monkey nonsense

i used to hate it in my college classes (particularly one freshmen year class where “D is for diploma” couldn’t have been more true…) when the professor would, in the middle of a proof, say “…and the rest is trivial” and stop explaining everything. i hated when professors glossed over things because hey, this idiot back here? i don’t understand!!

luckily, i ran into many smart classmates who had an insane amount of patience. who would answer all my stupid questions, explain concepts over and over again, and take the extra time to make sure i actually understood what was going on, not just the answer to that particular question. my helpful classmates were really awesome and i always said that i’d try to do the same, i’d try to be patient with anyone who might be having a difficult time understanding something i understood. fortunately, given that my understanding is very limited, i never really ran into many people asking me to explain things i hope i was helpful to the intro programming kids with their questions… that might’ve been the only class i could’ve helped in

today, my coworker (who has previously asked me “is ___ online? what does that little square next to his name mean? what is away?”) asked me more Paint questions. he’s asked me previously how to fill in boxes with color. this, in addition to asking me Word questions (and those AIM questions… and heck, even random questions about his work that i would know nothing about), has driven me nuts. i find myself trying to be as patient as possible explaining to him these things. then i realized how bad i’d become. i was like the “and the rest is trivial” professor i hated.

i want to say his questions were stupid because it’s not as if i have “superior” knowledge about this special thing… it’s AIM! Paint! Word!!! i want to say that my stupid questions are more acceptable because those were more “harder” things but then, a lot of my questions in that freshmen class must have seem pretty stupid. (sample question i recall asking someone in a logic class… “What does that upside down A mean? And that backwards E?”) and just because in my opinion the subject of my question was “harder,” is it necessarily a tougher subject to understand? because there were people in my class whose overall grades were over 100% and yet i was struggling even to get a 60%! (i also wasn’t doing my homework, but that’s another issue)

as you become more and more “educated,” do more and more questions seem to be more stupid and less acceptable? (by acceptable, i mean… can you ask it without fear of people thinking you’re stupid?) do you have less patience with these “stupid” questions? are some questions just so stupid that they shouldn’t be asked? are there some stupid questions that are acceptable? or are stupid questions never acceptable? because there’ll always be someone who knows more and to whom the question will seem stupid to…

so i did it.

for those of you who’ve been keeping track, the past 2 years haven’t been the greatest for me. here’s what i’ve accomplished:

• broke 2 IBM keyboards (popped off keys cannot be popped back in place), popped off 3 Dell keys
• picked up a propensity to curse, only when related to one thing
• picked up a shorter and shorter temper, a quicker and quicker snap judgement
• picked up an inability to seperate my frustrations from the rest of my life, resulting in a huuuuge decrease in the quality of life.

on valentine’s day, my parents finally told me it was ok. honestly, it was the happiest i’d been in nearly 2 years. freaked out briefly when some friends tried to talk me out of it. i respected their advice and wanted to follow it, but i also knew that i couldn’t. i just didn’t have enough in me to continue. i held out hope that i could make it work out.

the final straw was this wednesday night. i ended up leaving work earlier than i intended to to attend to some business. when my cell phone (which i already knew had crappy reception in the house) stopped working, i proceeded to throw a tantrum (yeah, i would go so far as to call it a tantrum) for nearly a hour. i’m not even sure why i got so angry, just that i was really frustrated by everything. i got so frustrated that i was exhausted after a hour of being angry and fell asleep.

so i did it thursday. and i haven’t felt this relaxed in a long time. i’m sure in a few weeks, i’ll come back down to reality and be stressed again (this time for another reason). but for the time being, this is the best i’ve felt since graduating college. i hope this is the start of getting back on track.

went snowboarding for the very first time this weekend! never been skiing/snowboarding before in my life before this! (ok… so i did go “skiing” when i was 6 at my cousin’s wedding/family reunion. but i was so little and so crappy at it that all i remember was “sledding” on the skis in the flat area by the ski lodge and drinking hot chocolate with my mom after getting bored)

fun: driving up and stopping at all the sporting goods stores along the way in search of ski pants. snowboarding class (came as a packaged deal)… the instructor was pretty patient and had good tips. unfortunately, he couldn’t do much in helping me learn how to execute his tips but eh, whatever. we saw one of the other classes going at the same time where they were learning to go across the mountain and weeeeeeeirdly, the instructor was behind one of the students gliding with her and holding her up. it was pretty funny to see.

no fun: ski lifts…. every single time that we got off the ski lift, i fell. and not just gracefully, like take out everyone and anyone on the ski lift with me. i kept gliding left for some strange reason and each time, i ended up sitting on the rightmost seat so i ended up cutting across everyone right as we got off and then falling right in their paths. the other boo thing is that i don’t normally get sore… but today, my neck just ached so badly! it’s gotten to the point where i use my arms to lower or raise my head since my neck just hurts so much when i try to use it. bah, a few times now i’ve actually dropped by head by accident because i didn’t realize the wall was behind me. idiot.

so… anyone up for curling?! there’s a curling open house in the DC area this thursday, saturday, and sunday. man! the olympics are so coool, always makes me want to go try to do those things i see on tv! on the drive up to the ski place, i was listening to nbc’s olympic theme song

after another crappy crappy situation, i was sooo incredibly frustrated last night. nearly broke my cell phone on the way home tossing it against my windshield. no phone calls went through, stupid reception! but that phone is the most durable thing i’ve ever seen!!

my parents decided to make the long trek to northern virginia from MD to see me. since my room was a mess and i didn’t want my mom nagging me about cleaning it, i prohibited my parents from going to my room. they decided to take me out to mcdonald’s instead

over a nice cone of softserve ice cream (dad had a vanilla milkshake which he gloated was a better deal… but you don’t get the yummy styrofoam cone!!), my parents told me that they’d support whatever i decided to do. it made me feel good (though scared) when they said “you have a plan and as long as you have a plan, then we’ll support you. we just wanted to make sure you weren’t crazy and do something you’ll regret.”

then my mom gave me 3 more $5 mcdonald’s gift cards telling me i’d need them. parents are the best.

…. i have a plan?

fuck sam. (anyone watch desperate housewives?)

got to thinking about education and how what we learn in school translates to the real world. does it really translate? here’s a list of thoroughly useless things i learned throughout school… let me know if you’ve found a real life application for the information.

• Geography – Still haven’t found any use for my knowledge of geography. Also, remember the tundra, savanna, and steppe terrains? or how maryland is like “a minature united states in that it has the coastal plains, the piedmont foothills, and the appalachian mountains” or something like that? no one really mentioned the types of terrain… they say “I want to visit the Serengeti” … not “I want to visit the savanna plains.”
• Simple Machines – This was one of my favorite units during science class. Learning about levers, inclined planes, screws, pulleys, wedges, and the wheel was fun and having to “invent” something with it as a final project was fun (:-P haha, i still remember our “home hair cutting machine”), but does anyone really say “why, this simplifies the amount of work we need to do because it’s a lever!” or “what we need here is an inclined plane and screw!” …if they do, what profession are they in?? because i’d be interested in that.
• How to make paper – i *think* the way we made paper was to rip up paper and mix it with water until it became a pulp…. so really, it was more like recycling paper. but when would one need to make their own paper (out of paper…) or recycle their own paper?
• Recorder – My elementary school required all 4th graders to play the recorder… everyone had to play it, regardless of whether you wanted to continue with instrumental music in 5th and 6th grade. What’s the point? It’s not as if we learned how to read music… we were just given numberings which told us which holes to cover. It didn’t prepare me to better learn the violin!
• Juggling scarves – I thought this unit in gym class was completely useless. Juggling itself is probably not that useful (though i do want to learn how to juggle things now), but scarves?! that’s the least likeliest thing you’d ever need to juggle!

hrm… i’m sure there’s more useless things that are taught in schools these days… can’t seem to think of any others off the top of my head

so after every visit to the dentist, i usually come back and google/wikipedia things to learn a bit more about what occurred with my teeth.

so the tooth i got root canal-ed was my 12 year molar… i got them when i was 16, what a misnomer! (so i’m a bit slow…) they actually haven’t fully erupted, part of the tooth is still in the gums. so normally after a root canal, they’ll grind away the crown part of your tooth and put a fake crown on top. since my tooth was partially in the gums, i had to get some gum “surgery” so that the crown would have space.

on the receipt, it listed a gingivectomy! haha, i got a gingivectomy! i tried to come back and wikipedia it to learn more about it and to my surprise, wikipedia did not have an article for it!!

gingivectomy – Gingivectomy is a form of gum surgery. It is best described as the surgical removal of gingiva. Healthy gums are an important part of a person’s general oral hygiene and appearance. Sometimes in certain people the gums can grow and build up over the front surface of a tooth. This formation of extra gum can change the balance between the length of the teeth and the height of the gum line, leading in some cases to a person having a bad smile.

A gingivectomy is a type of minor surgery that involves the removal of a small amount of gum tissue around a tooth or teeth. A gingivectomy can be performed to correct a poor smile or maybe needed to be done to remove a diseased tooth, or allow a filling to be placed.

Performing a gingivectomy is quick and relatively painless. Firstly a local anesthetic is applied to completely numb the area of the gums. A small incision is made and the excess gum tissue is removed using a dental tool. A periodontal dressing covers the teeth and gums post-surgery to protect them while fully healing. This takes a few weeks, but after that the gum is completely free of pain.

for work, i had to email my manager one “interesting fact” about myself by noon today for our meeting.

dude, that was so hard! i couldn’t think of anything interesting. my coworker IMed and wanted to collaborate and make something clever up. i was totally useless. (he had some pretty funny ideas though.) came up with a couple of ones that i thought were pretty interesting and amusing. when i told my friend, she pointed out that it wasn’t something about me… but something about my parents, my sister, someone else, etc.

man, for once, being completely normal has a drawback! and then, what’s appropriate to tell coworkers? i don’t want to (inaccurately i might add) come off as weird or lazy or anything! so that eliminated everything monkey and sleep related…

Tuesday, February 7, 2006; Posted: 9:18 a.m. EST (14:18 GMT)

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — The car chase capital of the world is going high-tech to end dangerous pursuits across Southern California.

Police Chief William J. Bratton unveiled a strange new weapon in the police department’s strategy to halt high-speed pursuits — adhesive darts with a global positioning system that are fired at fleeing cars by police.

Once fired from a patrol car, the GPS dart is designed to stick to a fleeing car, allowing squad cars to back off the chase.

“Instead of us pushing them doing 70 or 80 miles an hour,” Bratton said, “this device allows us not to have to pursue after the car. It allows us to start vectoring where the car is.”

U.S. Department of Justice officials suggested testing the StarChase system in Los Angeles. A small number of patrol cars will be equipped with the compressed air launchers, which fire the miniature GPS receivers in a sticky compound resembling a golf ball.

There were more than 600 pursuits in Los Angeles and more than 100,000 nationwide last year. Critics have long questioned the wisdom of police pursuits because they can endanger bystanders and officers.

Bratton, who often calls the city the car chase capital of the world, was asked why there are so many pursuits in Los Angeles: “There are a lot of nuts here,” he said.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

from: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/02/07/lapd.gps.ap/index.html

i just noticed i wore sneakers to work today

… 2 hours after i left. baaah! in the mornings, i’m so unaware of everything! i remember once in high school, i actually put on 2 different shoes and drove to pick up a friend. when i got out of the car to ring her doorbell, i noticed i had 2 different shoes on and had to go back and switch.

one day, i’m going to forget to change my pants or something and go to work with my PJs on