I don’t like listening to music being played by other people through the wall. I never agree with his/her choice of music. To make matters worse, I have to put up with a muffled version of it.
That’s most neighbors. My current neighbor is special. He doesn’t listen to music in the traditional sense; instead, he seems to enjoy just previewing music. His songs stop in the middle for no apparent reason. He plays the same segment over and over sometimes.
Why? Damn it, why?
This is worse than the girl who used to practice playing drums in James. (She would play a beat, and just when I got used to it, she would make a mistake and start over, throwing me off completely.)
Never believe anything I say when I am sleepy. I am a lying bastard. I will do anything that will get myself off the phone with you in order to sleep some more. This includes promising that I will do something or be somewhere at a certain time (usually immediately). Know that when I say that I’m ready, I’m just ready to go back to sleep.
Just because I’m sleepy doesn’t mean that my mind is any slower. In fact, I’d say that I can say some of the greatest lies when I am desperate for sleep. For instance, Wendy tried to get me up today by telling me to go shower, and refused to hang up until she heard some water sounds. I first tried to just imitate water with my mouth, but that failed miserably. So I just told her that the bathroom was occupied. She said I have two bathrooms, so I told her they were both occupied. Case solved.
I used to be less subtle about my desire to sleep. I think I’ve told Sharon, “Stop bothering me, you dirty whore!” and proceeded to hang up on her. (This is according to her. For all I know, she could be making it up. But I believe her.) I don’t actually remember ever calling her that, unfortunately. I may have said some even more atrocious words to other people who have tried to wake me up, aside from my parents.
Please don’t be mad at me for either yelling or lying to you. I feel like I have a rude relative who always ruins parties by throwing feces around. Except I’m my own rude relative.
There are some people in this world who blog like there’s no tomorrow. I’m talking about people who update their blog several times a day. I’m impressed by that, but at the same time, I wonder where they get all their thoughts from. I wonder if their computers are within their reach all day long. (Which is possible, as a cubicle tenant.)
I’ve noticed that those who write a lot tend to be writers themselves. Still, you would think that there is more to life than just blogging all day long. Every little thing gets written down. You can almost follow their entire day’s train of thought.
While I think that it’s very nice to update frequently, I find that people who update too often often lose me as a visitor. The ones I follow are usually those who update just often enough to get me interested, and are easy to catch up on when I hit those periods in time where I cannot access a computer.
When I read stuff, I like to read the entire thing. I also like to read in order. Thus when I am forced to read a lot in order to catch up on this person’s life, I get frustrated and overwhelmed, and eventually just give up.
As a side note, I feel like I’m running out of ideas for writing. Last night I wrote three separate entries, one after another, and decided to publish none of them because I thought they were either written poorly or irrelevant. I’m not too fond of this one, either.
I resigned for a multitude of reasons, among them:
Progress was going way too slowly. It seemed to me that we were all bitten by the perfectionist bug that I have. We were trying to build a hotel before we have even built a Lego house.
The meetings take forever. I don’t know why, but meetings always take a couple of hours. Afterwards, we are all hungry, so we go eat for another hour or two. That’s a whole day out the window. Not that the meetings aren’t necessary, but they are a major drain on resources.
Nobody was motivated. We have all put in much work, time, and effort, but in vain it seems. We have yet to receive any rewards, and I’m not even talking about money. The lack of progress creates a seemingly endless road.
Several people have been lost. In fact, it was pretty obvious that we would continue losing people, quicker than we would make progress.
I didn’t feel like I was fulfilling my responsibilities. I may not have been the only one who felt that way, but that does not excuse my negligence of duty. Although my resignation may deal quite a blow to the company, I would rather do that than continue acting irresponsibly.
It’s sad, really. I have been with this company from the start. I would have liked to see it grow and prosper. We had so many people who were talented and motivated.
I really don’t understand the mentality of some of my suitemates. They live here, yet they treat this place like a dump. It’s one thing to be a slob, but an entirely different matter when you just start leaving garbage on the floor or on the tables, thinking that there would be someone to clean it up for you.
Other things they have done:
Finished a case of beer and just leaving it next to the garbage can for weeks, even though we’re the ones who are suppose to take out the trash, not the cleaning lady.
Ordering Chinese take-out and doing the same thing as the case of beer.
Entering a perfectly clean bathroom but leaving one with toilet paper and puddles of water everywhere.
And of course, leaving little bits of garbage everywhere, like cup noodles packaging, styrofoam from packaging, etc. You know, it’s the little things that count.
I suppose I shouldn’t be upset. These bathrooms are already much nicer than the ones that we had in James. At least we haven’t had feces on the toilet seat yet.
I went down to the mail room this morning to pick up my package, and the guy in front of me was told to open up his package and inspect it. Seeing as how the war has just started, I assumed that they were checking for bombs or something. (In retrospect, that’s a pretty dumb way of checking for bombs.)
When it was my turn to pick up my package, I was also told to do the same. I opened up my box, but saw nothing but a CompUSA receipt and peanuts inside.
It turns out that some person(s) decided to break into the mail room this weekend and go Christmas shopping. I got my hard drive stolen. It was supposed to be a “slick deal”, too. At least I wasn’t one of those poor people who had their laptops stolen.
They were pretty prepared for this heist, too — they brought thick tape with them so that they could open and reseal everything, taking anything they wanted in between.
The detective at the mail room didn’t know who I should go to for reimbursement. He suggested that I go to my RHD and to Kelly Quad’s RHD (since the mail room is located in Kelly Quad.
Oddly enough, he was more upset than I was. I guess the hard drive was something that I wasn’t really expecting (since it took so long to ship), so the anticipation had kind of worn off already. Then again, he had to deal with cases worse than mine, like stolen laptops.
I also felt very secure, thinking that there would always be someone to protect me. The first and most obvious target would be the school, since they have a history of reimbursing people for stolen property. Next would be my credit card company. As a last resort, I could always beg CompUSA, seeing as how they are a pretty big company. Of course, this is under the assumption that big companies don’t want to upset any of their customers and will go under the policy, “the customer is always right.”
I wish people were more considerate sometimes. Stealing from your fellow students. (I’m assuming that they are also students.) Shame on you.
I must apologize for all my misspellings in the past couple of entries. I realize that they must be incredibly difficult to read. I will eventually add a spell-checker to this page.
Modified code for blog so that the text parser acts more like a LaTeX parser, i.e. “double quotes” and ‘single quotes’ are automatically converted to their HTML equivalents — not to mention em dashes and en dashes are parsed and double newlines automatically create pagagraphs.
I worked on this from 9:00 p.m. – 12:30 a.m. (Sorry, I just had to demonstrate that en dash.)
I will eventually put up the code for this, but I’m kind of already behind schedule. (Man, it’s so nice not having to worry about
tags.)
Oh, and idea (but not code) stolen from SmartyPants. Hmm, maybe I should implement the nice ellipses code…
Once again, this school commences deforestization.
It has occurred once before, back when I lived in James, when they were building a parking lot. One morning the forest was there, the next it was completely gone. The stench of freshly killed trees lingered for a week. Yes, even trees’ corpses have smells.
Here, in the Undergraduate Apartments, it begins again. The first telltale sign was when they posted up a sign on the front door, saying that any cars parked along a certain area would be towed. Spring Break came and went. I parked my car the night I came back, and noticed that there were a lot less trees where there used to be. I also saw lots of construction vehicles on top of flat areas that did not exist before. But it was only this morning, when I looked out the window and saw a few trees near the parking lot, a lot of trees very far off in the distance, and nothing in the middle, did I realize the magnitude of this massacre.
Yes, massacre. For this school to make more money, it destroys so many trees around here. For more students to be able to live here, so they can more conveniently be ripped off on their meal plans and books. Suddenly, all those earthworms, rabbits, sparrows, and stray cats have no place to live. They are forced to migrate to other parts because the human virus has spread.
It’s a disgusting fact — schools are not educational institutions, they are businesses. SUNY Stony Brook, for example, is gradually moving away from being a state university to being a private school so they can no longer be shackled by SUNY’s limits on how much they can charge students. Hence the gradual shift of their web site from being at sunysb.edu to stonybrook.edu, and their insistence on replacing all references of SUNY Stony Brook to Stony Brook University.
Pro-war or not, I am really disappointed in the way people have been responding. For the most part, I see people complaining either about how the war is replacing all their favorite television programs, or about how the war is not entertaining enough.
Haven’t you ever thought of those who are fighting in it?
Haven’t you ever thought that someone you know and love may be fighting in it?
I am very forgetful sometimes. I wish I wasn’t. It would make life so much easier.
Yesterday, I lost my car. Because of this, I wound up walking seven extra blocks in the rain, holding an umbrella and cradling a bag containing a friend’s laptop, its accessories (power supply, CD-RW drive, etc.), and a text book. (I had to cradle it to keep it from getting wet.)
Today, I left all my toiletries at home. I had to buy a new toothbrush. Luckily, I have extra of everything else, and I can use those until next week (or whenever I go back home).
At least this is better than the time I left my dorm keys at home.
Even today, there are many subtle ways of oppressing women.
Today, my friend called me and told me that her feet hurt. She had been walking around in a showroom all day long, in heels. She can’t wear anything else because the last time she tried, everyone there looked at her funny, as though it were improper, not allowed. Because she is a woman, she needs to wear heels in this “classy” environment, regardless of her feet and back pains.
Another friend of mine feels that, because of her lack of height, it is necessary to always wear heels. She even insisted on wearing heels this one time when we went out just to play frisbee. Unfortunately, she too suffers from back pains constantly, and her wearing heels all the time does not help at all.
Reminds me of the good old days of foot binding and corset wearing.