i'm done trying to stump parakkum and goonley. obviously, the wide reaching tentacles of google and the key words "logic puzzles" are no match for the wits of you two. i desert that grand goal.
anyhow, sf opera: really good, really nouveau experience, and really really long, rendering both me and TNH (the hiking nazi) REALLY hungry when we got out. now i understand why they repeat the chorus twice in music pieces. everything is sung twice, just in case the bellowing didn't pummel the storyline into your head the first time. we have two more coming up in the next year, as well as a visit to cirque du soleil's corteo and the symphony. should prove to be an interesting year of culture :o) (awww gawd! i used the face. admit it. it's damn cute!).
i have a theory that i'm going to just blurt out here, to be disputed by some, and to heralded by others. psychological studies have shown that there is no such thing as a full moon effect, but from empirical experience, disagree. i first noticed this in boston in 2003, when everyone started going crazy. more like, crises started going crazy in everyone's life around me. and it happened again this year: injuries, breakups, a death, an attempted suicide, people getting depressed, illnesses, etc. but you see, it's not just the full moon, it's the chinese harvest full moon. the last two weeks have been absolutely insane. and i'm not just going around seeking it. it's happening to people that i am very close to.
that being said, life keeps reminding me to pull back and enjoy what it is we have. i'm looking forward to a weekend with family and friends (albeit having to miss a wedding in seattle due to something here needing to be settled), preparing for my move down to the pee-nin-soo-lah, a long run, and some general goodness all around. even amidst the chaos, there is a santuary to be found.
alright. if you are so smart:
Burning rope
There are two lengths of rope.
Each one can burn in exactly one hour.
They are not necessarily of the same length or width as each other.
They also are not of uniform width (may be wider in middle than on the end), thus burning half of the rope is not necessarily 1/2 hour.
By burning the ropes, how do you measure exactly 45 minutes worth of time?
you have 9 marbles, and one of the 9 marbles is heavier than the others. you have two scales. in two weighings, how do you determine which one is the heavier marble?
snark! i hate these questions.
it was like the time that retard at oracle gave me this interview question:
you have 25 horses and you can race them in heats of 5. you can time the horses to find out the order in which they come in, but you don't know their races times (that is, you know who came in first, second, third, etc.). what is the minimum number of races you have to run to find the 5 fastest horses?
i struggled with it for 45 minutes and he didn't give me any help. then again, several people i know who are math algorithm freak people, solved it in 3 minutes. another reason why i'm glad i'm not a programmer. the world would come to an end if it ran on my programs.
going to the sf opera tonight. someone needs to clobber me with a spoon. i'm becoming a middle-aged boring snot. the other day, i had this overwhelming compulsion to plant some tomatoes. ahhhh!!
isn't this the cutest face ever?
:o)
makes me want to squeeze my cheeks. (the ones on top, dummy).
yeah. most of you called it. this sf -> peninsula commute sucks. gunther is taking a beating, i'm taking a beating, my wallet is taking a beating, the environment is taking a beating. this senseless beating evoked the decision to move during the months i expect work to be brutal.
so i am moving down to the peninsula. to a sublet studio for the next two months to see if i can weather suburban life. work will be a 15 minute walk from home, everything will shut down at 10, weekends will consist of lazy saturday mornings, dusty book stores, runs in the hills. i will go to the grocery store faithfully on saturday mornings, and prepare myself oatmeal and blueberry breakfasts. i will finish my newly purchased copy of don quixote. instead of going to a bar or a club on a friday night, i will go to sleep in my cozy room.
i am damn excited, for some reason.
firstly, to be close to work. secondly, to get more sleep and working out time. thirdly, to have my own space. lastly, to be entering a more sedate and possibly, mature, phase of my life.
someone asked me if i'd miss the city. huh. it'll still be there. what's there to miss?
i promised my shi fu this weekend that i would become ordained as a buddhist nun and be his student. what does that mean?
most simply, joining the monastic life, giving up all worldly pleasures and attachments (this really isn't as bad as it sounds), no alcohol, no romantic love, no meat, and the shaved head. two sets of brown robes, a new name, and leaving life as i know it today to devote myself to ending the suffering of others. going into 3 month long isolation retreats, living in a temple, detaching myself from me and a sense of want, etc.
it's a very complex reason why i came to this conclusion, but i felt it to be so deeply the right thing to do.
this might surprise some, this might not surprise others. some of my closer friends and i have always joked that i should become a monk. at least i've been joking about it since i was 6. my mother didn't take me seriously, but it's always had a strong pull for me.
the question is when this is going to happen. that part, i'll keep to myself. this is a promise, however, that will not be broken.
when you grow up in a conservative asian household, a few things are indelibly bread into your being. most of them are harmless habits: chopsticks are not to be inserted standing into food, shoes are to be taken off in the household, you bow to the urns on the mantles before entering the house and kowtow with incense that leaves you slightly delirious. other traditions i value: thriftiness, common sense, a good sense of responsibility for family and friends.
being asian is a complicated matter.
some, however, probably aren't so good: meekness, willingness to accept mistreatment and silently suffer, and a neurotic sense of incompletion and imperfection.
it's strange growing up in two worlds. once you crossed the threshold of the door, it was as if you were transported into another century, another world entirely. friends at school carried around pictures of scantily clad men, swearing was rampant, curfews were never before midnight. enter my home, and suddenly, heads were being shaken at movie stars getting divorced (and thusly was how kevin costner fell from grace in my household), and cussing resulted in serious ramifications.
what i have grown to dislike most was the complacency with which many of my fellow taiwanese accepted rudeness and mistreatment from others. i saw female friends dating idiots and accepting it. i saw male friends get pushed around on basketball courts and just accept it. they were, in their own words, "just not as athletic." one memory i cannot forget was the time i saw my father got called a coolie by the laundromat man who was far lesser of a man than he, and yet my father endured it. when i went to verbally slap back the bastard, my father got mad at me. i learned never to rage against things that bothered me. you just were to be silent.
well, i've had enough of that now. we're adults. we can express our feelings, our rage, our preferences to be respectfully acknowledged. we can say, no, "b*ttmunch, i refuse to let you treat me that way." and it feels damn good.
for a long time, i never said this to the person who needed to hear it most. but i'll say it now and just vent it out, regardless of whether it will ever be read by the due person:
我後悔認識這重殘忍的人。 我感謝我早放了你。
note: don't read this if you don't want to hear me b*tch.
so i didn't realize how unbelievably... (what's the right word) *clueless* undergraduates can be. i don't have issue with them asking questions, mind you, but many seem to possess an unduly strange sense of entitlement. entitlement to good grades without the common sense backbone of hard work:
"do i have to do this assignment?" uhhh, yes. if you don't want to fail.
"do i have to come to class?" uhhh, yes. that would be a good thing to do.
"do i have to buy the book?" wha? what do you even say in response to that question? "Uhmm, no. You can just assume that you don't have to learn anything for the entire term."
i am enjoying teaching this class, really, except that today i woke up on the wrong side of the bed. we all have those days, don't we? today, i woke up on the side of the bed that has rendered me extremely hungry, suffering from a fat day, and extremely, extremely irascible.
what's a fat day? it's one of those days when you get up and feel as if your body has burgeoned exponentially like bacteria or e. coli and you have expanded upon the universe to all far corners of the world only to leave nothing in sight except for yourself. every step seems to reverberate throughout the universe. every corner seems to be occupied by some distal part of your body. everything you wear looks to be an aid to that expansion. everything you try on (including those 10 outfits strewn on your bed) seem to only accentuate how it is you have become a mass too large to be reckoned with.
rationally speaking, it's pretty funny. my roommate watched me go through this. i bet the entire time, he was thinking, hell yah, thank god i'm a man.
i was thinking the exact same thing.
worst of it all, it's a beautiful day down here at work. i have nothing to complain about. for some reason, when you know you're being irascible and there's nothing contextually to support your feelings of dark gloom, it makes you feel dumber and even more angry.
it's basically an irrational cycle of idiocy. i love it!
at the end of it, really, there is no cure. except, maybe, for some more sleep. i swear, sleep is the panacea. sleep is the choice activity of the gods. sleep is why there is sunshine in our steps. and more sleep need i do.
* spina bifida, hydroencephaly, teratogens
* 10.5 hours of sleep last night
* dysfunctional relationships and why people stay in them
* i've seen 5 movies in the last month. none of them were particularly good. what a ridiculous waste of time and money
* make sure you're in first gear when starting your car, otherwise 3rd will result in repeated stalling. especially when you're slightly buzzed
* that it hurts to laugh because i played tennis with a guy on saturday who hits mother hard and my obliques are sore
* i need more sleep
* staving off a caffeine addiction
* gunther is the hottest damn car, ever. i'm not kidding
* pesto is the sauce of gods. really.