monkey nonsense

something came up this weekend that made me wonder… how long is it ok to carry a grudge? when do u let things go and when do you “stand by your principles?”

in 1995, my parents were “betrayed” by close family friends who sued them over… of all things, chinese school!! BAH! right??? it seems a ridiculous thing to sue someone over. and it was doubly retarded because they were all close friends. in any case, sides were taken and suddenly, close friendships were lost. many of the kids i grew up with actually sided with the people suing my family and it was kind of sad… i didn’t hang out with them anymore. however, on the positive side, i got to know many of my now close family friends a whole lot better and that is why we’re close family friends today. i think in high school, it was easy to have a sense of rivalry with our former chinese school classmates because there was a sense of pride over what our parents had overcome in creating the. greatest. chinese. academy. ever. haha, ok… maybe i was a tad obsessed.

it also hurt because a year after all this, my mom got really sick and ended up needing a lot of support from friends and family. i was quite sad that many of the close friends that i thought would have been there for her… didn’t even visit her while she was in the hospital. it was sort of sad to think that they couldn’t get over their sense of pride over chinese school to be there for her.

about 2-3 years ago, the parents of one of the people who sued my parents died. i grew up (and even shared a birthday!) with their son so i felt bad… but it’d been over 10 years since i last had even seen this guy. my parents told me that his grandparent had died and that there would be a memorial service… i asked my parents whether they would attend and my mom said no. i actually scolded my parents about carrying a grudge for too long. in the end, my parents called the adults and according to my mom, they had a nice long phone conversation… but both sides realized that they weren’t close friends anymore.

now one of the kids of the main people suing my parents owns a bubble tea shop right by my parents’ house. i don’t really go to it that often just because i’ve always preferred slurpees when home… but i’ve gone to it once or twice. but it came up in conversation with my sister this last time she was home. was it wrong for me to frequent “the enemy’s” business? i guess i am supporting her by spending money in her shop. have i lost my sense of chinese school and family pride to the point that i’ll sell my “principles” for some good tasting bubble tea? food is my weakness…

i always felt like it was between the adults and not really the children, but some things that my sister mentioned actually disgusted me. apparently (and i’m hearing second hand information… but from my sister so i will tend to believe her), the original chinese school held a meeting to discuss the dividing faction’s attempt at separating into its own chinese school. and this kid supposedly started crying in an attempt to make people feel sorry for her family and stay with the original chinese school… touting all the hard work her parents put into the school. well eexxxcuuuuuuse me… and our parents did diddily squat and deserved to be sued and BANNED from attending the closing ceremonies for the semester (no joke! one of my friends’ older sister graduated that year from chinese school and neither of her parents could attend!)?? this was all news to me… and it made me regret having gave my money to this person. suddenly, i felt all upset again over something that happened over 10 years ago.

so this weekend, someone suggested going to this bubble tea shop. and i was torn… on the one hand, i’ve already been a customer there… i’ve already “sold my soul” so what’s one more cup of bubble tea? on the other hand, now that i know all these details… i’m even more upset than when i was a kid! am i a rage-filled revengeful person for carrying a grudge (over chinese school!!) after all these years?

have you ever been stuck in traffic, parked behind an endless line of cars with no idea how much longer it’ll take for you to reach your destination?

i think highways should have those signs roller coaster lines have… those “Wait is 20 minutes from this point” signs. that way, when you’re stuck in traffic, you’ll know at least how much longer it is you have to sit there and you can call ahead of any waiting friends and tell them, “oh i’ll be there in half a hour. i’m stuck in 20 minutes of traffic!” or the like.

there are a few difficulties with my idea… traffic (PARTICULARLY in the DC area) seems to be caused by nothing in particular so knowing how long it’ll take to clear up is difficult to estimate. you can drive at a snail’s pace for 20 minutes straight, expecting to pass some accident of some sort that caused the delay only to have the pace of traffic suddenly pick up and the road clear! so i dunno how exactly the signs will know… maybe they can be the electronic ones that can be updated depending on what actually caused the delay. then there’s the problem of how do u know how far someone wants to go… do they want to take the road all the way to DC, just to exit 1… exit 2… etc. so i guess the signs can’t be throughout the highways…. maybe just to major destinations, like the city or the airport.

last wednesday, a couple of my coworkers and i went to famous luigi’s right by our office.  it’s this small, italian place with a sunroom.  once we walked in, it had a small italian eatery-like feel to it.  one of my coworker and i ended up getting pasta.  he got some white sauce spaghetti… i wanna say it included the word toscana because then we talked about the zuppa toscana (sp?) soup at olive garden, i got the rigatoni rustici because i was craving sausage and our waiter suggested it.  i  liked it, but it had a bit too much ricotta cheese for my liking.  my other coworker got a meatball sandwich that looked pretty tasty as well.  i did notice that other tables had pizza which looked pretty good, maybe something to try on another visit.

then today, i was looking up the resturant online and found its history page.  apparently, famous luigi’s is famous for introducing pizza to DC!!  … ‘cept it was founded in 1943.  isn’t that kind of late for pizza to be introduced?

1.  sleeping on my bed is no longer comfortable.  when i’m sick (typically with a fever), i don’t like sleeping on my bed.  because i’m in such discomfort, lying on my bed just feels weird and i don’t like to bring such negative sleep experiences to my bed.  my bed is awesomely comfortable, but when the whole body aches and even medicine can’t make the aches subside enough to go to sleep, i find myself lounging on the couch.

2.  lost appetite… and smaller appetite when starting to feel better.  maybe it’s the pig in me… but i get sad when i don’t enjoy my food and don’t even crave food.  now perhaps this is a good thing because we all know how much i overeat, but i hate how food makes you feel worse when you’re sick.  and i hate the slow appetite recovery when you start to get better.  like last night.  i couldn’t even finish my chick-fil-a burger, fries, and sweet tea.

3.  george’s smile doesn’t make everything better.  usually when i’m down or not feeling well, george will smile at me.  and i’ll feel slightly better.  but not when i’m sick.  then i just feel like he’s mocking me.  i know he’s not really mocking me (shuddup, no comments about him not being real), but for awhile i’ll get upset and not hug him.  that makes me miss him and his smile.

Ren-Yi: i can finisha whole corona now ! we’remaking progress.

weak.

edit 1:
Ren-Yi: can you at least edit the typos? add the spaces in ord something. it’s so unreadable.
Me: that’s for effect… to make u look drunk while IMing at work!

edit 2:
Ren-Yi: ok my internet is being dumb it submited the first comment before i was done. or my two comments make me look drunk…

i have 3 grandmas. and 1 grandpa (my other grandpa died before my parents were even married).

i think i call my mom’s dad that taiwanese phrase for maternal grandpa, ah-gong. i say i think because i’m not sure. my cousins (my mom’s brother’s kids) also call him the same word which means someone is not calling him by the correct name!!! (bah! it might be my family). my ah-gong knows all these random facts. i think my love for random history/facts comes from him. he always has these chinese brain teasers he asks whenever we’re in the car driving somewhere. and i never know the answer because i can’t even understand what the question is! whenever he comes to visit, we always go to some historic place and even though he barely knows any english, he’ll always be walking around like he’s reading the information. then he’ll ask me about something and how to say it in english. then walk around the place a few more times, muttering the word to himself so he can remember. one time we went to see the presidents’ bust museum in williamsburg, va. he went up to each president and then got really excited in front of eisenhower. he kept mumbling eisenhower over and over as we walked through the rest of the busts. here’s a good picture of him with eisenhower. look how happy he is!

my ah-ma is cool. she loves playing video games with my grandpa. when i was a kid and still taking piano lessons, she used to urgently call from the basement while practicing. i would always rush down… what emergency?!!?!!? she’d just be asking me to help her beat a certain stage of Banana or Lode Runner!! if i was able to help her beat the level, she’d shower me with compliments like “oh, i have such a smart granddaughter!” i loved how video games meant i was smart my favorite picture of my ah-ma is this old picture of her and someone dressed up as winnie the pooh at some amusement park. it was probably when i was a baby because i can’t remember ever going. but she’s standing next to pooh with this big smile on her face, like she’s laughing. and she doesn’t know a word of english! hehehehehehe. i’ll try to get a copy of that picture some time. here’s a close second:

i call my dad’s “step”mom (er.. grandpa had a couple of wives) grandma… i don’t think i call her by anything chinese. my dad and all his siblings call her “mommy” to avoid confusion with “ma”. i think she came to the US and started living here awhile ago so she can actually understand english. she reminds me of some of my aunts (the loud ones! ) because they all share the same head! er… i guess i meant face with that, but actually… their head shapes are all quite round.

i call my dad’s mom the chinese word for maternal grandma, po-po. everyone who hears me refer to my po-po always gets confused. my po-po is quite old. almost 90 years old. the last time i saw her was when i went back to taiwan in 2001. she was still quite active… walking around with us in the city and taking us to her retirement home in the mountains. we even went to one of the local mountain parks outside taipei with her. i remember her living with us when i was a kid (in VA, then in the temporarily apartment we lived in until our house in MD was complete, and finally in MD). we still refer to the room in our house that she lived in with us as po-po’s room, even though she hasn’t lived there in almost 20 years. my po-po was the one who introduced me to card games like solitare, that mountain-add-up-to-13, and that 9-cards-3-by-3-grid game and introducted me to the tv shows dynasty, dallas, and the price is right! when i got older, i wondered if she didn’t have a crush on bob barker . i remember trying to draw a picture of my grandma when i was a kid… the picture used to hang in our kitchen and was this random blob with purple hair and glasses, standing next to a floating piece of bacon and a lopsided egg… i was quite the artist! i also remember when my sister and i were helping her prepare for the citizenship test. my sister drew this awesome (accurate, no purple hair here!) picture of my grandma in front of a flag and wrote the pledge of alliegence at the bottom. (i think i helped by watching her as she drew.) she didn’t end up staying in the US; she preferred taiwan more. on my last trip to taiwan, my po-po was telling this story about when i was a kid… she and i were sitting at some table drawing or writing or something when one of the papers fell on the floor. she asked me to go pick it up for her. apparently, i took my sweaty foot and stomped on the piece of paper so it would stick and then held my foot up to her so that she could pick the paper off my foot. i like to think it was ingenuity… but yeaaaa… kind of wish my po-po had better memories of me. no picture of po-po i’ll try to get one of her. i particularly like the picture of her young hanging in my family’s hallway. she was so pretty.

i wish i had gotten to go to taiwan more often to spend time with all of them

a year ago today (the ides of march!!!), i quit my job. it was the best day of my life. i know it’s not good to advertise quitting (“winners never quit! and quitters never win!”) but for me, i think that was one of the best things to happen to me.

this past year, i’ve been the happiest since probably high school! (college kind of sucked because i hated my major ) sure, i haven’t found what i love yet… but i feel like i’m eliminating and narrowing my options. and on a day to day basis, i don’t feel like i wasting time away like i used to. it’s tough to do something for 8 hours a day that doesn’t reward you. i’m not talking about monetary reward and i know not everyone can discover the cure to cancer every day, but at least feeling like you’ve accomplished something and that you’ve contributed to something that i care about makes every day a little better.

i know a bunch of other people who are in “crappy” jobs. i feel like everyone is still searching for what they want to do in life. or maybe they’ve decided what they’ve wanted to do, but obstacles (entrance exams, schooling, getting a foot in the door of a tough-to-enter industry, heck… applying for jobs, etc.) are in the way. i say…

try quitting . if the company doesn’t provide what you’re looking for in a job, you shouldn’t feel obliged to stay. people told me that i should wait awhile and give things a try. i think that’s good advice, but you’ll always know before anyone else whether you’ve given things a fair shot and when it’s time for a change. i waited waaaay too long in my crappy job (nearly 2 years… and i hated my job within a month of starting).

also, for those who can’t quit because they don’t have anything lined up…. i gave notice at my old company without having another job lined up. it’s very scary… make sure you have enough savings stored up to last awhile (and helpful parents who give you mcdonald arch cards!), but it can also be a good thing. you’ll have more time to search for a job you’ll enjoy (no more excuses about working on job searching after work) and some times, you just have to get out of a negative environment before it makes you jaded about everything.

p.s. let me know if you want to work for my new company… i am very hesitant to say i enjoy work because of my previous experience, but i am willing to go so far as to say i like the variety of work my new company offers and i think the product it develops is more worthwhile than say…. a COBOL decision engine used by large corporations to help collect delinquent accounts on the little guys.

As part of my 1001 day project (87. Become a “food snob” – try out new unique/non-chain restaurants), i’m trying to try out different types of restaurants… not just the usual chain restaurants. unfortunately, this costs money. with coworkers, we’ve been trying to go out to restaurants/cafes near the office for team lunches on a regular basis. here’s my “review” of the restaurants we went to, in order of enjoyablility. i think in the future, i might post them as they occur.

Nooshi – this place offers sushi and noodles (hence the name Nooshi). This is my favorite place to get lunch. i think it’s a combination of convenient and tastiness. the sushi is decently priced and they have boxes of pre-made sushi that make for quick pickup. the noodles are also quite tasty. when tina was in training in DC, we ate here. i think she enjoyed her noodles too.

Vidalia – went for resturant week. for $20.07, i got an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert. i ordered a glass of wine following the recommendation of my coworker and really enjoyed it… need to find out what wine i had. i had the rabbit sausage for appetizer… that was my first time eating rabbit. it was quite tasty. i had chorizo sausages with pork tenderloins as the entree… it was a lot of sausage. but i actually enjoyed the entree more than the rabbit sausage (don’t get me wrong, that was good too). i got an apple turnover-like dessert. quite tasty.

Greek Deli – this place has a line out the door nearly every day. so far, i’ve had the greek combo (love the orzo and pastitsio, this lasagna like dish) and the gyro… both good. portions are very filling! the bread is also quite good though the crust is quite hard. (the inside’s nice and moist!)

Kramers Cafe and Grill – this is supposedly one of the best, cheap places to eat in DC. i remember enjoying my sandwich while there (in late november), but clearly it must not have been GREAT because i can’t remember what it is i ordered! my coworkers got the meat lasagna which looked delicious and the portobello sandwich, which was HUGE. i think i’d definitely like to try this place again.

Naan and Beyond – fast, take-out indian place. i love samosas and this place has both vegetable and chicken ones (i think i like vegetable ones more). this is also the place where i first tried biryani. i’m surprised i enjoy biryani because it’s a rice dish, but it was quite delish. also good are their tandoori chicken wraps.

Levante’s – we took my new manager to this restaurant. following my big manager’s lead (he was the one who chose the restaurant), i got some sort of pizza like dish, but on a pita. pretty interesting. i think i should’ve tried the pastitsio to compare it to the Greek Deli.

Well-Dressed Burrito – this place is located in an alley. seriously. we walked down a deserted alley into this hidden door and in the basement of the building was this burrito place. i think i still prefer chipotle, but this is a pretty good alternative. it offers more variety than chipotle.

Penang – on my coworker’s “last day” (it wasn’t her last day but because of scheduling, we did it a week before she actually left), we took her out to this malaysian place. i ordered the chicken basil. it came in large pieces of chicken (not the grounded up version that i like) but it was pretty good. they had a lunch special that allowed you to get an appetizer, soup, salad, and entree for $10. pretty good price though i cleaned my plate completely.

Nirvana – my coworkers wanted indian so we decided to go to this place. i didn’t realize it was vegetarian until we got there. i think i like indian food with meat better. this was the first time i tried their after-meal refreshmint… usually it’s in a bowl by the door, these seed like things. i’m not a fan of licorice… so i wish my coworker would’ve told me it tastes just like licorice before i put a spoonful in my mouth!

C.F. Folks – interesting little place that serves a lot of international stuff. depending on what day you go, it’ll have a theme (i.e. indian, italian, etc.) the day we went was american…. i got a sandwich which was alright. nothing too special. may be worth it to try on another day… a place that can prepare both indian AND italian has got to be interesting…

Singapore Bistro – this place is upstairs from my favorite lunch place and ole standby Nooshi. it serves the same kinds of food… maybe with even less variety (but more in-depth). my coworkers who ordered the singaporean noodles preferred Nooshi’s over this places. i didn’t enjoy my food that much and didn’t even finish it.

Finally… a restaurant I didn’t go to with my coworkers but should definitely be included in this list:

Jaleo – tasty tapas and sangrias! i like the spinach and pine nuts dish, the potatos something-or-rather bravas, the fried sausage-shaped rolls that have something inside (!! ahh, i can’t describe it), cod fritters, the duck, and endives… i’m sure i’m forgetting more. also, their paella (sp?) was good. the dishes themselves aren’t that filling so this is NOT the place to go if say… it’s 9pm and you haven’t eaten all day and just got back from hiking in the mountains… it gets costly!

there’s no preventing the inevitable.  some things are just meant to be.

like rolling a 7 in the game of settlers when i have more than 7 cards (for non-settlers players: when you have more than 7 cards and a 7 gets rolled on the dice, you have to discard half your cards).

or getting hit in the head.  i wore my glasses today while playing outside.  got whacked in the head with a volleyball.  didn’t even hurt.  but banged up my glasses pretty bad.  luckily i’m used to my glasses going crooked so i was able to push it back into shape.  but this time, my nose piece got pushed so far out of place that it actually scratched my lense!  oh well.  it’s a small, but wide scratch.  shouldn’t have been wearing glasses in the first place. should’ve known better.  my head gets hit with a ball without fail.

i think it was my cousin jenny who xanga-ed about the devil in the white city, by erik larson… but it was a few months later when borders was having its buy 2, get the 3rd free sale that i bought the book. the book is about the 1893 world’s fair, held in chicago and a supposedly normal businessman/serial killer who preyed on the tourists visiting chicago. (i’m not really sure why she was so excited about reading this book! i think i’d find it creepy to know that that kind of stuff happened on the street i live off of, or a street a few blocks away )

i’m a wannabe-history buff… i enjoy random history now and then. so the book was pretty interesting to me. it was interesting to learn about the 1893 world’s fair and all the preparation needed to put it on. supposedly the book does an accurate job with the facts. it did get kind of dry some times… it’s a pretty long book. i think larson does a good job of mixing in the serial killer stuff whenever the world’s fair stuff starts to get boring. the serial killer stuff isn’t that bad… at first i was worried it’d be scared (i’m a big chicken), but i think i was more creepied out by how slick the serial killer was. and that’s what got me hooked in… how could people be so mesmerized (is that the best word?) by this guy so that they became his victims?!

next on my list of serial killer books… dexter! i want to see how different the tv show is from the original book, darkly dreaming dexter. actually, i’m a little afraid to read dexter…