hehe check out the medicalert necklace I just had engraved for my friend Alex's belated bday gift.

School's out for the semester. I'm 25% finished my degree. Hooray. I've got a good list of shit to do over the summer, including finding an on-campus job to make some extra bucks, but I've run into that problem that I suffer whenever I'm out of school and out of work... the less I have to do, the less gets done. The inverse of which is the more I have to do, the more I get done. The biggest challenge for me is leaving the house. If all my tasks could be done sitting here in front of my computer, I would be so much more efficient. Unfortunately I can't get an oil change or car wash or get packages shipped out from my desk here. Dammit there's got to be a name for this disorder.

I sometimes have to ask myself why I am living in this country. When I first came down, it was like the gold rush of the late 1800s all over again. People my age were striking it rich working for these .com companies where they worked their asses off but were rewarded with free everything, lavish launch parties, and huge stock options. Suddenly work was fun and fulfilling and you, as an individual, contributed to the success of something really big. Of course now we know, there was no gold to be struck. Yet, I'm still here. The carnival atmosphere of the late 90s to 2000 is dried up and now we live in fear.

Once in a while I stop and realize that being in this country actually scares the shit out of me. 9/11 was a tremendous tragedy. Many innocent people died and their families still suffer today and always will. The threat of terrorism absolutely freaks me out. But two wrongs don't make a right. Slaughtering civilians by the thousands and torturing Iraqi soldiers and then, for Christ's sake, posing for pictures ($%?#!) does not bring back the victims of 9/11 or solve any problems for that matter. Americans sometimes wonder why the rest of the world hates America. After a performance like that, the question is, how can they not? And then you read garbage like this and fully realize how backwards some people in this country are. The only thing that scares me more than terrorism in this country is people who justify war and violence with all this Christian/conservative/patriotic rhetoric.

OMG these shirts rock.

My latest AOL CD came in a compressed wood box. What the hell. Before that it came in a tin. Even they poke fun at the fact that we get enough AOL CDs to create giant mosaics. So why the hell do they keep doing this? It pains me to throw them away because I can picture them piling up in some landfill but hell will freeze over before I go back to dial up and especially with AOL. I try to do what I can with the container it comes in though. I wonder if their free CD overload has any other consumers pissed. The environmentalist types couldn't be happy about this.

Hooray for NBC. The Fall line up includes a show with an Asian American lead. The Men's Room will be about 3 guys, one of them is John Cho. Can't wait to see it. I just hope they assign some good qualities to him. If he inherits those age old stereotyped characteristics like nerdy, unathletic, weak and lacking in sex drive, it'll be campaign time again. In the same vein, the Details Magazine apology will be coming out in June. We asked for a full page apology and a promise to do diversity training. We'll see what they produce. The draft we saw pretty much said "we're sorry you were offended." Is that a load of shit or what?

The only problem with staying up late to muck around online is that I get hungry and feel the need to, well, eat. But that means packing away another meal that my exercise deprived body doesn't need. So the key is to stay up late...but only to the point that I feel mild hunger pangs coming on.

I need a summer job bad. I'm going to have to resort to walking dogs and mowing lawns soon. The job with this program at school that helps transition low income students from high school to SF State will not likely pan out given that Arnie is making even the smarter kids go to junior college to somehow fix the budget shortfall. The other one I applied for was to check students in at a computer lab. Boring and low pay yes, but a job nonetheless but I didn't get the job. I have no idea how I could've not gotten the job unless the people who beat me to it had help desk experience and completed some corporate customer service training program or something. Productive to me means making some sort of money, even if it's just a little here and there to pay for books. Damn you Arnold.

I realize that once in while I have a hard time concentrating on tasks that require a fair amount of my attention. But what really distracts me more than anything is sharing my table with someone who is even less focussed than I. The guy who is sitting across from me right now in the library study area unpacked his bags on the table here about 30 minutes ago. One macro-econ text, two folders of papers, a notebook and a laptop. After all that, he put his head down and slept for about 20 minutes. He was probably nearing his REM stage when I moved my laptop over in hopes of getting a better Internet connection. (didn't work). Anyways, I think the rubber feet on my laptop dragging across the table echoed through the top of the table and right into ear because it woke him up quite suddenly. Sorry dude. He has since picked up some paper back book but in the last 10 minutes has not turned one page. I can tell he is reading the same paragraph over and over again. Have I gotten much work done in this time? Well, no. Too busy surfing wedding sites for Gi, watching this guy sitting across from me, and now blogging about it.

So summer is coming, which means fewer classes. A lot fewer. It's not like SFU's trimester system where you can take a full load year round, which was a beautiful thing. I'm taking a graduate level special topics course -- ie I develop a detailed thesis statement and do research on my topic for a semester under the guidance of my sponsoring prof. I'm very excited about doing this as it's the highest level of research I've ever done. I'll also be tutoring at least one student I know of over the summer, helping him catch up and get ready for grade eight, or eighth grade as they call it here. But what the hell am I going to do with the rest of my time? Well, since I'm only allowed to work legally on campus, I applied for some oncampus jobs. The problem? They pay a whopping $8.50 - $10 an hour. Yah you heard right. I've never made that little money in my life. My starting wage as a gymnastics coach (the job I worked between age 16 to 21) was around $12, usually it was more like $16. It sucks so bad to be applying for such low wage jobs but better to be making $8.50 an hour than spending it. I was also going to take a digital filmmaking course at College of San Mateo but it's around $550 and the credits don't really apply to my program so I'm thinking I'll learn by book, video and trial and error and use that money to buy more equipment. Might also volunteer to help with other people's documentary projects or something. Jeez I feel like my hands are tied not being able to get a real summer job like everyone else.

I ordered Charlotte Sometimes for $5.99 and free shipping from DeepDiscountDVD.com. I found that site from BensBargains.net.
Problem is I ordered it two weeks ago, it hasn't arrived and my order page says the order is shipped and complete. WTF. Where the hell is my DVD and what do I do now?

No matter what. I am completely inefficient and frustrated when my place is a mess. Going out and leaving the mess behind makes me feel guilty and even more frustrated when I get home. I don't know how some people can live like this. We haven't had time to really clean since Simon's family left. There's boxes from the cases of fruit and from various things purchased online and shipped all piled in a corner with all the free newspapers they keep delivering that we don't read. Jackets that never made it to the closet are all piled on the couch. I feel a desperate need to vaccuum and mop and clean everything I see but reality is I have 3 exams, a paper and a production project worth most of my mark all due in the next week and a half. So I must resist, although I spent yesterday and this morning doing 4 loads of laundry that I now have to fold (by myself I might add since someone seems to make a habit of going out every Thursday night even when there's more important things to do). Fuck.

Spencer Nakasako's film is on tomorrow night on TV! Nakasako is a local Asian American filmmaker who has won an Emmy award (I think it was for "AKA Don Bonus"). He's known for helping SF area youth at risk by lending them a camera to record their lives and teaching them the art of filmmaking and editing. I've seen one of his films, "Kelly Loves Tony" and it was really touching. Can't wait to see this one.

11pm Independent Lens (KQED Channel 9): "Refugee"

Three young Cambodian American men, raised on tough streets of San Francisco, travel to Cambodia and capture their experiences of meeting fathers, sisters and brothers for the first time.

So several people have reminded me the last episode of Friends is on tonight. Boohoo. Sadly, I don't care. The lack of minority representation (ethnic or otherwise) really ruins it for me. And, frankly, I don't find the show all that funny. I'm not that big on sitcoms in general but I find Will & Grace and Scrubs to have far greater laugh-out-loud, intelligent humour. Even better? Documentaries. It's APA Heritage month. Check out the REALLY good shit they have on KQED this month. If you have digital cable, check out Searching for Asian America.

Hanging out in the ugly, tiny, windowless, cement wall, basement level room we call a grad lounge, I heard another tidbit to file under "I can't believe how fucking stupid the undergrads in this school are". One of my peers is taking an undergrad (but upper level) psych course. The topic of discussion was how African Americans have higher blood pressure than people of other races in America. One student raised his hand and said "I think it, like, has to do with the civil rights movement." Woohoo, that definitely makes it in the top ten. I was told the prof then found some politically correct, non self-esteem damaging way to say that he'd completely missed the mark on that one. Apparently this is the student who, during introductions on the first day of class, informed everyone that he was taking the class because he had failed it once already.

If you have a page on LinkedIn.com. Do be careful if you currently have a job but your profile says that you are considering other opportunities. All I had to do was click on one of my previous companies' names and up popped all my former co-workers. Some are still at NetIQ but, gee lookie here, seems like they don't want to be there.

Just checked my phone bill. I used my cell for a whopping 37 minutes last month. I think it's time to downgrade my plan to basic plus. Thank god computer mediated communication don't cost me shit.