I need a Pensieve like Dumbledore

Over the course of the past month, I effectively killed half my brain cells studying for final exams and killed the other half in the drinking process afterward. So I'm pretty surprised that I'm able to remember these two moments at all. I point out these two moments because they remind me of how, for lack of a better description, "cartoony" some people can be. By cartoony, I mean not that they have jaws that drop beyond physical possibility or are seemingly immortal. I mean that as soon as you mention a name, an image and a personality and all the little catchphrases and quirks belonging to that person instantly pop to mind. Bugs Bunny, Homer Simpson, Dwight Schrute, George W. Bush - the instant kind of recognition that really makes these people stick in your mind for long after you've lost contact.

Moment #1: At UCLA in May, Boyer Hall - my second day on the job. I walk into a conference room and meet my PI and her lab for the first time. Not many people - a white girl, a Chinese girl, a nerdy-looking FOB Chinese guy, and a white guy. I sat down nervously at the end of the table waiting for each lab member to present their weekly findings; my PI told me to pay close attention, because I would eventually have to start presenting my own findings in the coming weeks.

It was the most distracting hour and a half of my life, because I swear to Bruce Wayne that the white guy I was staring at was Brett Haas.


The greatest American leader of the 21st century.
(Source, kids.)

Cue Captain Kirk monologue:
"But...no. It. Cannot be. He...LOOKS just...like...Brett. Minus the wife-beater and. The. Extravagant amounts of Lakers fan gear. Also. No...iPhone. NO iPHONE! But he looks EXACTLY. LIKE. HIM."

Just as I was about to tell myself "There's no other explanation for this: I guess I DO have a drinking problem," this Brett Haas doppelganger spoke up. I breathed a sigh of relief as I reassured myself that I could indeed continue to drink to my heart's content: this guy's voice was much higher than Brett's.

It was only after the lab meeting was over did I dare to ask this Brett impersonator what his deal was. He introduced himself to me as Blake Haas, Brett's older brother. Small world. Turns out that he's on UCLA's Bridge team, just as Brett was on Cal's Bridge team. No, not bridge-building like the CivE folks seem to love so much. Bridge, as in the card game universally embraced by old, retired Jewish women living in Florida. I thought it was peculiar that they had taken up interest in a game typically considered an old fogeys' pastime, but I appreciated the educational time afterwards that he spent teaching me about bridge and how difficult it is to do well in the game.

Moment #2: In Haas Pavilion on Nov. 24, 2008, watching the Bears take on North Carolina A&T.

(aside: band locker room before game.
"Who are we playing today?"
"North Carolina."
"...we're fucking playing UNC? Like, the Tar Heels? The number one team in the country? The team with GODDAMN TYLER FUCKING HANSBROUGH?"
"...A&T. North Carolina A&T."
"JESUS THANK YOU")

It's fairly early in the game, and the refs are making some pretty bad calls ("my eyes, I cannot see, I am a Pac-10 referee..."). The band present is a decent size - thirty people, maybe. There's the usual smattering of complaints and boos and random taunts towards the referees, but some third and fourth years and I looked around and felt that something was off. I couldn't quite put my finger on it though, and Greg corroborated the feeling: "I feel like something is wrong or missing." We shrugged it off and continued to watch the game.

Towards the end of the game, Cal was winning by a boatload, and North Carolina A&T was getting obviously frustrated. Their coach was a pretty animated guy who kept jumping off his chair and stepping onto the court to yell at the refs. One of the players on the A&T team hard fouled one of our guys, seemingly out of frustration at being down by 30 points (that, or being two letters away from being the #1 team in the country). It was a pretty blatant foul, and the Cal fans got fairly rowdy but quieted down because short of going to the scorekeeper's board and literally changing the numbers, nothing A&T did could help them win at that point.

But what's this? A lone voice dared to fight the mob mentality. That voice chose not to quiet down when common sense would dictate that it should have already shut up. The bold, the audacious, the foolhardy Robin Hood of sports arena taunts and borderline non-PC insults - who was this brave soul who chose to rise above the rest?

Who, of course, but KNak. All of us turned around to find him spitting his usual smattering of insults, half of which was indiscernable and the other half of which came with a free side of flying saliva.

Suddenly, it occurred to us who had known KNak for the past three or four years that we actually had NO IDEA that KNak was at the game until this very moment, especially because he was standing in the very back row. All at once, the band stopped paying attention to the basketball game and turned its attention toward the man of the hour, as if he had just called a press conference:

"Are you sick?"
"When the hell did you get here?"
"Why haven't you said anything until now?"
"Where the hell have you been?"
"What the fuck did you just say?"
"Can you stop spitting on me?"

I swear, if Cal Band would only put all its talents toward mass entertainment, we'd make a damn good group of TV sitcom writers. Untapped gold mine, swear to Tedford.

My mom thinks I am the Palo Alto Institute of Technology

The last time my father was here in the U. S. and A., the week of Big Game (I made him come watch me in one of my last performances on the field since he had never done so), he also brought along a laptop that he bought for my mother. I checked it out for them and it's a very impressive piece of hardware - FAR more powerful than anything my mother will ever need: 4GB RAM, 120GB HD, four USB 2.0 ports, Windows Vista, Bluetooth integrated, pretty good graphics card/accelerator, all that jazz...except that it's an Acer laptop, which means it will probably break within a year and she will freak out and call me for tech support and I won't be able to help her.

(Also, my father claimed that he got it for a jaw-dropping $450 USD. Either I was raised by a liar or he's in cahoots with some very dangerous people in Taiwan.)

The other important thing my father purchased along with this brand spankin' new machine is a Chinese freehand writing accessory. You can input Chinese characters by writing on this little pad with a stylus; he bought it so my mother can write emails in Chinese.

Unfortunately, therein lay the root of the problem. She didn't know how to use email. Or a mouse, for that matter.

So yesterday I gave my first in a series of one-on-one lectures on the basics of computing. Lesson One: The Mouse took a solid fifteen minutes, and in the end, my mother decided that she simply won't mess with Right Click. She spent a solid 45 seconds moving the mouse back and forth over a site link so that it kept turning from an arrow to "the little cute finger" and vice versa. Forty-five seconds that I could have spent doing something far more valuable, like eating a cheeseburger or scratching the inside of my ear deeply with a rusty knife to keep myself sane.


Source giantbomb

Lesson Two: Firefox Basics actually took ME a little bit longer to figure out because she wanted the Chinese version installed, and since I have the Chinese reading competency level of a fifth grader, I had to grab the Chinese-English dictionary to figure out what the hell was going on. But eventually I helped my mother set up some bookmarks so that she could quickly and easily visit some of her favorite sites: SinaNet (a Chinese news portal), Gmail, and, much to my surprise, YouTube.

You know those little lessons that life teaches you but you don't really want to learn? This was one of them. Much in the very same manner that I use YouTube to kill time and watch mind-numbingly entertaining videos of cats chasing laser points or babies getting kicked in the face, my mother uses YouTube to watch Korean and Chinese soaps. NONSTOP. This is all thanks to my sister who introduced the wonderful technorogy of YouTube to my mom, a bored housewife in her mid-60's who spends most of her day alone, so that she would have something to do in her spare time instead of bugging my sister while she's at work. Two birds with one stone in her eyes, I guess.

I wonder if this is a gateway for my mom to eventually start watching videos of retarded cats chasing laser points or babies getting kicked in the face, like me. (Answer: probably not. I feel like she's more of a retarded-babies-chasing-laser-points or kitties-getting-kicked-in-face videos type.)

And finally, Lesson Three: The Greatest Inventions in the History of the Universe Part I, cross-listed under Gmail Basics (Part II is Internet Pornography, a class that I'm 98% sure my mom isn't too interested in). I showed her the basics and let her try sending a test email, all on her own. And she did it without blowing anything up! My baby's all grown up and off to save the world.

Moral of the story: my mom needs to stay away from technology. And I need to stay away from my mom.

GO BEARS BEAT THUG U

Truly, the best policy

My estranged friend from Georgia Tech, in an email to me after discovering this blog:

"You're a lot funnier on paper than in person."

I had to agree.
-------
Genetics final at 8am. I still don't know what's going on.

Bear's Lair at 11:01am. A glass or two of Hefe.

Bear's Lair at 11:31am. Glass of Red Spot.

Music final at 12:30pm. I REALLY don't know what's going on, but it's okay. Mr. Jupiter Hefe will be whispering all the answers to me.

Bad News, Bears

I am a creature of habit, and this is never more true when it comes to exam days. Since I usually have evening tests, here is my ritual for exam days.

0730: Wake up. Feel like shit while freaking out.

0736: Bathroom routine, includes vomiting. Not kidding.

0740: Eat breakfast, which is ALWAYS one of the following: 1) cereal, 2) leftover Nude Sushi from staying up studying the night before, or 3) leftover Round Table Pizza from staying up studying the night before. (Why doesn't Subway deliver? Goddammit.)

0800 - whenever test time is, probably 1700: Park ass in VLSB library, 2nd floor, left side study carrels. Panic while reading through everything. Think about doing problem sets, then realize that I still don't know enough information to do the problems anyways. Problem sets are consequently neglected.

1900: Come out of exam hall feeling shitty with fingers plugged in ears so I don't have to listen to my classmates talk about all the problems that I definitely got wrong.

1930: MMMMMM HEINEKEN/BLUE MOON/PARTY-LEFTOVER-COORS-LIGHT
2000: MMMMMM WHITE RUSSIAN
2002: MMMMM WHITE RUSSIAN NUMERO DOS

I haven't really changed my routine in the past three years. Normally, my mother call me to tell me that it's not healthy and that if I would just study regularly instead of cramming everything in the two days before the exam, I wouldn't freak out like this and my GPA would look more like a square number. I usually expect her to do the whole "keep your grades up, go to med school" brah brah brah overbearing Chinese mother schtick, because, well, she's old and Chinese and barely speaks English. It's nothing new, and usually, I just tune her out while playing Solitaire and just utter "mmhmm" every few minutes. I tune back in when she gets to the important stuff, like when I'm getting picked up.

Last night, I called my mom to figure out when she's going to come pick me up after finals, which eventually turned into her telling me to start finding a job and study for the MCAT, to which I said "fuck it," to which she said "don't use bad language," to which I said "...you understood that?"

Apparently my mom knows more English than I thought.

Anyway, as I braced for her usual "try hard in school" lecture, she pulled a 360 degrees a la Jason Kidd (+5 points for reference) and said this:
"Just go to bed. Your grade's not going to get any better, so you might as well get a full night's sleep."

Bricks were falling out of my jeans.

My mother has finally given up all hope on me. Free at last!

Obligatory "End-of-an-Era" Post

There's really nothing I can say here that can do justice to how I feel about the end of my four years in Cal Band. I could write a 20-page term paper about all the people I've met, all the places I've seen, all the friends I've made, all the assholes I tried my best to avoid, and all the things I've learned, especially in the Department of Creative and Devastating Heckles (see: Desma Stovall, Oregon State volleyball, 2005) - and I probably wouldn't net any higher than a C- on the paper. There's just too much to be said and not enough time or electronic ink to write it.

I also don't have the kind of attention span to write a 20-page term paper anyway. So instead, I'm going to break it down into user-friendly bullet points devoid of necessary grammar.

-My Second Year Mug has lead and/or cadmium. Memo: don't use it to drink if I ever get pregnant
-Can't believe I wanted to join Stanford Band more than ANYTHING when I was in high school
-Football fans in the state of California tend to be bigger assholes than in other states, myself and KNak included
-"Shoot him like a horse" needs to come back
-I need a shirt that says "I spent four years in Cal Band and all I got was this lousy blanket"