Go on....be a Tiger!

Lately, I've came to the realization that I am quite a plain person. I really dont have any hobbies. I really dont have any special talents. My life consists of a daily ritual of going to school, going to work, going to the gym, and coming home to play computer - pretty sad in my opinion, not to mention these "hobbies" are not too applealing for the opposite sex.

For some strange reason, I've been thinking about taking up Golf. I have never been one to like golf - I've always considered it to be a boring sport. Speaking of sports......saying that golf is sport is like saying a remote control car is a motor vehicle. Regardless of what you categorize golf as, I've only been to the driving range and putting greens a few times in my life.

Always a go-getter, I drove 35 minutes to my nearest Costco and picked up my very first set of Jack Nichlas Golf Clubs. For $250, I got 10 clubs and a snazzy golf-holder-thingy; these clubs will probably break after 4 months, but you cant really get any cheaper for this, considering most high end drivers go for $500+ per club!!! I drove to my local driving range after pretending to study at Starbucks for 3 hours. (My local Starbucks is only good for one thing - it's not for the $5 coffees. Girls there are just so hot!)

The last time I ever made any functional use with a golf club was in sophmore year of college (circa 1996-1997), and even then, I have always sucked. My other encounter with golf was when it became popular in Taiwan about 12 years ago (age 16). Back then, my dad would always drag me and my brother to the driving range. I thought it was kinda boring whacking a ball into oblivion. For me at that time, oblivion was only 75-100 yards away.

I paid for my bucket of golf balls and finally arrived at the driving range. It felt almost nostalgic stepping back onto the fake turf complete with its fake golf tee. All of a sudden, I felt as if I was 16 - my dad standing behind me and coaching me about the subtleties of the proper golf swing. "Knees slightly bent and eyes always on the ball," my dad would always say. Knees bent and eyes on the ball, I wind back the 6 iron in my arm and let the golf club do what it wanted to do. WHACK - the golf ball flew straight and landed at the 100 yard mark. After 1 hour of swinging, I managed to get a few balls up to 175 yards. Of course, a lot more balls landed in the 50 yard mark. =P

Alcoholics Anonymous

After my 6 day marathon of reading, memorizing, comprehensing, and retaining 48 pages of condensed notes regarding all there is to know about the stomach, liver, pancreas, and anal sphincter, there's really only one thing on my mind right now - dammit I need a fucking drink!

I made a bet (well.......more like a self-imposed restriction) that I would not have a drink for one month. After killing my liver cells with several bouts of alcoholic beverages last weekend with friends at Tahoe, I decided that it for time for my liver to take a long awaited vacation from anything poisonous. It's quite funny.......I've never really considered myself an alcoholic. Of course Freud was right in that denial is one of man's first defense mechanisms. Dammit, but I'm not an alcoholic! Ever since I was a Junior in college (at the wee age of 20), I began binge drinking two to three times a week for pretty the majority of every year up until now.

In my marathon last week, I managed to learn that chronic liver damage results if I drink more than 5 to 7 drinks every day for more than 15 years. Thank goodness I'm not in that category. However, I belong to the category of binge drinkers. Binge drinking results in acute pancreas inflammation. You might think, "Inflammation, schminflammation! It's only your pancreas. It doesnt do anything anyways!"

The pancreas is responsible for enzymes that help with digestion of food in the intestines. It is also the organ responsible for diabetes if anything goes wrong. In the event of binge drinking, alcohol severely irritates the pancreas to you a low-grade generalized stomach ache. Also.....remember how each time you get sh!t faced with liquor, and then next day, you have the meanest explosive diarrhea ever? This next part is not proven nor will you ever find it in any of the medical literatures. My theory is that this irritation to the pancreas disrupts the intestine's ability to absorb proteins and fats from consumed food because of the lack of such pancreatic enzymes.

No enzymes = more fat in stool = more protein in stool = more water in stool. Fat + Protein + Water + Stool = The stankiest stankity runs that you will ever possibly get!

Maybe I should quit??!

I was awaken by the annoying ring of my cell phone at 8:00am - awaken from walking on the beach where I was oogling the volleyball vixens.

Me: Hello?? .......? (i just woke up.........so i sounded pretty damn groggy)
Voice: When are you coming into the office today?
Me: I'll be there in 30 minutes.

These office nazis arrive to the office at 6:30am. And what do they do?? They just surf on the internet and chat with each other in the break room about useless stuff for the first 2 hours in the mornings anyways. Why do they want me to go into the office so early? They used to ask me to go to the office at 7:30, but we all just ended up goofing off until 8:30 anyways. Whatevers. It's not like I am paid on a salary or hourly. I am technically an independant contractor, paid by productions, 20% of whatever I bring into the office is my share of the pay. So I dont really have any hourly schedule that I need to abide by. And then there is Dr. R, who is supposedly my boss, but not really. He likes to start each day with a prayer in the meeting room. I know there are laws with schools and religion, but something should be done regarding work and religion......sheesh. Dont get me wrong, I like my work - good people, good pay, decent work environment. I just dont like how inefficient it is run in the morning.

I'm basically a mobile professional - a travelling freak show, if you will. I travel to various nursing homes to take care of patients. On rare occasions, I do have to stay in the office to handle emergency cases. Regardless, I will have an assistant with me at all times. Assistants - the greatest inventions in the world. They basically do the grunt work for me. How nice is that???

I arrive at a nursing home to see Mrs. B. She was asleep with drool inching its way down her lips into a pool of its fallen brothers and sisters. I introduced myself, but she was still not responding. I nudged her shoulder gently and she awoke with the brightest twinkle in her eyes. She was adorable - I could tell that in her prime, she would have been a looker. I introduced myself and my assistant. I explained that I was the tooth fairy and that I was there to collect one tooth from her. 93 year old Mrs B. looked very fragile, both her hand stricken by arthritis and viscious atrophies, leaving only skin and bones. I held her shaking hands to comfort her and told her not to worry.

Mrs. B looked at me with yet another twinkle in her eyes and said, "You dont look like a doctor. You look like a movie star!"

Hehehe. Perhaps she was blind due to old age or maybe glaucoma or cataracts caused her to percieve differently, but she just made my day. =)

Oh, the tooth came out fine. Mrs. B became a nickel richer that day.

Onomatopoeia

Tonight, I was talking to Anna on the phone while she was driving to a friend's place. The phone call started off with her explaining a mishap she had with one of her close friends. Somehow the path of our conversation shifted towards talking about Cranium and FOB's in general.


Then out of the blue, Anna asked me, "Do you know what "scaffold" means?" as a test to see if I was still a FOB. Of course she didnt ask in a skeptic way, but girls are a mysterious species and you know what what to expect with them! :oD

Scaffold (skaf'eld, -old')......... Dammit! What does it mean? I had heard the word many times before and I was pretty sure I've used it a couple of times - but for some strange reason, the word slipped from my data bank. Perhpas the word went into hiding since my everyday vocabulary consists of words such as atelectasis, zygomaticofacial complex, and cholecystoduodenostomy - damn my life is sad, aint it?

"You know what it means, right?" Anna urged on.

Not wanting her to think I was a FOB at heart, I tried faking my way. Scaffold............probably doesnt mean something that can fold, just because it would be stupid and too easy? Scaffold......probably some kind of makeshift thing since it can fold? That's when I remember the book, Scarlet Letter. It turned out that the adulterers had to stand on some kind of platform, called a Scaffold. Having been in New York, where most buildings have been standing around for centuries and in need of crazy reconstructing, for the past 4 years, I remember seeing a lot of these Scaffolds. Scaffold.........must be some kind of makeshift construction platform.

Onomatopoeia...........never know when it will come in handy! Thanks Mrs. Kuno (9th grade English teacher)!!

Snowy Diswonderland

I just got back from my week in San Francisco and Lake Tahoe. It's amazing how sometimes months may go by where nothing significant happens. My one week vacation was packed with many ups and downs, as well as lefts and rights.

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Sunday - December 25, 2005
Landed at San Jose International Airport at 6pm - it wasnt until 7pm when Dave greeted me at the terminals. We had a quick dinner and decided to hit up an Asian party up in the city (aka: San Francisco). Being from California for so long, it was rather strange to be in a place where Asian Americans pretty much dominate the night scenes. Back home in Dallas, I would be lucky if I saw another Asian girl, be it Chinese, korean, or even Indians, at any of the evening shindigs.

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Tuesday - December 27, 2005
Went to dinner at Peter and Tina's, where we had traditional chinese hot pot - damn that stuff was good. After dinner, we settled for drinking games and board games. Playing board games with your boys - how much more queer can it get? It just goes to show you that life cant always be suspended in the college era where binge drinking and clubbing became more important than attending that lecture given by some famous Nobel Laureate. I had fun doing whatever with the boys. It didnt matter what we did - we could have been in a book club discussing Stephen Hawkin's theories for all i care, the point was that I got a chance to hang with my friends, and it was all that mattered.






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Thursday - December 29, 2005
Benny, Dave, and I arrived at Lake Tahoe after eventually sobering up from previous night of more alcohol intoxication. We didnt arrive at the slopes till 1pm-ish. Benny and I are decent snowboarders; we both have our own equipments and feel relatively at-ease with carving powder. Dave wasnt a true beginner, he had been on the board a couple of times, but really never let go his fear of toe-side manuevers. On our very first run on the slopes, and just after two falls, Dave managed to catch snow and pretty much fell face first.

"Hey guys..........I cant move my arm......." said Dave.

$850 and 2 hours later, Dave's right shoulder was placed back into its socket.



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Friday - December 20, 2005
The day started horrible. Benny and I tried to go snowboarding in spite of the unrelenting rain. Two hours later, my "Waterproof" clothes became completely soaked. Good thing my 3 layers of clothes underneath stayed somewhat dry - we wouldnt want any of my appendages to fall off now do we? =P

We ended the day with a blast..........blasts (aka:shots) of Rum! Groups of us hopped into the hot tub. Nothing beats the feeling of warm bubbles at your feet (and other places) while freezing rain water and gusts of wind hits you from the top. Benny, Dave, and I started off with some Cup-O-Noodles. Cup-O-Noodles miraculously turned into beer cans. Beer cans miraculously turned into shots of shots of Rum. After what seemed like 5 hours, the three of us managed to chug a few beers each and polish away half of those Costco-sized Barcadi Rum. The three of us were all OWN3D!



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Saturday - December 31, 2005
The Northern California rain continued the entire night. Floods and high winds threatened the entire Lake Tahoe area. What normally took us 3-4 hours of driving home lasted for 8 hours. We left Tahoe at 11AM and didnt not return to SF until 7pm. Thanks a lot, freaking Cumulous Nimbus!!!!!

After arriving home, we had to prepare for dinner and a Black Tie New Years Eve party in the city. We went to this pretty fancy chinese restaurant near where Benny lived, somewhere in South SF. It turned out the restaurant was holding a wedding reception for the Chen/Lee families. The kid in me wanted to re-enact "Wedding Crashers," but the mature adult inside me (hahaha....I dont know how there was ever one) stayed at bay. It turned out that the restaurant's upstairs was still open to the public.

We finally arrived at the New Year's Eve party around 10pm. By that time, the place was pretty much half capacity (this is the optimistic side of me talking now). It's nice to see parties with well dressed asians. Even if all of them dressed in FUBU's by day, they sure had me fooled at the event. Being away from the bay area for so long, I really didnt know anyone there besides my core friends - I almost felt like a stranger in a place where I spent 6 years of my life. The combination of whiskies, vodkas, loud music, swirly lights, meeting 50+ of my friends's friends, I was beginning to swirl myself. Throughout the entire night, all the girls I have met have been friends' friends. I got sick of meeting new people (and drinking), and began to wander aimlessly by myself. During my wander, I saw this girl that I thought I had met back in college. I went to talk to her. Turned out I had never met Anna before. Perhaps it was my drunkeness playing tricks on me. Perhaps it her pheromone that lured me in. Perhaps it was serendipity.......except in the movie "Serendipity," the two cities involved were New York and San Francisco. Anna invited me and go eat some post-drinking food with her and her friends. I countered her invite by inviting her to go eat with my friends. We ended up picking up some pizza from some drive by place and after-partied at Benny's house (yes......house, this 28 year old mofo actually owns 4 houses. And dont even get me started on how many houses Peter owns.) We karaoked away to Benny playing Jay Chow's tunes on his piano.