No hugging

Lessons from the ER, Part II: Keep Your Mouth Shut

2011-12-13T19:47:00.001-05:00

3:08am. Lord.

I sat there in my chair, constantly pushing F5, hoping that new test results would come back from the lab so I could update them in my chart and get rid of the patient. I felt my eyes start to droop.
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Lessons from the ER, Part I: Leave Your Jimmy Choos at home

2011-12-11T17:59:00.001-05:00

I sat at my computer station, staring at the ER patient status board on the screen.

Twelve patients in the entire ED. Twelve. Out of thirty-four beds, fewer than half of them had bodies. And about a third of those weren’t even real emergency cases, just whiny twenty-somethings with itchy va-jay-jays and blood in their urine.
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The Mayans Got It Totally Wrong

2011-10-06T02:26:00.001-04:00

I live in a state of perpetual fear.

I can’t help it. I grew up in a stereotypically science-based Chinese family, surrounded by doctors and nurses and scientists. As a child, I was always bombarded with warnings of “don’t touch that, it’s dangerous” or “if you put that in your mouth, you’ll get cancer.” Apparently, with the exception of fruits, vegetables, and twice-boiled water, every single thing in the world was bad for me.

Growing in California certainly didn’t help things.

An Open Letter to Posterity, or, Why I Shouldn’t Be Allowed Near Minors

2011-07-22T19:19:00.001-04:00

Dear high school kids I met in the Georgetown Summer Medicine Institute,

You scare the crap out of me.

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I Am a Menace to Sobriety

2011-06-25T03:07:00.001-04:00

I turned 24 in Dahlgren Memorial Library. Fitting that the first random article Wikipedia took me to that day was on Ammit, the Egyptian female funerary symbol, a demon known as the “Eater of Hearts.”
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The Freewheelin' Bob...uh...Gordon

2011-05-15T17:25:00.000-04:00

Since my first year of college, I have not lived in the same place for more than a year. Yes, I lived in Berkeley for five years, but I went through the annoying process of packing and unpacking all my stuff at the bookends of every school year. I never had the chance to create years of memories in a single house. As soon as one place started to feel comfortable, June would hit us in the face and shake us out. We packed up our hobo bundles and, hitchhikers' thumbs up, ambled down the street to look for yet another place to sleep for the next year. It was always pretty unsettling.

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Corporate Whoredom

2011-05-09T16:58:00.000-04:00

Let's see how many of you are screaming "bloody sellout!" at the monitor by the end of this.

I'm currently sitting in SFO's brand-spankin' new Terminal 2, waiting to go back ~~home~~ to the medical library. The terminal itself is well-organized and just chock-full of that Bay-Area-smug-hubris that we know and love. Holla, Virgin America: slick purple lighting? Personal satellite TV and games? Actual leg room? Welcome to the Mile High Nightclub. As Tom Haverford would say, "I have two questions for you. One, are you ready for the investment opportunity of a lifetime? And two, do any of you have pacemakers or a history of epilepsy?" (Because you know I'm gonna be looping the music video to 'Ye's "All Of The Lights" over and over while on that plane.)

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The Outer Limits

2011-04-05T18:56:00.000-04:00

I shuffled my way through the crawling security line of good ol' SFO at the buttcrack of dawn, bleary-eyed and still unsure of my destination. I looked down at my boarding pass again. Omaha. Nebraska. Corn, cows, and Christians. Three good things, but really, what else does Omaha have?

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Grumpy Old Men 3: Stroke-Induced Brain Ischemia

2011-03-15T23:58:00.000-04:00

Many of us non-undergrads frequent the on-campus restaurant/bar at Georgetown, The Epicurean (or, as I like to call it, The EpiKorean, considering their massive representation among the staff there). It's a pretty neat place - it's not dingy and crappy, the food quality is above average, there are lots of TVs for sports-viewing, and the happy hour specials draw us like bears to honey in our post-exam dazes. (Feel free to ask any Georgetown medical student about Dr. Suarez's anatomy exams, but prepare to shield yourself from the ensuing nosebleeds/vomit/swinging fists.)

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Post-Racial America: Still Racist, Still Hilarious

2011-02-26T18:24:00.000-05:00

There's a joint on Georgetown's main campus called Vital Vittles, roughly on par with the Quik-E-Mart that Apu Nahasapeemapetilan (thanks, Wikipedia) runs in Springfield. I typically enjoy going to "Vittles" thanks to their wide selection of food and their great policy of charging exactly one dollar for most 20oz. sodas.

My lunchtime visit today just elevated my love for Vittles to a whole new level.

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High-Fructose Corn Syrup Is In My Blood

2011-02-17T22:28:00.001-05:00

PermaRA and I, both Bay Area natives and first-year bEast Coast transplants, like to play this little game called “check the weather back home.” We’ve never won this game. Typically, the weather here has been so much worse than the unbeatable beauty of The Bay that we had to stop playing it as a drinking game, for fear of developing Alcoholic Liver Disease.

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What Would Don Draper Do?

2011-01-04T20:01:00.000-05:00

While I was riding BART to The City last week, I noticed an advertisement for Gilead Sciences, one of the more well-known biopharmaceutical companies in the U.S. The poster, an anti-HIV/AIDS campaign ad, featured our boy Big Time Timmy Jim throwing a pitch. It said:

"Until there's a cure, Tim Lincecum throws strikes."

I saw this and was horribly confused. So if there remains no cure for HIV, Lincecum will keep being awesome and light up K-Ville every time he's on the mound, but once this terrible disease is cured, Timmy will suck ass and the Giants will lose one of its heroes? Seriously, nobody wins here. (Except maybe Los Doyers.)

John, Paul, George, and Ring-u

2011-01-02T23:51:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year, everyone. No, I didn't make any resolutions. Can we move on now?

My mother turned another year older last week. Guess which Beatles song she won't be listening to this year.

There's a great little Japanese joint in San Mateo called Izakaya Mai, a place so authentically Japanese that English is still a bit of a novelty to all the servers. Imagine a Japanese beer hall that also serves sake and really great food - that's an izakaya. My mom and sister frequent this place, and I always try to tag along when the opportunity presents itself. (The food is fantastic, but that's not why I go. I go because of the toy train running along the ceiling all around the restaurant.)

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Growing Up SUCKS

2010-12-10T03:35:00.001-05:00

There were fish in here before, I SWEAR.

East coast winter is here. Granted, I wasn't here for SNOWPOCALYPSE '09, but being a spoiled Californian, it's pretty miserable. Even the fountain right behind the medical school agrees. If you can't tell, most of this fountain is frozen except for where the water is being forcibly moved by the pump. Waste of money to keep the pump going, if you ask me. Just let the whole damn thing freeze so I can buy skates and learn to stand on ice without breaking my nose.

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I don't get why Gluttony is a sin

2010-11-26T20:21:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was my first Thanksgiving away from home. Considering that 3/4 of my family are Taiwanese immigrants (the remaining 1/4 still living in Taiwan), we're not a particularly American group. Traditionally, my mother invites a couple of my cousins who also live in the area over to our house for dinner, and we have a big hot pot. For those of you unfamiliar, "hot pot" is a style of eating common in east Asian countries where everyone sits around a central pot of broth and everyone dips in various raw meats, frozen foods, vegetables, etc. to cook and eat. Think of it as fondue but without all the cheese clogging your aorta.

Simply Taking Up Space So You Don't Think I've Abandoned You

2010-11-03T21:42:00.001-04:00

I eagerly await the day that it actually gets colder outdoors than the temperature inside our refrigerator so we can save some electricity. We can just put all our food in buckets and hang them out our window. I fully expect this to happen in, oh, two weeks. ~~Frozen milk~~ homemade ice cream for everybody!
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One Mississippi, Two Mississippi (Or Alligator)

2010-10-18T15:12:00.001-04:00

At least it's not like walking into a sauna anymore.

The walk from my house to school is lined with trees starting to turn. I suppose this officially means that autumn has begun. There have been a couple nights cold enough to make me think about wearing a scarf and my gloves outside. I was dissuaded by the thoughts of ridicule coming from, like, everybody else in my class calling out a spoiled, pussy Californian. I do have to admit, though, that I've never seen such a beautiful scene in the fall. Despite what my father insists, watching the seasons turn here is most decidedly not like watching paint dry. Knowing that I'll FINALLY have an excuse to blow money on fall and winter clothes is exciting, no?

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The Reasoning of FOOTBAW

2010-09-25T17:19:00.000-04:00

Just because you're going to trust us with your health doesn't mean we have to make sense.

(5:11:17 PM) Gordo: holy crap. go bruins. [on UCLA leading Texas AT Texas at halftime]
(5:11:38 PM) RoPo: tellin you bro
(5:11:49 PM) RoPo: it's gonna be a good day for California
(5:12:30 PM) RoPo: California schools will go 4-0 today
(5:12:34 PM) RoPo: ;)
(5:12:42 PM) Gordo: ROSE BOWL
(5:12:45 PM) Gordo: THIS IS OUR YEAR
(5:12:55 PM) Gordo: i am going to throw around the R word as much as possible now
(5:12:59 PM) RoPo: no
(5:13:07 PM) Gordo: i've had such a superstition of never saying it the past 5 years, and it never worked
(5:13:12 PM) Gordo: why not just try the opposite
(5:13:18 PM) Gordo: if it works, i'll look like a genius
(5:13:26 PM) Gordo: if it doesn't, then i'll look like an asshole, but i'm already an asshole anyway
(5:13:39 PM) RoPo: alright, i see your logic

QED, son.

Hit Me Baby One More Time

2010-09-14T15:26:00.001-04:00

Having been public-schooled all my life, there are a couple things that I found out about attending a 1) private 2) Jesuit institution that threw me for a bit of a spin.

A hallmark of major research universities: genius professors who are horrible lecturers. Just because I'm paying 4.5x more tuition doesn't mean the quality of teaching is that much better.
Getting way more days off that a public school would never even think about giving its students. Columbus Day? Good Friday and Easter Monday? What on Earth are those?
Crucifixes. Like, everywhere. Almost makes me feel guilty about swearing under my breath every time a prof goes over a really dense topic really fast (which, incidentally, is practically every single lecture.)

Corollary: boldly walking into Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart without use of holy water nor making the sign of the cross. People definitely shoot me funny, irreverent looks.

Seeing that it is once again exam week (but then again, when isn't it exam week), I left the library at a rather late hour, somewhat delirious from cramming eight different metabolic pathways within the span of six hours. I have this bad habit of reviewing things and talking aloud to myself while walking to fight the goddess Athena trying to taking my hard-earned wisdom away from me. Unfortunately, I also love to blast Ke$ha while walking. This is clearly detrimental to me on two fronts:

1) Facts like "proteins are built from amino acids" become "proteins are built me up you break me down my heart it pounds yeah you got me."

2) Pumping loud dance music means that my hearing, one of the five senses key to human survival, is eliminated. This becomes a huge issue when crossing the street.

I saw the little white walking man and eagerly bounded across the asphalt when a gray Camry screeched to a halt, six inches from obliterating every last bone in my body. "Deer-in-headlights" would be the understatement of the year. I looked at the driver, expecting it to be a tiny Asian lady. Instead, the driver and her companion were both old, wrinkly nuns, wearing their full habits and looks of terror on their faces. Any desire I held to curse out the driver and all her ancestry dissipated. How terrible of a person do you have to be to yell at a nun?

The irony of almost being slaughtered by some of the kindest people on Earth is still beyond me.

DML Runs On Dunkin'

2010-09-04T13:58:00.001-04:00

We've only had two exams thus far, and already I've developed the terrible habit of restricting myself to 15 minutes of daylight during the review day before the exam. I get to the library by 9:00am or so with a packed lunch and what ought to be an illegal number of Red Bulls. I then have passionate, 14-hour-long romps in beds of roses and honey with my notes and PowerPoints. The only fun I have during these marathons is stress-eating, but that's not a thing to complain about because it's just…fun. It's a terrible, disgusting lifestyle, and I wish I had more discipline to study regularly.
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Gunner Palace

2010-08-20T21:44:00.001-04:00

The first definition of "gunner" on Urban Dictionary defines the term as "A person who is competitive, overly-ambitious and substantially exceeds minimum requirements. A gunner will compromise his/her peer relationships and/or reputation among peers in order to obtain recognition and praise from his/her superiors."
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Murphy's Law Says: Welcome to The DMV

2010-08-04T17:45:00.001-04:00

Because we have no internet at the new house yet, I'm currently sitting next to Carter Pewterschmidt at a Starbucks on Wisconsin Ave., about a five-minute walk from the house. (Seriously, this guy looks and sounds just like him, except in New Balances and a Microsoft tee instead of loafers, ascot, and silk robe.) I'm furiously scratching my 18 mosquito bites while cooling down with an iced latte and Starbucks' full-blast A/C, listening to Mr. Pewterschmidt wax poetic on the perpetually unruly state of his dog's hair.
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The Best Little Whorehouse in Palo Alto

2010-07-29T03:58:00.001-04:00

When I was little, my sister used to tease that my mother actually found me in a dumpster and raised me as her own. There are a couple of surprisingly plausible reasons to support this claim:

My mother was 40 years old when she had me. The fact that I didn't turn out with an arm coming out my face or as a musical genius-idiot savant is a medical miracle.
I am practically the only dog person among my family members and many, many relatives.
Corollary: I am deathly allergic to cats. Nobody else in my family is.

Asian moms are hardcore/confusing

2010-07-14T22:17:00.001-04:00

I was at Elegance Hair Salon, waiting to get my usual cheap-o haircut from my man Jimmy, when I witnessed the pinnacle of a cultural phenomenon I have grown up observing.
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What is this I don't even.

2010-06-23T15:08:00.000-04:00

No es frio, D.C. NOT COOL. NOT COOL AT ALL.

“Everything the light touches is our kingdom.”

2010-06-22T02:32:00.001-04:00

This is another one of those stupid end-of-an-era moments that I really hate. My apartment is cleaned out and I’ve moved out of the hobbit-hole apartment in Berkeley, my fifth place in five years. I was feeling pretty depressed yesterday about moving out of my favorite city and, more importantly, moving back in with my mother for a month. Then came a series of ~~unfortunate~~ unbelievable events that somebody up there tied together into a nice little package for me. I don’t think I’ve ever been more in love with Berkeley than I was yesterday.

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Murphy's Law Strikes Again

2010-06-18T17:44:00.000-04:00

Considering that I pay $80 per month for a gated carport in our apartment building, you'd expect some kind of security. I found my car, which was parked in my carport, ransacked.

This one was my fault completely for trusting the people in my apartment building and being too lazy to lock my car doors. Good thing I didn't leave anything really sentimental in there, like my iPod or laptop. But I lost my GPS, GPS charger, cell phone charger, auxiliary cable, and cheap-o sunglasses case from Daiso. Net loss of about $300. No broken windows or broken locks. So I'm thankful for that.

I guess this is what I get for cursing Sasha Vujacic during last night's game. The Machine clearly has friends in powerful places.

Thank heavens I'm moving home after this weekend.

God Bless Wikipedia

2010-06-18T00:25:00.000-04:00

Saw this at 9:23PM PST, right after the Lakers beat the Celtics:

Remember the Apple Newton? Didn’t think so.

2010-06-15T00:28:00.001-04:00

Sorry to get all sentimental on you guys. This one’s going in a different direction (think Friends 5th season).
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I’m 23 now.

Many of you withstood me bitching and whining all day long about taking yet another step toward the inevitable. I was trying to be facetious about the whole aging thing, but the more I joked about it, the more aware I became of the passage of time. It did not help that my birthday coincided with my last day at the greatest job I’ve ever held.

23. So what? I’m still in the early 20s. I’m still young and my liver is still invincible. My whole life this year will be a tribute to Michael Jordan (HT: Calvin). Sounds pretty good, actually.

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Well, there’s ONE career I know I won’t have

2010-05-25T17:34:00.001-04:00

I like food. A lot. That should come to no surprise to any of you who have spoken to me for more than five minutes. As a result, I spend a lot of my time and visiting websites and watching movies and TV shows related to food. I’m not a picky man; my tastes in food entertainment range in everything from haute cuisine (Good Eats, TasteSpotting, Serious Eats, FoodPornDaily) to the exotic (Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern) to the morbidly grotesque (Super Size Me, This Is Why You’re Fat, Supersized Meals, anything from Paula Deen). I am a huge fan of the TV show Man vs. Food. Honestly, Adam Richman has the best and worst job in the world all rolled into one delicious, steamy tortilla. The man gets paid to go around the country and eat at some amazing restaurants with Herculean challenges, but the nature of the beast rears its ugly head when he has to actually undertake the challenge. He then inevitably fails miserably, whether it’s trying to shove far too much food for his gut to hold or to eat something so spicy that it makes him bleed out his pores. He then takes pounds of Metamucil and/or laxative to get it all out of his system later.
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Brand Loyalty

2010-05-16T23:26:00.001-04:00

“The relationship between a man and his barber…that’s sacred.” – Barack Obama
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When my family and I first crossed the Pacific on a ~~raft made of chopsticks~~ Boeing 747 in 1992, we settled in an upper-middle class suburb in south San Jose. Five years passed without much note. Other than learning English (and speaking it better than my American-born peers), being whipped into playing piano and violin like a good little Asian boy, and becoming overweight thanks to a steady diet of high-fructose corn syrup and avoidance of physical activity, nothing of significance really happened during my years in the ‘burbs. Life was quiet, slow, and full of sunshine (most it wasted on me, since I spent my life in front of the TV, playing remarkably bad video games). I was a happy boy.
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Mussorgsky’s Great Gate of…uh…China

2010-04-29T20:40:00.001-04:00

I can’t think of a good way to describe the scene we saw that day. I guess the closest would be that we were staring at a solid sea of heads and sound. Either side of the parade route was overflowing with outstretched arms reaching toward something unseen. Most of the folks looked like locals, but the crowds were notably diverse. I couldn’t help but wonder just how far some of these people came to see these sights. We were so far back in the crowd that our line of sight was completely obscured. What were these people reaching for? What powerful force would drive them wild like this? Somewhere in the deafening commotion, they called some name over and over, made indistinguishable by all the background noise of explosions and constant screaming.
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"You get that Blue Shell away from me, asshole!"

2010-04-22T15:59:00.000-04:00

We all know about Berkeley's strong history of open political dissent and public protests (and counter-protests) of issues ranging from budget cuts to property rights of sewer rats. What you may be less familiar with is how much the City of Berkeley hates cars and the people who drive them. The sheer number of inexplicable one-way streets and phantom alleys is enough to extend a simple five-minute drive across town into an epic three-part journey involving answering the Sphinx's questions and throwing a ring into the heart of an active volcano.
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More pleasant surprises

2010-04-11T18:49:00.000-04:00

Reason #1,034 why it is awesome having a mother who barely understands and speaks English: I can play Robin Thicke's "Sex Therapy" with her in the car and the only response I get from her is "Hey, that's a nice-sounding song - it's much nicer than that really loud obnoxious stuff you normally listen to."

Dulles Airport sucks for not offering free Wi-Fi

2010-04-09T10:29:00.001-04:00

It’s been a fun week on the bEast Coast, but I’m sobering up at Dulles right now while waiting for my evening flight. This post won’t be funny or sarcastic or witty. Skip it if that makes you uncomfortable, but no torches or pitchforks, please - I just redid the kitchen.

I’ve seen old Boston, the birthplace of liberty, I’ve walked the Infinite Corridor at MIT, I’ve touched the golden pee-toe of John Harvard, I’ve struggled along the hobbled brick sidewalks up Beacon Hill, and I’ve seen the Fenway Fanatics REALLY up-close.

I’ve also seen northwest and central DC, I’ve strolled ‘neath the blooming cherry blossoms in front of Healy Hall at Georgetown, I’ve judged far too many students for wearing the entire catalogues of J. Crew/L.L. Bean/Burberry, I’ve walked the entire length of the National Mall in 85-degree weather, I’ve eaten at the history-laden Ben’s Chili Bowl (WAY overrated), I’ve tasted Five Guys Burger (I’m really torn between Five Guys and In-N-Out), and I’ve experienced what REAL subway systems should be like, thanks to both these cities.

I’m going to Georgetown. I had already kinda sorta maybe-ish made up my mind a week ago about which school I wanted to attend, but this little vacation really set everything into stone. I was a little wary about picking Georgetown before really walking in and seeing the campus and The District. Now, I’m more sure than ever that I’m making the right decision. Hell, I even found the house that I’ll be living in next year. GIANT BACKYARD PORCH FOR BEER PONG WOOOO oh wait I mean uhhh relaxing open-air study/dining environment!

Hoya Saxa, Go Bears, and the Nats suck.

(Your regularly scheduled programming will resume when I get back into good ol’ California.)

Go Go Power Illusions of Grandeur

2010-04-03T01:44:00.000-04:00

T^3, a highly valued friend of mine since sixth grade, showed me this hilariously adorable little Japanese dollar store down in the South Bay called Daiso. Ok, I guess it's not really a dollar store; Daiso is "Japan's #1 ranking livingware supplier" according to their website, but the sheer variety of odd knick-knacks and the extremely low prices at which the products are offered means that, really, it's Japan's #1 ranking overseas dollar store. Anything authentically Japanese, from bowls to backscratchers to candy, can be found in that little store.

T^3 decided to take me to Daiso because she had found the oddest, most specific piece of livingware I've ever seen: a $1.50 banana keeper. As you can see from this image (HT: LunchInABox)...

...the banana keeper is a hard carrying case made specifically for bananas or plantains. Actually, not a bad idea, especially if you are a frequent consumer of bananas and you don't want them to get smushed in your bag. I, however, subscribe to Alton Brown's philosophy of "the only uni-tasker in the kitchen should be your fire extinguisher." If we take a look at this thing when it's closed up...

...well, you get where I'm going with this. The banana keeper is clearly NOT a uni-tasker. For only two buckaroos, it's the cheapest date a lonely girl can get OH! Ummm but I'm totally sure that T^3 bought it SOLELY for the purpose of keeping her bananas in good shape.
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"Gullible" is TOTALLY in the dictionary

2010-04-01T03:52:00.000-04:00

When it comes to April Fool's Day pranks, I've never been the successful aggressor. In middle school, you could probably find me hiding in the boys' bathroom, scared to initiate any human interaction lest they give me some terribly unfunny news like "your mother was in a car accident in the parking lot and both her legs are broken!" or "oh wait, just kidding, she actually has cancer." (You understand WHY I believed that car accident story - my mother is female, Chinese, and above the age of 60, which legally qualifies her as a road hazard, required by law to maintain an empty radius of 50 feet around the vehicle.) Of course, the jokes were always innocuous, released by a simple "April Fool's!" Unfortunately, by that point I would already be screaming and crying about which hospital my mother was in or how far the cancer had metastasized. The horrified look on those kids' faces were priceless, especially the always awkward, always embarrassing "holy crap, does his mother ACTUALLY have cancer?" look. Yeah, I didn't make many friends in middle school. Shut up.

NO MORE. This year's April Fools' Day will go down in my books as the Glorious Victorious. Since none of my students read this blog, I'm going to reveal my genius plan of action and you will revel in my glory. Tomorrow, I'm going to teach all my students incredibly wrong formulas and concepts. That way, when they come back to me in a week or two with tears on their faces and F's on all their tests, I'll clear the air with a jovial "April Fools! Haha, see, now wasn't that hilarious?"

I was BORN to be a mentor.

Save me, John McClane and/or Batman

2010-03-23T05:48:00.001-04:00

If you take a look at timeline of my recent writing history, you’ll notice that I was MIA from October of last year to January of 2010. Those three months were an adventure not unlike an oddly eerie, opium-fueled thrice-international trip you’d expect from Lewis Carroll. (…or Chris Farley TOO SOON?)
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I met them on a website. These four ladies were always together, attached at the hip, closer than sisters. Each of them was uniquely different, yet all of them were irresistibly sensual. One was quick-witted and filled with facts; another had a slow-brewing mind and was highly analytical about everything around her. I especially liked this one – she was simple on the surface, but I had a feeling that she would be frustratingly complex once I got to know her better. Of all four girls, only one of them was short and seemingly mentally challenged. Must be all that acetone and ethanol she has with her all the time, I thought. But, my word, she was gorgeous. It was hard to compare them all, so I decided that I must have all of them.

I sauntered over, nervous yet confident, and slapped down $230.

“Hey girls, how’s about all y’all hangin’ with me for the next few months?”

The first couple weeks were filled with simple flirting beneath the sweet caress of fluorescent light from the study carrels at the library. Eventually, I felt comfortable enough to bring them out to my favorite fine dining establishments. At the beginning of this thrilling courtship, I’d take them out for a night on the town and show them what the odd sides of Berkeley offer in the dark of night. After a couple weeks of playing this game, we finally engaged in a passionate hours-long orgy, complete with chocolate, caramel, strawberries, bowling pins, and Mike Tyson’s tiger.

That night – oh, what a night – locked us within each other’s destinies. Eventually, I became a disciple of Senator Bill Henrickson, the tragic yet hilariously fortunate protagonist in HBO’s Big Love. I took the dive and married all four of them.

Four dresses, four rings, four vows, four wedding parties, and one big honeymoon later, we started having marital issues. Just as well, I figured. Over 50% of marriages in the U.S. end in divorce anyway. If I’m lucky, at least two of these money-grubbing whores will be gone by the end of January.

No dice. As the weeks went by, the fights got worse, the yelling got louder, the bottles and beer cans emptied faster. Pretty soon, I was abusing them so badly, both mentally and physically, that Joe Jackson would have been proud of my work. I had no regrets. None.

I woke up one morning and found all four of them gone. Like a lone feather in a harsh winter gale, they were nowhere to be seen. I looked high and low for them, but to no avail. I returned home, exhausted but feeling an odd sense of relief. That’s when I saw the divorce papers on the kitchen table. The date of separation was set for January 31, 2010. It finally hit me – this relationship had been doomed to fail from the very start. Who the hell has enough time and energy to split among four wives, anyway? (HT: Mormon Fundamentalists.)

I picked up the nearest pen and scratched my John Hancock on those papers with zeal. “My pleasure, ladies. My total god-damn pleasure.”

The big day finally came. I made my way to the address on the divorce papers, deep in the heart of the San Francisco financial district.

What an odd little building, I thought. It was the right place, but almost TOO right. It was just so…sterile. No matter. I walked in and checked myself in. Twenty minutes later, I was asked in.

There was no judge, no jury, no mediators. The ladies weren’t even there. Instead, I proceeded to answer a series of computer-given multiple-choice questions tangentially related to my marriage for the past three months.

11. How many ATP are required to transform pyruvate into glucose?
A. 5
B. 6
C. 7
D. 8

“How in the hell am I supposed to know this?”

But wait. Mrs. MCAT Biology had told me this on the first day we met. If I just think back hard enough, I can answer this. The test went on and on, asking me everything from my sexual history with Mrs. MCAT Gen. Chem. to a criminal report about Mrs. MCAT Physics. I took my time, swiftly yet surely answering each question the glaring screen threw at me.

Five hours later, it was all over. Divorce finalized, I breathed a sigh of relief. I haven’t seen those soul-wrenching succubi since, and I could not be happier. Turns out that those three months were handy, seeing how my MCAT score actually turned out to be pretty respectable.

Moral of the story: studying actually paid off. Also, butt cheeks can’t have freckles – wear a condom.
---
If you’ve hung out with me at all, you know I like to use any stupid little reason to celebrate, so long as drinking is involved. The minute I finished my MCAT, I whipped out the flask of Jameson I had kept in my bookbag and started my night off right. I ate like a king at Zabu Zabu on University Ave. Suffering those three months of abuse and crappy late-night sushi was worth every single delicious bite of quick-boiled meats.

Of course, no night of decent celebration could be complete without my favorite watering hole, Beta Lounge. The whole gang was there, including my fellow MCAT war survivors, PermaRA, TheYoc, and Teeks. (Interestingly enough, I’ll be going to school on the bEast Coast this coming fall with Teeks, while TheYoc is staying here in THA BAY to attend UCfreakingSF. If you know who he is and you see him, congratulate him, then do me a favor and punch him in the face for being too smart.)

$180 of drinks later, I wandered back to my apartment along with $R$, BestBruinEVER and PermaRA. Considering my lack of fine motor skills, I thought I’d take the crappy excuse for an elevator up one floor to my unit. The three decided to come with.

We got in, pushed the “2” button, and…nothing.

“Uhh…are we moving?” $R$ questioned warily.

“No, I don’t think we are.” PermaRA made the executive decision to just take the one flight of stairs up. I vehemently (read: drunkenly and foolishly) refused. “I am taking the elevator if I damn well please! I LIVE HERE! WOOO RICKAY BOBBAYYY!!!!”

So the three of them stood outside and watched me through the three-by-six-inch window of the elevator door. I pushed “2” again. This time, the sliding door moved…then got stuck 90% of the way before fully closing. Crap, I thought. I could’ve just walked the one flight of stairs. What am I doing?

I jammed on the “Door Open” button. No response.

I looked all around the panel to see if there were other buttons I could push to rectify this situation. I looked up and saw the City of Berkeley Elevator Permit taped up top. The permit expired in April 2008. Scenes of the terrible horror movie Final Destination started to flash before my eyes.

I’m the kind of guy who has no problem drinking expired milk or eating expired processed meats. I guess an expired elevator license shouldn’t be that much worse. Boy, was I ever wrong about THAT assumption. Neither the “Door Open” nor the “Door Close” buttons worked. I started to panic, but that panic quickly turned into excitement.

“Oh my God, it’s like I’m in some awesome Hollywood movie.” See what a little booze does to your judgment? This is your brain on drugs, kids.

“I’ll try going upstairs to call the elevator to see if that’ll make it move!” Thunk thunk thunk went PermaRA’s quick steps. I waited. And waited.

“Did you push it yet?”

“Yeah. I guess it didn’t work.”

Panic set in once again, and much like pre-labor contractions, this one hit me harder than ever. Enter Bruce Banner. With sheer frustration and for lack of a better plan, I gripped my sweaty fingers onto the sliding door and pushed it right as hard as I could.

Ka-THUNK. “Oooooh holy CRAP it’s moving!”

An elevator ride that normally would have taken 45 seconds turned into eight minutes’ worth of a story I can tell for the rest of my life. Nobody was hurt, and I didn’t even have a hangover the next day. Go me.

Thank heavens I got out of that elevator when I did. I’m pretty sure that if I had been stuck in there for just another five minutes, this would’ve happened:

That would NOT have been good. Bruce Willis is WAY too old to save me from life-threatening situations like that.

30% irony, 100% coincidence

2010-03-09T18:07:00.001-05:00

I can’t tell how much of this is irony and how much of it is plain dumb luck: watching an episode of Trauma on Hulu, thinking that it’s crappy and poorly written (there’s no way a person with claustrophobia could make it as a paramedic – the back of an ambulance is TINY), and then personally requiring emergency medical assistance a mere two hours later due to hypoglycemic shock at the gym. They sent six - count 'em, SIX - paramedics (okay, really 5.5, because one of them was a Basic on observation only) to take care of one little ol' me. And all I really needed was a can of Mountain Dew to get my blood sugar up.

The lesson of the day: EAT before you work out. Don’t be in a hurry/stupid like me.

“I am your density.” – George McFly

2010-03-01T22:14:00.001-05:00

There are various cheesy motivational posters put up around my workplace. If you’ve seen them, you know what I’m talking about. The posters have some inspiring HD photograph of a majestic bird in flight or a majestic stone arch or the majestic ocean or some other majestic crap in the middle. Written underneath it is some big key word in all caps, key words taken from the glossary of the American Standard Guidebook of Boring Corporate Motivational Team-Building Exercises. Underneath the key word is some short adage meant to inspire you and make you feel better about contributing to your team. A simple gigantic banner asking “Is this good for the COMPANY?” might be more cost-effective.

I hate these motivator posters with all my heart. How effective could a $20 poster really be in order to get employees to stop dicking around for five hours a day playing paper football or throwing paper clips at each other?

Today only further cemented my disdain for these motivator posters. The one I saw today said the following:
“DESTINY: The choices we make, not the chances we take, determine our destiny.”

I looked at this and I felt my neurons set on fire, one by one. Isn’t the act of taking a chance a conscious, self-made choice in and of itself? Furthermore, isn’t destiny defined as an inevitable conclusion regardless of actions taken? So even if the choices we make were the true drivers of our immediate direction in life, how can they DETERMINE our DESTINY if the very definition of destiny is founded upon PREdetermination?
There were so many things self-contradictory with this statement that I had to sit down for five minutes to collect myself before moving on with my day. Someone should thank me that I didn’t have a lighter to set the damn thing on fire.

By the way, my favorite Demotivator of all time, courtesy of Despair.com: “BLOGGING: Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.” The wordplay makes me giddy like a schoolgirl.

Lost In Translation

2010-02-18T21:27:00.001-05:00

Picking my father up from SFO is a biannual Olympic event. For some reason, he likes to fly in on Fridays, and I still can't figure out why. It’s certainly not any cheaper, and the airport is always an absolute madhouse on Friday evenings. Considering that he only shows up twice a year, he might consider doing the rest of us a solid by not picking days when my mother and I have to operate a truly Olympic-gold-medal-worthy act of coordination. The event, aptly named RunSnatchCallGo, looks like this: somebody (usually ME) runs out of the car and snatches my father while my mother circles around the loop at just the right speed so that she’ll pull up to the terminal door at exactly the right moment so I can call her and frantically scream, “HE’S HERE HE’S HERE HE’S HERE WHERE ARE YOU OH MY GOD.” We then all hop in while implementing a number of group triple axels and backflips. I think we averaged 9.2/10.0 in the past. (Thanks to our many years of forced practice, I can proudly claim that the last time my mother was on the receiving end of senseless screaming from one of those people they hired from the mental asylum to run airport traffic, I was 12. Maybe.)

My mom likes to make sure that this ceremony of dealing with idiotic drivers and insane people waving their arms becomes a family affair (unless my sister is working late on Fridays, something all-too-common nowadays).

That brings us to the evening of February 12th. Since my poor sister was once again working late into the night (we’re talking 9:00pm on a Friday, a time which typically marks the 8th beer of the night for me), my mother and I picked up my father from the airport first, then headed south to pick her up from work.

Sorry about this, folks, but I need to go on yet another tangent here for background purposes.

My father is a huge film buff. The size of his VHS, LaserDisc (think big-ass DVD), and DVD collection at home is mind-boggling, made all the more impressive considering most of it is hidden in various nooks and crannies so that it just looks like we don’t have ANY movies in the house. That is one of the qualities I inadvertently picked up from my father, the whole film-lover thing. Our standards for what ought to be considered a “good film” are surprisingly close. In fact, I’ve come to notice that, for a man I’ve seen about twice a year for most of my life, I have grown up to have his personality almost exactly, including the penchant to be a physician and our senses of humor. The best part about it? I’m allowed to make dirty jokes in the house, because he has no right to disparage something I do when he does it five times more often. Apologies: the point is that my father actually knows what’s going on in the film world.

Back to the story.

We picked up my sister and instantly the whole family engaged in a gigantic bitchfest about the state of the American economy. The statements “America is no longer tops” and “immigrating to this country was a mistake” were my father’s new catchphrases. (Used to be “OH GOD why is Taiwanese baseball so crappy now?”)

After all of us got our ya-yas out, there came the inevitable awkward silence. To break that silence, my sister asked me an absolutely bizarre question:

“Have you seen Evita?”

I flashed back to my childhood. Evita. “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.” 1996. Madonna. Antonio Banderrrrrrras. FOURTH GRADE. My introduction to the shaky genre of musical-to-movie adaptations.

Why the hell would she ask me this now?

“Evita? Did you just ask me if I’ve ever seen Evita?”

“Um, I THINK it’s called Evita. Or maybe ‘Evinta.’ I’m not sure.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re asking me if I’ve ever seen the 1996 film adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber classic musical, Evita, starring Madonna. The movie that won the Academy Award for Best Original Song that year. A movie that I know WAY too much detail about for being nine years old at the time. EVITA.” (And if you’re wondering, yes, I knew all those facts off the top of my head.)

“No! I’m talking about that new movie that everyone is talking about with all the big blue people. The one my friend invited me to watch in 3-D.”

Wait. But that sounds like she’s talking about Avatar. Last I recall, Madonna was definitely not in Avatar.

Because my father is a huge film buff, he frequently watches the big blockbusters right when they come out in theatres in Taiwan. Avatar was no exception. Good thing he was there to save the day, because Lord knows I had no idea what anybody was talking about:

“In Chinese, the transliteration for Avatar is ‘Ah-Fan-Dah.’”

So that’s where she got “Evita” or “Evinta” from.

I cracked a Coors Light as soon as we got home with the hope that the alcohol might revive the neurons I lost while trying to figure out that conversation in the car.

The John Smith Incident

2010-02-16T18:29:00.001-05:00

This blog is mostly a chronicle of stupid and unfortunate incidents that, for whatever reason, happen to yours truly. (Sometimes I think it’s because the Great Oski in the Sky has been crying so much recently that he needs to pick on me for occasional comic relief.) Then there are stories like this – stories of a truly and uniquely Berkeleyan nature. It’s a story that I like so much and is so memorable that it deserves its own timeless moniker.

1770 gave us the Boston Massacre, the spark that ignited the volatile powder keg culminating in the American Revolution. 1982 gave us The Play, a series of events so zany and improbable that a name so simple would suffice. 2009, appropriately, gave us The Pick, one of the most exciting single plays in Big Game history. Now, I give you The John Smith Incident, admittedly an event nowhere near a tier of importance high enough to warrant uses of definite articles nor unnecessary capitalizations. False advertising? Perhaps. If you have a problem, take it up with HR.
---
TheYoc, Teeks, EZ-E, BarackObinna and I went to one of the local cheap-o college student eateries in the Asian Ghetto, Thai Basil, to celebrate our men’s basketball team’s victory over that ketchup-and-mustard school in South Central L.A. There’s nothing unusual about a group of college-age friends grabbing some late-night grub. Once you add one cup of Berkeley crazies, stir in two teaspoons of irreverent and misdirected anger, broil at 400 degrees, and garnish with a sprinkling of crack, though, you’re playing in a whole new ball game.

The five of us, jolly and hungry from the excitement of the game, were sitting around the table in the restaurant, minding our own business, eating away, when somebody brought up the film Avatar. Time for a “Ugh, I HATE it when Gordo gives these snobby film snob opinions” moment:

I did not like Avatar.

There, I said it. The visuals were certainly stunning and provided for three hours decent entertainment – a hallmark of James Cameron films. The plot, however, was unoriginal and the acting shoddy at best – the other major hallmark of James Cameron films. As far as I’m concerned, a pretty face does not a good mother make. The plot devices were serviceable, but I was pretty bored by the one-hour mark. Also: sorry, Sigourney, you know I love ya, but even your star power couldn’t overcome one of the absolute most poorly attempted American accents in the history of film. (Apparently, Jake Sully is a cross between a paraplegic American soldier and a half-Australian, half-British man with a speech impediment.) Honestly, if you’ve seen Dances With Wolves or Disney’s Pocahontas, you’ve seen Avatar. Still don’t believe me? Boom.

During the heated discussion between EZ-E and myself regarding the quality of Avatar and why Zoe Saldana is still smoking hot whether she plays a hot college cheerleader, a hot intergalactic linguist, or a hot big blue cat-Smurf-thing, I brought up the parallel between characters of Pocahontas and Avatar. While I was emphatically comparing Jake Sully to John Smith, characters so similar that Cameron did not even bother to change their first initials, a bystander chimed in:

Guy: “Y’all talkin’ ‘bout John Smith?”
Us: “Ummm…yeah?”
Guy: “Yeah, that guy needs to DIE.”

The five of us sat there, dumbfounded, while this guy went on and on about how John Smith was basically evil incarnate, raped or murdered or otherwise destroyed all of this guy’s Native American ancestors, and led the movement for the modern social imprisonment of all American minorities today.

To be fair, this guy had a few valid points – the Europeans were no saviors to the Native Americans by any means, and the forced removal of Native Americans from their homeland is still a major stain upon this nation’s history. The beautiful First Thanksgiving that we all learn about in grade school was a rare face of mutualism. BarackObinna even spoke up in support of this guy’s opinions.

At this point, I was thinking, Okay, this guy’s just opinionated about social issues. We’re in Berkeley – probably shouldn’t expect any less. He’s right in some respects, but I hope he stops talking soon - I really want to finish my meal in peace.

Then things got WEIRD.

He started talking about how any minority in America who owns and operates a corner grocery store or a laundromat is stuck in that unfortunate predicament because of John Smith and every negative racially-linked social issue in the United States is John Smith’s fault. Of course, in between each sentence, he always encouraged John Smith to go die. At one point, I quietly suggested that John Smith is, in fact, already dead and therefore cannot die again. He suggested that I go look up my genealogy and that I should be angrier at the Europeans who raped my ancestors and ruined my potential future. Apparently, no thanks to the entire continent of Europe, I am destined to be a poor owner and operator of a shady store-laundromat hybrid with an income ceiling of $25,000 per year.

I honestly wasn’t offended by anything he was saying, because I knew he was either delirious or just full of crap. However, I was really hungry and his incessant rambling was keeping me from my delicious, rapidly cooling Pad Thai. So I called him out on it. He told me to go fuck myself.

BarackObinna, the glorious future lawyer, stepped in and talked some sense into the situation. He told the crazy man to go research his own genealogy more closely. Crazy Man retorted with a “fuck you, you KNOW you have some Native American blood in you” and left us with what I guess was an American Indian tribal middle finger greeting.

We sat there, speechless. The looks we all exchanged said but one thing: WHAT ON EARTH JUST HAPPENED?

EZ-E broke the silence in as perfect a 1980s sitcom way as possible: “BUT WE WERE ONLY TALKING ABOUT AVATAR.”

BarackObinna made a suggestion that we all decided was the best way to settle this: “He’s probably on crack. There’s no other explanation.”

Consensus made, we happily went on with our meal and laughed off the whole thing.

Yeah, this story really isn’t that good. But if you want to see societal problems in America, once again, let Berkeley be your guide:

I guess “Brita” is a nickname I’m never going to have

2010-02-05T17:25:00.000-05:00

I’m back. Don’t ask me where I’ve been or how it went, and I won’t ask you about those Facebook pictures you took with those two dudes and that horse in that barn on New Year’s Eve – pictures I’m sure your boss would love to see. Fair? Deal.

Just like last year, I have made no new year resolutions. I can’t keep them, and I’m not going to lie to myself year after year. It seems to me that the only thing new year resolutions do is make the gym impossibly crowded for the first few weeks of January, no thanks to all the folks who say to themselves, “I SWEAR I’m going to lose these 50 pounds this time” or “Why did mom have to put so much damn butter in the stuffing?”

We all caught up now with the mushy stuff? Good. On with the show.
---
I’ve done a smattering of publicly embarrassing (a redundancy, I suppose) things through my adult life up to this point. Ask any of the Cal Band alumni in my time, and probably the first story they will tell you is the Middle School Boys’ Basketball Incident at a Cal basketball game during my first year in college. (If you really want to know, I’ll write it later. Just take my word for it that it’s a strong enough story with enough cheap thrills and shocking laughs to have tainted my good reputation for the past five years and likely for the rest of my unfortunate life.) There was, of course, the Tucker Max At Work Incident from last year. This incident is the first one of the new year, and if destiny has ever meant anything, this event will set the tone for the rest of the year.

This is a story about my first eviction notice, blame placed entirely upon my filter-lacking brain-to-mouth neural connections. My co-worker, AsianShaq, has described me as him, but drunk, meaning that when he loses all inhibition and says whatever he wants to without consideration of consequence, that’s just me ALL THE TIME. You know how Robin Williams can’t ever seem to “turn it off” because apparently he broke his “Funny” dial years ago? My “Inappropriate” switch is similarly broken. I’m guessing both he and I were brought to our mommas by storks from Acer Computers, because our warranties sure didn’t last very long.

As college rivalries go, Cal-Stanford is relatively tame. Yet every time any sports event poster branded with “CAL VS. STANFORD IN THE BIG [insert creative synecdoche],” you see the inner blue-and-gold flames flare up as Cal fans young and old show up to support their teams, no matter how obscure the sport or how bad the teams. I mean, how good can West Coast college hockey teams be?

Being a big money sport, the twice-yearly Cal-Stanford men’s basketball game always draws a full house. Being a Cal Band alumnus, we like to use our former powers and get into basketball games for free wielding nothing more than our trusty instruments, oddly decorated straw hats, and our annoyingly loud vests. And here…we…go:

Vegas had us favored at something like 13.5 points, and thank the Great Oski in the Sky that it turned out that way. In the final two minutes of the game, we were up by around 15 points when the referees started calling really bizarre phantom foul calls. Immediately I thought that they were pulling a Tim Donaghy, trying to throw the game in favor of the spread. (I guess since being a college sports referee is a part-time gig, they need all the extra pocket change they can get their grubby, incompetent little hands on. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Pac-10.)

Those of you who know me well know that I sometimes have difficulty controlling my emotions in the heat of the moment; consequently, the phrases that fly out of my mouth could be rated anything from a gentle PG to a blasphemous R. Let me tell you, those inexplicable foul calls elevated me from a nice “awesome, we’re going to win this game easily” Disney movie mood to a “2.23 uses per minute of the word ‘fuck’” mood a la the 1995 classic Casino. My brain had no filter of any sort, not even a sieve or a collander. It was a just a straight cannon.

I can also tell you that there is a difference between the entire arena booing loudly and a single loud, poignant opinion in the silence of dead air. Instead of choosing to yell profanities under the cover of ubiquitous noise, I accidentally called the ref a “stupid bald motherfucker” as soon as the arena noise died down. It wasn’t my fault, mind you. Who knew dissenting noise could die down so quickly?

No sooner had the words left my lips did a Haas Pavilion official take a quick skip and hop up to where I was standing and told me to go with him. We strode to the lobby of the pavilion. It was actually a really calm, amicable conversation:

“Am I being kicked out of the game?”

“Yes, you are. I need you to leave the premises. Come on, man, there are kids here. You have to come up with insults more creative than that.”

“Fair enough.”

He kindly showed me the door.

I think he only got pissed at me because he was bald too.

The Odyssey, or, Dear Bears WHAT THE FUCK

2009-10-11T20:13:00.001-04:00

Foreword
I am a bad role model.

To date, the closest I’ve ever come to being a father is taking care of my car, BEAST MODE (affectionately referred to by some as Nene Hilario). And, like many bad fathers, I pushed my baby through puberty. Though only in his infancy, my car has already accumulated about 2,000 too many miles on it, thanks to two major road trips, one of which was BASICALLY THE BEST ROAD TRIP EVER, the other of which comprised the MOST WORTHLESS ROAD TRIP EVER. The following is a story about the latter.

Be forewarned, reader. This is a story of fire-and-brimstone adventure, discovering new lands, solidifying certain bonds, and tearfully breaking others. Most importantly, however, this is a blueprint for how to simultaneously shatter 8,000 hearts into a million little splinters. (Pay attention, schools I plan on applying to. That includes you, USC.)

There is no happy ending here. This is not a revelation of David’s triumph over Goliath. This story, in all its misery, could easily parallel any tale about all the trials and suffering of the Jewish people, and that’s saying a LOT. If you wish to dig into the hay pile and look for the silver lining, be my guest. This will not be over quickly. You will not enjoy this.

Presenting your feature cast:
Gordo, your friendly neighborhood Driver Man
TheYoc, party medic/SDN addict
Teeks, ~~village bicycle~~ ~~doorknob~~ ~~skanky whore~~ ~~ok fine I’ll stop~~ ho
DeezNuts, operator of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride
CarpeDM08, resident ~~PITTSBURGH SUCKS~~ east coast transplant
EZ-E, resident ~~unemployed hobo~~ badass
JenNAY, resident ~~cokehead~~ hot stuff
Pussyface, resident ~~Thai hooker~~ Southeast Asian of indeterminate origin
Pomona, helmsman of the U.S.S. Enterprise
PomonaXX, Pomona’s girl
TheWhiteMichaelVick, just as fast and more accurate plus not stupid enough to torture and kill dogs
----
Act I
Journey to Oregonia.
Friday morning. Sunshine kissing our happy faces. Warm, but balmy.

BEAST MODE had the honor of transporting TheYoc and Teeks, piloted by yours truly. The eight-hour ride up to our hotel in Sutherlin, about an hour south of Eugene, had the following highlights:

-TheYoc: “Dude, I’m sorry, but I have to go pee again.”
Gordo: “But you JUST WENT, like, half an hour ago.”
TheYoc: “I know. I said I’m sorry.”
Gordo: “Suck it up. This is what plastic water bottles were made for.”

-Lunch stop at the In-N-Out in Redding, where we accidentally ran into another car of Cal Bandsmen. Also, we later found out that every single car involved in this road trip stopped at that In-N-Out. Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name/and you’re always glad you came, ya know?
-Breaking out my “Songs We Grew Up With” playlist. BSB, *NSYNC, Britney, Christina, etc. instantly brought up the “OH MY GOD WE’RE SO OLD I CAN’T BELIEVE SOME OF THE NEWMEN DON’T KNOW WHO *NSYNC IS” talk. This xkcd comic reflects our collective sentiment exactly.

-Playing word-connection games. The celebrity name game: one person names a celebrity’s full name, and the next person has to name a celebrity whose first name starts with the first letter of the previous celebrity’s last name. This entertained us for TWO WHOLE HOURS and proved to us, as TheYoc put so well, “how much useless shit we know just by watching TV and stuff.” Also, playing Contact, which is basically a human crossword puzzle. It’s an insanely time-consuming game, psychologically challenging, and also extremely rewarding. Ask store for rules no need to purchase to be eligible prizes may vary see store for details.

-TheYoc: “Why does Oregon look like L.A.? Is this smog?”
Gordo: “Hmm. It shouldn’t. Maybe there are wildfires around here?”
TheYoc: “Let me look it up on my iPhone…OH SHIT there are HELLA wildfires.”

We drove through that smoke for about two hours.

Strider at the Inn.
8PM, gorgeous sunset in the distance.
Teeks: “This is our hotel?”
Gordo: “Hey, don’t knock it. It was cheap as hell.”
Teeks: “This is totally a hooker hotel. Look:

Wall-to-wall mirror against the beds…

…bigass mirror on the opposite wall

…few ceiling lights…

…this is totally a hooker hotel.”

Gordo: “I guess all that’s missing are magic finger beds shaped like giant hearts, a retractable stripper pole from the floor, and a mirror on the ceiling and this might as well be the cheapest Japanese love hotel ever.”

(Ed. note: the hotel was actually really, really nice for the price. The hotel stay, complete with breakfast and free wi-fi, cost less per person than any other expense, including tickets and gas. From the bottom of my heart to the Microtel Sutherlin staff – 4 stars, truly.)
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Act II
First Dinner.
The Apple Peddler restaurant, right next to our hotel. The three of us walked in, hungrier than three wolves howling at the moon, and immediately we felt the entire restaurant’s eyes peering our darker complexions and ethnic features. Not only were they all white, they were also coveting our youthful energy and vigor because calling them “beyond old” would be a gross understatement. One third – ONE WHOLE THIRD – of our menu was titled “Senior Citizens Early Bird Specials.” We would’ve been better off going to any of the other fast food restaurants in walking distance, because the food was pretty bad – the steak tough and chewy, the fish barely cooked well enough, and the gravy more starch than liquid. However, sustenance gained, we ventured to the gas station to procure vitamins and minerals, necessary for…um…~~advancing our battlefront and to boost morale~~ oh who are we kidding what’s a Cal Band trip without drinking in hotel rooms?

Prima Notte.
Teeks: “What is there to do around here?”
TheYoc: “Nothing. That’s why we got the beer and the cards.”
Gordo: “Let’s at least check out what’s on the TV.”

…click clickety click click…

TheYoc: “STOP. Oh my god. Is this SHOWGIRLS? THIS IS TOTALLY SHOWGIRLS.”
Gordo: “How do you know it’s ShoWHOOOOA BOOBIES ok we’re staying on this channel.”
Teeks: “You guys are GUH-ROSS. Can we please watch something else?”

There are reasons why men rule the world. Controlling the remote control is definitely one of them. We watched every single minute of that damned movie starring, you guessed it, Elizabeth Berkley of Saved By The Bell fame.

Yep, that’s her. Jessie Spanos, showing her ta-tas and hoo-hoo for the world to ogle, like some animal at the zoo, but with boobies and dancing around naked for most of the time.

BEST SCENE OF THE MOVIE:
Nomi Malone (Berkley): “I’m on my period.”
Dude wanting to fuck her: “Yeah, right.”
Nomi: “Check.”
Dude wanting to fuck her reaches down her pants and slowly pulls out his fingers dabbed with blood.

It’s no wonder why this movie became such a cult classic. Being lame and worn out/hot-‘n-bothered, the three of us went to bed at midnight.

Pomona, PomonaXX, and TheWhiteMichaelVick showed up to the hotel room at around 2AM. Let’s hop in the way-back machine and do some quick grade school math: if Pomona’s car left Berkeley at 7:30PM and got to the hotel room by 2AM, how long did it take them to drive the 460 miles north? At what speed were they driving to get there in that time?

Got the answer? I’ll wait.

Like I said. Helmsman of the U.S.S. motherfucking Enterprise.
----
Act III
To Arms.
The other five actually got to the hotel at around midnight, but since we had all passed out, we didn’t actually see them until Saturday morning.

There was a football game, I think. I can’t really remember because I’m pretty sure I blacked out for most of it. That’s how bad it was. The only tidbit I would like to relay here in full detail: CarpeDM08, valiant warrior and watchful sentinel as always, whispering, “I can’t tell what’s worse right now – how badly the Bears are playing or the number of teeth missing from the Oregon fan standing next to me.”

Drowning our sorrows.
An extremely delightful dinner at Turtles Bar & Grill in Eugene plus daily specials, Saturday’s being $4 Sex on the Beach, meant that I was ready to gorge and booze and I was parking my ass there till I was done, come hell or high water.

Pussyface: “Well…now what?”

We all looked at each other knowingly.

Typical Cal Band hotel set: beers in hand, huddled around the idiot box, watching one of our favorite childhood films of all time - Jurassic Park. JenNAY had never seen the movie till that night, and I am proud to report that she was just as excited and thrilled as the first time all the rest of us saw it. “Clever girl,” indeed.

Click click whirrrrrr. 9:45PM. We needed to end this trip right. Translation: QUEST!
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Epilogue
10PM. Our motley crew, eleven soldiers of fortune, stood around the cashier area of the Dairy Queen, located literally a fifteen-second drive from our hotel, as they neared closing time. We huddled in that wagon circle, porking our sorrows away with Blizzards and cream cones and also doing an excellent job of getting in the way of other people trying to order.

At that point, I didn’t feel like a Cal Bandsman. We didn’t talk about the game. We didn’t talk about the future of Cal football. Instead, we ended the night with what I now realize is the absolute perfect way to sum up our trip in a convenient, ready-to-go, handheld 41-second package.

For every brilliant invention in the world, there exist fifty absolutely pointless and overhyped ones (such as the Snuggie, the Big Top Cupcake, and the Shake Weight). One of the most famous and technologically brilliant ones is, without question, the Segway. Originally touted as “the next leap forward in transportation technology,” advocated by the venerable Steve Jobs to be “as significant as the personal computer,” the Segway was one of the greatest flops of all time, even bigger than Ryan Leaf (YES I SAID IT).

The Segway was unveiled in 2001 and first produced in 2002. Since then, a grand total of nobody has purchased it for personal home use. Instead, Segway has found several niche markets, each as Failblog-worthy as the next. Observe:

Tour Groups (actually, not a bad idea)

Segway Polo, a.k.a. Sport For People Too Rich To Play Anything Less Regal Than Going Around Whacking Balls With Hammers Yet Too Lazy To Learn How To Ride Horses While Whacking Balls With Hammers

Communist Oppression Enthusiasts

None of these sectors, however, match up to the entertainment value of zoo animals on Segways. Chimpanzees, specifically. Watch this video. Turn the volume up, and I guarantee you that this damn song will be stuck in your head for the next two weeks.

I thought nothing of it at first other than quick, cheap laughs, but thank you sweet baby Jesus for letting this video inspire me to break my writer’s block.
Sorry for the way-too-long setup, but to the point:

The Segway is the 2009 Cal football team.

Gather the yearning, drooling masses to watch an extremely overhyped product, widely touted by multiple big-name sources to have extreme future potential, embarrass itself very, very publicly. Be unsurprised as the vast majority of the potential market share runs away, seeing the promise of many years of development fall inexplicably short of expectations. Be very impressed, however, with the dedicated few who stick with it through thick and thin, because that, my friends, is LOVE.

I’ve actually met a so-called “Segway enthusiast” in my time at Cal, and by Noah’s right hand, he LOVED that machine. I asked him about all the detractors, naysayers, and jokesters. None of it mattered to him. He loved his Segway regardless of what anyone else said. And this is the most valuable lesson of all: loyalty, though capable of being blind and unreasonable at times, is an honorable virtue. We will always and forever love our Bears, no matter what. There is no fancy language or impressive vocabulary to make that statement any more or less true.

So there you have it. The Oregon Trip, The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Nine. Since I’ve never been great at good-byes, I’ll simply end with this running gag from CarpeDM08: “You make sure they remember…FOREVER…the night they played the Titans.”
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Good news/bad news time. Good news: you just got through what I consider to be my best post ever. Bad news: I won’t be writing again until January. Science beckons, friends.

"My Humps" = The Breast Cancer Awareness Theme Song

2009-10-08T16:22:00.000-04:00

Quest for Oregonia, a.k.a. WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT BEARS story coming soon, I promise. But we now interrupt your regular programming for this important message. Have you ever felt cold and wanted to just lie down on a couch with a warm blanket but also read/eat/channel surf incessantly at the same time while keeping your arms covered by said blanket? Well now you can!...oh hey just kidding. Sally forth.

Our company is currently doing a lot of fundraising for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, as noble a cause as any I've ever heard of. Certain people simply donate cold, hard cash, while others find a way to benefit not only the kids at JDRF but also their fellow employees. To reach that goal, many of them have bake/cook sales - hot dogs, homemade cupcakes, tamales, pearl milk tea, etc. (I wonder how much house takes for "production costs" or if they actually give 100% of proceeds to JDRF. Hmmmm.) The major players in these sales are two of my favorite coworkers, Arcadia and JLo. Now, the day before every sale, Arcadia will send out a company-wide email containing something along the lines of "HEY Y'ALL KNOW WHAT TOMORROW IS THAT'S RIGHT IT'S HOT DOG TUESDAY AGAIN HOT DOG CHIPS CUPCAKE $3!!!!!!!" or something equally ridiculous. The best part, however, is that he includes an awesome hi-def photograph of the meal. You know how McDonald's makes a Big Mac look like it should taste as if it actually has two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun...

when in fact it looks like this?

Well, that's exactly what Arcadia's hi-def photos of his delicious, plump ballpark franks (wow that didn't come out right at all THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID oh stop it) does. False advertising, sir! I ought to report him to the Better Business Bureau.

Anyway, as I was standing next to CatsofBerkeley (yes, that's a real blog by a real guy I know and work with) looking at this amazing photo, FDU walks by and exclaims, "Oh, would you stop ogling that? Do you know anything about the explosion of obesity rates in the United States in the past two decades? I'm going to send all four of you this CDC article with all the statistics so you guys stop eating that utter garbage." And, FDU being FDU, he immediately went to his office and sent us this link, which in truth is 1) ridiculously scary and 2) more fodder to use against Alabama for any and all entertainment/insult purposes. (Watch the slideshow - Alabama is ALWAYS the first to go.)

Then, of course, Hojin sent us a link about KFC's new Double Down sandwich. This is 100% real and currently only offered in Rhode Island and Nebraska as test markets. (Please excuse the fact that it's sourced at Faux News.)

Atrocities/AWESOMESSS like these are exactly the reason why websites like This Is Why You're Fat exist and flourish, and by atrocities I mean Alabamans. It's really not our fault that Americans on average are obese and dying from the number one preventable cause of death in the country. It's THEIR fault. But let's look at the silver lining. This leads me back to why I chose to title this entry what I did (there's ALWAYS a reason, fool): without innovations like the Double Down sandwich or Wendy's Triple Stack, where would we get entertainment such as this, the purest and most principled blistering-speed humor only found in absolute Americana?

Requiem For A Doubleyou Tee Eff

2009-09-23T22:44:00.001-04:00

About a fortnight ago, I came home after a fairly long day of work (hey, growing E. coli and squinting while moving extremely small volumes of liquid back and forth takes a lot of energy) to find my roommate with his door closed but lights on. I thought nothing of it because it was nothing out of the ordinary. I stepped into the bathroom to find a 12mL plastic syringe with a gigantic metal needle sitting in the sink. The sink was splattered with a viscous, dark red fluid and the syringe was partially filled with the same.

“Oh Jesus Christ, he’s a junkie.”

But wait. A 12mL syringe is far too big, almost laughably big to be using for the purpose of injecting oneself with heroin or cocaine or speedball or whatever else Al Capone was so good at peddling. Observe, a 12mL syringe:

It’s like one of those syringes in cartoons that Dr. Bugs Bunny uses to shoot antibiotics into Elmer Fudd’s ass. Like so:

You fill that baby up, you could kill Keith Richards, bring him back to life, and kill him again. And that’s saying a LOT, because Keith Richards is a modern medical phenomenon, having somehow accidentally discovered the secret to immortality with a mysterious mixture of questionable cocaine-to-alcohol ratio. I’m pretty sure that he’s a walking, breathing mummy at this point. For the sake of discussion, let’s do a totally unbiased scientific comparison.

Exhibit A, young Keith Richards:

Exhibit B, Keith Richards today:

It’s like I’m playing those damn “see you if you can find the 10 differences between these two pictures!” game in Highlights For Children, and I’m losing miserably. Hx: Goofus and Gallant taught me everything I need to know about common decency and basic social skills. I guess I never really paid close attention, or else I would’ve known better than to irresponsibly exclaim certain statements about feces and phalluses in the workplace.

My word, that was quite a tangent. To the point: having known my roommate, BetterThanViolin, for eight-plus years now, I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell that he could be a junkie. So how do I explain this horse tranquilizer-sized syringe?

He walked in and hurriedly mumbled, “Oh dude, I’m just refilling my printer ink cartridge. Don’t worry, I’m not a junkie or anything like that.”

Hmmmmmmmmm.

Several open letters to the community at large

2009-09-18T04:26:00.001-04:00

Big ol’ bacon-grease shout-out to NotAMockery. YOU MY [GIRL] BLUE!
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The following is a series of open letters I’ve mentally accumulated the past few weeks. Most of these involve the central vein of our fair city.

Dear University Avenue in Berkeley, Calif.:

Thank you for making traffic on you absolutely insufferable for the past couple of months to re-pave your western end. At least now when I drive to and from work, I’ll only feel like I’m off-roading HALF the time. [Seriously, though, the new pavement is badass. The too-tight suspension on my Honda and my ever-so-delicate baby bottom thanks you.]
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Dear driver of Super Awesome Pickup Truck on University:

Thank you for driving slow enough to allow me to keep my left hand on the wheel while using my right hand to grab my camera out of my bag, take my camera out of its case, and zoom/focus onto the back of your awesome FAILBLOG-TASTIC TRUCK:

A hybrid what, exactly? I am 87% sure that the awkward steel frame of sorts situated atop your truck bed does not garner you the 50 mpg city/49 mpg highway that the new third generation Toyota Prius achieves. But I salute you, sir, for making my day a little bit better, knowing that if I ever wanted to, I could submit your vehicle to Failblog and take the credit and the love from the masses.
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Dear driver stopped next to me at the light on University and Sacramento:

If I want to have all my windows down while pumping Toto’s “Africa” at 8:30AM and singing along at the top of my lungs, quite frankly, that is my prerogative. Your double-middle-finger-salute, accompanied by your multiple colorful tattoos, prematurely balding head, severely jewelry-mutilated pinna, and undoubtedly tiny penis, intimidate me not. I’m sure your precious Oakland Raiders love to have your ravenous kind around, and to be honest, I don’t dislike you and your brethren – a crazy jackass loyal base is better than no base at all (read: ~~Republicans~~ ~~Raiders~~ ~~USC~~ ~~former LA Raiders fans who have since hopped on the USC bandwagon~~ ~~Republican Raiders/USC fans~~ USC) – but you feel the need to put me down for my loves and desires, well then by Jove I’m going to put you down for yours.
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Dear Z Gallerie on University Avenue in my beloved/much-avoided hometown of Palo Alto:

Well, it took damn near forever, but you’ve FINALLY closed. Your advertised “fine home furnishings” were tacky and far overpriced and your storefront an eyesore to the entire street. I sympathize with the owners/operators of the store, because this closure, like so many around the country right now, means that a few more good, honest Americans are out of jobs, but really, not unlike the bankruptcies of Enron, Lehman Brothers, or Umbrella Corporation, I think it’s for the best.
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Dear powers-that-be at Random House/McGraw-Hill/Scholastic:

These past four years, I have had the privilege (some might argue an unfortunate one; to them I say merely misunderstood) of knowing and befriending an incredibly unique individual. His sense of recklessness toward the laws of society by which we lead our lives and his commitment to always pushing – nay, shredding and destroying – that envelope is, at worst, cause for psychiatric concern and, at its very best, wild laugh-a-minute entertainment. He is the modern Tucker Max, minus the sexual exploits. I present the single most powerful argument for why you need to get this man a book deal NOW:
(10:44:45 PM) KNak: “annie le, you have a real good story and imma let you finish, but jaycee lee dugard had one of the best abductions of all tahm, of all time”
(10:44:54 PM) KNak: and im going to hell
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Dear faithful reader:

The fact that you have stuck with my incessant complaining and relations of unfortunate events thus far tells me that you are somebody worth rewarding, because no fool in their right mind would waste their time pitying a guy such as myself, much less read about his embarrassing exploits. But onward: on the right, under the section emphatically labeled “Bro vs. Manssiere,” is where I include some of my favorite websites (other than the obvious Google.com, YouTube.com, Wikipedia.org, NYTimes.com, and YouPor…yeah that’s about it I’m a decent guy I swear PR0N IS LEGAL IN CALIFORNIA GET OFF ME I CAN WALK MYSELF TO JAIL). Check them out – they are all quality humor; if you are a college football fan, DEFINITELY check out EveryDayShouldBeSaturday. There are few men in my life I try to emulate and follow; my father, Tucker Max, CarpeDM’08 and Orson Swindle, author of EDSBS, are in this honorable list.

We’re 2-0. GMFB.

(678): I wish I could rss feed the hooker ads on craigslist because it looks suspicious that I check craigslist every hour.

2009-09-02T02:04:00.001-04:00

I sometimes seriously wonder why I’m the one writing this blog and not the universally-loved-and-misunderstood KNak. Gem of the night:

(10:39:39 PM) Gordo: strip clubs are such a waste of money
(10:39:47 PM) Gordo: if you're gonna spend that much money you seriously might as well hire a hooker
(10:39:58 PM) KNak: i suppose thats true
(10:40:11 PM) KNak: but strip clubs have more savory bitches
(10:40:30 PM) KNak: with a hooker you dont even know if she has both kidneys

(That one’s for you, AsianShaq. And I think the world needs to know about your fat stripper story.)

3 days until Cal football. I’ve been going through five pairs of underwear a day thinking about Lucky Number 13, The Jet, and The Prophet tearing it up on the field. BE TRUE, WEAR BLUE. GO BEARS.

Mystery Science Theater 2009

2009-08-30T15:52:00.001-04:00

My phone just cheerily gave a single beep that I had never heard, apparently reminding me that I had a saved voicemail that was about to expire. The problem: I don’t ever recall saving a voicemail, mostly because I NEVER save voicemails. I typically have my left thumb on 7 whenever I listen to voicemails to lay the smackdown on the pesky little messages as swiftly as possible. And yes, I also Archive my emails religiously. A clean Inbox is an efficient Inbox.

Wondering what on earth a saved voicemail was doing in my inbox, I hit 1 to listen and I heard a bunch of giggling and the following message TO MYSELF FROM MYSELF:

“So I’m with Hsiao and Stacy right now. Hsiao said, ‘You only visit once every couple weeks now! [I assume we were in Palo Alto.] Why don’t you come back more often?’ And I said, ‘Because I have to work. And…uh…go drinking with my friends afterward.’ Then Stacy…wait…no, HSIAO says, ‘You’re going to grow up to be a GREAT father.’ [High-pitched, depressed voice] ‘Daddy, why don’t you spend more time with me?’ [Deep, angry, cigar-and-whiskey-rific voice] ‘Because daddy has to WORK. And go DRINKING with his buddies afterward.’”

I have absolutely zero recollection of this event ever happening. I don’t know what we were doing or how this ever came up in conversation.

I love the little surprises that the gods throw at me. It lets me know that the powers above still care about me enough to make me look like a fool every once in a while.

I was THIS close to being on The Price is Right.

2009-08-27T08:15:00.001-04:00

Lessons in Chinese Culture, Lecture 2: the best things in life are free or heavily discounted.

This is why the Chinese absolutely obsesses over coupons and cream themselves every time ~~they~~ we can manage to save fifteen cents on a two-dollar can of soup (or bok choy or whatever the hell it is we buy). Never has “a penny saved is a penny earned” been truer for a fifth of the world’s population, especially in these perilous economic times. There are certain parts of This Glorious Nation of California where coupons are worth more than its weight in gold, where these sacred, poorly-printed slips of newspaper can buy you friends and earn you more enemies. You’d think that SF Chinatown would be the epicenter of this phenomenon, which is true to a certain local extent, but I argue that entire areas east of Los Angeles, such as Alhambra and San Gabriel, where billboards, street signs, and store signs are printed entirely and exclusively in Chinese, value these pennysavers the highest.

Of course, better than discounted foodstuffs and laundry detergent are giveaways, quality be damned. I went to a job fair on campus earlier this year for two main reasons: one, to find work, and two, to collect as many free toys and promotional items as possible. I have a whole little box of completely worthless crap from various companies who will probably never employ me in my lifetime, yet I relish the idea that I got these lead-painted, Made-in-China trinkets for FREE. All it cost me was a few dozen calories walking around the show floor, pretending I was interested in their company, and in some cases, literally grabbing and dashing. This is why I haven’t purchased a ballpoint pen in a while: elementary and middle school were served by the small hill of free pens given by pharmaceutical companies that my father had collected over the years; my high school years were served by a few extra pens that my sister had during her college years; the first couple years of college served by a couple of pens that I borrowed from classmates and entirely forgot to return (and they, in turn, forgot to request); and the last two years of college served by the large number of Cal Band Great pens sitting in the office. I am a whore, I know, what can I say, I was MIT ‘87 (that’s Made in Taiwan for you mainlanders and Mýllý Ýstýhbarat Teskýlati for you assholes wiretapping my phone and reading my e-mails. I’M TURKISH INTELLIGENCE TRAINED BRING IT ON).

Why do I bring up this lesson? One word: Caltopia. Billed as the “largest College Lifestyle Festival in the nation,” for the past seven years, this fair, adoringly referred to by many of us as FreeshitFest, has brought about tons of companies giving away free promos, advertisements, coupons, games, prizes, and free samples to get you hooked into what THEY think should comprise your College Lifestyle. Year after year, I go to Caltopia to eat breakfast/lunch, get stupid free crap, most of it useless, some it entertaining, rarely significant, and have a good time laughing about the interesting advertisement schemes that the companies come up with. “Two days of fun, food, music, & FREE STUFF! August 23 & 24 FREE ADMISSION!” is printed on the front of the Caltopia Event Guide, weighing in at 0.59 lbs. and proudly “printed by UC Printing Services on Recycled Paper with Soy Based Ink.” (I love you, Berkeley.) We didn’t stay for the entertainment – we made our own by spinning stupid wheels with crap prizes and throwing beanbags into holes of questionable size.

Notable features of this year’s Caltopia: the banks were advertising extremely aggressively this year. Wells Fargo had 12 representatives all holed up in one side booth while Bank of America was smack-dab in the middle of the entryway to the basketball courts (the main showroom). Wells Fargo had a spinwheel. Bank of America had Plinko. That’s right, America’s favorite game on America’s favorite daytime game show, The Price is Right, was at the Recreational Sports Facility at the University of California, Berkeley, and I didn’t play it because YOU BANKING ASSHOLES ARE PUSHING CUSTOMERS AWAY BY BEING SUPER AGGRESSIVE AND LITERALLY GRABBING US BY THE ARM BEGGING US TO BECOME CUSTOMERS and I didn’t want to get dragged into that black hole of you dicks spitting all over my face while trying to sell me on some introductory low APRs that I don’t need.

[You’ve never seen Plinko, say you? You’re probably the same Commie bastards who think Drew Carey is an adequate replacement for the legendary Bob Barker. Let’s amend that:

I PASSED THIS UP. IF THAT’S NOT DISCIPLINE, I DON’T KNOW WHAT IS.]

My haul this year:

-Pizza from Extreme Pizza – not coupons, actual slices
-Four cans of various flavors of Izze soda
-Too many samples of OLA LOA, a new sugar-free energy drink, as well as a free packet of OLA LOA powder
-A bag of pita chips and a sample serving container of Sabra hummus
-8 oz. of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream
-Popcorn
-Vitamin Water samples
-Honest Tea samples
-A zip-up bottle cozy (now I can conceal my open bottle in public AND keep it cold!)
-A legitimate nice notebook from Bank of America along with Bank of America pen
-Five small notebooks
-A coupon for free 3 oz. of yogurt from Yogurtland (I WILL NEVER USE THIS COUPON, YOU DISGUSTING, WATERY-YOGURT-SERVING MOTHERFUCKERS)
-Five San Francisco Soup Company coupons for $1 off any soup or custom salad
-Two pens from the Cal Student Store with the Apple logo on it, made from entirely recycled products, such as cardboard shaft and wood clip
-A tube of kiwi lip balm (yum) in a LIP BALM COZY WITH A KEYCHAIN ATTACHED TO IT
-A bag of honey-roasted peanuts, courtesy of Southwest Airlines
-Three coupons from Extreme Pizza for a free slice of pizza with purchase of drink
-Two free tickets for free club house admission at Golden Gate Fields (“HIS MUDDER WAS A MUDDER?” – 5 extra credit points for reference)
-A couple “got sperm?” stickers
-Desi Dog coupons for $4.00 combo special: 1/4 lb. dog, fries, and soda/water

And the winner: a goodie bag from the Sperm Bank of California containing four latex condoms (Durex, not sketchy unmarked), a keychain bottle opener, and a sample packet of IDglide personal lubricant

My cheapass Chinese side was gleefully satisfied all in three hours.

In honor of Bob Barker: Remember to spay and neuter your pets, kids. (Er, I mean remember to spay and neuter your kids, pets.)

Apprenticeship of a Weekend Warrior

2009-08-19T01:26:00.000-04:00

10:30PM, in lab waiting for a gel to finish running (but to be fair, I rolled in at 2PM wearing a Transformers t-shirt, plaid shorts, and flip-flops after cramming my whole weeks' worth of errands into one morning. So I'm putting in my 8 hours).

Since the prospect of Cal football starting in 17 (RAHHAGHRGRHRAAAHAAHHH) days has me watching old Cal highlights nonstop and itching to watch ANY football, no matter how bad (seriously, I watched the Raiders-Cowboys preseason game), I've been talking to my friends about how this season is going to pan out. These discussions also led to logistics about how we're going to handle game days, since this is the first time we will be going to Cal games NOT being in band (read: NOT going to bed super early on Friday night so we do NOT have to wake up at the asscrack of dawn on Saturday morning to NOT rehearse).

My glorious, double secret probation ninja plan: to do five days' worth of work in four days every single week until December so I can skip almost every single Friday solely for the purpose of drinking my ass off. For home games, I can drink from Friday morning until Saturday after the game. I'm attending three away games this year (including Big Game), so Friday would be spent for travel and for making beer stops along the way. And the weeks when there are away games that I won't be attending or we have Byes...um...let's designate those "liver recovery weekends."

Go team:
[22:12] Gordo: i'm thinking about taking every single friday off until december
[22:12] Gordo: home games = take friday off to drink
[22:13] Gordo: and the three away games i'm going to = take friday off to travel/drink
[22:15] Gordo: mostly travel
[22:15] Gordo: drinking is secondary
[22:23] Gordo: "hey boss, i'm gonna miss work this friday"
[22:23] Gordo: "okay, are you going somewhere?"
[22:23] Gordo: "yep. BevMo."
[22:24] Ja Liule: "oh, awesome. remember to pick me up a six-pack"
Too bad I can't actually picture my boss saying that.

One day to NOT skip work, however, is August 28th. I kid you not, the first-ever National Single Cougar Convention is being held at Dinah's in, where else, PALO ALTO. This thing is 100% real: BOOM, YOU LITERAL MOTHERFUCKERS.

AsianShaq and I are 110% committed to going to this thing, if only for the entertainment value. $20 has never been better spent.

Scientists are weird people

2009-08-11T06:31:00.000-04:00

The nature of doing molecular biology-related things for a living boils down to experiments and, more importantly, timing your experiments correctly so that you don't have to wake up at weird hours to make sure the experiments don't run on too long. Take me, for example. It's 3:35AM, and I am in lab right now, groggy-eyed with a massive craving for In-N-Out that I can't fulfill because it's far too late for that. I came into lab about an hour ago to stop the restriction enzyme digest that I started far too late in the day and consequently forgot about due to Jonathan Sanchez sucking ass against the Dodgers in the 4th inning of today's game. The digestion should have taken only 1-2 hours, meaning I should have come in at around 7pm to stop it, but again, the tears streaming from my eyes watching Sanchez revert to his old form of suckitude blinded me, rendering me unable to operate heavy machinery and vehicular transportation (that, and I just plain fell asleep from a couple of Coors Lights. Laugh away, but I have a job and chances are you don't so HA.)

Now, when I was down at UCLA, going into lab at weird hours and seeing other people there was uncommon but not entirely unexpected - the nature of academic research is a little bit different than corporate. Here, it's pretty much the 8-6 grind, and after around 6:30 or 7, everyone pretty much goes home.

Imagine my surprise, then, to be fumbling around in the kitchen brewing a cup of tea and hearing footsteps coming down the hall.

I froze and slowly turned around. My first thought was that FDU was here already, since he lives relatively close by and is awake at the buttcrack of dawn every day anyway. But even 3AM is a little early for him. Who, then, could it possibly be? The morning cleaning crew? Do we even have a morning cleaning crew?

I came face-to-face with AnimeGirl, one of the quiet but very nice RAs here (okay I don't know if she's actually super into anime but her unique haircut - mostly shoulder length except for some really long hair down the middle back - made me think of it immediately so that's what she'll be from now on until further notice kthxbai).

"Hey." So nonchalant. So natural. As if seeing your co-workers at work at 3AM was the perfectly normal thing to expect.

"Um...hey. What are you doing here?" I immediately regretted asking the question, as I didn't quite know the answer to that question if it were directed towards myself.

"I got here at 6PM, so I'm just about finishing up here."

"Oh okay. Um...I know what this looks like. I swear, I'm not here at 3AM just raiding the fridge for company food - I'm actually doing work but I need a pick-me-up."

I actually finished my work (including updating my lab notebook, something I haven't done for a period of time too embarrassingly long to admit) about an hour ago. Why am I writing right now, then? Because, once again, the long dick of Murphy's Law fucks me in the ass.

Our complex is right next to a big trainyard. Starting around 6 or 7 in the afternoon, they start shuffling the trains around, and this involved moving the trains out into the street such that cars cannot cross. If timed poorly, traffic can get stuck at that intersection for a good fifteen minutes minimum (I've heard up to half an hour from others here, and my heart goes out to them.) Just as I was walking out the door, I heard the obnoxious CLANG CLANG CLANG of the trains shuffling around. The gates were down, the red lights were blinking, and once again, the merciless biology gods above have decided to mess with poor Gordo's sleep schedule some more.

25 days until Cal football.

Bucket List, The Lawrence Taylor/Michael Jordan/Barry Bonds/Pee Wee Herman Edition

2009-08-09T20:47:00.001-04:00

Football arenas to visit:
-~~Neyland Stadium at Tennessee – Knoxville, TN~~
-Lane Stadium at Virginia Tech - Blacksburg, VA
-The Big House at Michigan - Ann Arbor, MI
-The Swamp at Florida – Gainesville, FL
-Death Valley at LSU – Baton Rouge, LA
-The Horseshoe at Ohio State - Columbus, OH
-Beaver Stadium at Penn State – University Park, PA
-Watching Cal beat UCLA at the Rose Bowl on October 17, 2009 - Pasadena, CA
-Watching Cal beat Oregon at Autzen Stadium on September 26, 2009 – Eugene, OR

Baseball stadiums to visit:
-~~Oakland Coliseum – Oakland, CA~~ THE WORST BASEBALL STADIUM IN THE ENTIRE FRIGGIN’ WORLD
~~-PacBell Park (YES I SAID IT, IT’S PACBELL) – San Francisco, CA~~
-Wrigley Field – Chicago, IL
-Fenway Park – Boston, MA
-Camden Yards – Baltimore, MD
-Yankee Stadium – New York, NY

Basketball arenas to visit:
~~-Oracle Arena – Oakland, CA~~
-American Airlines Center – Dallas, TX
-Staples Center – Los Angeles, CA
-Madison Square Garden – New York, NY
-Boston Garden (current) – Boston, MA
-Pauley Pavilion at UCLA – Los Angeles, CA
-Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke – Durham, NC (and Krzyzewskiville)
-Allen Fieldhouse at Kansas – Lawrence, KS
-The Dean Dome at UNC – Chapel Hill, NC
-The Palestra at UPenn – Philadelphia, PA

Miscellaneous places to visit:
-That super shady adult store on Telegraph that has $5 DVD sales right now – Berkeley, CA

The things we do for money

2009-08-02T16:23:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine who recently moved to Madison, WiscAAAnsin is trying to look for housing while staying in temp housing.

This is why I am staying the fuck away from the midwest:

(1:20:19 PM) Wiscansin: my temp housing ended
(1:20:23 PM) Gordo: shit
(1:20:26 PM) Wiscansin: so i moved into this like crack spot motel
(1:20:30 PM) Gordo: lol
(1:20:52 PM) Wiscansin: i think your life expectancy goes down by a month for every night you stay here
(1:21:25 PM) Gordo: hahaha
(1:22:30 PM) Wiscansin: the good thing is that there are 4 bolts on the door
(1:22:39 PM) Wiscansin: the bad thing is that somebody thought it was necessary to put 4 bolts there
(1:22:55 PM) Wiscansin has signed off.

I am Jack's bloody, undesired children.

2009-07-27T15:36:00.000-04:00

One thing that really fascinates me is the innate human desire to leave behind legacies. Be it literary, musical, kinship, or notoriety, we all want to leave our mark on this earth, to let prosperity know that we were here and we made an impact. [I think that this blog is my way of beginning that journey; this, and my lifelong dream of an international food tourism trip.] Of course, I am always excited when I can contribute to the greater community and inspire others to contribute, and I am especially excited when they follow the same vein. Welcome a co-worker of mine, henceforth named AsianShaq (you'll be hearing about him quite frequently), to the blogosphere. He's ten times funnier than I am. Find him here. Read him. Love him. Pet him, feed and walk him twice daily. The following story can be found in his perspective here.
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"You are a walking, talking Murphy's Law."

That has been the central dogma of the past month. The next few stories will revolve this theme of unfortunate timing and coincidence, soaked, battered, and deep fried in schadenfreude (served on a hot corn tortilla with fresh mango salsa and a chipotle aioli).

Most recent major incident: we were all in the kitchen during lunchtime, enjoying much-needed sustenance of corn dogs and Eggo waffles (or whatever the heck was there). AsianShaq, who had just started his blog after reading mine, mentioned blogging and leaving his mark. I quote, "...and someday, just maybe, they can follow in my footsteps." He mentioned a mutual hero of ours, the infamous Tucker Max, creator and star of the famous stories which can be found at TuckerMax.com. By leaps and bounds, the best story in his very impressive arsenal is the "Tucker tries buttsex; hilarity does not ensue" story.

Take a ten-minute break from reading this blog right now and hop on over to his site to read that story, linked above for your convenience. The story's not actually that long; ten minutes' allotment is suggested because it'll take six minutes to read, three minutes to stop laughing, and one minute to change your underwear.

Back? Got your ya-yas out? Got new skivvies on? Good. Now that we have established context, let us sally forth.

Of course, when people have a common moment of sharing movies lines or music or whatever within mutual knowledge, we tend to repeat the best lines, if anything as proof that we actually know what we're talking about and not just pretending to know it for the sake of building friendship. If you've read Tucker Max's story, then you know that the best line in the whole laugh-a-second product is "DID YOU JUST...SHIT ON MY DICK?"

I happened to shout that line out loud because it was so damn good. I also happened to shout that line out loud right as FDU, one of the team leaders and senior scientists here, walked by.

FDU stopped and gave me a somewhat stern look. He looked around at the other interns who had suddenly stopped laughing.

FDU: "You know what I love about this company? The thing I love about working here is the professionalism in a public area that we keep, a public area that an investor or public official might be visiting at any given moment."

Everyone else looked at me and was dying not to crack up. I was dying to dig a hole and bury my head to save myself from the shame. By the way, that hole gets smaller and smaller every time - At the rate I embarrass myself publicly here, I figure I'll be immune to all this shit I do to myself within, oh, a month.

I am a walking, talking Murphy's Law.

Fresh Mex, Indeed

2009-07-25T19:00:00.000-04:00

Sincere apologies for the long absence. Science beckons, and that frequently means going in on weekends so my E. coli, every single one of them conveniently named Bobby, won’t die from self-competition for nutrients from bacteria soup.
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For Teeks' birthday two Sundays ago, a few of us went to the Chevy's in Emeryville. Sombrero, pitcher of margarita, embarrassing birthday song, free ice cream - not a big deal, just a pretty good night with one very distinct and what could have been a potentially fatal highlight:

In the middle of the meal, Teeks suddenly exclaimed, "What the hell is this?" and proceeded to pull out a tiny little metal ball from her mouth. Pinoy nearly gagged on his food, the look of absolute surprise and bafflement on his face priceless. [Ed. note: There's a really bad slut joke somewhere in there about the surprise of seeing Teeks pull something other than a penis out of her mouth. But that's all water under the bridge - we won't revisit that side of history, because she’s nice and actually NOT a slut, etc. etc. etc.]

Of course, being the jerks we all are, none of us were seriously concerned about Teeks’ well-being. the only thing on our minds was that she had somehow coughed up a FREAKING METAL PELLET. Also, being the cheap bastards we all are, we immediately started thinking of how we could milk the situation for all it was worth. Compensated meal, of course, but what else? Another margarita, on the house? How about five shots of Gran Patron Platinum, which is $250 a bottle? Maybe just everything at the bar, no? Because we sure as hell don’t want any more of your metal-BB-laden cuisine.

Eventually the manager came over, looking quite embarrassed but ended up being very nice and funny about the whole thing. Teeks got an extra watermelon margarita and a comp’d meal. We were quite disappointed in her for several reasons: 1) being too nice, 2) not taking advantage of a fantastic opportunity, and 3) being nowhere near as Asian as she should have been, because if she were TRULY Asian, she would have milked the poor manager dry until the restaurant went under.

Best line of the night, by far, was our super chill waitress telling us, “Oh, don’t worry about the BB. That’s how you know our pork is fresh – we’re killing them out back.”

IM/TFLN

2009-06-25T15:04:00.000-04:00

Over the past month, SRS somehow became the worst Korean EVER.

(11:04:00 PM) SRS: you're not gonna believe this
(11:04:09 PM) SRS: but i'm like not that into drinking anymore
(11:04:15 PM) Gordo: i hate you
(11:04:40 PM) SRS: but i bought a 6 pack like a week ago
(11:04:47 PM) SRS: so i'm limiting myself to one a week
(11:04:55 PM) Gordo: one a WEEK??
(11:04:58 PM) Gordo: dude
...
(11:06:23 PM) SRS: no i think it's because i have less stress overall
(11:07:01 PM) Gordo: dude
(11:07:07 PM) Gordo: how were yo ustressed at ALL when you were in school
(11:07:11 PM) Gordo: you did not go to class at the end
(11:07:16 PM) SRS: yeah man
(11:07:19 PM) SRS: hella stress
(11:07:28 PM) SRS: how was i supposed to know if i was going to pass or not?
(11:07:50 PM) SRS: but having to deal with so many people
(11:07:59 PM) SRS: and things that happened in college
(11:08:04 PM) SRS: creates a bit of stress
(11:08:18 PM) SRS: the kind of stress that goes away when you drink scotch
(11:08:30 PM) SRS: but that's all gone now

Refusing to let this pass as an opportunity for comedy gold, I turned to someone I KNEW I could rely on to shit all over this thing: the only girl I know who can drink me under the table.

(650): [SRS] says he doesnt like drinking anymore. Help me think of the best possible ways to call him a vagina.
(408): Ask him if he goes through a lot of boxers because of all the bleeding he does every month
(650): he says he wears tampons. i dunno whats worse now

I don't belong in Vegas.

2009-06-17T18:42:00.000-04:00

OH MY GOD WE'RE OUT OF EGGO WAFFLES AND CHEERIOS AT WORK WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON

At least we still have honey. And tomorrow is restock day, thank heavens. I once again got through the workday with only my usual Diet Dr. Pepper.

Also, we got the rare (okay actually not so rare because apparently that machine is a piece of crap, a piece of crap that EATS MY QUARTERS GIVE IT BACK WAAAAHHHH) chance to play Plinko with our beverage vending machine because one of the orange juice bottles got stuck between the glass and one of the racks below. Considering that drinks are only 50 cents, I decided to make the gamble: buy another appropriately-positioned orange juice so that it would hit the stuck one and hopefully get it out, thus rewarding me with TWO orange juices for the price of one. But which one to pick? Much like that old favorite of mine The Price Is Right with my man Bob Barker (FUCK YOU DREW CAREY YOU WITLESS SON OF A BITCH), some of the interns standing around started yelling indiscernable suggestions to me: "A1! A1!" "No, get A2! You gotta hit it from the side! A2!" "B1! Hit it straight on!" Overwhelmed, I blocked out all their suggestions and examined the situation: the bottle was stuck right in front of A1, so if I got A1, the most likely result would be BOTH of them getting stuck. However, it was just slightly to the right enough such that a bottle dispensed from A2 would definitely hit the bottle and thus increase the chances of knocking it out. Any options from the row below were out of the question. So A2 it was.

I only got one orange juice. Vegas would LOVE me.

The Eternal Question

2009-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

In the past 3.5 weeks since I started working, I have only had to pay for lunch on two of those days. And those two days were the times when the carnivorous interns failed to understand the limits of "The Company Is NOT A Genie In A Bottle And We Only Resupply The Foodstuffs Every Once In A While," or to put it nicely, "STOP FUCKING EATING ALL OUR SHIT YOU FUCKING INTERNS." Today during the sole ten-minute break that I had to cram in the last apple on the table and a wheat bagel with salmon shmear (mmmmm), another of the interns and I were discussing how we could actually live on everything the company provides. I agreed - food, small gym (just a couple treadmills and a rack of weights, but hey, not shabby), shower, socialization - we're in a twelve-year-and-runnign little BioSphere bubble experiment. And I love it. (Except, of course, when we run out of food and the interns have to fight each to TO THE DEATH! for sustenance, and then the senior scientists get to take the leftovers after the stronger, victorious interns finish feeding. That, or eat Eggo waffles with Cheerios and honey because we never seem to run out of those three things.)

I took that step that I told myself I would not take, however. I showered at work this morning.

But seriously, the shower at work is nicer than the shower at my apartment. Good water pressure. Water gets hot FAST. Lockers. Cubbies. Lots of hooks to hang stuff. Spacious. Stainless steel assistance handlebars. Seriously baller.

Why was I showering at work, you ask? Because yesterday I crossed yet another important milestone: yesterday was the first time that I could shout out the phrase "I'M ON A BOAT!" without everybody reminding me that I am a habitual liar. Pitts and Crabs generously invited me to go out sailing on Pitts' twenty-seven-footer sailboat in the Bay. The weather being absolutely gorgeous (first in a damn long time), I of course accepted the offer and had a grand ol' time sailing from the Berkeley Marina out to the Bay Bridge (the shitty half before you hit Treasure Island, not the beautiful half after it) and back. I was so pooped after, unfortunately, that I just went home and passed out after.

Consequently, I showed up at work smelling of the sea, fresh fish, and barges carrying giant pieces of the new Bay Bridge, hence the shower. Shut up, I'm gross, I know, GO JUDGE YOUR OWN FACE SOMEWHERE ELSE.

So yes. Milestone achieved, and I made a hasty executive decision to utilize the shower at work in the 5 minutes before 9AM.

So forget you, Googleplex. I may not get a game room or really awesome food or free drinks or a bunch of awesome Google merchandise or the right to say I work at one of the most successful companies in the world or a massage parlor or a hair salon or a dog park or barbecues or sushi days or...um...

Damn.

Maturity Is Overrated

2009-06-13T03:47:00.001-04:00

Two years ago, I bought a white board that we could hang on the wall near the front door of Ellsworth House (or Casa Durant, depending on whom you ask, and by whom you ask, I mean Doc is the only one who ever called it that) so that we could all keep track of things and leave messages for each other. Instead, it simply became a board of endless doodles and jokes that made us laugh so hard we refused to take them down for months (especially those involving racial stereotypes because, again, we were immature assholes for the most part).

Poignant example, if you please: in a “Would You Rather” we played once, the question was “If you were stuck on a deserted island and your only companion was a mermaid/merman (depending on your preferred gender), would you rather have a top half human, bottom half fish (like the standard mermaid/merman we all think of), or would you prefer the opposite, top half fish, bottom half human?”

I was the only dissenter to ruin the consensus. Three guesses which option I answered, first two don’t count. The folks were horrified and my justifications went ignored. I feel this might be a fair and totally, completely, absolutely unbiased forum to justify my answers: as proven in the Futurama episode “The Deep South” in which Fry et al. head down to Atlanta (now sunk under the ocean, effectively making it a really ghetto Atlantis permeated with Coca-Cola) and Fry decides to stay behind because he falls in love with one of the Atlantan mermaids, Fry can’t have sex with his new mermaid love because she has fish parts for genitalia. That is my entire justification for choosing the fish-top, human-bottom mermaid. Also, companionship is overrated.

But back to the point: I’ve put up the white board in my room in my new place and felt really good about it when, two days ago, I actually started using it for practical purposes – writing down tasks, grocery lists, designing primers and figuring out better plasmid ligation protocols, etc. Unfortunately, like all too many New Year Resolutions, that didn’t last for long. Here’s what is currently on my white board:
-Portuguese Breakfast (linked to UrbanDic for your convenience and delicious pleasure)
-Bucking Bronco (also linked to UrbanDic for your LMAo convenience)
-Learn to drive stick (pretty sure that one’s not going anywhere for a while)

And that’s it. That’s all I have. A sad de-evolution of what could have been an impressive way to make myself seem more mature and responsible.

And I Thought Palo Alto Had Too Many Sushi Places

2009-06-09T11:08:00.001-04:00

There’s something about the series finale episode of Friends that really says a lot about the past couple of weeks in my life (minus the complete lack of racial diversity in the cast, and no, Julie and Charlie did not count). That one scene where the six of them all, one by one, leave their keys on the counter as they longingly consider that one apartment with so many years of memories and, more importantly, their incredibly intertwined lives about to go in completely starburst directions – that scene just kills me, now more than ever. Why do I bring up a bright note in an otherwise subpar (let’s face it, Friends had nowhere near the cultural impact as a lot of other shows out there) television series, you ask?

SRS moved across The Bay to San Francisco last weekend, since that’s where his new job is. I have been going to school with this guy for 11 years and lived with him for two of those years (well, really more like 2.5 years, based on the amount of time he spent in our house during our Third Year). I went to visit (so I could claim F1RST!!!11! on it) this bangin’ house in The City right next to Golden Gate Park and UCSF that SRS had been raving about for the past month. And, my God, the house is bad ASS. The rooms are enormous and the place is an absolute STEAL for an Inner Sunset location, not to mention SRS chose the room with a FIREPLACE. Non-functional, of course, but HE HAS A FIREPLACE IN HIS FRIGGIN’ ROOM. He conveniently put his couch on the opposing wall, meaning all he needs now is a flat-screen TV hung on the wall above the fireplace and everything will be hunky-dory. The parking situation is a nightmare, though. Every day will be an adventure for him as he liberally employs the George Costanza Method for City Parking: first, look for the magic spot right in front of the building, and if that fails, begin circling blocks in ever-increasing concentric squares to get as close a spot as possible to the building. Honestly, though, at that rate, SRS is going to be discovering new streets in San Francisco every day (hence the “every day will be an adventure for him” claim).

But I digress – that was just me pulling BS out of my ass about more BS (emotions are for non-Vulcans and pussies, incidentally one and the same). Onto the really important observations:

We went to dinner at this excellent Japanese restaurant on 9th and Irving in San Francisco called Hotei, which I highly, highly recommend. Handface moment numero uno: SRS and I weren't originally planning on going to Hotei; we were simply playing Russell the Wilderness Explorer and walking around, looking for a new restaurant to try in his new neighborhood.

There are three - THREE - Japanese restaurants on that block, all within 100 feet of each other. I kid you not: Ebisu is right across the street from Hotei and Kiki is 1/10 of a block north of Ebisu. Don't believe me? TRUE DAT DOUBLE TRUE: check it out here. The thought of needing THREE Japanese restaurants within pissing distance absolutely perplexed us. We looked for all the usual tells: do people like you on Yelp? Are you Zagat Survey rated? Do you actually have people eating in your restaurant? More importantly, do you have actual Japanese people eating in your restaurant? After some Indecision 2009 moments, we picked Hotei.

One of the dishes we ordered at Hotei was one of their specialty rolls, the Hanukkah Roll, which is smoked salmon, broiled salmon skin, topped with salmon roe and green onion. It actually tasted pretty damn good, but because SRS and I are terrible excuses for compassionate human beings, we had to say it:

G: "Man, it's pretty salty. Tastes exactly like 6,000 years of tears and suffering of an ever-resilient people."
S: "Yes. Yes it does."

Doing science LIKE A BOSS

2009-05-31T20:20:00.001-04:00

Cardinal Rule Number One about putting your life on the World Wide Series of Tubes for all to see: never, ever write about work. (Well, for some, it might end up being a godsend, like one of my favorite blogs, Dooce.) Unfortunately, that means that I’m losing quite a bit of potential material about which to explore and share. But no matter, we will sally forth (“Who is Sally? And why is she fourth?” – Bubsy) and make the best of a lost opportunity. Because I am immature and still enjoy games marketed to third graders and don’t want to risk the wrath of my employer, let’s play some mad libs! Write down each of the following:

-Name of a company
-Emotive adjective
-Time of day
-Name of Cal Band member also interning at name of said company
-Expletive
-Food item
-Verb, simple present
-Unit of currency
-Bodily function, present participle (verb-ing)
-Illegal firearm of Russian origin
-Vital internal organ 1
-Vital internal organ 2
-Vital internal organ 3
-Clothing item
-Debilitating disease
-Verb, present participle (verb-ing)
-Name of virus or bacteria
-Day of week 1
-Day of week 2
-Your favorite cuisine
-Gender that has penises

Ready? Let’s play!

Gordo is an intern at name of biotech company and is very emotive adjective about his job. Every day, he wakes up at the ungodly hour of time of day to go to work. His carpool, operated by the very talented and very sexy name of Cal Band member also interning at name of company is frequently frustrated at Gordo’s refusal to come out on time. However, Gordo says “ EXPLETIVE! “ to that because he still vehemently believes in the absolute cemented legitimacy of Berkeley Time.

After arriving at work and realizing, yet again, that he forgot to eat breakfast, he raids the kitchen and eats the free food item that the company so generously verb, simple present . He then looks longingly at the vending machine that offers 20oz. drinks for 50 cents and Red Bull and Rockstar for ONE unit of currency and decides that drinking that much Red Bull for that cheap could lead to no other path than bodily function, present participle on my kidneys before my system busts out a(n) illegal firearm of Russian origin and completely obliterates my vital internal organ 1 , vital internal organ 2 , and vital internal organ 3 to smithereens.

Then, off to work! Gordo dons his nameless white lab clothing item and starts to figure out his experiment schedule. “But Gordo!What exactly do you do?” you ask. Good question, sport! Gordo is hopefully helping to cure debilitating disease by verb, present participle DNA so that name of virus or bacteria can’t infect you and kill you! Yay!

Working for this company has a lot of nice perks. For example, we get free dinner every day of week 1 and day of week 2 . The dinners rotate among Thai, Mexican, Chinese, and your favorite cuisine . Also, every Friday the gender that has penises members of the lab gather outside, crack open some beers and chips, and have weekly Happy Hour. It’s the one time I get to really see these guys outside of the workplace setting, and I realized that they, like me, are nerdCORE. They can’t stop talking about science, even when work is over and there is excellent beer present. I do the exact same thing.

I love being a nerd, and I love my job to death.

Pop Quiz, Hotshot

2009-05-22T14:54:00.001-04:00

The world economy is in the shitter. You’re entering the American workforce in one of its bleakest moments in history. Recent reports show that just 19.7% of 2009 college graduates who applied for jobs have actually found one (compared to 51% graduating in 2007 and 26% graduating in 2008). You’re one of the very fortunate few to have secured a job, at least for the short term. But you’re on the cusp of leaving the bubble of the awesomely free college life and entering the proverbial “real world.” Your world is in shambles because most of your college friends are leaving, taking their own paths, and you are without direction. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?

I sit through 560 Asian names being called by faculty who are clearly struggling with the discomfort of some of those pronunciations. I walk across the stage of the Greek and take that little piece of paper from Dr. Beatty commemorating the One Hundredth Forty-Sixth Commencement from the University of California, Berkeley. That’s what I do.

I’m going to Commencement Convocation to see all my favorite motherlovers one last time before they all run away. Alcohol will surely follow.

My father flies back to Taiwan today. I’m partying like no other this Sunday. I’m moving out on Monday. I’m starting work on Tuesday. I’m looking for a new gym on Wednesday. Not much more to do other than GO BEARS and ONE MORE MOJITO! and FOOOOOTBAWWWWWW.

‘The Great Escape,’ or, ‘Cheating Death’

2009-05-15T18:14:00.000-04:00

The documentation of this story has been in slow progress over the past four weeks, since it happened almost a month ago. I’ve been busy finishing school, and as of 11:00pm today, I officially finished my final exam for college ever. (Leave it to me to have to pull an all-nighter for the LAST THING I EVER DO IN COLLEGE. I got distracted and went drinking the night before in the middle of studying, okay? Stop your judging.) I’m on a very cramped Boeing 737 flying down to that city of pain, Los Angeles, to visit my lab at UCLA (see entries from June to August of 2008 for more shits, giggles, et cetera et cetera et cetera), and since I’d much rather poke a million little holes in my wrists with the free plastic toothpicks that the flight crew offers so readily than have to sit through an hour and half between Otis McNevershower and a screaming baby (because that’s FUCKING HAPPENING RIGHT NOW), I’m going to take the time to finish this damn thing while blasting Lil’ Jon and Flo Rida as loudly as possible into my headphones. The voices in my head get louder when I’m in confined spaces with people I hate.
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~To Mama Goose, my muse.~

This is a story of intrigue, mystery, high-flying adventure, passionate romance, unforgiving betrayal, and, of course, stickin’ it to the man. That, or a bunch of desperate middle-aged Chinese folks borderline breaking the law. Take your pick.

A few Sundays ago, the younger brother – let’s call him Leon, just for kicks – of a good friend of mine at Berkeley – let’s call her Forrest, for good reason – was on break from his high school and was spending the weekend up here with his sister. Forrest, being a close family friend and just freaking adorable, very easily talked me into calling my mom to drive up to Berkeley and have dinner with us.

Now, I try not to write about my mother, but this requires a little introduction. When my mother comes to Berkeley, the only – ONLY – places she will eat at are Cafe Intermezzo and Great China. True, she doesn’t visit very often, but when she does, I always get free food, and I have absolutely zero reason to complain about either of those fine establishments. Forrest and Leon, being Taiwanese natives, obviously opted for Great China, it being one of the best Chinese restaurants in the area. My mother drove to Great China, expecting eventually circle around several times to find a parking spot four blocks away, but almost like the revelation of the Grail itself, we saw a brand spankin’ new parking garage RIGHT NEXT TO THE RESTAURANT. “Winner winner, chicken dinner,” I thought to myself, and very rudely backseat-drove the car/my mother into that parking garage. But then again, she wasn’t complaining either.

We parked. We banqueted. We drank pot of tea after pot of tea. We made merry for two joyous, Chinese hours.

But this is where the story takes a dastardly turn. Cue Shostakovich’s The Bolt Suite, Op. 27a. III: Variations.

We exit the restaurant, bellies full and brains a-twitter with jokes and stories shared over some really good Peking duck. But three seconds later, our bubble burst.

There was a gate down, blocking the entrance and exit to the parking lot entirely.

We stood staring at those steel bars, not quite sure how to feel, thoughts and emotions dashing back and forth not unlike our half-human, half-Vulcan friend Spock. “What’s going on? Why are we locked out?’ we queried to nobody.

“I know, what is this?” a mysterious voice replied, as if we were in a real-live RPG video game. We turned around to find a middle-aged Chinese-American couple staring at that same icy cold prison in bewilderment. “There must be some sort of mistake.” We were locked out and our poor car was stuck inside, swallowed by the beast known as “The System” and facing a doomed destiny of abandonment and skipping from foster home to foster home, eventually ending up sucking dick for crack on the street at the age of 14.

I looked around and realized what the mistake was. The parking lot, owned and operated by the City of Berkeley, had designated this parking to close at 8PM on Sundays. There was no contact number to call and none of the restaurants nearby could do anything about it.

I know what you’re thinking. “Good job, dumbass, way to NOT READ DIRECTIONS. Didn’t you learn ANYTHING from STAR testing and the SATs?” But that was not the mistake. The mistake was the City of Berkeley being retarded and closing a major parking lot at EIGHT O’CLOCK AT NIGHT, rendering it virtually useless on Sundays. Good job losing a ton of potential cash on a weekend night when people actually like to GO OUT TO EAT.

Soon, more groups who had similarly (and foolishly) parked their cars in this garage showed up and expressed the same distress. Some took the news with a slight hit and obvious disappointment, but were generally civil and calm. One man was not so. His obvious subscription to Douchebag Quarterly and the Encyclopedia of Verbal Abuse was reflected in his language and frequent use of his catchphrase, “HORSE SHIIIIIT!” His ladymate looked around, embarrassed, and looked very apologetic. We forgave, because we understood his pain.

Now, the design of this garage gate is such that there is a “Gate Up/Down” button on the wall about two feet away from the gate. However, the gate bars were sufficiently close together, making it impossible to stick an arm through to reach the button.

That first middle-aged Chinese American man decided he had had enough and went back into Great China. He returned with a broomstick. After some fiddling around and a lot of poking and prodding with the broomstick, he was able to hit the Gate Up/Down button on the wall. The gate slowly opened while everyone sighed a breath of relief; some exclaimed squeals of joy and gratitude.

You know how Jack Bauer just runs into problem after problem after problem, all in the same day? Boy, we sure could use his help. After we all walked into the garage, we found our next problem: the bars. When the car enters the garage, you push a button to retrieve a ticket and the bar gate rises up to let the car through, and when exiting, you have to insert the paid ticket into the collecting reader to raise the exit bar gate. We went to the automatic pay stations to try to pay for our tickets, but the stations had been locked out because it was after hours and would not accept our cash. We went back to the gate and found a “HELP” button on the ticket collecting reader. We pushed the button and immediately heard a phone ringing nearby. The lot of us followed the ringing, like lost ducklings following their mama’s quacks.

We arrived at a manned pay station…which was locked and dark and unmanned. Our cries for help were going to the ringing phone inside the station, which of course was no help at all. “HORSE SHIIIIIIT!” again, this time reverberating throughout the depths of the cave.

“What the hell are we gonna do?” a woman desperately cried. I could hear a slight shaking in her voice, as if her car being stuck in a garage were on equal grounds as being stranded on an island with aliens or whatever the fuck J.J. Abrams can pull out of his ass.

Lo, a savior: enter the same resourceful middle-aged Chinese American man who got us past Level 1 by acquiring and equipping Broomstick and defeating the Level 1 boss, BUTTON. (Ok I’m done nerding out) The man whipped out his keys and, cross my heart, started unscrewing the bar gate from the hinge. We stared at him in bewilderment, some slack-jawed in absolute disbelief that this man would have the Jack Bauer Balls of Steel to do something so daring, so outside-the-box, so incredibly heroic, and so freaking illegal that we were surprised the cops weren’t all over our asses at that point.

CLUNK. The bar sat dead as that lone noise rang through the underground lot. Still we stood there, feeling nothing but the silence of the night and the ever-present shock.

“Come on, what are you people standing around for? Let’s get the hell outta here!” exclaimed Hero while waving his arms excitedly. Almost as if a video were going from Pause to Play, all of us simultaneously began running towards our cars. While briskly walking back to our car in the back corner of the lot, Forrest, Leon, and I exchanged looks of HOLY CRAP THIS CAN’T BE REAL and WHAT IF THE COPS BUST US? My mother, on the other hand, seemed to ignore all that and actually seemed to be glowing with pride rather than glad to be free of our predicament. I suspect that her feeling of internal pride was because it was a Chinese man who had solved our problems, and therefore by proxy she had somehow contributed to the solving of the problem because she was Chinese. That, or pride in the intellectual power of our people. TECHNOROGY!

One by one, we all lined up and drove up the ramp as fast as possible and GTFO’d like no other. When is was our turn to leave, my mother hesitated for a second. “What are you doing?” I asked her. She mentioned that not for a second did anybody else think about paying for their tickets. My mom, being the righteous and just woman that she is, insisted on having me returning the following day and paying for the overnight price of the ticket, which is $15. I said sure.

I still have the ticket.

On Television Comedians

2009-05-10T17:22:00.001-04:00

(2:19:50 PM) Gordo: oh man
(2:19:52 PM) Gordo: barack obama is hilarious
(2:20:01 PM) KNak: i saw
(2:20:39 PM) Gordo: funnier than that assclown Jimmy Fallon
(2:21:41 PM) KNak: my anus is funnier than jimmy fallon

Mr. Rogers Did Not Teach You SHIT

2009-05-09T22:38:00.000-04:00

Dear neighbor:

You have been blasting classic rock at 9AM or 10AM practically every single Saturday or Sunday morning for this entire school year. We have been plenty kind about this incredibly annoying act, especially because the weekend is for sleeping in and said classic-rock-blasting is crucial in preventing this joyous process.

I am about to graduate. I no longer give less than one-tenth of a lab rat's shit about your opinion. So do not come bitch at me because I decided to turn my speakers toward my ceilings and pump such childhood-memory-inducing Golden-Age-of-Disney classics such as "A Whole New World," "Beauty and the Beast," and "The Circle of Life." You have a point about my singing along at the top of my lungs to said songs, so I will give you that and I will stop. But your request for me to stop washing myself in my childhood fantasies will go unfulfilled.

I am about to cross into an entirely new stage of my life and there are certain promenary procedures I must undergo in order to emotionally prepare myself for this key transition. Consider it an emotional and mental baptism and atonement for the past sixteen educated years of my life, minus the guilt and religious affiliations. One part of me is elated that I am done with formal education for a little while. Another part of me is soberly depressed that I will never have a time like this again. The real world beckons. Disney songs are how I cope. Apparently classic rock is how you cope. Deal, mang.

But a sincere good luck on finals, from the bottom of my heart. The University of California, Berkeley boasts 32 libraries. I suggest you make use of at least one of them to study quietly, because my ass is parked in my room and it is going to be a motherfucking Disney paradise in here, I shit you not.

I Am Inappropriate, Mentally and Physically

2009-05-05T18:49:00.000-04:00

I'm back at home, safe and sound. There's a neon green band-aid covered with soccer balls just to the right of my tailbone because, evidently, the very nice medical staff thought I was ten years old. Irrefutable empirical evidence: In Pre-Op notifications, the nurse taking my history exclaimed, "You're just a baby! And you've already screwed up your back?" I grumbled, "...yeah." So: no more comfort foods. No more Chicken and Waffles, no more In-N-Out, far less red meat, no more super sugary things. I need to reduce the everyday forces that my lower back experiences. Also, no more badminton, basketball, or football. I am a 21-year-old with the health problems of a 50-year-old.

My right leg is still numb below the knee and my right foot is still weak, making walking rather difficult. The numbness makes it such that I have to look at my feet when I walk now to make sure I'm actually stepping on the ground at the right time. You sit here asking, "1) Why the hell is this post so serious? And 2) but Gordo, your back and leg pain are gone! Isn't that a good thing?" No, it is not. In fact, numbness is far worse than pain. Pain is how your body tells you something is wrong and is proof that your nervous system is working properly. If your nerves are numbed out, that's a sign that your nerves are failing you. Even though I am no longer in pain, I am now much more afraid for my future and my well-being than I was before Sunday.

Speaking of Sunday: Oh, Sunday. Bloody Sunday. I was feeling just fine in the morning when all of a sudden I tried to stand up straight from sitting in my chair and a shock of stabbing pain emanated from my lower right back and shot down my right leg. I sat back down, but a continuous throbbing pain made that impossible as well. I had no choice but to lie down on my stomach or on my back for the remainder of the day. Finally, at 9:30PM, the pain in my back and down my leg was so severe, even while lying down, that I rounded up my roommates and screamed, "WE'RE GOING TO THE FUCKING EMERGENCY ROOM. NOW." Since I was unable to stand up straight, I had to stay bent over while supporting myself on a random stick that became a very useful cane. This stick helped me traverse the 20 feet from my apartment to my roommate's car as well as the 50 feet from the car to the Alta Bates ER entrance. After a painful half-hour wait in the ER waiting room (which, frankly, was INCREDIBLY fast for a packed house), I was taken into a curtained room. After some history-taking, I was given shots of Toradol and Dilaudid, two powerful painkillers, and a shot of Phenergan, an anti-inflammatory to get my herniated discs away from my nerve roots in my spine. Just to make it extra trippy, they also gave me a tablet of Percocet, an incredibly powerful short-term painkiller similar to OxyContin that knocks you OUT. I went home and passed out, but I woke up on Monday morning to find myself pain-free but leg-numb. Frantic, I called my spine specialist, who insisted that I get the lumbar epidural steroid injection as soon as possible. I got the procedure done at 10:30AM today.

A thought as I sat in the Pre-Op room for about an hour, getting pumped full of IV saline solution, listening to lots of Lil' Jon and Cut Copy (<3333 Cut Copy) to pump myself up, only one thought crossed my mind: "How come all middle-aged nurses are either butt-ugly or insanely cougar-fine?" Because every single nurse who helped me out today was FOXY.

I know, I'm an asshole, but I needed something to distract myself from the thought of a NEEDLE GOING INTO MY SPINE, thank you very much. Turns out the procedure was five minutes long and entirely painless.

I have the best parents in the world.

Life goes on.

2009-05-01T03:55:00.001-04:00

The funny thing about auditions is that sometimes you can't really judge whether or not you did well. You just go in, do it, and hope. I was not selected as speaker, but here was the piece I auditioned with for the MCB student commencement speaker.
---
Esteemed faculty, parents, friends, and most importantly, the class of 2009:

I have a confession to make. I grew up a Stanford fan.

Now, before you all run up here and beat me to death, let me explain. I grew up in Palo Alto and attended Palo Alto High School, which sits right across the street from the Stanford campus. My dream – my poor, misguided DESTINY – was to attend Stanford. As most of us here today know all too well, rarely do our lives go down our intended paths. Almost all of us, at some point, had to have at least considered, if not utilized, a second option. I didn't get into Stanford and turned to consider other schools. Fortunately for me, my decision to attend UC Berkeley and concentrate in Molecular and Cell Biology became the best choice I have made in my 22 years. From the time I first stepped foot on campus four years ago, I have loved this school with all my heart, and I could not imagine a more inspiring place to receive a top-shelf education, especially in Molecular and Cell Biology. I am ashamed that Cal was ever anything below a first-choice school on my list.

Having had to hand-pick our majors at some point in the past four years, we have all asked ourselves the question, “Why MCB?” The strange thing about choosing UC Berkeley, and MCB in particular, is that we actively chose to forego the path of least resistance. Quite honestly, the last four years could have been so much easier. Many of us could have attended a smaller, far more expensive school served with a heaping side of grade inflation and a 64-ounce cup of hand-holding. For our decision to let all that go and instead face the daunting task of completing a degree in the largest department at one of the most notoriously difficult schools in the world – for that decision, some people call us foolish. I call those people humanities majors.

The MCB experience here at Cal is a coming-of-age experience unto itself. I was watching the Discovery Channel and learned about this small tribe in the Amazon that initiates their young men by sticking a bunch of these gigantic, inch-long ants into gloves made of interwoven leaves, which are then fastened onto the hands of the young boys. The ants bite the boys' hands nonstop, and this incredibly painful experience turns their hands black and swollen to twice their normal size. This process is repeated twenty times before the boys are recognized as men. Now, I tell this story as an analogy to help the parents understand a common fiber that links all of us MCB students. Ready? We call those ants “organic chemistry.” That's honestly how painful it felt sometimes. But we all went through it and came out the other end a little smarter, a little tougher, and a little more mature. I know I do not regret my decision because the MCB major put us through the grind and ultimately made us better people.

When we chose MCB here, we took on our challenge with pride. Our battle scars are the dark bags sagging underneath our eyes, the deep calluses on our fingers from furiously taking notes and doing problem sets, and our injured social skills, no thanks to the myriad nights of parking ourselves in the library burning the midnight oil. With every battle won, of course, comes rewards. Our trophies are the well-developed muscles from slinging our Campbell and Vollhardt books, the sharp ear developed in lectures with professors who blaze by at ten words a second, and most importantly, a degree that makes others fall on their knees and weep in jealousy knowing that we received an intensive, serious, door-opening education in one of the most important scientific fields in existence. This degree, and all the experiences that came with it, equips us with the power to enter all sorts of careers that can change lives for the better and revolutionize the collective knowledge of the life sciences. We are incredibly privileged to have learned from some of the world's best researchers, doctors, and educators. You simply cannot get this kind of encompassing experience anywhere else in the world other than right here, our glorious alma mater that turned our blood Blue and Gold, the fair mistress by the sea, the University of California, Berkeley. Honestly, I'm not really sure why I bothered with Stanford in the first place. Thank you, and as always, Go Bears.
---
Exciting story coming next. Hold on to your seats.

"THIS IS ESS EEE SEE SPEEEED"

2009-04-25T16:16:00.000-04:00

Wikipedia fascinates me to no end. One of the little things I like to say is, "Wikipedia teaches me so much, I think I should pay it tuition." To a certain extent, that's true for me at the university level - I have learned some pretty valuable information from that lovely bland website that netted me quite a few points on exams, information that my professors conveniently refused to disclose.

The great thing about Wikipedia is the constant updating. As a makeshift bullshit social experiment, I wanted to see how long it took in real-time for a new critical piece of information to be included on Wikipedia. The NFL Draft is the perfect fit for this because everybody gets the information at the same time, so all you have to do is open the page and hit refresh until the information is updated.

Jason Smith was drafted by the Rams at 1:15:02PM, PST. At that point, the information for Round/Pick had not yet been filled in. At 1:16:27PM, PST (last available load of Jason Smith's Wikipedia page), the information had been updated to Round 1, Pick 2, St. Louis Rams.

Mark Sanchez's page was literally updated as soon as he put on that J-E-T-S hat. I watched him put the hat on, hit refresh, and the color scheme had changed from Crimson and Gold to Green and White and all the appropriate information had been filled in. I'm guessing that the teams have hired some people to do this stuff for the franchises.

We remarked that some people have no lives, but then again, what the hell am I doing constantly hitting refresh on Wikipedia pages?

We Live in a Fabricated World

2009-04-23T05:25:00.000-04:00

2:25AM. Channel surfing.

SRS: "Oh snap, Vivica A. Fox and Jean-Claude Van Damme!"
Me: "In what?"
SRS: "Does it matter? It got two stars. It has JCVD. It HAS to be good."
Me: "Did you just call that ass-clown by his initials?"
SRS: "Shut up. So what?"
Me: "MLK. JFK. MTT. NPH. These are great men, brave men who earned the privilege to be mentioned by nothing more than their mere initials. Everyone knows who they are merely by the combination of the initial marks of their names. This is a revered brotherhood, the most prestigious Princetonesque eating club that gets their way. YOU TAINT THEIR FRATERNITY WITH THE NAME OF THAT BLOND, TALENTLESS JACKASS."
SRS: "It's called 'The Hard Corps.'"
Me: "Oh. Let's watch it."

There's Not Much to Say

2009-04-21T08:55:00.000-04:00

You know, I don't specifically remember a whole lot about anything that happened yesterday, but looking back, I don't think there's really a need to specifically form any memories. I seem to remember buzzing around for what must have been hours looping my "LA Summers" playlist, which includes a good sprinkling of JT, Timbaland, Jason Mraz, Chris "Beat 'Er Down" Brown, and the one song that defined my entire summer of 2008, M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes." (See The Great Seth Rogen Adventure, August 2008.)

There's something about contemplatin' and pontificatin' in a separate mind, writing it all down somehow, and then looking back on what you and your friends discussed and realizing that most of it makes no sense to a normal person, yet there's always one or two really good points that filter down through the process and the five of you somehow managed to polish a big ol' cow dung into a finely tuned de Beers diamond worthy of a night of your girl's best lovin'. Jonas Brothers, your purity rings are killing your creativity. Let your brains breathe for a bit.

I don't know much right now. All I know is that there's a receipt for four Double-Doubles and two fries sitting on the kitchen counter and that only one Double-Double is left right now. I should go get a blood lipid panel soon to make sure my bodily fluids didn't become 30% cheeseburger overnight.

Asshole Moment of the Day

2009-04-17T01:03:00.000-04:00

News came today that Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics might be out for the entire playoffs this year due to a knee injury.

Danny Ainge, General Manager of the Boston Celtics, had a heart attack today.

Coincidence? I think not.

Note: Laughing about heart attacks is almost never okay.

Screw anonymity

2009-04-15T11:11:00.000-04:00

Today, I woke up at 5AM to finish my Immunology Lab "problem set" due at 1PM today, a series of questions that might as well be a full-length lab report anyway. Just as I was finishing it at 8AM, I got a class email announcing that the deadline had been extended to Friday. Now I'm sleep-deprived, tired, and jittery from my first dose of my short-term Prednisone regimen. FML

Sponges for brains

2009-04-14T02:31:00.000-04:00

SRS: "Aw man, so hungry. What are we gonna get for dinner?"
Me: "Dunno."

It was Easter Sunday night. We walked around downtown Berkeley for twenty minutes. Everything was either closed or not appealing enough. We returned to the apartment, defeated, hungry, and crying.

SRS: "Well, it's Easter Sunday. We can't decide. I guess we just have to ask, What Would [deity] Do?"
Me: "He would watch TV and go to the first restaurant he sees advertised on the television."

We turned on the TV.

Nine seconds passed.

"Well, I guess we're going to McDonald's."
"FUCK."

Missing the point entirely

2009-04-13T06:46:00.001-04:00

I have a couple of embarrassing guilty pleasures, one of which is The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

You may now kindly shut up. Thanks.

I’m a fan of Ellen because of her brand of comedy – her style of speech is marked with fast-shootin’, quick-thinkin’ jokes that appeal to the basal intellectual side yet don’t get bogged down in stupid technical detail (one reason why I’m not a huge fan of technical jokes – lack of broad appeal). Her monologues are usually well-done, and while she has some dumb segments along the lines of Dave Letterman, those are pretty rare. Unlike Jay Leno, she’s excellent with interviewing guests – she’s never boring, she’s smart in her responses, and when she’s interviewing, there’s almost never dead air (a major flaw of Leno’s). I’m usually pretty happy with the product she puts out on the market.

But here’s why I REALLY watch the show. If you’re reading this, you can participate in this little game too and see how massively entertaining the show can truly be.

The Ellen show market is targeted towards women who watch daytime television, so…uh…slightly older than me, I guess. Of course, that means that the major party of interest for people who get tickets and attend live tapings are those very same older women.

Here’s where you come in: go on YouTube and find any Ellen clip that shows the audience members at some point. The audience is a chlorine-filled swimming pool of estrogen waiting for Patrick Dempsey or Matt Damon or whomever else is the Sexiest Whatevers of the Arbitrary Time Period. Stuck – nay, DROWNING – in that pool of estrogen are a very few number of men who all look extremely uncomfortable. This look of discomfort has one reason and one reason only: they’re present at the taping because their wives promised awesome makeup sex in exchange for voluntarily taking them to get their ya-yas off by seeing male celebrities in person sexier than their own husbands.

This game is most fun when Ellen does her little dances as transitions between segments and the entire audience, full of raucous, excited women, also get up to dance. The men always just kind of stand there and shift around a little bit, forcing a laser-etched, unnatural smile, thrust upon him by the desire to not look like an idiot on national TV. (There are, of course, some men in the audience who possess slightly more flamboyance and therefore dance along with all the other women, but those are more common.)

I ALWAYS point out the men out loud, even when I’m by myself. It’s like I’m playing Where’s Waldo for adults and with fewer papercuts. I like to reward myself with +10 points per man found, equally exchangeable for 0.16 oz. of ice cream. I still haven’t made a full bowl yet. (+5 points for flamboyant men found. +50 points for anybody who looks like they’re under 25 years old.)

Here’s a demo: 1:04 into the video, man in a Dwight Schrute-esque mustard yellow Polo shirt looking angry because he is surrounded by screaming 30- or 40-year-old cougars who all think that Patrick Dempsey is the shit and he’s just a lump of balding, aging chopped liver who has to dish out the hard-earned cash out of his own wallet to pay for the expenses for this bullshit. YES +10 POINTS

Let’s play!

Fixing Senioritis

2009-04-09T00:32:00.001-04:00

I’ve been clicking back and forth between months on my Google Calendar. Some might be hit with the sobering realization that they will be graduating from college in about six weeks and start freaking out and locking themselves in their rooms and crying and slamming the Jack.

I am one of those people.

But that freakout moment happened a couple of weeks ago. The reason why I haven’t written much is because I’ve found so many other things with which to occupy my precious, precious time before I have to leave childhood forever. Note: I’ve never considered myself an adult except in the legal sense. It’s quite obvious if you take a look at my sense of humor. I’m the kind of guy who wants to live in a house with a pile of dead babies in one corner, roadkill kittens in another, a bookshelf full of vulgar jokes and pictures of boobies, and a fully-stocked bar on top of an endless Jewish deli (my last meal on Death Row, before I get electrocuted for drinking a smoothie made of one dead baby, three cups of puppy organs, one tablespoon of fresh endometrium and blood from Hillary Clinton’s latest estrous cycle on national television, will be a potato knish with gravy, a jalapeno bagel with lox, tomatoes, cucumbers, and shmear, a bowl of matzo ball soup, a bottle of Dr. Brown’s black cherry-flavored soda, and a whole smothered fried chicken from Chicken and Waffles).

Calvin said to Hobbes while sitting under a tree, “The end of summer is always hard on me, trying to cram in all the goofing off I’ve been meaning to do.”

Having admitted my childishness and immaturity, I can now safely say that I have been really happy cramming in all the things that I have not really had the time to do in the previous 3.5 years because I simply haven’t had the time and had too many other obligations to face. Here’s what I’ve been up to:
-Making all five flavors of Skittles vodka en masse
-Drinking in my room
-Crying
-Falling asleep while listening to Jim Gaffigan, masturbating my navel, and craving Hot Pockets
-Chilling and drinking at Beta Lounge, the greatest bar I have had the good fortunate of meeting. [Shameless plug: If you haven’t already, PLEASE go check out Beta Lounge at 2129 Durant, cross Oxford. They have some awesome deals like 4-7pm Happy Hour daily, $5 cocktails on Mondays, $20 wine bottles on Wednesdays, and $3.50 sake bombs and half-off sake on Sundays. To boot, Gabe, Elon, and J.A., the owners and operators, are the best people EVER. Tell them Gordo recommended them.]
-Playing as much badminton as possible before RSF membership expires
-Somehow losing ~10lbs since January
-Working on speeches
-Reworking those speeches while drinking
-Apartment-hunting in the Richmond area
-STAYING THE FUCK AWAY FROM THE RICHMOND IRON TRIANGLE
-Promoting synergy LIKE A BOSS
-Continuing my three-month-long search for a real-life nautical-themed Pashmina Afghan that I can wear to graduation

Mother of invention

2009-03-30T01:34:00.001-04:00

Every time we order from Nude Sushi, they always give us a buttload of soy sauce packets and disposable chopsticks, way more than we will ever need for a single meal. They sit, melancholy, unutilized in our utensils drawer.

[Tangent: are the objects SAD that they are not being used, or are they HAPPY that they get to live to see another day before being chopped up to a billion little bloody, screaming, tearful pieces by the monstrosities under the aegis of EBMUD?]

Of course, the chopsticks being an invention of the ancient Chinese, we figured that they could be very useful multi-taskers (the only uni-tasker in the kitchen is the fire extinguisher, according to Alton Brown, but what about the power stick hand blender?). To date, we have used disposable chopsticks for the following purposes, sometimes more than one in a single day:

-Unclogging the port into which we pour laundry detergent in our washing machine
-SRS using the chopsticks to break his poop in half so it could flush down the toilet because the log was too long, too solid, inserted into the toilet bowl at an unfortunate angle, and just too damn resilient to die without honor or glory
-Projectile weaponry

President Obama Will Hurt Me

2009-03-27T00:24:00.001-04:00

I only went back home for 2.5 days for Spring Break. Every time someone calls me now and asks me if I want to hang out, I have to give the unfortunate reply, “Sorry, I’m already back in Berkeley,” inevitably followed by the angry or surprised response “What the fuck? WHY?” Here’s why: it’s all about efficiency. I always plan to see as many friends as possible in the shortest amount of time. I really have no other reason to be in town other than to see those who I am otherwise unable to see. The added benefit to this grand strategy is spending as little time at home as possible. Call me an asshole, but being stuck at home while taking one of my few precious breaks is not how I want to spend my time.

I also get to eat at all the places that I can’t go to because I have no car at school. I choose to spend my time eating terrible, terrible things for me, and somehow I block it all out of my head with some hand-waving and a simple “It’s okay, I only do this twice a year.”

After dining and wining at my cafeteria of choice, Fresh Choice (bad pun AND name-dropping = advertising $$$$ please!), I didn’t know what to do for the rest of the day, so I just hopped in my car and drove around until the winds of destiny brought my fat ass and my Asian Silver ‘93 Toyota Camry V6 XLE to the local googolplex. I rolled into the parking lot at around 3:00PM. Little did I know that I would end up staying until 11:30PM, my mind bursting full of Pokemon-esque flashing lights and mind-blowing speeches.

How was I able to stay so long, you ask? Because I do not fear the law. I can ravage the streets of Oakland in the dark of eve and whisk away the firstborn from every house, collect and bottle their tears, label said substance as precious, extremely rare morning dew collected from the highest canopies of Amazonian rainforests, and sell them at an extreme premium to stupid tourists, and the law wouldn’t be able to touch me with a 10-foot pole with an electric eel at the end. I’m that good. Like a FUCKING NINJA.

Just kidding; it’s because the folks at the theatre were too lazy to man their ticket collection stations. Nobody at the main entrance. Nobody at either side entrance to the auditoriums. Nothing.

I saw three movies in a row for the awesome price of $Free.99 (I hope it’s not taxable). I guess I’m not helping the economy any by keeping my money in my pockets, but hey, I ate at a restaurant and I bought gas in the damn San Francisco Bay Area. I think that’s plenty of compensation for the rest of the country, no? Of course it is.

Blasphemy

2009-03-22T23:22:00.000-04:00

A loud conversation overheard at Starbucks:

A: "Hey! Good to see you!"
B: "You too! It's been so long since I last saw you."
A: "Sorry, I'm a bit forgetful - what's your major now?"
B: "I'm a history major, Middle Eastern Studies emphasis."
A: "That sounds really awesome!"

Time passes. I sip my coffee, reviewing some words for my GRE this coming Friday. Soon, my eyes glaze over as the prospect of taking an exam I will not be using anytime soon overwhelms me. I tune back in to the loud conversation next to me.

A: "I seem to recall you wanted to go to med school, right?"
B: "Yep. I'm still on track to go to medical school. I'm finishing up my prerequisites right now."
A: "Wait. You're still premed?"
B: "Yeah."
A: "But you're not a bio major."
B: "That's correct."
A: "...I don't understand."

I feel that way all the time.

Ghetto City by the Bay

2009-03-19T15:51:00.001-04:00

No more frantic searching.

No more conversations with random people whom I met years ago with six degrees of separation away from me about a possible job opening.

No more sending out resumes and poorly-written cover letters.

I prayed to Tedford and the Great Oski in the Sky. They delivered.

I got a job with a small biotech company here in the Bay Area. And, damn it, I’m going to take it. There is no reason for me to consider other positions. The only leveraging factor is the pay scale – USC offered a little more money – but it’s not significant enough to tip the scales on this one. Unless something catastrophic happens, I expect to stay here with this position for the next two to three years.

I’ve also purchased my 2009 Cal football season tickets in the Young Alumni section.

Now all I have to do is stay awake long enough to finish my stupid lab report due 9am tomorrow before I can REALLY go on spring break.

I haven’t been this excited in a while.

A short thought before I get back to cramming

2009-03-16T05:12:00.000-04:00

It's 2:14 AM on March 16, 2009. I'm studying for my last ever college midterm. A thought:

If I had a nickel for every time I heard or read the phrase "in this economy," I wouldn't have to worry about finding a job in this economy.

Also, I think this is my 100th post.

Story of my life

2009-03-10T03:50:00.001-04:00

Seeing your professor, the one you actually enjoy listening to, at the gym: kind of awkward, but also kind of cool (oh snap, professors are human?)

Seeing your professor, the one you actually enjoy listening to, super sweaty and Full Monty in the men’s locker room after working out: FML.
---
Talking shit about the University of Southern California, the school you have loathed for the past four years, without discretion: cool, when done in mob form.

Talking shit about the University of Southern California, the school you have loathed for the past four years, without discretion after they offer you a job: I should probably stop here.

Blank blank-ity blank blank blank

2009-03-08T04:46:00.001-04:00

When SRS and I came back to the apartment at about 1:00am, we turned on the TV and found ESPN2 showing a live broadcast of the Pool A first round of the World Baseball Classic this year. Normally, neither of us are baseball folks, but just as we were about to turn the channel, they announced the teams playing: Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) vs. Korea.

It was fate. It had to be fate, right? Two drunk guys with nothing to do, stumbling in at the wee hours of the morning, suddenly finding a game involving their very two countries, battling it out through the great American pastime?

The game went as expected – the Korean team blanked the Taiwanese team, 9-0. We were hoping that the Mercy Rule would be invoked so that we could finally get to bed, but nope, it just kept dragging on at 9-0 for a couple innings. (The Mercy Rule in the WBC is up by 15 by the 5th inning or up by 10 by the 7th inning.)

The best part about all this, other than the sheer surprise of circumstance, was the discovery that one of my favorite sporting accessories, the now-ubiquitous Thundersticks, were invented by the Koreans.

Thundersticks, for the uninitiated or the deaf, are long, narrow plastic balloons that are filled with a LOT of air to make them as solid as possible. They make a surprising amount of noise when you bang then together lengthwise, and they can be deafening when tens of thousands of fans clap their Thundersticks together.

There weren’t many fans in attendance, but then again, the Tokyo Dome is pretty difficult to fill to capacity. Of course, ESPN being the good network that it is, always shows some enthusiastic or interesting fans. It showed the Korean fan contingent being all coordinated with their matching uniforms and light blue Thundersticks and their little slutty cheerleaders with their little slutty dresses and their team being all not jealous of the other team.

Then it panned to the Taiwanese fans, a group much more sparse and much less coordinated in terms of appearance and active cheering. They did, however, focus on a shot on a happy Taiwanese family, a set of parents with two happy infant girls.

Here comes the asshole comment of the day. You should have a glass of water ready at hand. You should also have some paper towels nearby.

SRS: “Too bad your fans aren’t awesome and don’t have Thundersticks.”
Me: “I wonder how well it would work if that mother slammed her two babies together repeatedly. That’s gotta be pretty distracting, right?”

Listen, my children, and ye shall hear

2009-03-03T09:12:00.001-05:00

I’ve been to quite a few excellent celebrations commemorating the twenty-first year of life of several close friends. During the beginning of my third year in college, I started thinking about what I wanted to do for my own 21st birthday and how to top all those other little shits and make it the BEST BIRTHDAY EVAAAR GOLD STAR! Several really half-baked ideas popped into my mind – get wasted and go to Chuck E. Cheese’s (sheer irony of celebrating the legalization of alcohol imbibement at an annoying, dirty chidren’s playground that serves really crappy food), get wasted at Dave & Buster’s (the slightly less stupid idea), going out for a nice dinner with a large group of close friends and then getting shitfaced at local bars (Plan A Priority Alpha or whatever the hell the military calls it) – the list goes on. I could go all day.

Something you may not know about me is that I love the radio program This American Life. Something you may also not know is why I interrupted this riveting, sweat-busting story with such an inane detail. Calm down, sir, keep your pants on, I’ll explain: the TAL show broadcast on 2/20/09 was called “Plan B.” It was about people whose lives didn’t exactly go the way they had planned it when they were younger and how they dealt with it or how, through perseverance and a little luck, they wound back on Plan A. I’m putting my thoughts down now regarding my 21st birthday because I just listened to it on podcast (I’m usually a couple weeks late, and don’t say “that’s what she said”) and felt that, though my story is nowhere near as grand or long-term as the broadcast ones, this one was befitting of a Plan B backroads blueprint. To make it more interesting, let’s switch up formats. WONDER TWINS POWERS ACTIVATE! FORM OF…SHITTY NOVELIST FEATURED ON OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB:

The alarm on my cell phone went off at precisely 8:30AM. The chorus of Dave Matthews Band’s “The Space Between” rang annoyingly next to my head. My worthless roommate was still passed out on his bed, undoubtedly having stayed up all night playing WoW or DotA or whatever stupid online game he beat off to. I got up, partially excited that I was starting a new project in lab, but mostly despondent that I was still stuck in this city that I so loathe. I looked out the window.

Los Angeles. For The City of Angels, it sure was pretty gloomy – the sky was once again tainted with the rust-red cummerbund that sorrowfully separated sky and earth. I told myself that I would only have to deal with a little over one more month of this bullshit, got dressed, and hopped in the shower. The cool water woke me, and at that moment, I let out a little muffled scream in the shower stall because, damn it, today was MY BIRTHDAY and nobody was going to stop me from having the time of my life. Nobody, except for the city of Los Angeles [grammar fail].

This was my route to work every day:

View Larger Map

It doesn’t look like the distance is that far from this zoom, but you can’t see all the goddamn hills to the west of campus that I had to painstakingly traverse in order to get to my lab. I remember it was particularly warm that day, especially considering the thick smog present.

I went to work as usual. There was nothing different about the lab – the folks were all the same, my project was pretty much the same stuff as last time but with more tedious protocols to follow, and nothing was out of the ordinary. I didn’t want to express that it was my birthday because I didn’t really want the fake attention they would have undoubtedly showered upon me. That was one of the aspects of the lab dynamic that I enjoyed but also loathed – they were friendly, but sometimes I questioned whether or not it was genuine (go figure, it’s LA).

I quietly worked away for a few hours, all the meanwhile thinking about what I actually wanted to do for my birthday. I had no friends in the immediate vicinity, I had some pocket money to spend – why not just go to a couple of the local bars and get piss drunk and stumble home by myself? That seemed like a good idea.

Then reality hit. I was going to spend one of my lifetime landmarks alone in an unfamiliar city with strangers I didn’t particularly like. I put down my P200, sat in my chair, and thought about if that’s what I really wanted. I decided against it and made a couple of calls.

Tint picked up immediately. He was in Irvine, his hometown, and somehow we convinced each other that he and KNak would drive up together to come celebrate my birthday in Westwood. I eagerly waited their arrival while mindlessly finishing up my last bit of cell culture preparations.

6:00PM showed on my clock, and The Call came in. I packed up, hurried downstairs, and met Tint and KNak, ready to party the night away like Duff Man had just burst through the door. The problem was that KNak was not yet 21. This was a big problem for the rest of us. We walked around Westwood Village, thinking of what we could possibly do that could include this little not-yet-21-year-old-bitch hunkering our epic plans.

We walked past California Pizza Kitchen on the corner of Broxton and Weyburn. Why not? It’s as good as any of the other overpriced chains around here.

We walked in, sat down, and immediately began perusing the beverages menu. Not a huge selection, but a Sam Adams will do.

“ID, sir?”
Tint: “CHECK HIS AGE.”
”Thank you, sir. Your order is coming right up.”
Tint: “…did he notice that it’s your birthday?”

Thus went my very first ID check. Lacking.

“I’m sorry, sir, we’re out of Sam Adams.”
”Uhh…guess I’ll go with a Budweiser then.”

KNak and Tint: “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU. WE’RE BUYING YOU A DRINK. WHY WOULD YOU DOWNGRADE TO A PUSSY BEER LIKE THAT.”
Me: “SHUT UP, it’s not my fault! I’ll make up for it later.”

We ate and drank and ate some more. Just as we were about ready to leave, I made a note to the other two that I was rather unsatisfied with the amount of alcohol thus consumed. Once again, we sat around The War Table and decided what to drink.

Me: “I’ll get a Long Island Iced Tea. That should make up for it.”

Sure enough, the evening was finally starting to spin around like stars. Just for kicks, I thought I’d finish top off the meal with something that really caught my eye earlier.

"Sir, I’ll have a Peach Breeze please.”
Tint and KNak: “I FUCKING HATE YOU WHY ARE YOU SUCH A VAG”
Me: “I WILL DRINK WHATEVER I WANNA DRINK FUCK YOU GUYS”

I finished off the Peach Breeze with relative ease (which I guess is a sure sign of a vag drink). We left the restaurant and thought about what to do next. One discussion led to another, and somehow we made it over to Ralph’s on Le Conte where I purchased my very first bottle of alcohol from a grocery. We somehow landed on Malibu and a carton of orange juice.

Derrick called somebody. “Hello? Are you home? …Oh, you’re busy? Like, really busy? …Yeah, I’m here celebrating a friend’s birthday. Can we come over to play Rock Band?”

And thus went the remainder of the evening: in a dorm room of someone I did not know at all playing on a broken Rock Band set and shooting Malibu and OJ every few minutes. Not how I had expected the day to go, but a funny alternative nonetheless.

Happy 21st, buddy. One hell of a Plan B.

END OF “PLAN B,” A SHITTY NOVEL BY GORDO

Recent polls suggest that Americans are getting too lazy to actually read and instead prefer quick, visual summaries or sound bites (Time Magazine certainly has changed their format to fit this growing demographic). Therefore, I have decided to include the following summary to best express how my 21st birthday went.

PLUS

EQUALS

KNAK

Refusal to break promises

2009-03-01T04:05:00.001-05:00

I promised myself that, unless it was absolutely an emergency or work-related, that I would never wake up before 10am on a Saturday ever again.

Thanks to my sterling character, I successfully kept that promise by sleeping through ESPN College Gameday, which started at 6am.

I really wanted to go, and I had set my alarm for 4:30am so I could get up, get to BRH by 5am, and be ready to go. And I DID wake up at 4:30am, as I had wished.

However, I also unfortunately fell back asleep and didn’t wake again until 11:30, thus missing College Gameday entirely. And based on some of the stories I’ve heard, I missed out on some pretty good stuff.

BUT! I got my chance to make fun of Bob Knight anyway. Sleep AND ridiculing TV personalities that I personally don’t like? That’s called a “win-win” in Gordoland.

Difference between [insert race of your choice] and a bucket of shit

2009-02-28T17:31:00.001-05:00

For those of you who don’t know what a bucket list is, a bucket list is a list of things you want to do before you die, or “kick the bucket.” For some, it’s an incredibly sobering, midnight oil experience. For others, it can be tragically short – a list of things to do given a couple of weeks to live. For an asshole minority (such as myself), it’s only half-serious and mostly for entertainment value. Creating a bucket list allows you to set the bar impossibly high so that when you don’t accomplish any of it, you still feel okay about it, thus ending your life on a high note. (I’d much rather do that than take Vince Vaughn’s advice and set zero expectations so that you feel good all the time.)

My Bucket List thus far:

[] Attend a sold-out Liverpool or Celtic F.C. game and sing "You'll Never Walk Alone" at the top of my lungs

[] Visit Anfield

[] Probably learn something about ~~soccer~~ it’s called football, you Yankee shit before doing either of those things

[] March in the Rose Bowl Parade with the Cal Band

[] Get into medical school

[] Write the greatest American novel of all time

[] Meet ~~Kiefer Sutherland~~ Jack Bauer, shake his hand, and tell him how honored I am to meet a true American hero

[] Check out the new CITRIS building

[] Work in Stanley Hall because it’s badass

[] Work in the not-yet-finished Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences because it will probably be badass

[] Mathematically figure out how the fuck UC Berkeley has all this money to build all these new buildings but not enough money to give Cal Band its due

[] Attend Gabe’s Hit The Slopes in Dwinelle

[] Find out how safe brothels in Thailand are

[] Visit Thailand for three days with $900 USD in my pockets

[] Visit Planned Parenthood for…um…precaution

[] Cry

Well...damn.

2009-02-26T00:42:00.001-05:00

Campus Physical Plant took down my sign for Phlynn already. That lasted, what, about 24 hours? Not a bad run.

Because I am procrastinating

2009-02-25T00:12:00.000-05:00

When I procrastinate, I reminisce. And there's nothing more I love to reminisce about than my years in band, because I am a loser and have nothing better to think about. (It was that or porn. And I've fulfilled my 60-minute quota of porn for today.)

When Phlynn, the Student Director from the 2005 season and my first StuD, got married this past week, I decided that, since I have all the free time in the world (I figure that at this point, studying for the MCAT is moot because there's no way I'll break 30 no matter how hard I try), I would do something to honor the occasion. Nothing grand or widespread. Kind of like how we honor former athletes for the institution, even though we really have no idea who they are or what they accomplished. I don't know Phlynn super well, but I felt that he was one of the best Student Directors this band has seen in recent years.

Remember this poster? The one that's still hanging on the far left on the east wall in the overhang between Strawberry Creek and Lower Sproul? Yeah you do.

Anyways, here it is. A little bit of tape, a Sharpie, and a piece of scratch paper.

Go Bears, beat aging.

You can take your MBA and shove it up your A-S-S

2009-02-21T05:08:00.000-05:00

If there's one thing I'll admit about Stanford, it's that they seem to have a knack for producing a great pool of entrepreneurs and innovators: Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard of HP, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Jerry Yang of Yahoo!, Peter Thiel of PayPal, Phil Knight of Nike (aka Resident Rich Uncle Pennybags of UC Eugene; also, international advocate of a your-face-looks-like-a-million-bucks-it's-green-and-wrinkly level of ridiculously ugly uniforms) - and these are just some of the bigger names. Stanford's Graduate School of Business just seems to have some sort of nurturing environment conducive to giving their students the freedom to toss around these new ideas and actually act on them, to give them the greatest possible chance to plant their seeds and hopefully see significant fruit.

The Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley isn't too shabby either - any school that produces great beings such as Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, and Norman Mineta, former Secretary of Transportation (whom some refer to as "Underperformin' Norman"), has got to have SOME clout behind it.

On Thursday, February 19th, however, I had a glimpse of the next great wave of innovators who may claim gold and glory to our dear alma mater. And they're not even enrolled in Haas. (By the way: Dear Haas School of Business, I WILL PLAY MUSIC ON MAXWELL FIELD WHENEVER THE FUCK I WANT TO. STICKS OUT OF ASSES, POR FAVOR. Thank you for your time, Go Bears, praise be to Tedford.)

Two buddies of mine, CarpeDM and FederagoogSlayer, wallowing in sheer boredom, greed, and their recent clinical diagnoses of Stage Three Senioritis, decided to make and sell black-bottom cupcakes on Sproul Plaza just for kicks. When I first saw the notification on my Facebook inbox, I seriously thought it was a joke. Were they serious about this? For goodness' sake, they named their new upstart the Happy Summertime Funcake Factory. How they managed to come up with such an awesome name like the Happy Summertime Funcake Factory without the assistance of some combination of greater-than-or-equal-to four recreational drugs is simply beyond me.

(Wait a second. Maybe they DID have extracurricular "help"...who else would make cupcakes at 2am? OH MY GOD SKY FALLING WAAAAAH)

For kicks, I decided to go check out their very amateur, very illegal shining beacon of a new wave of young entrepreneurship. I didn't take a picture, but a fellow friend, P. Titty, happened to take a picture of the event and was kind enough to let me use the image.

The future of business models. God help us.

Let's break down this photo:
1) The weather was GORGEOUS. This day was a completely random sunny day stuck straight in the asscrack of two weeks of gray skies and rain.
2) They seriously named their place the Happy Summertime Funcake Factory. Seriously.
3) You can't see it very well in the photo, but on the small print next to the little ClipArt on the sign, it says "KISSES $1.00" with the "$1.00" crossed out and "50 cents" written underneath it.
4) To the stage right of the fine gentleman in maroon on the left of the photo (our friend RyRo) is the blue Cal Band sandwichboard, normally only brought out for Cal Day for potential recruits to take interest forms and our older-than-Goldie-Hawn brochures.

Now let's analyze.
1) Clearly this is a sign from the great Oski in the sky that this is the beginning of an amazing journey.
2) SERIOUSLY?! (It eventually grew on me. Seriously.)
3) CarpeDM had originally priced cupcakes at 50 cents and Hershey's Kisses at a DOLLAR EACH. I'm glad we NORMAL PEOPLE with COMMON BUSINESS SENSE were able to talk him to marking it down.
4) When they first brought out the table, there was a UCPD copper just chillin' next to The Structure Formerly Known As Sather Gate, shooting hate rays from his eyes in our general directionn. He might have been looking at the Asian Business Association table across from us, I don't know, it's entirely possible, damn Asians and their businesses. Since the operation was illegal, we thought this might have been a problem. Good thing he biked away shortly after the table was set up and we were all THAT'S RIGHT, RIDE AWAY BITCH, YOU CAN'T STOP ME MUTHAFUCKA CUZ I'M ON A BOAT. (Basically, the Cal Band sandwichboard was brought out to cover our asses.)

I purchased one of the cupcakes, and they were DELICIOUS. I never thought that half-day-old cream cheese in the middle of a cupcake would be good, but man, it was delicious. Black-bottom cupcakes. BUY THEM. PLEASE.

That night, I asked CarpeDM how their first day went (I had to leave early), and it turns out they sold them all and made about $50. Subtract about $25 for materials, and we find that they turned a nice $25 profit (URGHRHGR MATH BRAIN HURT MOMMA WAAH). A beautiful start to a beautiful new era of future business models. Who needs an MBA when you have a little plastic Cal Band membership card?

I believe in Harvey Dent. I also believe in happiness, summertime, fun, cakes, and factories.

BUY THEIR CUPCAKES. It's a STEAL at 50 cents a pop. You will not regret it.

Peer pressure wooooo

2009-02-15T22:49:00.000-05:00

The first time I saw the "25 random facts about myself" meme on Facebook, I knew it was going to take off like wildfire, but I was really hoping that I wouldn't get caught up in it. (Meaning I was hoping none of you bitches would tag me. And by bitches, I mean friends. I <3 you guys.) As far as I'm concerned, chain mail is chain mail, and heavens, I hate chain mail. I do feel, however, that the concept itself - this idea of bottom-up, democratic, self-perpetuating education - is extremely useful and quite clever. It is the motor that drives what we now call "Web 2.0" websites, and it's exactly why I absolutely love sites like Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, and Wikipedia. The natural extension of that concept into internet pornography...actually, let's not go there. (I could write entire theses on the advent and growth of porn, but the only people reading it would be seedy assholes with whom I do not wish to associate.)

Therein lies my dilemma. I love Web 2.0 sites because I feel the principle behind it is a very important tool to contemporary communications, yet I hate contributing to it because I feel I have neither the time nor anything interesting/original to contribute. Therefore, I am almost a 100% mooch when it comes to Web 2.0 sites and similar concept games. I'm an asshole, I know, shut up already, SHUT UP, I know you are but what am I, your face, YOUR MOM, HA.

That's why I'm writing my 25 things list, but not on tagging other people on Facebook. I have a feeling the wave is already starting to die anyways; no need to keep it alive further.
----
1. I enjoy the creative writing process because I'm a terrible performer. It's exactly why a lot of people tell me I'm much funnier on paper than in person. I wholeheartedly agree; at the same time, I wish I were a better performer, but simply do not have the time nor drive to improve.

2. My least favorite word is "tabernacle." It has nothing to do with the definition of the word; it's just incredibly awkward to say and doesn't sound pretty at all.

3. I love the word "moist." Again, nothing to do with its definition or connotations (ok maybe a little bit to do with the connotations), but to me it's a very satisfying word to say.

4. I hate arrogance and douchebaggery and elitists. But question: does hating those groups of people inherently define the hater as an elitist? PARADOX OH NOOOOOOOOOOES

5. Foreign accents do not excite or entice me in any way. Especially FOB accents that sound like my mom. (Side note: when my mom went down to San Diego with her friends a couple weeks ago without telling me, was it some kind of weird cougar sex romp roadtrip that I wasn't supposed to know about? Addition: my mom's not a cougar. STOP THINKING STOP THINKING STOP THINKING)

6. I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to movies. It kinda pisses off some of my friends.

7. I entirely ruptured my left Achilles' tendon in Junior year of high school. I consequently spent about two days on crutches and a month in a wheelchair after falling down the stairs of my house while trying to get from the top floor to the first floor on my crutches, leading to the ankle on my good leg swollen and unable to support my weight. FML

8. One of my worst flaws is passing prejudiced judgment on somebody based on where they went to college.

9. I go out of my way to look for humorous items, books, and toys as gifts.

10. I do not know my dad's birthday, and I'm not afraid to admit it. I am, however, afraid to ask my mother when it is.

11. My sister and I aren't particularly close, but I constantly worry about her future (in terms of family life).

12. I love yelling dirty, terrible insults at sporting events. I respect student sections that come up with creative, effective, but not over-the-line group taunts. (Individual taunts are free-for-all, as far as I'm concerned. Fuck it.)

13. I could watch Shaq shoot free throws all day. Honestly.

14. I hold a constant inferiority complex because most of my extended family is extremely academically accomplished.

15. I have a thing for older girls/women.

16. Sometimes, I feel like I'm not Asian at all. (Then my mom calls me and reminds me in awful, awful ways how extremely Asian my family is.)

17. The absolute very first, a priori thing I want to know about a school is its campus layout. This means that the very first thing I search for when I go to a school's website is its campus map. I have never broken out of this habit.

18. My greatest fear is not death or public speaking or the real world. My greatest fear is the knowledge that President Obama faces the very real possibility of being assassinated.

19. As of today, I have still never had a steady girlfriend. (I like relaxing music, long walks on the beach at night, carnivals...)

20. I hate the term "lover."

21. I would like cats a lot more if they were more like dogs.

22. When I was young and my mother asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, among the answers I gave her were butcher, truck driver, and street artist. I think she still cries herself to sleep every night.

23. My list of places to visit, in this order: NYC, Boston, Chicago, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul. My list of places to RE-visit, in this order: Florence, Venice, Prague, London, Paris, Nashville, Washington, D.C.

24. I still keep in touch with a couple of my high school teachers and I still try to visit my high school every time I go home.

25. I wanted, more than anything in the world, to go to Stanford and join the Stanford Band. I ended up not getting into a single private school that I applied to. As of today, I have no regrets. Go Bears.

THIS ENTIRE POST IS DEATH BY IRONY (if you think about it)

2009-02-11T02:32:00.001-05:00

A phone conversation with my mother: an excerpt. (You can purchase the entire set for 4 - 4! - easy payments of $19.99, cash or check only.)

Keep in mind that this (and ANY written conversation with my mother) is in Mandarin. I'm just poorly translating it back.

M: "So your sister told me that you're friends with her and with your cousin on Faceplace."
G: "Facebook."
M: "Okay. Facebook."
G: "Yeah? What else did she say?"
M: "She says she's been reading your diary."
G: "...I don't have a diary. And if she can read it just like that, then it's not a very good diary, is it?"
M: "YES YOU DO. She says you write funny things in it once a week or so."
G: "Ooooh...my blog."
M: "What's a blog-uh?"

Conversation moves on to something else, probably something banal and pointless - I don't even remember what she said. Then somehow it all came back to my blog:

M: "Your sister says that you write a lot of bad things about USC."
G: "Yeah."
M: "Why don't you like them?"
G: "They're cocky, arrogant, rich, self-righteous, silver-spoons-in-asses bitches."
M: "But their ranking in that U.S. News thing is so high."
G: "It's inflated with all those gold coins they so seem to enjoy for breakfast."
M: "They have a good music program."
G: "True."
M: "They have a really good business school."
G: "Also true."
M: "They have a great film school. Look at the kinds of students they have - Steven Spielberg and his fat friend that you kids like so much."
G: "Steven Spielberg is a genius of the cinema. George Lucas is an embarrassment to the film directing community."
M: "But don't you love those Star Wars movies?"
G: "Only the ones he didn't direct."
M: "Fine, I don't like that stuff anyway."
G: "Is this going somewhere?"
M: "And USC has a really great med school."
G: "Probably true, though I question the usage of 'really great.' Let's go with 'somewhat above average' medical school."
M: "THEY HAVE A REALLY GOOD MEDICAL SCHOOL."
G: "Fine."
M: "You're not getting my point. THEY HAVE A MEDICAL SCHOOL. IN CALIFORNIA."
G: "You're right, I'm really not getting your point. What IS your point?"
M: "So stop writing bad things about USC! What if you have to go to school there someday?"

At this point, the thought of possibly HAVING TO attend USC hurt my brain so much that I had to temporarily put the phone down, count to 10, and do my breathing exercises so that I wouldn't poke a hundred little holes in my wrists with the tip of my mechanical pencil. Meanwhile, my mother once again proved her incompetence with modern technology: "HERRO? HEEERRRRO? Wo xiang ta yo gua duan le, wang ba dan...HERRO? ARE YOU THERE? Maybe the phone is broken." A series of thumping noises then came across the speaker; I can only imagine that she was banging the phone against the desk so that the little men inside the phone who operate it would wake up and get back to work.

I recuperated and picked up the phone again, just so that she wouldn't break the phone.

G: "It's not going to be a problem. Don't worry about it. Trust me; I'm smart about these kinds of things."
M: "I still don't understand why you think all these terrible things about USC's students. Your sister said that she's seen you write some pretty disgusting things."
G: "Have you MET them? Because I have."
M: "I know you're really good friends with [name redacted], and SHE goes to USC, and she's the exact OPPOSITE of how you describe their students."
G: "Okay, two points. One: I have ONE friend there. Two: She's different. She hasn't bought into their culture."
M: "Whatever you say. Oh, and your sister also told me that you write about ME in your diary thing a lot."
G: "Oh...um...yeah. Do you not want me to? I can stop if you want."
M: "I would prefer it, but I guess it's okay if you don't write anything terrible about me. I haven't read any of it."
G: "Oh. In that case, your request is denied."
M: "WHAT?"
G: "THE ANSWER IS NO."
M: "I'd better not be seeing this phone conversation on your damn diary."

Sucks for you, buddy (I'm not your buddy, friend!)

2009-02-09T03:51:00.000-05:00

On a more serious note (something I haven't approached in a long time):

I don't think it's a huge secret that I love PostSecret. (I also love badminton, long walks on the beach, easy-going music...SOMEBODY LOVE ME DAMMIT) I subscribe to it, and every week, when the site is updated on Sundays, my Google Reader gets just a little bit brighter (or more depressing, depending on how many suicide/divorce/hate/fuckoff postcards happen to be in there that week).

This week's update made me particularly despondent, because one of the secrets this week was this sad note:

To whomever wrote this secret, I have no hatred and bear no ill wills. I have nothing but sorrow and pity for you. You clearly did not put in the effort to get the most out of one of the greatest opportunities available on this planet. This is a school that brilliant people halfway around the world scrimp and sacrifice to attend. This is a school that cares so much about the pure integrity of education, instead of its politics, that it streams classes on the internet for free so that anyone can learn for the sake of learning. This is a school that still has Nobel laureates teaching undergraduates, when in most top-tier schools in places like England, NO professors teach undergrads. This is a school that makes good, smart, hardworking people and sends them all over the world to do important, life-changing work for others.

But you already knew all that (I hope.)

I don't suspect that UC Berkeley is the perpetrator here. If "UC Berkeley" had been replaced with any other major, top-tier American university, your message would probably have stayed the same.

You, sir/madam, are at fault. You are at fault for having wasted four years of your life NOT experiencing an incredibly vibrant city, full of interesting (if crazy) people that you will NOT find anywhere else. You are at fault for NOT taking the initiative to go out and explore the amazing selection of restaurants in the immediate vicinity. You are at fault for NOT choosing a subject you truly, honestly loved to study, and "it wasn't available" is NOT an excuse, not at a school like Berkeley, because you can design your own majors here. (I admit that I, too, am guilty of choosing a concentration I do not entirely enjoy, but that's more the fault of the department's poor organization than of the subject itself. I DO like microbiology and immunology, but probably less so than social psychology.) You are at fault for NOT putting in the effort to strive for the best and milk every last drop of knowledge out of what your teachers wish to pass on to you, despite the occasional questionable teaching that almost all of us here - or at any other school - encounter. You are at fault for NOT wanting it enough. You are at fault for expecting everything to fall into your lap on a silver platter. You are at fault for NOT fighting through the initial cold, impersonal collective shadow cast by the 35,000 other students here. You are at fault for NOT thinking outside the box and believing that education is just books, pens and classrooms.

Berkeley has its flaws, yes. But what school doesn't? We like to blame the school from time to time, and sometimes, it really IS the school's fault. But it is NEVER ALWAYS the school's fault.

~"If you are bored with Berkeley, you are bored with life." - Clark Kerr, first Chancellor of UC Berkeley~

I'll bet you never heard that one.

It really did take me four years to realize how incredibly, eerily true that statement rings. My path to discovering the power behind that simple, almost comedic sentence was not the easiest, mostly because I did not give myself the chance at first. It felt stupid, and to some extent, it still feels stupid.

Here's the bottom line:

It's 2009, I'm 21 years old, and I'm graduating in about thirteen weeks with a degree in Immunology.

I've never been more glad to have made that stupid journey. Swear to Oski.

Gordo Gets Lucky

2009-02-08T05:13:00.000-05:00

Foreword: I'm going to stop importing my entries into Facebook until the imported formatting is fixed. Until then, everything will still be here, same hugsless time, same hugsless network.

---

I love board games. Call me a geek, but there's something about the social aspect of having multiple bodies physically sitting around the same board and playing the same game that satisfies me to a level far greater than any MMORPG or online game could achieve. (It's also why I love the Wii, but not online.)

Now, I've never been a particular master at the real thinking man's games, even though I enjoy them all the same. I've never been big on Chess, but I certainly do appreciate its educational and entertainment value...unless, of course, we're playing with the Kama Sutra Chess Set. Then you've got my attention, at least for a short while, before I run off to the bathroom ten minutes into the game and mysteriously stay there for fifteen. (Note: how do you even tell the pieces apart?)

(Source nerve)

Clue, Battleship, Mancala, Monopoly, Wits & Wagers, and BANG! - the more childish, less intelligent games - definitely top my list, because if I want to think, I'll go to school, dammit.

However, today I happened to get the chance to play a riveting game of Scrabble, and the words that I happened to make were so good (and my letter draws were so lucky) that I had to photodocument them and present them. I am not making any of this up - these plays actually happened today.

O Fortune Moment #1:

I got to spell "GANJA" pretty early in the game - my second or third turn, I think. I just happened to draw G, A, N, and J.

Then, a few turns later, I drew W, O, and L to spell WOLF off FIG. The very next turn, I drew two Es and a D.

I think Fate is trying to tell me something with these two words I was able to spell. I'm not quite sure what the prophecy is though - the voices speaking to me are a little fuzzy. But the people on the interwebs tell me that there's some sort of mystical plant out there that can help elucidate the voices you hear in your head. If only I could remember what it was called. Help me, Obi-Wan.

About halfway into the game, this was my rack of letters:

The board at this point (maybe 2/3 into the game) was such that I was SURE I couldn't make any really good moves; I figured the greatest number of points I could get on this turn was six, which would have put me in a dangerously close margin to my opponent's score. Just as I was about to put down "TIE," I took one last glance at the board, and suddenly a halo of golden rays, more beautiful than the Holy Grail, more brilliant than the Campanile in the dusk, more pure than a single tear rolling down Oski's cheek as we lose in LA, hit the periphery of my right.

A few turns earlier, out of desperation, I had wasted a turn getting only nine points spelling "TIT." (Retrospect: not a wasted turn at all; the entertainment value granted my halftard twelve-year-old brain was quite rewarding.)

The ONLY sensible play that could net me a good number of points was this:

O, how we giggled and snorted and el-oh-elled. The strangers around us thought we had gone batshit. (Relevant tangent: who wants to play Battleshits? Give me a gallon of milk and bring it on.) I did it sort of as a joke, but my opponent was so entertained by the notion and so gracious that I was granted the play. AND IT GOT ME...1...2...3...carry the...IT GOT ME HELLA POINTS.

But now you may be staring at this picture and asking, "Hey Professor Gordo, you're a dumbass. Even if 'TITTIEBAG' is accepted as a word, which is only marginally true, what the hell is 'MATEE?' Epic fail, bro."

My opponent and I definitely picked up on that and had a quick discussion regarding the legitimacy of the play on contention of the word "MATEE."

Me: "HURHURHUREEEEHEHEHHEH TITTIEBAG"

Buddy: "Okay. Calm down."

Me: "EEEEHEHHEHEHEHEEEE okay are you going to accept 'MATEE?'"

Buddy: "Well, certainly. I mean, if there's a matEE, then there has to be a matER, right?"

Me: "So...one of them is just lying on the bed while the other one is doing all the work?"

Both: HURHURHURHURHUR

It was thusly agreed that "MATEE" was not only an acceptable play; it was a brilliant play. ESPECIALLY because it was attached to "TITTIEBAG."

Oh, and dear ol' Cal Bandsmen:

Edit [2.8.09 2359]: A trusted friend - henceforth referred to as PeePee - was kind enough to give me his opinion on the legitimacy of the word "tittiebags." Claims: "tittiebags" is a legitimate word only when used as 1) an insult or 2) medical equipment terminology. I asked for sample usages, and this was what was given:

1) Jon Brockman sucks hard at freethrows; look at his giant tittiebags. (Shaquille O'Neal would have also been acceptable.)

2) Johnson, I need two tittiebags, stat!

Why won't my mother love me?

2009-02-03T05:24:00.000-05:00

I spent a good portion of my adolescent life in front of the idiot box (that's "television" for you folks out there who don't have to wear a helmet and foam padding all over at all times). As a result, much of what I learned came from the TV. It was my de facto legal guardian when my de jure parents weren't around. I have learned much from the Great American Box for Idiots. She has been an absolute blessing. Yes, HER. What, a chair can be feminine but my mother/secret lover/box can't?

Sesame Street taught me my numbers and helped developed my first adult social intuitions. Bert and Ernie introduced me to the world of potential homosexuality, and Big Bird taught me that my imaginary friend Snonkolees should go away. R-r-r-rewind: Everyone thought Big Bird was hanging out with Oscar the Grouch a bit too much. You just know that Oscar the Grouch dealt some shady stuff living in a freaking DUMPSTER. It's all his fault that poor Big Bird ended up hitting too much of that marijuana and imagining Snuffleupagus all the time. [Seriously, if you're up early enough or if you're not busy around after school hours, watch a little bit of the show. There's some funny stuff targeted at adults in there.]

The Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers taught me what my teachers in school were never allowed to teach us:

1) Scientific and political advisors be damned, teenagers with social drama led by a mysterious gigantic talking head and a robot of questionable sexual orientation are the solution to all our interplanetary terrorism concerns

2) White & nerdy teenagers who wear glasses are AWESOME at beating the shit out of animatronic and/or costumed creatures made of clay

3) All black people are cool and hip and with it. Also, great dancers

4) I think the Green Ranger was Irish

5) If true, Irish guys are sneaky tricksters/badass

6) Kimberly was FINE

7) Wait was Kimberly yellow or pink

8) Just Google Image'd it, yeah she was Pink Ranger

9) HELLA FINE

Of course, who could forget cuddly, lovable, master of the literary arts, Shakespeare to my Fido,Wishbone? Who the fuck needs college English courses when you have the cutest dog in the world teaching you the story in short digest form, replete with adorable costumes and real-world life lessons all wrapped up into a 22-minute package?

Inspector Gadget may also have some responsibility in piqueing my interest in the hard sciences. The sheer amount of amusing and plain awesome gadgetry that Inspector Gadget could fit into his body and expel from random orifices was, for some reason, fascinating to me. Only now do I realize that he was probably some sort of early Japanese sex robot prototype gone haywire. You can't honestly ask me to believe that a geeky guy who can cram a helicopter, a flamethrower, a chainsaw, a magnifying glass, and all sorts of other crap into his head didn't also happen to think about cramming a fifteen-inch, instantly extendable, flame-spewing fandangled mandangler down the front of his pants. It's just that, when the American television producers decided to green-light a show about a detective robot, they had to censor a couple of things, such as change the name from "SUPER NIPPON EXCITE METAL MAN: CLAW BOSS ANGER!!!!!" to something more polite and acceptable to the average American audience. The producers also probably removed Gadget's deep-veined purple-hearted Spartan of love. (It was either that or "Dora the anal explorer." Take your pick.)

Her loving glow at three in the morning, her warm caress when the harsh bullwhip of winter strikes, her smooth static tingle when you gently touch the glass screen - there is no greater feeling than knowing soy amado. I love you, Mother Brain.

The Super Bowl XLIII Liveblog, brought to you by Tyson Dino Nuggets

2009-02-01T18:24:00.001-05:00

For the first time ever, I'm recording, moment by moment, one of my two annual religious holidays (the other being Big Game).

----

Some indeterminate time: GUnit knocks on my door. "JOURNEY IS PLAYING!" I scrambled out of bed, barely conscious, to catch Arnel Pineda rock out to the greatest song in the history of the universe, "Don't Stop Believing." (And yes, the official title of the song has a 'g' at the end.)

1328: Matt Lauer and President Obama sure are good ol' chums.

1329: OH SHIT THE FEED WENT OUT WE CAN'T HEAR OUR PRESIDENT TALK Must be the terrorists PAAAANIC

1400: Tint and KNak show up. Immediately a game of BANG! begins during the pregame show.

1425: They're talking about Larry Fitzgerald's mom passing? All respect to him and his family, but why are they showing something so depressing?

1452: Faith Hill sings "America the Beautiful"...um...beautifully. But it took me by surprise for a little bit when she sang the words "for spacious skies."

Gordo: "It's 'spacious?' I always thought the word was 'gracious.'"

GU: "GET BACK ON THE BOAT"

KNak: "If Jack Bauer had heard you he would've raped you in the ass with that lamp."

1523: Oh shit, an awesome trailer for some new movie just came on. What is this? There's soldiers and ninjas flying around and stuff. Looks like it could either be really awesome or really lame.

1523.15: From the director of "The Mummy?" Aw fuck, it's gonna be terrible.

1524: OOOH SHIT IT'S G.I. JOE THE MOVIE UUUUMG

1526:

Gordo: "Damn, Jennifer Hudson is hella good."

SRS: "That's why she's singing in the Super Bowl and not one of those crappy games before the Super Bowl where they get no-name singers to butcher the national anthem."

1530: Honorary captains. Hella old

"From Super Bowl XXXIII, from the Denver Broncos, John Elw-"

KNak: "BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"

1531: Hines Ward's face appears on TV for about ten seconds, looking emotional, proud, and patriotic.

1533: Why would you not just throw to Hines Ward all day? It would be 24-0 by the half.

1534: Nevermind, throw Willie Parker in there two. Just make it a 6-play offensive playbook. The options are Parker middle, Parker left, Parker right, Ward left, Ward middle, Ward right. You don't need anything else.

1537: Oh shit, the Steelers are at the half-yard line already?

1538: TD, Ben Roethtslisalshtslithsberger. What a monster.

1539: GREAT Bud Light commercial. Pop factor of dumb bitch flying out windows always wins.

1540: Trailer for Angels and Demons.

My Kevin Bacon number is 2, because I saw Tom Hanks filming for Angels and Demons at UCLA this summer, and Tom Hanks was in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon. I win.

1542: Dino Nuggets are done! Also, TD retracted. Just QB sneak with Roesthishtsthistihsberger and it's a TD.

1543: WHY ARE YOU KICKING THE FIELD GOAL?! JUST GET THE SIX! THE ZONA D CAN'T STOP BIG BEN!

1544: Kick is good, Steelers up 3-0 with 9:45 left in the 1st.\

1545: Crystal ball Doritos commercial taught me something today: carry a snow globe around at all times so that I can break into any vending machine, except those machines at ghetto-ass high schools with all the steel bars over the glass.

1547: Arizona offense introduction. AW WHERE'S J.J.? Oh wait, he's not starting.

1549: Almost fumbled. Good job, Edge.

SRS: "It's because he doesn't have long enough hair. The hair is the source of all their powers."

Gordo: "Like Polamalu and Fitzgerald?"

SRS: "Yep. That's why they're so good."

Gordo: "So what about Hines Ward?"

SRS: "It's because he's Korean. DUH, fucktard."

1550: "By the way, 'swaggit' is not an institution of higher learning." So white.

1555: Touchdown. Touchdown. Touchdown. TouchdoooooOOOONOOOOO FUCK DOMINIQUE!

1557: Sack. Sack. Sack. SackooooooOOOOOSHIT BIG BEN IS INSANE! Complete to Miller!

1558: KNak: "This [Arizona] defense is so epic fail right now."

1600: Man. I gotta drop the kids off at the pool. But this game is so good...screw it. BRB.

1606: Back, just in time to catch another ad.

Oh man, I gotta eat Doritos all the time now! Making hot women naked, making it rain cash, turning white cops into monkeys...OH NO THA BUS

1607: GoDaddy.com AGAIN? Oh shit, this commercial looks hot. Let's go to GoDaddy.com to watch the rest of the ad.

1608: That ad was FUCKING RETARDED. Also, Steelers TD again. Steelers up 10-0 only a minute into the 2nd.

1609: Pepsi Max. Made for a woman, strong enough for a man.

1610: Budweiser's not American anymore. That's why the commercial is so bad.

1611: J.J.! Aw, crap return.

1612: This Bud commercial is racist. What, a white horse can't love a brown horse? Why does the white man always have to wreck true love?

1613: UUUGH JIIIIIIIIIZZZZ STAR TREK TRAILER JIIIIIZZZZZZ

(Tint missed it entirely. He's still playing with that damn Rubik's Cube.)

1615: FUCK Matt Leinart. Get his mug off the TV screen.

1616:

GU: "That Super Bowl XLIII logo flashes yellow at the end of every play, and I just keep thinking, 'Oh shit, flag AGAIN?' But no, just teasing."

Gordo: "Yeah, damn NBC."

1618: Whoa, Troy just straight up MISSED. How does that happen?

1620: 45 yard pass to Boldin with a side of bitch-flipping.

1621: Yes, Warner tripped whooaAA WHAT?! TD?! 10-7 Steelers, 8:34 2nd.

1626:

Gordo: "Damn, I weigh more than he does and what am I doing with my life?"

GU: "You should be playing football. What the fuck are you doing here?"
Gordo: "I can't, I'm 5'9" and Asian!"

SRS: "Dude, Hines Ward is Asian and he's the best player on the field!"

Gordo: "Are you kdding me? Did you forget he's also half black?"

1631: Breaston trying to pull a DeSean. Not gonna work - the Steelers D is just too fast.

1632: KNak: "I loved when Marshawn Lynch wore the dark visor. It looked like Darth Vader running around on the field, destroying."

1635:

Tint: "Did Hyundai really win the NA Car of the Year?"

Gordo: "Yep."

Tint: "UGGGHGUHGGH (while clenching chest)"

SRS: "YEEEEEEAAAA (Tiger fist pumps)"

All: "HYUNDAI?! HYUUUUNDAI?!?!?!"

1636: Dick LeBeau is 71?!?!

1637: The Edge FAIL. Dropping a perfect pass like that with nobody within 5 yards of you? Can't do that in the big game, man.

1643: Nevermind, the basketball pick totally made up for it.

1650: ...Why on earth did Polamalu jump up like that? He's just crazy. Polamalu's kinda sucking today.

1651: PICK AT THE LINE! Hooooly god, plus a 100-yd INT return, JUST as the clock expires. That's definitely going on SportsCenter later on. Bee tee dubs, KURT WARNER CHOKE = 17-7 Steelers, end of 1st half.

1700: What the fuck is up with all of these ads being in 3-D? And why didn't we pick up our 3-D glasses at Safeway yesterday when there was a whole box just chilling there?!

1701: Halftime show...or BANG!? I guess we're going with BANG!

1731: Damn, Bruce Springsteen has stage presence. I knew I listen to his music for a reason. Also, LA BAMBA AND MAX WEINBERG!

1735: They're ruling the almost-KW-sack a FUMBLE when it's clearly a forward pass. In the SUPER BOWL. Unacceptable.

1738: Yet another KNak Legends moment:

"OOOOOARHGAHG FREE GRAND SLAM TUESDAY 6-7AM WUWOHHOOOOOH" while jumping up and down like a half-tard manchild.

1742: Oh shit, new movie with The "Dwayne Johnson" Rock (we all know that's his real name;" Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson" is bullcrap). Plus Sormtroopers!

...

It's called "Witch Mountain?" Damn it, Disney, really?

1744: YEA HINES WARD. What a catch! GG.

1749:

KNak: "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

Tint: "Uh oh, Naki's getting passionate."

1751: Willie Parker hits a huge hole for a good 15-yard run. Next play is GG.

1752: Damn it, Parker for no gain. Hurry up and GG so I stop watching and play BANG!

Big Ben almost sacked, threw it away. I think we jinxed it.

1753: Roughing the holder in the field goal attempt. ADRIAN WILSON FAIL

1755: I LOVE these basketball deflections. That could've been a ridiculous pick-6 for Rolle. I also love that we've been saying "GG" on every play for the past 7 plays.

1758: Darn, I just saw Shia LeButtfuck on the screen. So...another Transformers movie? Yep, another Transformers movie. MEGAN FOX!

1759:

Damn, CareerBuilder.com made a good ad. Who knew.

1800: J.J. kickoff return FAIL.

1801: Trippy Coca-Cola ad just played.

SRS: "I need to have some Coke now."

All: "Dude, they just cog'd you."

1806: "And now I'm in the Super Bowl" = USAMA YOUNG FAIL.

1807: The Comcast ad is possibly the best ad of this year's Super Bowl.

1808: OH MY GOD, JACK! NO! www.HangInThereJack.com isn't working. WHY?!?!

BTW: Wow, we just got totally ad-cog'd.

1813: The Celebrity Apprentice commercial.

SRS: "Dennis Rodman? What charity would Dennis Rodman possibly play for?"

Gordo: "Probably Area 51, so that his family who was captured by the government after they crash-landed from Mars doesn't starve to death."

GU: "That's where he lay his spores."

1816: "[Dockett] has burst for a big guy, and he burst right into Ben Roethlisberger that time." Ummm...gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

1817: Why can't we have this kind of excellent special teams play? Oh wait, they're a pro team. Nevermind.

1818: Troy Polamalu is hilarious/a monster. Also, I miss Mean Joe Greene. Also, Coke Zero's "taste infringement" advertisement campaign was always stupid. But this is definitely the best ad they've released.

1820: GO BEARS. J.J. Arrington for 22 yards. This game is getting really interesting now. Good thing we didn't stop watching.

1825: LARRY FITZGERALD WIN. 20-14 Steelers, 7:33 left to go in the game. Again, it's all that hair that gives him his power.

1827: Oh crap, a Hulu ad! Now the rest of the world will know about Hulu! But I do have to admit that "An evil plot to destroy the world" for a TV-streaming site is a pretty catchy tagline.

1834: PepSuber!

1837: Man. Polamalu is not having a great game. Neither is Kurt Warner.

1840: GREAT punt coverage, on top of the fact that the Steelers are having some serious fouling issues right now = Arizona might actually pull this out. JAMES HARRISON FAIL

1843: The whole ball has to break the plane, but is that really a safety?

Nope, not a safety.

1844: Great pass to Holmes.

OH SHIT, HOLDING FOUL. Safety? SAFETY! Man, this is definitely one of the better Super Bowl games I've seen. 20-16 Steelers, 2:53 left in the game.

1848: UUUMG LARRY FITZGERALD UBER WIN 50 yard pass. 23-20 Arizona, 3:57 left. Crunchtime for the Steelers.

Tint: "OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD HE'S TOO FAST POLAMALU DOING JACK SHIT"

KNak: "ARUHGAURAOIHGAUUH PATRIOTS ALL OVER AGAIN!"

1850: Prediction: that Fitzgerald touchdown is the game-winning touchdown. Also, in about 6 months, Larry Fitzgerald will get arrested from a nightclub after shooting himself in the face with a concealed weapon.

1852:

KNak: "KURT WARNER HALL OF FAME HALL OF FAME HALL OF FAME"

All: "Shut up!"

1855: Here we go Steelers, two-minute drill. Santonio Holmes is a beast.

1900: Santonio Holmes MVP FOR SURE. That kind of tip-toe TD reception is

Also, new prediction: in about 6 months, Santonio Holmes will get arrested from a nightclub after shooting himself in the face with a concealed weapon.

1904: Larry Fitzgerald slow motion "Nnnnoooo nnnooooo nnnnnnooooo" was amusing. Let's see if Kurt Warner can pull this off.

1910: Nope.

Cal should give me my Ph.D. NOW, my research is so awesome

2009-01-23T19:36:00.001-05:00

Jack Bauer's official biography states that he graduated from UC Berkeley with a Master of Science in Criminology and Law. Unfortunately, no such degree exists, or else I would be all over that shit (imagine being able to tell your friends that you majored in the same field as Jack Bauer. And they would ask you, "You majored in Legal Studies of Techniques, Procedures, and Protocols in Torture?" And you would say, "Boom, muthafucka.")

So I did a little bit of internet research, because everything the internet says is true, especially because Facebook and Wikipedia are on the internet. It turns out that at the beginning of Season 1, the viewing audience was informed that Jack Bauer was 35 years old. (I'm not going to use extrapolated ages based on later seasons, because multiple years pass between seasons, making Season 1 the most accurate benchmark for the actual age.)

Season 1 ran from 2001 to 2002. Let us make a logical extension and assume that Season 1 (more specifically, that entire day) occurred in 2002, giving Jack the benefit of the doubt. This means that Jack was born in 1967. Let us also assume that the Master's in Criminology and Law is a two-year Master's degree, because that's simply the most common timeframe for terminal Master's degrees. His biography states nothing about any educational or occupational activity between finishing his Bachelor degree at UCLA and his Master's degree at Berkeley, so we can assume that he went straight from four years of college to two years of graduate school. After crunching some basic numbers, we figure that Jack Bauer graduated from UC Berkeley at the age of 24 (HURHURHUR) in the year 1991. (Ph.D., please!)

Now, why did I bother doing all that? So I could make this:

I wonder how much he gives back every year, assuming dead people isn't considered legal tender in the United States of America.

Now, all that needs to happen is that his face needs to be on 1) the big board on Dwinelle Plaza with all the faces and 2) on the Campaign for Berkeley website.

Welcome to American music, here's your complimentary Kleenex pack

2009-01-22T23:35:00.000-05:00

One of the first memories of living in the U.S. is the old infomerical advertising Wilson Phillips' first album, Wilson Phillips, featuring that freaking catchy hit single, "Hold On." I still remember being a young, pre-obese tyke with my soon-to-be fat ass parked in front the grainy television in our rental home in suburban south San Jose, a.k.a. WHY DOES 3/4 OF CHINA LIVE HERE OH EM GEE TOO MUCH MATH NERD BLAHRGAHRG

I was just sitting there, munching away on snacks that five-year-olds should not be allowed to touch, when all of a sudden, I saw a flash of platinum blond hair and hooker red lips. Only fifteen years later did I learn that her name was Wendy Wilson. The only words I knew to that song were, "But you hoooold on, for one more day...blahblahblah Incoher, ent fooooreign lang. uage, English sounds so. stuuuuUuUpid...." (Five, new to the country, waddaya expect.)

So, to Wilson Phillips: thank you for introducing me to American music. I owe you one. I think.

R-r-r-r-reeeewiiiiind:

Racial profiling, but not

2009-01-15T22:08:00.000-05:00

Event number one:

I walked out of Safeway holding only a box of Cream of Wheat, that being the only thing I purchased and my breakfast of choice at the moment. One of the Safeway staff who happened to be black saw and commented, "Mmmmmhmmmm. Cream of Wheat. My favorite." I replied, "Yes sir, none better" and continued on my way towards the car.

But he snuck up on me and, before I was even halfway to the car, he tapped me on the shoulder and asked, "Hey man, you half black?"

Now, I've gotten Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and most commonly Samoan/Hawai'ian, but this was my first time getting half black.

I gave a puzzled look and replied, "No, why do you ask?"

He blurted out, "Then why you like Cream of Wheat so much? Cream of Wheat's a black man food."

In the split second thereafter in which I froze up and racked my brain's fifteen-year library collection of racial stereotypes/jokes, Cream of Wheat was noticeably absent. I'd always known about the controversy regarding B&G/Kraft's usage of the character "Rastus," the smiling black chef on the box cover, but I hadn't heard anything along the lines of "white people : stealing other people's cultures :: black people : Cream of Wheat."

I really didn't know how to respond, but he just kept looking at me, looking for an answer, so I responded honestly, "I'm allowed to like Cream of Wheat if I want to. It's easy to prepare, low in cholesterol, and an adequately filling breakfast."

Taken aback at my super lame answer, he said, "Oh is that so. Well then, what, you like fried chicken, watermelon, okra, and that purple shit too? Huh?"

This guy was getting on my nerves. All I did was admit that I enjoyed Cream of Wheat, and somehow he's throwing random accusatory-sounding remarks my way, though I still wasn't quite sure what his point was. And, of course, I once again honestly said, "Yes, actually, I thoroughly enjoy all of those things."

He grabbed his forehead.

"Damn, man, you blacker than ME. I HATE fried chicken. Go enjoy your Cream of Wheat, brotha."

Acontecimiento numero dos:

Earlier today, SRS was headed to a potluck, for which he decided to make a simple Cracker Chicken recipe he found online. The recipe involves grinding a ton of Ritz crackers and mixing it with paprika, garlic powder, salt, and black pepper, and then dredging it onto drumsticks covered in eggwash and baking the drumsticks. I tasted one, and it seriously tastes like a giant chicken nugget, but that's neither here nor there.

Conversation:

Me: "What are you making?"

SRS: "I'm making cracker chicken for this stupid meeting."

Me: "CRACKER chicken? Does that mean that we're not allowed to eat it?"

SRS: "You're dumb."

Minutes pass while he tinkers away in the kitchen and I watch a ESPN special about Steve Bartkowski and his kick-'Boys-ass Falcons team back in the '80s. Go Bears.

SRS: "I added a secret extra ingredient in the dry mix. Bet you can't guess what it is. You might be able to taste it when it's done cooking, but I doubt it."

Me: "Is it chili powder or dried chili flakes of some sort?"

SRS: "Fuck you."

Me: "What?"

SRS: "How did you know?"

Me: "Because you're Korean."

Event the third:

G-Unit got two dwarf hamsters a couple months ago, which he named Flotsam and Jetsam (Flo and Jet for short). He took them home over winter break and brought them back to the apartment a couple days ago, but poor Flotsam was missing. He informed us that Flo got out of the cage somehow while he was at home, and is now MIA in the house. (She'll probably die pretty soon, but whatever. Jet was always the less temperamental one anyways.

SRS and I figured that, since Jet is darker than Flo, Jet has to stay in prison for much longer. We felt bad for about five seconds after making the remark.

Jet tends to run on the wheel a lot. We think she's bulking up so she can eventually break out of that hellhole.

Chinese Culture, Lesson 1: American Football = ???

2009-01-08T16:38:00.001-05:00

January 1st came and went, and once again, I spent a significant part of it in front of the television (now new-and-improved 42" HDTV that my parents bought WITHOUT TELLING ME) watching USC beat the crap out of yet another undeserving and overrated "Big" "10" "team." To tradition!

The next morning (that's January 2nd for all you non-math majors), I woke up and found that nobody else was home - apparently, my mom and sister had miraculously decided that I was mature enough to be left alone and not burn the house down. (Not kidding - in the days of old, leaving me alone at home was verboten because they were honest-to-God afraid that I would somehow hurt myself or, more importantly, somehow hurt the neighbor's adorable dog.) I read through the sections of interest in the Mercury (translation: glance fleetingly at the front page, read the comics, flip to Sports) and, before putting my paper down, I saw my mom's Chinese newspaper of choice, the World Journal, sitting underneath it. And, oh, how I laughed and laughed at my own people's ever-more-interesting culture.

Here's an overall shot of the front page of the Jan. 2nd, 2009 issue of The World Journal:

It's about the Rose Queen for this year's Tournament of Roses down in Pasadena. The same Tournament of Roses that culminates in the aforementioned football game. This is page A1. Like, MAIN HEADLINE. The same place where the New York Times would have put something urgently important, such as the unfortunate bombings going on yet again in the Gaza Strip area or the international economic crisis. But maybe I'm just jumping to conclusions and should give these people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they're talking about something else. Let's take a closer look, shall we?

That red headline states that, in the Tournament of Roses' 120-year history, this year's Rose Queen, Courtney Chou Lee, is only the second Chinese person to receive the honor.

I suppose it's a point of Taiwanese interest to be celebrated in ANY manner nowadays, no matter how mediocre, after the mind-boggling disaster that was Chen Shui-Bian's presidency.

(And now, a message from NBC: Boys and girls, if you want to see a real modern history lesson in nepotism, embezzlement, and general abuse of power, look no further. Indicted on Dec. 12, 2008 for forgery, money-laundering and misuse of public funds, former President Chen was one of the greatest embarassments to the Taiwanese people in its short history. For more information, Dr. Wikipedia has more here.)

This message brought to you by THE SHOW.

It makes sense that the article made absolutely zero mention of the results of the football game, since American football is generally not in the interest of the people of Taiwan (or anyone living outside of the US and Canada, for that matter), but just to make sure, I very slowly made my way through the article and found that, like any respectable Chinese/Taiwanese newspaper should, the writer did indeed mention the football game.

But there was no mention of the game itself or the scores or the history of the Rose Bowl game at all.

The only mention of the Rose Bowl game was the names of the two schools playing in it - the University of Southern California and the Pennsylvania State University - AND THEIR UNDERGRADUATE RANKINGS ON THE LATEST US NEWS & WORLD REPORT. (USC is at 27 and PSU is tied at 47 with UT-Austin; Cal is at 21...again.) Leave it to a Taiwanese newspaper to make sure the readership develops an immediate impression of these schools (if they hadn't already heard of them) based on a single comprehensive and, might I add, totally inaccurate representation of their academic reputation.

I come from a people of goddamn nerds. Pride!

P.S. Just for kicks, I took a picture of the Rose Queen herself.

Not bad.

I need a Pensieve like Dumbledore

2008-12-30T03:15:00.000-05:00

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.