No name

Randomly found this today. I found it really moving (and funny, of course), even though I'm far from graduating and am never going to remotely relate to the feeling of graduating from Harvard. Oh yes, and Conan rules :)

Conan O’Brien’s Speech to the Harvard Class of 2000

And we might be doing a murder mystery party this weekend. Yay :)

Yay, I actually went out and did something today! We went to Great America with friends so that our WOW card wouldn't be an absolute and complete waste, and it was pretty fun (although we only got to go on 7 rides due to the long lines...and only 2 of those were "real" rides instead of ones we went on just so we could sit down). Our parents got mad at us for coming back late though, and apparently they called us several times but we never heard the phone ring.

And I had way too much fun playing this Nancy Drew detective game (for kids) yesterday. ^^;;

Yesterday we had a group outing, our last one with all of us together, since Steven is leaving on Thursday *sniffle*. We had dinner at the Macaroni Grill, where, apparently, every other graduate from Aragon was also meeting for dinner. Then we went to the Barnes&Noble next door, where we signed yearbooks (yep, 2 months after school ended) and Chen insisted on buying a book that was shaped like a toilet.

Went to work today. I was quite surprised to discover that the packaging of the napkins indicate that they are "one-ply", not "half-ply" as I had thought. No, I didn't think "half-ply" existed either, but those napkins are just so thin. Day after day, there are more and more flies and the trays smell more like puke. And I hate the kids who come over and ask for a hundred free samples without buying anything. As some left today, they were all trying to act bad-ass and were like, "That shit tasted good!" Well, then maybe you can stop being a cheapskate actually buy some instead of taking our samples, damn it.

After work, I went with Chen to Michaels to get some arts & crafts stuff (do to extreme boredom). We got a cross-stitching thingy and a rug-making kit....and of course quickly gave up on both after starting them once we got home.

And I just discovered that I lost 3 of the drawings that I was going to put up on this blog...darn it...

I spent a lot of yesterday playing that CSI game, which finally finished downloading. In the game, you collect/analyze evidence, collect more evidence, interrogate suspects and make an arrest. I thought it was kind of cool that it was voiced by the actors in the show, and their animated counterparts look a lot like them too. Observe: (uh...these were the best pics I could find...)

                       

                       

                       

                       

                       

Ok, I left out some people, but you get the idea. My favorite character in the show was Greg, the last guy I listed, but he was particularly annoying in the game. Sometimes when I want to analyze something in the computer, he keeps saying "Hey, you can't scan that into the computer." It's a piece of paper, of course you can scan it into the goddamned computer. There are 5 cases in the game, and you get a score for how much evidence you find. It says that you can access some bonus stuff if you finish all cases with 100% of the evidence found....so I literally played this game two or three times in attempt to get 100%. I gave up, finally, after reading in a walkthrough that the bonus is some screenshots. Ok, the show comes on 5 times a day on different channels, why the hell would I want to work so hard to see some lame screenshots?!

Oh no, that ugly Even Stevens dude is coming up on Conan in a couple of minutes...must remember to turn away before that >.<

Last night Chen and I decided that we must spend no more time wasting our time by going online and watching TV all day, since there's only about 1 month of summer left. Our sad list of "stuff we can do" (other than wasting time) include playing our old instruments, buying arts and crafts from Michael's, playing board games, and cutting out the paper dolls we randomly bought on eBay two months ago. And these are not as random as they sound. Yet, I ended up spending most of today reading Yamada Taro (left...I wish this pic was bigger, but it isn't), which is about this really poor guy who's always trying to conserve money and food. I didn't think it was that funny before, but I must have been too bored for too long or something...because I suddenly found it to be hilarious. So hilarious that I laughed out loud. Several times!

Also ordered some textbooks on Half.com...which actually took quite a long time. You see, they have this offer where, if you send a "friend" a $5 coupon and they use it, you get $5 off. Since I have 2 ebay accounts, I decided to pretend to be both me and "my friend", and then bought textbooks in two separate orders. This allowed me to save $10, and I saved a total of $24 by not buying these books at the UCLA store!!! Muahahaha! I'm an evil genius!

Hmm..Even Stevens guy was actually pretty cool...and this goes for anyone else who's willing to make fun of themselves.

And Leno was pretty lame despite the whole Fab5 makeover thing. Just wait for the day when Conan replaces you. Ha! Ha! HAhahahaha!

Oh man, this Whoopi show looks so unfunny.

More randomness: Go east coast power outage! That looked fun! Yay looting!

As expected, it was another boring/pointless day of existence. Work was horrible as usual, and there was this one guy who bought $6 of food but didn't have enough cash, went to the ATM, and never returned. And we had the food scooped out for him and everything. Asshole. By the end of my shift, even one of the customers said I looked bored.

Oh, and I randomly took a nerdiness test. I got 48%, hehe, from randomly guessing...since I know nothing about Star Trek/Wars or Lord of the Rings. Oh, and Chen somehow managed to get perfect on the Conan trivia test (through repeated tries), which makes us eligible to win tickets to the taping of the 10th anniversary show...to which we would never be able to go. Yay.

Hmmm....I swear I thought of something to put down last night...but now I can't seem to recall what it was...

Ug, this is so frustrating. I've been spending a lot of time playing The Mystery of the Mummy, which is this PC game in which you go around a house in Sherlock Holmes's POV and solve puzzles. The graphics are pretty sucky, the sound skips, and, damn it, Sherlock Holmes looks like the Green Goblin from Spiderman (and consequently my principal Mr. Black). I only kept playing it because I wanted to find out what the secret of the mummy was, but all clues were pointing towards the cliched mummy-had-put-curse-on-tomb-disturber revelation anyway. I was 3/5 through the game when I finally decided to stop playing, since I couldn't go 5 minutes without dying. In any case, I still can't figure out how any of the puzzles or settings have anything to do with Sherlock Holmes. I mean, why the hell is the greatest detective of all time going around solving lame slider-puzzles? Here, allow me to provide screencaps of the game:

                       

Doesn't he look evil? Anyway, I am waiting for this CSI game to finish downloading...it's 2 gigs, so it'll take a while with my slow connection. The program says there's only 178 hours left to go!

The new Jay Chou album came in the mail yesterday, so I spent some time yesterday and today listening to it and watching the VCD that came with it. Ok, for one, Jay's songs are getting worse, though his lyrics are equally crappy as before. It is also apparent that the guy who writes most of his lyrics is running out of ideas, as one of the songs is about the pressures of playing ping pong at school. I think some of the songs are anti-drug also, but it doesn't matter anyways, since no sane person can decipher what he's saying when he "sings" anyways. I know it's a distinctive style to slur his words and thus have them be unrecognizable, but it has progressed to a point where it feels like I'm listening to korean music all over again. The VCD is also quite hilarious. In one music video, it seems as if he's some sort of Chinese mobster in an Italian mob. In another one, he beats up a gang of Chinese and American drug-dealers, and his kid brother (who's a 6-year-old drug dealer in the music video) calls him "The king of Chinese hip-hop". Chen and I couldn't stop laughing at this point, because...well, the suggestion of the existence of Chinese hip-hop is funny. I also enjoyed the photos in the album-jacket, which involve Jay trying to look cool/bad-ass in a sweater-vest. Observe:

Whoa, it's really been a week since I got back from orientation? Hmm, time really flies when you do nothing but watch TV all day. Well, actually it's a combination of playing crazy adventure games, watching TV, and going online...which has been rendered nearly impossible since we switched to DSL. It can never log onto the network, and when it does, the connection's super-slow. Now every time I see that stupid Yahoo DSL commercial in which people are amazed (simply astonished!) by the speed of DSL and the fact that that you're always connected, I want to scream and laugh hysterically at the same time.

Now let me backtrack, because I've already said everything I can about today. On Saturday, we went to Steph's party. Well, we didn't go at first because we weren't invited, but Steph called and said she swears she sent us an email...hmmmm. There were some semi-cute dorky-looking Asian guys at the party, but they're all going to Berkeley (damn, too late), and then we all played group games like "Murder" and some mob/detective/mayor/nurse thingy. Everyone else was familiar with these games, but, of course, I'd never ever heard of them. Finally, everyone else left at 3pm, because they have lives and other things to do, and, of course, we stayed till 5 or 6pm.

Also, quite horribly, we now have to work at The Grill every freaking single day (although Chen and I get to alternate...so I only have to dread the even days). I was there on Sunday, when my schedule was 12 to 4. Trust me, four hours is like hell itself, except he didn't tell me I could leave at four, so I was forced to stay till 5. Finally, at 5:15, when I was about to collapse from a combination of boredom, hunger, and having to smile the whole time, I asked him if it was time for me to leave. "Oh, and I was going to have you leave at 6 or 6:30," said the owner-guy, and then he proceeded to underpay me! I was also there today, and my hours are 11:30 to 2:30. I glanced at the clock every 2 minutes, and finally, when I was ready to leave, he asked me if I could stay longer. I lied that I might have something to do later, but just when it seemed as if he was going to have me stay longer, I went into a fit of panic and blurted out "Uh, I better just leave now" and just left! Um..so he was probably mad/weirded out.

Today, for the first time, I saw The O.C., which is a soap-opera-ish show that's like the new "90210". If you've never heard of it, guess what "The O.C." stands for. Go ahead, guess. OK, it stands for Orange County, which is strange because no one in the world (well, the real world) calls it that. Actually, when I hear the abbreviations OC, I think Obsessive-Compulsive. This explains why I want to gag and crack up at the same time whenever someone delivers a line like, "Welcome to the O.C., bitch." It like a "cool" term that TV people attempted to make up. When this expression begins to catch on in real life, and people begin to say things like "I'm going down to the O.C. this weekend", it'll be the end of the world as we know it. Anyway, I didn't get to see all of this show, but apparently the "villains" in the show are the preppy rich kids while the "heros" are the "unpopular" poorer kids who get shunned by those rich kids. Of course, the "heros" are actually very popular-looking as well. One of the actors is supposed to be 16 but looks like he's thirty. Let me see if I can find a picture of him...


OK, it might just be me, but who decided that this guy looked like he was 16? Do TV execs even know what 16-year-olds look like anymore?

Oh, Conan's on. That's all for now. I saw Ben Affleck on Leno yesterday, and he was actually pretty cool...I liked the way he made fun of Gigli (one critic said it gave him eye-cancer) himself.

Got back from orientation yesterday. I guess it was better than I expected, but it felt soooo long. Three and a half days without TV or internet? How did I survive?! I wish it'd been shorter. And cheaper. In fact, on the evaluation, I wrote "should have been shorter and cheaper" under a bunch of the comment areas. Come on, it was $400 for me. A whole bunch of the time was filled up by "fun" (note the quotation marks) activities like a variety show or scavenger hunt (which the counselor pimped excessively. "Are you going? Why not? You should go. You'll remember it forever. You should definitely go. So you're going, right?") My orientation counselor was this really nice and really cute Asian guy (who later told us he was gay...damn...). I was really shy/quiet the whole time, but apparently he just thought I was angry or something and asked me about it later. So I guess if I don't smile, people will think I'm mean, though if I do smile all the time, they'll think I'm some sort of freak. I didn't talk to that many people, so I guess I'll have to work on talking to people randomly and being more interesting when I do. Because I know I bored the hell out everyone I talked to...since all I could talk about was TV! Who knew excessive TV-watching would have adverse effects?! On the last day, we went on this tour where they told us all these stories about the school and then later revealed that they were almost all lies. Apparently, the school is so uninteresting that they had to make up stories to tell. Oh yeah, and my fall quarter classes are Computer Science 31, Math 32A, and Microbiology 6. What's microbiology, you ask. I don't know either, but I'm sure it'll bore me like crazy. That was the only life science GE (non-engineering-related-required class) that fit my schedule, so... But at least my schedule is pretty empty, and I actually have nothing on Tuesday.

I've been back from Japan for about 3 days now, but I didn't feel like posting. Japan was absolutely the best...there's so much to do that I almost wish I grew up there. There seemed to be all sorts of stores, karaoke boxes, arcades/pachinko, etc. everywhere right next to one another. And then I come back here and there's absolutely nothing do. I wish I could've stayed longer (I stayed w/my aunt, who, I'm convinced, has absolutely the best husband in the world), and I'm still a little depressed from having to return to my normal boring life. There's still a ton more to say about Tokyo, but I don't really feel like writing about it now. Maybe later.

Tomorrow I'll be leaving for the UCLA orientation thingy...and I'm keeping my expectations extra low so that I won't be too disappointed. I chose this school for the major, but I'm having second thoughts (ugh!). EE sounds so boring (and difficult) >.<...but changing majors seems so hard, what with all the extra classes I would have to take. Maybe Mechanical Engineering... I don't know.