conquering the world one oxymoron at a time
Archive for December, 2005
December 15, 2005 at 11:35 pm · Filed under tv/movies
“This is the apprentice, not the apprenti.”
Thanks, Randal, for perpetuating the stereotype that MIT people can’t speak english. I know it sounds like it fits, but did you really have to say “apprenti”? With your 5 academic degrees, of which you never fail to remind others, surely somewhere along the way, you learned how to use a terminal “s” to make words plural? Well, at least I can still sleep knowing that Donald didn’t hire you for your language skills.
now back to exam studying …
December 13, 2005 at 6:34 pm · Filed under friends
Big Yuffie: Shan, looks like you got an early christmas present
Big Yuffie: I wish someone put christmas lights on my desk
Big Yuffie: hahahha
Big Yuffie: so who’s it from?
wahooswu: no clue, nobody knows … and i don’t even know how to find out
Big Yuffie: oh yeah, and also
Big Yuffie: in jr high, all the cool girls hanged out with boys
wahooswu: who? like kelsey and laura and mindy, etc. etc. etc.?
Big Yuffie: none of those names are familiar
wahooswu: hahaha
Big Yuffie: but you did hang out with boys in jr high
wahooswu: hmm … no mostly, i avoided boys in jr high
wahooswu: and talked about them with yin yin & xijia and stuff
Big Yuffie: remember the co rec?
Big Yuffie: the hours we spent playing monoploy
wahooswu: okay, so the msh crowd
Big Yuffie: that was time well spend
wahooswu: basketball and stuff
Big Yuffie: that’s right
wahooswu: i dunno … corec that summer was awesome
wahooswu: with you and zheng, and xijia for part of it
wahooswu: but overall … i always felt like you boys didn’t like us girls playing bball with you
Big Yuffie: yeah we didn’t want to play with you guys
Big Yuffie: you guys played like girls
wahooswu: that and the fact that i had a crush on jiangbo, made me not want to play even more
Big Yuffie: you had a crush on jingbo?
wahooswu: hahaha, yeah
wahooswu: for a long time too, bet you never knew that
Big Yuffie: no I did not
wahooswu: that’s what girlfriends were for
wahooswu: we’d just sit around and talk about guys we had crushes on … all of us had one
Big Yuffie: hahah
Big Yuffie: that’s like sex and the city
Big Yuffie: with training bras
December 13, 2005 at 2:02 pm · Filed under daily grind
I walked into my office today for the first time around noon and noticed lit christmas lights everywhere. I thought “woah, cool! My office mates put up christmas lights!” Then I quickly realized that the lights are only strung around the shelves above MY desk, and were plugged into MY power strip. The lights weren’t here when I left last night around 7pm, but they were here already when a post-doc came in at 7:30am this morning. No note, no explanation, no nothing. Nobody knows who or why.
My officemates think that I have a secret admirer, which is an entertaining and attractive thought. I’m thinking though, that it was a practical joke by someone who had key access to our office. So who’s the ghost of christmas lights? Nobody knows.
December 12, 2005 at 12:14 am · Filed under friends
The older I get, the more I realize how much I need my girlfriends. Sadly, the older I get, the fewer girlfriends I have. Ever since this summer, I’ve been obsessed with the Sex & the City lifestyle. I want the parties, the clothes, the shoes, the men, and most of all, I want the girlfriends who are there no matter what, the girlfriends whom I can cry to, the girlfriends who will back me up and tell me that He’s bad for me.
I got brunch with a friend today, and it was one of those things that can only be described as “I’m so glad that I did this,” and lord only knows how much I have needed these things lately. It was so refreshing to have someone actually listen to me talk, someone who didn’t try to sum up all of my problems in one sentence and offer me unhelpful, overly-simplified solutions. It was a relief to be able to gripe for 10 minutes about how I FEEL without any interruptions, and to be told at the end of those 10 minutes the most understanding, the most heartfelt, the most thoughtful things. Most of all, I loved that she knew exactly where I was coming from, why I saw things the way that I did. She could relate to me.
So why is it that I have such a hard time finding girlfriends like this? Junior high, it was unacceptable to hang out with boys, so off I went with my girlfriends whom I still consider some of my best friends today. Magnet high was filled with friends whose bridal showers and weddings I attended. Governor’s School was the first time things got a bit different; I hung out with the math team and chess team and then played frisbee and pulled fire alarms (wait, did I do that?) when I wasn’t doing my physics homework. But through it all, there was always Ali. And sometimes I feel like I miss her more than anything else from high school.
But college … I am so thankful for the wonderful friends that I made for life at UVA, but they are also all male. Sure, being in the engineering school made it just a tad different from high school and junior high, but UVA was 55% female overall. Sometimes I wish that I had rushed a sorority, or been more active in SWE. Ugh. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
December 11, 2005 at 12:15 am · Filed under daily grind
When I meet people for the first time, I don’t like telling them what I do. In a way, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I go to MIT, that I’m a PhD student. Non-professionals seem intimidated by it; professionals don’t know what to make of it.
My response, when I’m asked what I do, used to be “oh, I’m a grad student.” Inevitably though, people dig further, “what do you study? where?” Then I feel worse for having not completely revealed what I actually do, as if I were trying to hide arrogance by feigning modesty. So then, for a while, I answered with the direct approach, “I am a PhD student at MIT, studying Bioengineering.” The response I got in reply? “Well, that’s no basket-weaving, that’s for sure.”
Lawyers, consultants, bankers, it didn’t matter; they all gave the same response: “That ain’t no basket-weaving.” Do people study this phrase in company training case-studies? Do they teach people how/when to say this in business school? Law school? Etiquette school? It’s not a clever response anymore when everybody uses it; it is actually rather absurd.
Speaking of absurdity, I got stopped for directions twice yesterday in the hallways of MIT. So my skills at attracting lost strangers is not restricted to the dark streets of downtown Boston.
I’m gonna try this new thing at the end of posts. We’ll see how soon I get tired of it.
currently listening: Firefly by Ben Arnold
current mood: mellow
December 8, 2005 at 11:00 pm · Filed under dating/relationships
I’m staring at my computer, and I can’t feel anything except an extreme sense of emptiness. Something my parents said to me over Thanksgiving break finally sunk in tonight and broke my heart all over again. While home, they off-handed said that they have had all of my “wedding money” set aside now for a few months. I guess as parents of a daughter, you never quite know when to start saving for her wedding, but you don’t set aside that lump sum until you’re pretty sure she’s getting married soon. My parents really did think that I was going to get married soon.
So what happened? He claims personality differences. I claim religion. We both claim religion, but he still stands by personality differences. I claim forever together as the reason to overlook those differences; he claims those differences prevent us from considering forever together. Two and a half years, and we still claim religion. We were fools to think that it would ever be different.
Weeks, months have passed. Goodbyes have been said. The tears have all been shed. Now why the emptiness all of a sudden again?
December 8, 2005 at 12:26 am · Filed under wahoowa
Instead of studying for my french test, I started to look through all of the folders in My Documents on my desktop. Stumbled on some priceless quotes from those good ol’ eschool days:
Spence: i think engineering frats have gender confusion because the girls are still considered brothers
Brad: but really it’s only the girls who are confused because they think they are boys…
Spence: yeah but the boys are confused too because they look at the girls and think the girls are boys and then they’d be confused about what they are themselves. Wouldn’t you think that’d be a dysfunctional family?
brad: Every time an albino whale breaches, it sunburns. it’s like, is that a whale or a giant tomato??
vince: yeah! like, a tomato is a vegetarian version of a whale!
valter: come to think of it, almost all animals in africa are poisonous
me: even giraffes?
valter: only if you kiss them
me: yeah… if it were a date, i just simultaneously cheated on 3 different guys all at the same time with all of them present
philip: I knew you were good
gordon: star trek:nemesis is b-a-d, bad. if you TLBed it, it’d just come out bad, like it would be hard-wired to bad
(I guess this is only funny if you know what TLBs are.)
me: so why are you so happy vince?
jess: vince exchanged url’s with a girl
vince: yeah, she SO gave me her universal resource locator
December 6, 2005 at 9:32 pm · Filed under wahoowa, people
Tonight, while navigating the backstreets of downtown Boston/financial/district/”I didn’t really know where I was between Downtown Crossing and Park Street”, I got approached FOUR times for directions from random people. Was it a coincidence? Four times is a lot of times in 10-15 minutes. Do I, in general, look less intimidating and more approachable than the other people in the streets? I’m thinking that this probably isn’t a good thing, considering the fact that I was walking around by myself along sketchy, narrow, dark streets further darkened by humongously tall office buildings. Maybe I need to work on looking tougher.
As to why I was down there in the first place, I was reading applications from Boston-area candidates as a part of the Jefferson Scholars Boston Regional Selection Committee. I happened to meet the chair of the committee back in October at a cocktail party down at the Harbor Hotel. It turned out that the committee was looking for some fresh faces. I guess I looked fresh enough and managed to shimmy my way in.
I found it fascinating being on the other side of this process. This year’s application was almost completely different from the one I filled it out 6 years ago, and it freaked me out that one guidance counselor wrote something about recommending the kid for UVA’s Class of 2010. 2010!!! Once again, I felt old. And all these kids got to turn in their application ONLINE! I remember typing, and retyping, my entire application on our school’s typewriter using scratch paper, before finally getting up the nerve to type on the actual scholarship application, and still ended up cursing myself and struggling with the white-out brush. Repeat 10 times for all the other schools and scholarships for which I was applying. Weren’t those the days?
December 4, 2005 at 1:50 am · Filed under tv/movies
the biggest letdown of the year. I had to fight to pay attention through the movie; most of the time, I was bored out of my mind. While reading the books, I remember thinking to myself that Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix were too long. I remember flipping through pages just so I didn’t have to read about flickering fires in the Gryffindor reading room. This movie gave me the same feeling. I felt like so much of what was in it was unnecessary, and the necessary story development things were completely ignored.
So in the end, the movie was a forced string-together of various plot highlights from the book, and it ain’t pretty. There were no transitions, no explanations, nothing. I’m hugely disappointed. Also, after all that media and fanfare about Cho Chang, Harry’s love interest, she was in the 2.5 hour movie for all of 5 minutes. So much for that.
December 3, 2005 at 3:03 am · Filed under daily grind
I started IMing a lot again, and since I’m kinda too irked/pissed-off to fall asleep right now, here are some snippets:
P super Bald: i want a gf just so i can have a dance partner
P super Bald: an obligated dance partner
P super Bald: that’d be sweet
P super Bald: i think that’s going to be my away message
jason rathesun: i mean from a capitalist point of view the hos when
jason rathesun: win
jason rathesun: darn
jason rathesun: homophones
jason rathesun: i must be getting sleepy
jason rathesun: i think that is probably a disorder
jason rathesun: typing in homophones
« Previous entries ·
Next entries »
