, the inverse of Pro-life. Strictly speaking, Pro-lifers should be pitted against the Anti-life faction, but they should be working with Pro-choicers to create a social environment where the choice to not kill fetuses becomes a no-brainer. And certainly, that's what's happening in less-radical circles, or so I trust.

Personally, the thought of aborting a life is abhorring to me, but so is the thought of removing my right to choose to give life. To take away the choice over an act is to discount the value of that act. What I might have done out of love would be indistinguishable from what I am forced to do by law. I want babies to live, yes, but I also want babies to grow up having no doubt that they were and are wanted by their parent(s). Too much emphasis is placed on the fact that if we're given the right to choose, 'murder' might be chosen. That's a big worry, but allow me to look at the flip side of this coin: what about the fact that if we're given the right to choose, life could be chosen? It's a fine, fine line, but an important one. Anyone celebrating someone's decision to keep a baby is essentially Pro-choice (as well as Pro-life), because if there were no choice, there would be no decision to make or to celebrate.

Bottom line: Choice and Life need eachother. They are two fundamental bases of humanity - why shouldn't they coexist?

And now the excerpt from Dan Savage that started my little train of thought:

-------------------------------

Sept 11, 2008
http://www.thestranger.com/savage

The 17-year-old daughter of Sarah Palin, the GOP's vice-presidential nominee, is pregnant. The news was released by the McCain camp during a busy week—a hurricane, the Republican National Convention, Dick Cheney getting us into a war with Russia—so it didn't receive the coverage it deserved. To recap:

Seventeen-year-old Bristol Palin got her ass knocked up five or so months ago by 18-year-old Levi Johnston. Among the hobbies listed on Levi's since-yanked MySpace page—"fishing, shoot some shit, and just fuckin' chillin'"—was this revealing tidbit: "I don't want kids." But Bristol, says her mom, "made the decision on her own to keep the baby," and is now engaged to Levi "Shootin' Shit" Johnston.

As the adoptive parent of a child born to a pair of unwed teenagers, I'm certainly not in favor of abortion in all circumstances. But I believe that it's a choice teenagers should be able to make for themselves—with input from their families whenever possible—and, so it seems, does the GOP's VP nominee. Sarah Palin is pleased that her daughter made the decision—on her own—to keep the baby.

But Sarah Palin doesn't believe that other girls should be able to make their own decisions. Sarah Palin believes abortion should be illegal in almost every instance—including rape and incest. So Bristol Palin is being celebrated for making a choice that Sarah Palin would like to take away from all other American women. Apparently, today's GOP believes that choice is a special right reserved for the wayward daughters of Republican elected officials.

Oh, and Sarah Palin also believes that birth control shouldn't be made available to teenagers, she opposes medically accurate sex education, and she backs abstinence-until- marriage sex "education."

Sigh.

The GOP has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into abstinence "education" programs during the Bush years. I believe this enormous investment of public funds begs the obvious question: Are our children abstaining? Sarah Palin's aren't. Despite this massive outlay on the part of the American taxpayer and the example set by her Christian parents, Bristol Palin became sexually active while still in high school. Excuse me, but if abstinence education can't keep the daughter of the evangelical governor of Alaska off the cock, what hope is there for the daughters—and some of the sons—of average Americans?

I'm a cad for writing this, of course, because shortly before Bristol and Levi were paraded before cheering throngs at the Republican National Convention, the Palins asked the media to respect their daughter's privacy.

Another special right: When it comes to respecting your family's privacy, Palin and the GOP see no need. They want to micromanage the most intimate aspects of your private life. And if their own kids fail to live up to the standards that Palin and the GOP seek to impose on your family, well, that's a private matter between the Palins, their daughter, their God, and the thousands of screaming imbeciles in elephant hats waving McCain/Palin signs on the floor of the Republican National Convention.

i am an exteemed customer

and now a word from your friendly neighbourhood reconomist

I did the Grouse Grind 3 more times (a grand total of 4 for this summer). I know I promised to organize a big GG outing for you all, but things just happened too spontaneously due to the irregular weather. I haven't yet brought anybody up that I've managed to beat (my time hovers around 1.5). The likes of Candice "I haven't trained in years" Wong, Kenny "I'm a social smoker" Tai, and Reuben "I'm asthmatic" Heredia all left me trailing in the dust. I'm not at all surprised nor affected by this, but apparently some people were. I had a chat with Candice about this, and we came to the conclusion that I either physically appear more athletic than I am, or I am so quick to motivate people to do the Grouse Grind/ Sun Run/ Run for the Cure with me that they think the only reason I would want to do it is because I'm naturally good at it or at least better at it than they are.

That's just silly talk. I naturally suck at many things I regularly pursue. Sure, I could be in worse shape (it could always be worse!), but even at my best I would never think to compete in anything athletic against anyone but myself. It's because I naturally suck at it that I choose to pursue it - to be a well-rounded person, not because I'm masochistic. Nature versus nurture. The fun is finding out you naturally lack in something you need, and nurturing yourself to be better at it. If you weren't born with it, and you know you need it, then you muster up the willpower and get it yourself. The ability to do so is much more attractive than sticking only with what comes easiest and least painful. I'm not intrigued by the things that come naturally; ingeniousness, after all, is like being born inheriting a cognitive empire, but it's persistence, hard work, and willpower that make a person.

That's partly why the last three weeks up have been so depressing for me. With an MA freshly in my pocket, and no promise of another challenge in the form of employment on the horizon, I mostly moped about around home with the intention of writing job applications that don't seem to be getting any notice. Thankfully, an opportunity came up for a full time temporary receptionist at the MOA. Despite being somewhat mis-qualified, I'm having an absolute blast there as the resident receptionist-economist (reconomist) and am slowly getting over my phone-shyness. It will be sad when it ends, but I've promised myself that I won't go back to the brain-dead lazy bum that I was for 3 weeks. Knowing my propensity to make rational-sounding excuses later on to justify reneging, I've backed up that promise by signing up for a French course at Continuing Studies (to motivate the brain cells and improve my hirability), and signing up for the Run for the Cure 5km (to make sure I always make time for running). As with any economist familiar with the lessons of game theory, I don't ever want to hear or make another far-fetched promise that isn't backed up by a commitment device, I've just been let down too many times.

I really miss the mountain. After my full-time stint as a reconomist is over, I'll try to squeeze one more GG session in before the season is over and I am back to hanging out on a treadmill with the incline all the way up for the rest of the year.

hand-made musical instruments

This site is cool.

Here is a cigar box guitar. This is what it sounds like. Pretty decent for $55.



And it turns out that these have already been invented: the almighty earmuff headphones!



Not as cool as the ones I was envisioning, which I found at gadget reviews.



Anyway, back to work!

"there is no exit strategy!"

An oldie, but a goodie :D.

i read very nice

I had some reading to do this afternoon, so I went to the public market for some bubble tea and sat outside on one of the benches surrounding the water feature. There were a bunch of asian families around and their kids were chasing pigeons and being all sorts of annoying to the pigeon population. Other than that, I noticed there was this guy who looked like Sam Roberts minus access to a razor, whose attire and aloofness suggested hobo, starving artist, or professional backpacker, sitting diagonal to me. Probably in his late 20's, but it was hard to tell because of his unkempt facial hair situation. He would get up and leave periodically, returning to his bench to roll a cigarette and listen to his discman, sometimes chatting with some other folks of a comparable AGI class (hmm, guess what I was reading about).

Anyway, for an hour I was totally immersed in some papers for my literature review and was furiously scribbling things down. Then I noticed that he was walking towards me. Thinking I knew what was going to happen next, I mentally flipped a coin (Harvey Two-Face style, baby) to decide whether or not I will give him any change. See, I don't really have a problem with sparing some change, but I just hate taking out my wallet to do it. It was a gift, a really pretty thing suggestive of more money than it possesses (thanks for making me look rich, Colleen), not to mention ownership of a tiny dog.

I didn't look up until his shadow was in my way, and when I did, he placed a sealed strawberry "bubble tea" (more like a smoothy from a bbt place) next to me on the bench (narrowly missing a pair of copulating flies, no less) and said, in a thick eastern european accent: "If I need excuse to give you this, it is because you read very nice." I was confused as to what he meant by "read very nice," but like that time I thought Irfan bought a real helicopter for $100, I pretended I wasn't shocked and thanked him (..twice), like I get bubble tea from vagrant celebrity look-alikes all the time. He walked away after that and didn't come back.

mmm..... dream omelet

Just a little something to tie you over until the next real blog post.

Chef Cooks 'Dream Omelet' From Recipe That Came To Him In A Dream

a meditation on bananas

-----Email Message-----
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2008 11:10 AM

I'm the kind of person who can't separate a bunch of bananas in the store because they'll miss each other. I have to buy the whole bunch, or none at all.

-----Email Messge-----
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2008 12:41 AM

i buy the saddest "charlie brown" christmas tree i can find every year because i feel sorry for it, knowing no one else would ever choose it.

i love that part of me

Taken from http://postsecret.blogspot.com/, week of July 13th, 2008.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Me, too.

Even though I can't stand the taste of bruised bananas, I sometimes would take pity on a poor, bruised banana from the fruitbasket at home and eat it first so that it would not be subject to the cruel neglect of my more discriminating family members. It's an underdog-preference complex; many of us suffer from some (though not always fruity) form of it. I would pry the injured banana from its more fortunate brethren with their clear complexions, all survivors of an unfortunate grocery bag mishap, and deem it worthy of consumption. By me. ME. Because I'm awesome.

Admittedly, beneath the sense of justice and potassium rushing through my veins lurked some doubt as to how much good I was doing for bananakind in the end. To be chosen is to be eaten, after all. Do bananas prefer to be chosen and chomped to bits, or would they rather be neglected and decompose more or less intact? Am I the god of the bananas? Are they honoured to be chosen by me regardless of what being chosen might entail? Is it the lifelong goal of the humble banana to be crushed between mighty human molars, forced into a pool of acid, and ultimately to facilitate the formation of healthy stools?

How we flatter ourselves into thinking that the objects of our desire, desire to be desired by us.

So much for rational consumers. Some of us are not even sane.

366 days later

This song came on while I was trying to write your card.

i’m never gonna give you up
what do you got if you ain’t got love
if you ain’t got love
what do you got if you ain’t got love

define dancing

The title of this blog comes from the movie WALL-E, which I just saw. It's so great. Plus, I have a major soft spot for cute robots, which I discovered the first time I laid eyes on the Mars Rovers (cuuute!). Here is a comparison:



As you can see, Opportunity needs to work on its puppy-dog eyes.

Just as Reuben (who saw it just before I did) predicted, the entire movie was an AWWW-fest for me, and I enjoyed every moment of it. More than that though, I thought it spoke volumes about the human condition.

It's obvious that the characters were deliberately portrayed so that we would generally sympathize more with the robots than the humans. They are cuter, I guess, and they are in love, and they are more alive, somehow. But it's at first rather strange that we would sympathize more with a hunk of metal than a chunk of human. The humans on board the Axiom are not evil, they are pretty nice, actually, docile. Wouldn't evolutionary urges dictate that we be more sympathetic to our own kind?

It is likely not so simple. Consider your reaction to a part of your body after it has been separated from you. The famous 'spit in the metal basin' experiment. Few people enjoy swallowing back their own spit once it leaves their mouths and falls in a clean metal container. What about your reaction to strands of hair that are one instant being lovingly conditioned and shampooed, and the next instant found at the bottom of your bathtub? Would you rather pick up dog poo than human poo - even your own? I think human society, as it's portrayed in the movie after 700 years of physical and spiritual atrophy, is the hair that is found sticking to the bottom of humanity's bath tub. It's okay when there are a few strands, easy to ignore, but we're all forgiven for worrying about the day when there will be more than just a few. When it becomes the norm.

Sure, the humans depicted were a gross (triple pun!) parody of where we're headed physically and spiritually as a species led by the affluent "West", but is it really so far off? For example, many people actually had to be told that this 'news footage':



was a fake. Many thought it was real (read the first few comments) and reacted with a disgust not unlike that which is cast upon our own bodily abjections. I knew it was fake right away, but it doesn't matter, parodies by nature have to be based on some grain of truth, on some extrapolation of a stark trend in reality, and its humourous effect is fueled by unspoken fears. I sure lmfao'd at that vid, but it was partly a nervous laugh.

My unspoken fear is that convenience is threatening human spirit. Not necessarily right now, but since when did we only worry about now? What about the rest of our lives? We take the most convenient route now in order to save time now so that we can later afford to correct the wrongs we previously inflicted upon ourselves in order to save us a few minutes or pennies in the short run, all the while forgetting what our end goal is. More convenience? More money? To ultimately never have to move your arms to pick up a Big Mac? You can tell me the feed bag idea is ridiculous and will never fly. Of course it won't, if only because it would mess up the taste, and because it looks nasty. For now. We've gotten used to and normalized a lot of nasty things over the course of our evolution, always with some noble justification. Just imagine being able to eat a fast lunch even quicker, and best of all, hands-free. Why not drive while you munch on your hands-free lunch so that you have more time to get back to the lab and find the cure for heart disease?

Do we merely want to survive, or do we want to live?

In WALL-E, one of the human characters (the captain), who has never been to earth, asks his voice-activated computer to "define dancing" after hearing about it in descriptions of former life on earth. Outside, WALL-E and his femme EVA are twirling in space. It's beautiful; it's human, we hope.

new blog

Welcome to my new blog. I've gone and left the old one. No specific reason, I just needed a change. After having not blogged anything beyond fluff for months, I feel increasingly cranky and bottled up. Fact is, I have strange ideas. Not strange, but ones that are not palatable at social gatherings, and ones that I just can't or forget to bring up one on one. I'm tired of these things keeping me awake at night as I blog in my head. I need another outlet, a public one. So here I am, and here you are.

Please enjoy your stay, and don't be afraid to judge me based on what I say.