monkey nonsense

You Are Big Bird

Talented, smart, and friendly… you’re also one of the sanest people around. You are usually feeling: Happy. From riding a unicycle to writing poetry, you have plenty of hobbies to keep you busy. You are famous for: Being a friend to everyone. Even the grumpiest person gets along with you. How you life your life: Joyfully. “Super. Duper. Flooper.”

i’m not sure about a couple of the things said in this quiz… (“Super. Duper. Flooper.”… what the heck does that even mean?!), but one thing i DO agree with is that i’m one of the sanest people around!

ann: ur parents are over
ann: being crazy
ann: ur dad wants to throw an oldies party
ann: and we’re in charge of making sure chang shu shu and him don’t drink too much

bah!!! they didn’t tell me they’d be partying it up at ann’s parents’ place!! that’s only 20 minutes from where i live… i guess they don’t want any kids cramping their style.

this morning, i woke up late. at 8:10. when may called to say she was ready. (errr, my alarm never went off. so i got ready as fast as i could. luckily traffic was light because of the holiday and i think we didn’t get in too late.)

on the metro ride, i noticed my shirt was a bit different. and then i realized. i wore my shirt inside out!! again.

in my rush to get ready as fast as possible, i grabbed a white shirt and just put it on. since it just came out of laundry (and i hadn’t folded it yet), it was slightly flipped inside out so i flipped it really quickly to put it on. apparently, i flipped it in the wrong direction. baaaaaaah!!

this is the second time that i’ve recently worn a shirt inside out. i did it one other time with another shirt. (to my credit, that shirt is really simple and looks the same inside and out, with the exception of the seams and the tag. and shirts these days… a lot of them have seams that stick out on the outside!) i need to pay more attention to tags.

i claim one of my pet peeves is when people act as if they know me, but really they don’t know me at all. i think i’m a very private person, that not many people know me very well. claiming this as a pet peeve furthers perpetuates that idea. i’ll admit, i do use it as an excuse a lot of times to avoid/justify not getting to know people better. and it’s also why i don’t claim to have many close friends. because i’m almost afraid to say that i know someone well… because what if i don’t??

the whole idea of people not knowing the “real” me is based a lot on differences in perception. i would guess 9 out of the 10 people who “know” me perceive me to be: a weird, crazed, monkey obsessed, blue tongued, candy popping, hyperactive, immature slacker who’s shallow and simpleminded (or something like panera’s you pick two… i’m sure you would’ve used at least two of those adjectives to describe me if you suddenly had to describe me for some strange reason). i used to get annoyed when people thought those things of me because i thought of myself differently. i didn’t understand why anyone would even think of me that way. what about my other characteristics?? like uh… er… yeah.

i realize now that when i get nervous (which is quite often… i’m actually pretty shy though those who know me from back then might actually have mistaken me for being outgoing), i tend to become a goofball. call it the chandler bing(!) defense mechanism if you will… whenever i get into an uncomfortable social situation, i’ll start to joke around and inevitably, i’m suddenly known as the blue tongued one, monkey girl, hyperactive/ADD person, etc etc. it’s weird to think how all your actions, however you perceive them, can be perceived differently (not necessarily misperceived because i guess there is no wrong perception). so i understand how people get, in my opinion, the wrong impression and as much as i think they’re wrong, i also realize that their conclusions must have been drawn from somewhere. something i did at some point in time must have been “ambiguous” (not sure that’s the correct word really) enough to allow that.

but humans all think/perceive things differently. every little detail in life (even things like colors… everyone sees colors a little differently) would be open to interpretation with nobody in complete agreement. yet somehow, we are able to generally come up with what constitutes red, yellow, any other color. i think we’re able to come to an agreement because what our eyes perceive falls into what our language has defined as red (or yellow or any other color). when we see only a limited palette of colors (like if an artist only uses certain colors), our eyes actually compensate by seeing gray or white or whatever as the missing color though it’s not really that color. i think perhaps the way we perceive people’s behavior is the same. with only limited exposure, we tend to fill in the blanks and start to generalize as to what their typical personality may be like. following that argument then, if a person really got to know me, they’d really know me.

i guess i comforted myself by telling myself that at least those close to me knew the “real” me. but more and more it seems, the difference in how i perceive myself versus how others perceive me is growing. found out recently how some close friends perceived me. wow, completely different than what i thought of myself. and it kind of made me sad.

anyone remember james from saved by the bell?! he worked at the max as a waiter and was a part time actor or something. in a couple of the episodes, the kids asked him to pose as someone else to trick belding or something. i think one time, he was acting like a college rep from haaaaaaaah-vard (the episode where the snotty standsbury rep only wanted to talk to zach because he got like a 1601 or something ridiculously impossible on the SAT).

i just saw him on arrested development!! i was re-watching season 1… and the one where michael gets in a car accident because of lucille and she tries to blame it on him… the doctor who takes care of michael is played by james!!!

i miss good shows like arrested development. heck, i even miss old shows like saved by the bell.

pretty cool article about a M.S educated pizza deliverer… makes me want to try something else as a career!

Study Hard and You, Too, Can Deliver Pizza
People might say I’m crazy to waste my education, but I have what most of them don’t: a job I love.

By Kathy Kallenbach Clark
Newsweek

May 22, 2006 issue – I’m a 43-year-old mother of three young kids with a Master of Science degree. I also deliver pizzas for a living. I started doing it after staying home with my children for four years. Caring for your kids all day is a fantastic opportunity for many women, but it wasn’t right for me. I began suffering from depression and decided to get a job so I’d have more of my own identity. Now I work nights when my husband is home so we don’t have to depend on child care.

After I learned the basics of pizza delivery—like getting the orders together and not getting lost—I began to fine-tune my new “career.” Being competitive and organized by nature, I studied the tipping patterns and demographics of the town.

Our community had a small, expensive liberal-arts college full of students who ordered lots of pizzas. Most of the kids were friendly and polite. On Friday and Saturday nights, some of the dorms had huge parties. Though the stairs were sticky from beer and the music was so loud they couldn’t hear me knock on the door, the crowds of happy students shouting, “Pizza! Pizza!” always let me through.

A few of the quieter dorms were full of more studious students who seemed to look down on me, perhaps because they were on their way to more professional employment. I always felt like telling them that they should stay in school and get their master’s degrees, and maybe one day they would have the wonderful experience of delivering pizzas.

The first few days of each month, one of us drivers would take our turn covering the public-housing developments. These customers did not always tip well, but I always liked seeing the children and adults sitting outside and enjoying the evenings when the weather was nice. The higher-income neighborhoods were much quieter, and I rarely saw neighbors talking to each other.

The delivery area was quite large, but in a country town like that one you could drive 10 or 15 miles and hit only one stoplight, so a quick driver could cover more than 100 miles and 20 deliveries a night. I learned to love the solitude, listening to music, looking up at the stars and thinking about life.

A year ago my husband switched jobs and we moved to the suburb of a large city. I planned to get a job that would put my degree to use, but within two weeks of settling in I found myself yearning to drive again. I went to work with a pizza franchise and once again had to learn how to pack orders and not get lost. Within a month I learned the lay of the land, which included eight-lane highways and stoplights every mile. Deliveries take far more time, but some things never change. The college routine continues, and public-assistance checks bring a boost of business at the beginning of the month.

I also deliver to multimillion-dollar homes now, but the amount I make in tips has stayed the same. As I drive up to these beautiful houses, it’s easy to fantasize about a generous tip. The person who answers the door invariably looks young and, like the members of my own family, highly educated. All I usually get is a brief “Thank you” and a dollar or two. (Why do people tip a waiter 20 percent to bring them their food from a kitchen that’s 15 feet away but barely tip someone who drives 10 miles to do it?)

Not everyone is generous, but most of the people I meet are honest and will tell me if I give them a $5 bill in change when I should have given them a dollar. Still, there are some who like to try to put one over on me. I wonder how those people feel about tak-ing my money. Do they think the company will make up for it? The truth is that if I come up short at the end of the night, I pay for it out of my pocket.

I keep my résumé up to date and look for jobs that require my degree, but I haven’t found anything that interests me. I feel bad that my daughter does not ask me to speak at her school on career day, but there is something about delivering pizzas that I find very fulfilling. I love watching the moon change nightly and working with fun, happy people. This job has made me very nonjudgmental about what people choose to do for a living.

You can now order a pizza on the Internet, but it is still a real person who has to deliver it. If you’re lucky, you’ll get someone like me, who loves her job. Please tip accordingly.

CLARK lives in Newark, Dela.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

from: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12776623/site/newsweek/?GT1=8199

so WB and UPN are merging into one network called CW.

i just heard the very, very disturbing thing that the CW is considering bring back 7th Heaven. PLEASE please do not bring back 7th Heaven over Veronica Mars. that would be the dumbest move EVER.

i can’t believe how successful 7th Heaven, the longest running family drama or some crap like that, has been. i used to watch the show for purely crap entertainment purposes. i remember discussing with shruti all the fake melodrama going on with the family, the terrible acting, and the poor conclusions/resolutions the show would come up with for the problems. it was hilarious.

but then, it got worse. whereas maybe it used to be a somewhat painful (like running into the corner of a table/chair and stubbing your toe) to sit through an episode, now it was like getting hit by a train and then run over… then having that train realize you got run over and it reversing itself to get off you… but say the train is like 100 cars long and 99 of the cars have already run over you… and now those 99 cars are re-running over you to get off you. it was that bad. finally… when it seemed the show would be put out of its misery, this is quality story tellling that ended it all… (sorry if you didn’t want to be spoiled, but i doubt any of you guys cared):

On last week’s episode there were even suspicions voiced that Rose was pretending to be pregnant to pressure Simon into going through with the marriage. But all that was a false alarm.

Monday night, the wedding ceremony, after so much build up, wasn’t seen by viewers.

In fact, it didn’t happen.

“We never even got into the church. We just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t right,” Simon told one latecomer to the reception, where everyone seemed in wonderful spirits — and quite relieved by the outcome.

Adding to the good cheer: Son Matt (departed original cast member Barry Watson, making a guest appearance) and his wife Sarah announced they are having twin boys.

Pregnant daughter Lucy and her husband Kevin chimed in to say they’re expecting twin boys, too.

And, not to be outdone, daughter Mary (departed regular Jessica Biel, also back for the episode) and Carlos, reunited after a marital split, had their own scoop: They are expecting twin girls.

c’mon!! Veronica Mars better be back if 7th Heaven gets to come back! i’ve already lost Arrested Development this season

my parents are party animals. i guess that’s not a bad thing… they’ve worked hard their whole life, always putting my sister and me before themselves. now that we’re all grown up, it’s only natural that they begin to enjoy life right?

but sometimes, i think it’s out of control… staying out til 2-3am in the mornings, parties every day of the weekend, their social life is better than mine! i used to come back during breaks from college and expect some quality family time only to have my parents tell me, at the last minute of course, that they already have plans but i was welcome to make plans with my own friends. so some times i would go out with friends, but i was always home at a reasonable hour. but my parents? those crazy partyers… they’d be out until the wee hours of the morning!! most times though, i wouldn’t be able to find any friends to hang out with. after all, most holidays, it’s the parents who want the kids home for quality family time… not the kid! so my friends were all busy hanging out with their parents!

some times i’ll call home to see how they are… and they’ll pick up with all this noise in the background. “oh we have a few people over… what’d you say? i can’t hear… hey, we’ll call you back.” other times, i’ll try to surprise my parents by coming home unannounced on a week day if i happen to be in MD, only to be met with disappointment as i come home to an empty house. where are they on this tuesday night?? it is a “work night” is it not??

well today was mother’s day. first off, i thought it was unspoken that children will want to celebrate mother’s day with their mothers whenever possible. plus, the last time i was home (2 weeks ago), i mentioned how i’d see them on mother’s day. so i called them today before heading off to tutoring, warning them i’d be unreachable until i finished tutoring at 5:30, but that i was planning to head to MD right afterwards. boy was i surprised when my dad told me that they already had plans for the evening.

what??? with who??
fine, some old friends from taiwan.
what about some other time this week? next weekend?
no, they’re in town for the whole week through next weekend!!

fine! i guess i’ll just keep my mom’s mother’s day present for myself!

so everybody who knows me knows i tap/shake my foot a lot.

sorry.

my parents have tried to get me to stop.
“it’s not lady like!”
“so ugly!”
“you’re losing money every time you tap!”
“you’ll get big legs!”
… and numerous other things

friends have tried to get me to stop.
“you’ll get big legs!”
“it’s so annoying!”
“you’re making the whole pew/row of desks/car shake!”
… and numerous other things.

none of it worked. i still tap. i don’t know why it is. i don’t even notice when my leg starts to move. typically, someone will tell me/tap my leg.

today, i was napping on the metro on the way to work. suddenly, someone tapped my leg. i woke up startled and immediately looked at my leg. it was NOT moving… for once! turns out the lady sitting next to me poked me with her purse while getting up. oops, i instinctively thought it was my leg moving again.

on another note: i have big legs. DARN foot tapping!!

i heard on the radio today that may 10th is national clean up your room day!

i did some googling and it seems, although it is called “national,” there really is no formal declaration of national clean up your room day. this is good i guess i would like to clean up my room a little maybe?

incidentally, may 10th is also george’s “birthday.” it is the date that my mom told me is the day she bought george. i seriously doubt she remembers what date she bought george (though i do know he was purchased in 1980)… i think she just randomly made up a date when i was bugging her about his birthday. hrm… i wonder why she chose may 10th.