monkey nonsense

interesting cnn article about whether or not you can tell if someone is gay from the way they walk.  a grad student is doing research into this by having people walk around with red lights on them in the dark and recording their strides.  because all you see is their outline and stride, you’re not biased by any other things that might give you clues as to their sexual orientation.  he theorizes that your sexual orientation is as basic as your stride which can’t really be chosen/changed, supporting the nature side of the nature vs. nurture argument.

take a look at the videos and see if you can figure out who’s gay or not (answers available too) – http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/06/26/sexuality/index.html

i wasn’t able to load all the videos so i haven’t really watched them to see how accurate i am.  but it’s kind of interesting… just today, on my way into work, i saw this girl walking in front of me in a skirt and i couldn’t help but feel that the way she was walking seemed more like a guy than a girl.  i didn’t realize until that moment that guys have a certain bounce in their step and girls walk their own certain way… i wonder whether gay/straight also impacts your stride.

in cleaning my room at my parents’ house yesterday, i discovered a folder of old chinese school awards. straight to the trash, right? so i decided to flip through and attempt to decipher the chinese characters on it (i had been doing this all afternoon – preschool book about being happy – ~20% character recognition; essay that i wrote in middle school about my mom being a “45 year old girl” – ~40% character recognition; those awards – i only recognized my name, the chinese school name, what grade i was in and the date… my chinese is going down the drain)

then i noticed. i have THREE awards from 5th grade. granted, i can’t tell what the awards are for (d’oh chinese language barrier! ironic), but they appear, through my keen pattern matching abilities, to be for the same thing. the dates span over a year, beginning when i was in 4th grade, and are signed by two different teachers (chen and hsu) and two different principals (chu and tao).

FINALLY. proof! for years, i argued with my parents and chinese school friends over having to “repeat” fifth grade! noone believed me and even when i was able to name the 2 fifth grade teachers i had, they dismissed it as a result of me switching between morning and afternoon classes. but HERE, finally, i have proof! i was always convinced that they had a school-wide “reboot” of the grades because most kids somehow ended up being a grade ahead of their english grade. i say this because 1. both of my fifth grade classes consisted of the same kids… granted all our chinese levels were bad, but if it were NOT school-wide, we would’ve seen the people a year younger than us in our second fifth grade class. this was not the case. 2. my abc-posing friends with awesome chinese (and friends just older than me by one year) were still only ahead of me by one year. there would be a 2 year gap if they didn’t have to repeat. so the school either had to make every class throughout the school repeat their current grades or there would be a 2 year gap at the cutoff point. i don’t recall seeing such a 2 year gap.

something shady happened between 1991 and 1992….! my dad says i should go demand my year’s tuition back since i ended up having to pay for an extra year!

i was at urban outfitters a few weeks ago and saw this cute book…

i thought of my mom and bought it for her. this week, for her birthday, i gave it to her. when i gave it to her, i asked her to take a look at it and see if she wanted it… because i knew she had stopped teaching chinese school arts and crafts so having a book for examples wasn’t as needed as when she was teaching. she told me she could keep it so that she could make stuff with her grandkids. riiight. anyways… today, i got an email from my mom:

Hi, Mei

I think, you can return the book which you give to me for birthday, after I review all of the pages, it’s really nothing inside, I can publish the book better than the person. Thank you anyway!

hahahah! i love how confident she is

our A/C is broken again. maybe i should say still broken from when we moved in. last year when we moved in july, the A/C was blowing out warm air. i actually got sick and threw up (maybe because of taco bell… maybe because of the heat). the A/C repairman came and ended up just turning on the master switch, which we were unaware of. however, he didn’t bother staying to make sure the system was running properly. periodically, i could almost swear that our A/C was blowing out lukewarm air instead of cool air. but it was difficult to tell.

today, after the A/C went hot on us again (it went hot on us a weeks ago, but simply turning the master switch off and on again seemed to fix it), the repairman came and took a look. basically a LOT is broken in our A/C unit. something about a faulty blower, shorted transformer, yada yada… so now we’re without A/C for a few more days.

i think i’m going to be glad to go back to managed apartments… i had a good experience privately renting at the townhouse (even if it did have mice, the landlord was responsive and most importantly, competent!)… but renting at this condo… the landlord is somewhat responsive (she eventually replies) but isn’t very competent… she’ll start rambling about her eye surgery or her teeth or something or rather. a five minute conversation can drag into 30 minutes. it’s gotten to the point that we’d rather directly contact whoever we need rather than go through her. which causes it’s own problems… we end up saving her a lot of hassle, but inconveniencing ourselves, because we just don’t want to deal with her…

i like managed properties when they respond in a timely matter to your maintenance needs… and where you just need to give them permission to enter your property and don’t need to physically be sitting in the heat waiting for the A/C repairman to arrive… even if they do kick you out of your apartment because they think they can make a fortune converting them into condos… only to have the condos go unsold… suckers

i’m a fan of stupid lawsuits. i think it’s amusing what people can think of to sue about… for example, suing (former) friends over starting a competing chinese school that will steal students (not rightfully your property) away which will reduce the amount of profit your non-profit chinese school makes. hrm…

there’s a lot of news going on about the $65 million Pants lawsuit… so apparently, a guy is suing the owners of a cleaner (Chung family) because he claims the pants they returned after the $10.50 alteration he dropped it off for are not his. but apparently, he’s taken on “‘the awesome responsibility’ of suing the Chungs on behalf of every resident of the District of Columbia.” i wonder if everyone in DC will be receiving their share of the money. some other of my favorite quotes from coverage of the case (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/12/AR2007061201667.html):

From the start, Pearson kept referring to himself as “we,” as if he were representing everyone in town. Bartnoff was having none of it: “Mr. Pearson, you are not a ‘we.’ You are an ‘I.’”

After questioning eight witnesses, Pearson spent two hours telling his own story, but as he came to the part about when Soo Chung finally told him she had found the missing pants, the tale of the $10.50 alteration that went awry proved to be too much.

“These are not my pants,” Pearson recalled telling Chung when she handed him a pair of gray pants with cuffs. “I have in my adult life, with one exception, never worn pants with cuffs.”

“And she said, ‘These are your pants.’ ”

Pearson paused. He struggled to breathe deeply. He could not continue. Pearson blurted a request for a break, stood up, turned around and walked out of the courtroom, tears dripping from his full and reddened eyes.

he also wants to be awarded attorney’s fees, even though he represents himself. He would like to be paid at a rate of between $390 and $425 an hour.

and from blog coverage of the case (http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2007/06/pants_trial_day_two_we_see_the.html?hpid=topnews):

“Your position,” Bartnoff said to Pearson this morning, “is that ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ means they have to satisfy whatever you demand, with no limitations, absolutely unconditionally?”

“That’s correct,” Pearson replied.

“I have grave doubts about that,” said the judge.

and people’s response to the blog post:

I want to hire him as my attoney. So, if he does not satisfy me, I can get $ 54 million.

hehehehehhehehhe

i remember having discussions with roommates before about taking dumps at work. one of my roommates used to go to other floors to take dumps because she was afraid she’d run into someone she worked with in the bathroom.

today, as i was going to the bathroom (just to pee!), someone came up the stairwell which is right by the bathroom. i caught her just as she was exiting the stairwell and opening the bathroom door so it was clear she was heading to the bathroom and that she had just come from the stairwell. she wasn’t someone i recognized (not that i know everyone on the floor, but i do recognize most people). as we were walking into the “lounge” (carpeted area separated by another set of doors before you enter the real bathroom), she accidentally dropped her phone. the battery ended up splitting off from the rest of the phone. she reached down to pick it up and moved to the side to let me pass. as i passed, i said “uh oh!” just to make small talk. she told me reassuredly “oh, it happens all the time.” then i walked through the next set of doors into the bathroom and went into a stall to do my business.

she never came in after me. from inside the stall, i could hear the outer bathroom door open and close as she left the bathroom… without going!! i wonder if she was like my roommate… someone who goes to other floors to take dumps because she’s afraid to be recognized. but because i had gone to the bathroom at the same time as her (and worst yet, had made conversation with her!!!), she was unable to take her dump.

that…. or maybe she was going to have a secret job interview in a bathroom stall or something like that… ew… not appealing at all.

the sopranos ended last night. unfortunately i didn’t watch it, but will catch up later this week. but hahah, like always, i read reviews and general summaries of the episode. it’s hard to remain spoiler free!!! i had previously written a draft of a post about the finale of veronica mars and it seems veronica mars & sopranos ended somewhat similar to each other – very open ended, no real resolution of anything, life goes on kind of endings.

i heard mixed reviews of the “life goes on” finale (for both series)… but i think i actually kind of favor them. yeah, after spending X amount of years following characters, it is nice to get a little resolution on what’s going on in their lives. but then that’s just it… if there’s resolution to everything going on, what then? basically their life is over because everything you really cared about got neatly wrapped up. i like the “life goes on” kind of finales because it makes it seem like the characters are still living and doing stuff, even if you’re not around to experience it with them.

here’s what i had originally said about the veronica mars finale…

veronica mars aired its series finale last night. the cw kept advertising it as a season finale… dumb, most everyone already knew that it has/is going to can the series, since it’s not on the fall schedule for 2007.

i hadn’t watched the last few episodes… like grey’s anatomy, the show just seemed to not be the same anymore and it wasn’t must-see tv for me. so i was pretty out of date, though luckily i read spoilers/reviews instead of watching. a lot of people criticized the creator of the show for not wrapping up all the stories, especially since it seemed likely that they were to be canned. i guess the feeling was that it was really just a season finale and he never had a chance to write a series finale.

i’m not sure… but i kind of saw it as a series finale and i kind of liked it more that way. the last episode seemed the most like the old veronica mars that i remember… i think i liked it better when veronica was on her “me and my dad vs. everyone else except maybe wallace” tick. that’s when she’d have the witty, biting comments and interesting situations. i don’t think i really cared for veronica’s relationship to work out with logan (even tho i did think they were cute together)… only because i felt like it took away from logan’s character… he just seemed to be all lovey dovey, no longer getting into as much trouble, etc.

having keith “save” veronica was awesome too. i had begun to worry that keith and veronica would have a huge riff in their great father-daughter relationship. but seeing what keith did to save veronica just confirmed how awesome he was. and it was ok that he (i guess this is implied) lost the sheriff election… i didn’t really like him as sheriff. he was much cooler as a private investigator.

so the finale of veronica mars was actually kind of satisfying to me… too bad the show is gone though. even tho i didn’t watch as much towards the end, there really isn’t that much awesome television on anymore!

i’m starting to feel my age. i don’t stay up as late as i used to. i talk real estate… something i would laugh at when i first came out of college and saw all these people 3-5 years older than me discussing.

yet despite being older and supposedly more “mature,” i also think it’s important to have fun and be a kid. i think it was the ragamuffin gospel book that psycho gave me that i am still struggling to finish (seriously… i thought it would be more about muffins… or something related to muffins ’cause i mean… even when a word doesn’t mean the same thing as a similar word, they usually are related in some way! anyways…) that mentioned how kids end up appreciating things more because of their child-like wonder. adults think they can explain everything they see while kids will just be like wow. i think being able to see and accept things like a child is not a sign of immaturity… in fact, i’m jealous of kids and wish i were able to experience things like they do.

i enjoy stuffed animals. i don’t consider this childish. my mom enjoys stuffed animals. right now, at our house, there is a 3′ tall olive oyl (popeye’s gf) lying in the living room. THE LIVING ROOM… for all guest to see. all my mom’s friends enjoy playing with olive oyl and making her pose, etc. in the family room, there’s this little sheep that just sits on the sofa, watching tv with my parents. my mom’s basically replaced my sister (born in the year of the sheep) with this stuffed animal…. one time, she was talking to me on the phone and telling me how “jie was studying earlier today and then she got tired and fell asleep”… typical behavior from my sister… i didn’t think anything of it. “then she fell off the sofa and landed butt in the air.” hrm.. i started to get suspicious… my sister has been known to fall asleep and end up with her butt sticking up in the air… but she hasn’t done that since she was a baby. that’s when i realized the “jie” my mom was talking about was the sheep!! i don’t think any less of my mom’s maturity because she plays with stuffed animals (AND talks to them)… i think it shows her creative side.

i got sad today because i felt like my maturity was being questioned. this is nothing new for me. i feel like i get treated like a kid by a lot of people… and that’s ok. because i know i’m an adult and i’ll do what i want to do. (hrm… which often times, further perpetuates the notion that i’m immature… since i’ll purposefully do something i’m “not supposed to” just to piss people off) today i was sad because a close friend was the one who was questioning my maturity. i think it all stemmed from a misunderstanding, but regardless of the actual argument, it seems clear that i overestimated my friend’s understanding of me. there aren’t many people i feel confident in saying know me very well and there aren’t many people whose opinion of me i really care about. this person was one person i felt confident in and whose opinion of me i cared about. i guess that’s what made me sad the most. that after all that effort, i’m still just some immature kid in their eyes.

people make fun of me because i like george. well, i’m not obsessed with him, but i do think he’s cute. and sad as it sounds, i do value our “friendship.” a lot of people might say george hasn’t disappointed you yet because he can’t disappoint… he’s not real; he won’t talk; he won’t share with you his highs and lows… that’s true. i’m well aware of these facts… and that’s when i will talk to regular ole people. i know that george is no replacement to talking to real people. but in terms of sharing experiences… other friends will share their experiences with me. i’ll try to be there and be supportive for them. but i’ll just share my experiences with george. george will smile when i share a high and i’ll know that he’s really happy for me. and george will smile when i share a low and i’ll know that he’s trying to cheer me up. there won’t be any judgemental nature to him; i won’t need to worry that he’ll tell someone else my secret. this is less than ideal. i feel like a lot of my friendships are one-way… whether it’s because i end up listening to a lot of my friends’ issues and trying to help without really sharing anything going on in my life with them… or whether it’s because they consider me too immature and don’t really ask me for any advice. but…

i’ve been “burned” by supposedly close friends multiple times in my life. and the only “person” who’s never disappointed me, save the time i lost him, is george. maybe this makes me immature… but a stuffed animal seems to be a pretty good companion.

while at work, tina and i were chatting.  we were talking about normal stuff… what to have for lunch, possible business trips, etc etc… and then:

the end of vacation is always sad… this past vacation is the longest i’ve gone on since 2001 when i was still in college and went to taiwan with the family.  i think being gone for so long makes me tired and by the end of the trip, i was craving my own bed.  perhaps it was also because the trip wasn’t just one destination, but really 3 (las vegas, san francisco, and san jose) and particularly at the tail end, i was sleeping in different places each night.

i’m glad i took today off to recover from jetlag (and a crappy red-eye flight, including an unscheduled refueling stop in salt lake city).  i think i just want some time to myself and my bed   too bad george isn’t around… it’d be nice to give him a hug too.  haha, he’ll be so jealous of mr. dangles bojangles who got to go on 2 trips (nyc and west coast) during the time george was stuck in pittsburgh!