conquering the world one oxymoron at a time
May 15, 2007 at 1:28 pm · Filed under dating/relationships
One thing I like about going to the local REI is interacting with the cute nerdy guys who work there. As soon as I walk in, they come up to ask if I need help with anything, always so friendly, smiling, and so obviously in love with their sport(s) of choice. As I walk by them standing in aisles, deep in conversation with other customers, I always eavesdrop and smile to myself when I hear them so passionately explaining why welded seams are better than stitched, or why the nozzle of one floor pump is better than the other brand.
I always wonder how these cute nerdy sporty boys would be as boyfriends (I mean, they’re cute, so why not think more serious? :). They’re laid-back, outdoorsy, LOVE gear (hey, they’re selling it, and REI is that kind of a place where they hire people to sell stuff they believe in) … what’s there not to love, right?
Then I think, they probably wouldn’t ever want to put on a suit, or a tux, or go to fancy restaurants with me. That’s the problem with cute nerdy guys who work at REI. They can rattle off bike gear ratios, but they don’t know what cuff links are.
May 7, 2007 at 6:49 pm · Filed under grad life/MIT
I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly sensitive person; I don’t get offended easily, and I usually roll really well with bar jokes, so it’s strange that I questioned a few times this week whether or not I was being too sensitive to things.
The most recent episode involved an email sent out to announce a campus-wide event. There’s a lot of back story that I won’t go into, but essentially the email was coming from a group with a history of tension with the event’s organizing committee, the latter of which I was a member. I read a strong antagonistic tone, expressed in a passive aggressive way, in the email, so I voiced my concerns to the organization committee. Only one person agreed with me in taking offense, which prompted me to ask if I was being overly sensitive, especially when one dissenting email started out with “Well, maybe I’m too insensitive … ”
Or maybe it’s back to the perpetual problem of reading too intonation in emails/IMs that aren’t actually present.
May 1, 2007 at 2:09 am · Filed under hobbies
The local burrito shop puts their burritos in these brown paper bags for take-out. Recently, the bags started touting an advertisement for Tri State Trek, a 270-mile bike ride from Boston to New York (through three states). When I saw this for the first time earlier today, I thought “wow, cool. I’m looking for something to train for this summer, why not a bike ride?”
So I went to the website and checked it out. That’s when I found out that it’s a fundraising event, which then immediately turned me off to the race. Registration for this event is $135, and each rider must raise a minimum of $1650. The cause is a good one, Lou Gehrig’s Disease … but I just don’t do well with fundraisers.
This makes me think about recent solicitations I have gotten from friends in the past doing raises for a cause, asking for donations. If I remember (and I try to remember), I do almost always go and contribute some small amount. So why am I so skittish about doing one of these things myself? I’m not sure. I guess I’m afraid of bugging people; I don’t want to make people feel obligated.
So I think, did I feel obligated to give to my friends in the past? To be fair, I think I did feel a certain level of obligation; I probably wouldn’t have ever contributed to these charities otherwise. This latter point is probably why these races happen: the charities really can raise money from it, and from people who otherwise wouldn’t have given anything but do because their friends and family are bugging them.
I don’t know … maybe one of these days, I’ll get over whatever complex I have against these things. In the meantime, I’ll just continue my small donations to friends undertaking ginormous tasks of raising money for charity through completion of feats of endurance and strength.
April 17, 2007 at 2:47 pm · Filed under current events
I never thought such an incident would hit so close to home. It may as well have been the University of Virginia. I can’t even begin to imagine the anger and pain of the students, faculty, staff, and their families.
April 17, 2007 at 12:55 am · Filed under the internet, tv/movies
I rarely ever mindlessly watch TV, but figured tonight was as good of a night to start as any. I’m mostly emailing and reading blogs on my computer, but a movie trailer commercial caught my eye. I was even more shocked when at the end of it, instead of a website, it listed a myspace site.
Remember when movie trailers didn’t even have websites attached to them? When did that start? I want to say mid to late 90s; I always wondered when they would run out of domain names because the movie websites kept getting longer and longer. So now maybe they did run out of domain names and decided to go with myspace instead.
I don’t like this trend, mostly because I don’t like myspace.
April 13, 2007 at 4:23 pm · Filed under friends
A college friend of mine is the luckiest person I know. It’s as if he has a four-leaf clover in his pocket every day of the week (remember that Futurama episode of Fry’s 4-leaf clover?). Here are three examples of why my friend Paul is the luckiest person I know.
- Once upon a time, Paul and I took a trip to Europe together during the summer. Before the school year ended, the local Peace Frogs store sponsored a “European Backpacking Trip” seminar for students and advertised the event by saying that they would be raffling off a First Class 2-month Eurail pass. Paul decided at the last minute that he would go to this seminar and check out the happenings for the both of us. He ended up winning the raffle for the Eurail pass in the popularly-attended seminar.
- Every year, the Engineering Student Council sponsors E-week (engineers-week) with games and food and prizes. One of the games featured an iPod as the first-place prize. I had class, so I told the guy I was dating at the time to go play the game and potentially win me an iPod. Paul somehow found out about this game and decided to also go for shits & giggles. Paul ended up winning the silly little game of chance and subsequently the iPod.
- Yesterday, Paul told me that he won another iPod, a silver nano. It was some kind of meeting for school, and he decided to go at the last minute. When he showed up, he realized that there was a raffle for an iPod nano, so he entered the raffle (I mean, why not?). Well, he won.
So my question is, how does one person get so lucky? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. It’s not like a skill that you practice, like piano, whereby you can get better. It’s an intangible chance that shouldn’t differ from person to person. So how is it that my friend Paul has all the luck?
More importantly, what is the mechanism for this so that I can either learn from him, or take some of his luck?
April 5, 2007 at 9:41 pm · Filed under random
My parents went to Las Vegas today. At some point over the last 2 or 3 years, they realized that it was futile to hold out on vacations in order to coordinate with my schedule and take family trips together. So on a whim, they decided to take a mini-vacation out west, specifically Las Vegas. Pretty cute, huh?
Except my mom lost her wallet along the way… completely gone (stolen perhaps?). Luckily for her, she never puts anything useful in her wallet anyways because she depends on my dad to have money, credit cards, passport, gift cards, all the important stuff one normally keeps in one’s wallet. The only thing she had in there was her driver’s license.
Having recently requested a replacement after losing my own driver’s license, I became the front-line consultant. My dad gave me all of her information earlier tonight, and I very quickly submitted a duplicate license request for my mom just now. Then I called my dad to tell him that I’ve put in the request, and that more likely than not by the time they get home early next week, her new license will have already arrived in the mailbox.
He sounded unusually giddy when I told him this. Then he told me that they were currently drinking beers. Apparently they got thirsty, and waters cost $6.50 a glass whereas beers are only $2. So naturally, they went for the beer.
That’s Vegas for ya … I hope they have a fun time out there :)
April 3, 2007 at 8:32 pm · Filed under people
The scholarship I had at Virginia is very good about keeping alumni involved and informed as to the happenings of the program. Today, I received mail listing the high school seniors who were recently named Scholars after a grueling weekend of exams, dinners, and interviews. As I always do, I scan the list for other South Carolinians because there never were many of us at Virginia. Sure enough, there was a guy from Greenville, SC. He goes to Christ Church Episcopal School.
The name of the school sounded eerily familiar, which is strange indeed because why would I have ever heard of Christ Church Episcopal School in Greenville? I know no private schools; I’m not religious; Greenville, SC is clear across on the other side of the state from Charleston … why was this name so familiar to me?
Then I realized that CCES was where Dr. Cox went to be Headmaster after he left the president’s job at SCGSSM. Such a small world…
This then reminded me of a recent encounter where I met someone random at a party, and it turned out that he was college friends with a high school friend of mine. Really, we ARE all connected in strangely familiar ways.
March 30, 2007 at 3:52 pm · Filed under hobbies
Last weekend, I met up with Liang for some midday bloody marys, with brunch on the side. He must have been drunk because he let me test ride his sweet sweet fixie afterwards, and I kinda got hooked. So I think I’m in the market now for a fixie. If/when I get one, I will have 4 bikes (#1, #2, #3), but I’m trying to sell #1. Maybe I’ll have better luck than the first time around. So if anyone’s in the market for a 2002 Gary Fisher Wahoo, let me know :)
I began my search for a fixie today on Craigslist. There really aren’t so many options, or maybe I just don’t know how to look. Additionally, I got really upset seeing Walmart bikes being sold for $150 with the caption “full suspension! Only $150!” Yeah right; the bike is maybe worth ~$80 completely new from Walmart. Why are people so dis-integritous? On craigslist no less! Isn’t craigslist supposed to be some kind of honor system cult?
Yes, I know dis-integritous is not a word.
Additional note: I just read this craigslist ad. WTF?? Kmart doesn’t even sell $300 bikes new. Is this person out of his mind???
March 29, 2007 at 11:41 am · Filed under daily grind
In working with student government this past year, I’ve come across several people who are students but who try to be politicians. And by that, I mean the sleazy, slippery, reason-we-hate-politicians type of politicians. I don’t particularly understand the motivation, except maybe to just appear as a politician. I guess people have made comments such as, “Yeah, he’s just being a good politician”, and maybe these are the compliments these people strive to get.
I get very frustrated working with these people, and I visibly fume. Take a recent example where one student completely and ruthlessly expressed his disgust with a particularly idea, in the company of a group of other students. However, when the audience changed to a key MIT administrator, the same student sweet-talked the administrator and told stories about how he really supported the idea and how he only wished he could have done more to convince others that it was a good idea.
My jaws dropped during that meeting. While I never had that great of an impression of this guy before, he just lost all forms of respect from me.
When I brought this up with the two other students in the meeting, they agreed, but one of them backed up the sleazy guy and said, “Well, he was just being a good politician. He did what was best for us, and he said what I wouldn’t have been able to say.” I was more shocked. So now his actions are being viewed as good? When did we lose all sense of integrity??
I really feel that there are two ways to do politics: with slippery sleaziness and with integrity. The slippery sleaziness is like the hacked temporary solution; you smile and tell people what they want to hear knowing full well that you are completely lying to them. It’s not even a white lie; you are just flat-out lying through your teeth. The people are happy with you in the moment, but 1) everyone else who witnesses this loses respect for you, and 2) eventually the people you lied to figure it out, and they too, hate you.
The integrity is trying your best to do what is right and to be able to in your heart, justify your decisions. It’s impossible to make everyone happy, and politicians have that impossible task. So the point shouldn’t be to make everyone happy, but to have a good feeling about the decisions you do make. People will disagree, but you can go to sleep at night knowing you did your best and your actions were not questionable morally.
I heard a talk recently, by a Harvard Business School graduate-turned entrepreneur. He talked about this idea of a company culture, and how important that was especially for a small start-up. He put up a list of qualities to define his current company culture (small startup with some 10 employees, I think). And in there, specifically, says “As much as possible, do everything that is right.” He even mentioned in his talk that they value personality so much when hiring. If someone is arrogant, that’s a big red flag. If someone seems dishonest, that’s a even bigger no-no.
So often, HBS graduates and politicians and entrepreneurs get lumped into the same pot of “sleazy schmoozers”, and it was nice and refreshing to see a completely humble and down to earth guy talk about the importance of integrity and company culture. It made me feel kinda justified in my whole view that politics can be conducted with integrity instead of immorality.
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