The new Star Trek

The new Star Trek by JJ Abrams is amazing. That's pretty much all I'm going to say without spoiling anything.

And to think that I was skeptical when I went to go see the first movie of the series (when Conlon, Eric, and Will dragged me to go see it and Conlon dressed up as Spock).

To be fair, the TV version of Star Trek with Professor X was really boring.

The Oregon Trail

Just had a brief trip to Oregon, but back now in California for the time being.

Er-ratata

Me: What does "butte" mean in French?
Ben: I don't think it is a current word
Ben: like my middle name
Me: barber
Ben: Barbier
Ben: is not proper french
Me: French for barber
Ben: it's not
Me: sorry, male barber
Me: female barber is barbie
Ben: that's not how french works

There still are some really good perks to the west coast. It's a good Sunday morning when I can wake up at 9:30AM, play a couple of games of Starcraft with DH and Evan, watch the Yankees game, and watch the end of the Celtics-Knicks* game all before 1PM.

* Even if it means that the Heat win again, I'm furiously rooting against the Knicks because I don't like Carmelo and because they screwed over Jeremy Lin

Also, I realized that true reason why I started reading This Side of Paradise was because the main character in The Perks of being a Wallflower said that it was his favorite book. So that's a correction on my previous post.

Monkey mug

From Pier 1 Imports.

Francis?!

"I think we all know that when Gatsby talks about reliving the past he doesn't mean time travel."

Did you know that the "F" in F. Scott Fitzgerald's name stands for Francis? Francis Scott Fitzgerald sounds so much lamer than F. Scott. But it makes sense because if you look at this picture of him, he looks like someone who got made fun of for being named Francis Scott. So naturally he had to change his name to make himself seem cooler. Also, naturally, he had to go marry someone named after a video game character.



Actually that's a picture of Tom Hiddleston playing F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I can understand why most people enjoy The Great Gatsby, especially when they are required to read it either high school or as a mandatory reading assignment in the summer before heading to college. It's a colorful novel about partying, Prohibition, partying, reliving the past, time travel, etc. It's a very enjoyable novel.

I'm in the middle reading This Side of Paradise. It's actually my second attempt at reading it. The first time I tried it was on my Kindle and I made it about half-way through. This time I picked up a copy at a local used bookstore. I'm not sure I'll finish, but it seems to be easier to read in paper form.

Let me explain why I'm reading it. Somewhere along the way, in my Wikipedia adventures, I came across the Wikipedia entries for F. Scott Fitzgerald and This Side of Paradise. According to Wikipedia, he wrote This Side of Paradise to win over Zelda, i.e. convince her to marry him. It's like something out of a video game. So that convinced me to try to read it. I don't really get it.

When the good time zone becomes the bad time zone

"If you’re a baseball fan and (1) have a spare $130, and (2) are either single or have a relationship that will bear your watching 40 hours of baseball a week, there’s no better investment than MLB.TV."

http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/58416/the-all-mlb-tv-team

I've been praising the "good" time zone for a few years now. But now that I've been out here for an extended period of time, I've gotten used to a lot of what makes the "good" time zone great.

It means that when I wake up at 10am, it's 1pm ET. Or when I sleep at midnight it's 3am ET. (It used to be that I got up and slept at better hours, but that's all regressed back to normal).

Sports are on at weird hours. How am I supposed to watch the NCAA championship game when it starts at 6pm? How am I supposed to watch Andy Pettitte pitch when the games starts at 4pm? It's hard to make use of MLB.tv when games start at 4pm on weekdays and games are blacked out on Saturday afternoons. That above quote would describe me perfectly except for the fact that it's impossible to watch sports on the west coast. I also end up being incredible bored when I get home and have nothing to watch at night. Nothing being sports. So I just watch Netflix, Hulu, or Starcraft.

I guess that's the end of that rant.

How often do you change your wallet?

I never really noticed this but the wallet I have is completely worn down. It's not falling apart; it still holds bills and cards well. It just looks kind of gross.

From my impromptu poll, I've learned that you're supposed to change your wallet every 2-3 years. I thought wallets were things that you hardly ever supposed to change. I think I think that because I have never seen my dad change his wallet. I've had mine for over 10 years. I think my sisters got me my wallet as a present in like grade 6. I estimate around there because I have a wallet sized photo of my family from around that time in my wallet. That's just another barrier towards getting a new wallet. It means I have find a new photo to put in my wallet.

Stay tuned, it looks like I have to get a new wallet.

"You're a bold kid, Arnold. A bold kid."

I was looking for movies to watch on Netflix and I stumbled across the awesome cartoons section of Netflix. I decided to make a list of the cartoon episodes that most influenced my life.

Doug - I can't think of a particular episode that I like best. Maybe the art show episode with the guy who says "Why are you touching me?" But Doug touches on many themes of my life, like where to go to get a hair cut and drawing comics. Also it further fuels my desire to have a cartoon dog like Porkchop (or Snoopy). If only I could have a cartoon dog (Dogs, like monkeys, are way better in cartoon form. In fact, I only like dogs and monkeys in cartoon form).

Spongebob Squarepants - "Squilliam returns" - "Forget about everything except breathing and fine dining"



You have no idea how often this is my exact mental state.


Powerpuff Girls - Meet the Beat alls - The first time I watched this episode was the first time I realized how much fun allusions can be. I really love allusions. I think it's also why I like inside jokes so much.



Hey Arnold - Gerald Field - A Sandlot-esque episode. An episode of dreams. Is this heaven?

Hey Arnold - What's Opera, Arnold? - The best episode of Hey Arnold as it introduced me to Carmen. Also another allusion heavy episode. I didn't realize until I wrote this blog post that the title is a reference to the Looney Tunes opera episode, What's Opera, Doc?

Rugrats - Chuckie's Wonderful Life - I'm pretty sure I saw this episode before I had even seen It's a Wonderful Life. If I remember correctly I think we took a field trip in elementary school to see a play rendition of "It's a Wonderful Life", but I still saw this Rugrats episode first. It was also the inspiration for one of me and DH's German scripts in high school.


Honorable Mentions
Hey Arnold - Stoop Kid
Fairly Oddparents - "Where'd you get that?" "The Internet."
Arthur - "Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card"
Rocket Power - the Capture the Flag episode

Randomness

I have just successfully sewed a button back on my shirt -- with some help from my mom and YouTube. My poor mom having to walk me through sewing back on a button in the middle of the night.

Success makes me feel much better.

~~~~~

Baseball season has started but it doesn't feel that way because

1. Being on the west coast sucks for sports. How do you expect me to follow baseball when the Red Sox and Yankees are playing at 10AM?
2. I don't really get a chance to watch baseball until the summer time when I can lounge around and watch the Yankees play at night. Oh wait, they don't play at night anymore. Sigh.
   
3. I've gotten caught up watching a lot of college basketball.

It's going to be much more difficult watching baseball this year -- especially since I have to work during most games that Andy pitches in. And to think that Andy had once retired.

Sidebar: The west coast has treated my NBA following well. I can come home and check the score of the Rockets game and see whether or not they won or lost. I don't really care much about watching it, I just want to know who won and then I'll watch Jeremy Lin's highlights on YouTube.

~~~~~

After being on the west coast for a prolonged period of time, I think the meaning of "good time zone" has lost it's value as I now struggle to get up at 7:30am every morning for work.

I think I need to come up with a better commuter routine. Sometimes I do work, but that's contingent on the Wifi being not spotty. Sometimes I just doze off to sleep or I just read. Though, the book I'm reading right now isn't really holding my attention. I knew there was a reason why I didn't read books written in Russian.

Fanfiction

In recent days/weeks, the recurring topic of fan fiction has come in my day-to-day conversations. (That might be a slight exaggeration because I don't go up to random people and start talking to them about fan fiction. I do however yell at random homeless people.).

I started thinking about fan fiction because, one day, I wondered to myself whether or not people write real-life fan fiction. I.e. made up stories about real-people. Apparently they do, as people write made-up stories about celebrities. Apparently I do too, as I write about fake morning shows and about Ben's encounter with Thalia at Arby's. And if I ever get around to writing the saga about Evil Brother, Leader of the free world, and Stormtrooper then we can consider that real-life fan fiction. There are also the prehistoric tales about Mark being a Velocity Raptor and how EBD stole Mark's eggs.

Sidenote: Do you see why I believe that one day I will become a paranoid schizophrenic?

So then I started thinking about how things we wouldn't necessarily consider as fan fiction are fan fiction. Isn't there a whole bunch of Biblical and historical fan fiction? Isn't Paradise Lost fan fiction? Or Julius Caesar? It makes me think that all fan fiction isn't trashy. Though I still assume that most fan fiction is written and consumed by 15 year old girls.

I guess that's all I have to say about fan fiction.

Moleskin Notebooks

I've been meaning to blog for a long time now except whenever I sat down to actually write something, my mind went blank.

No, this blog entry won't be me talking about how I have nothing to blog about. Though in grade 11 we had to do this free write exercise where we had to write for 10 minutes straight in a notebook. I vaguely remember, one time, writing about how I didn't have anything to write about. I pretty much love stream of consciousness.

During the course of a day I think about a lot of things that could be blog entries, but I don't write them down so I forget them. It's like when I'm lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, and I keep thinking of interesting ideas but I don't want to get out of bed and write them down because I'm trying to fall asleep. I always think to myself that I will remember them in the morning, but I don't.

I should buy a nice notebook and carry it around with me and fill it with blog entry ideas that I come up with throughout the day. I would get a Moleskin notebook but I'm not sure if I can justify the cost of one yet. Maybe in a month.

This isn't what I originally wanted to talk about.

We were getting dinner today and we walked by a couple of people playing Magic cards in the cafeteria. Sort of as a troll comment I said "Did you know that they got rid of manna burn?" It's pretty much the only thing that I know about Magic cards. It helps me carry on conversations that I have no business being in. I guess it's like someone saying "I know Derek Jeter" in a conversation about the Yankees. Sometimes it's weird when my troll comments are taken seriously.

I don't know where I was going with this.

Oh. It's funny to think about how I ended with such disdain for nerd culture, despite now being fully immersed in nerd culture every day and living among the CS vampires. I blame Mark and Will. And to think, freshman year, I could have been placed to live anywhere. I could have been placed one floor higher and lived with Porky and Long Long and ended up playing D&D. That would be scary.

Now back to my meta-commentary on what I blog about or why I blog. I find that blogging is a good way for me to snapshot the current state of my brain. Or at least some portion of what I'm currently thinking (while Tumblr is for reposting animated GIFs of Parks and Rec and Jennifer Lawrence pictures).

I'm not really sure what the point of this was.

Brain dump of some current thoughts

• I think the weirdest way to eat a banana is to unpeel the entire banana and then eat it. The second weirdest way is to eat it upside down. Then again, I can only think of 3 ways to eat a banana.


• Getting an iPhone has significantly changed my life. Waiting for things like the bus or eating breakfast by myself has gotten 10x less awkward.


• It's crazy that we'll get to see another pope in our lifetimes.


• I forgot to mention that I "Go Blue!"ed someone who was wearing Michigan gear during orientation. It was probably the least "genuous" "Go Blue" in history and the guy probably thought I was mocking him.


• The Retina Macbook Pro that I have for work is amazing. The screen makes text (and Starcraft) look gorgeous. Using my personal laptop now makes my eyes bleed.


• I found the real city part of SF. That is the Financial District and downtown. Real city means tall buildings.


• I'm in silver in Starcraft now.


• I'm addicted to tater tots for breakfast. The plus side is that they can't be unhealthy for you because they're potatoes. And potatoes are vegetables.


• I don't really watch TV anymore. I watched the first episode of Community, but I wasn't sure how I felt about it. This article describes my sentiments exactly.

Orange shoes

I didn't bring a pair of sneakers to SF so I had to buy a pair.

The impending Superbowl post

"A good bullet point for your impending Superbowl blog: how cool it will be in 3 years when it's Superbowl L" -Will

I didn't really have a rooting interesting in the Superbowl this year. It was a good game, the commercials were pretty good. It was kind of annoying being in San Francisco during it. There are just way too many people wearing San Francisco 49ers gear. Actually I'm glad that the 49ers didn't win because apparently people riot. Or something like that.

This was my favorite Superbowl commercial:


I do like the fact that there was a power outage just because it made the Superbowl last longer. It's weird watching sports on the west coast. It's weird just following sports on the west coast. The Ohio State-Michigan basketball game was tonight (I had tickets, but since I took this internship I couldn't go). It started at 6pm PT, which wasn't that weird of a time this time. But a 7pm ET tip-off is an awkward 4pm PT start. Even watching the BCS championship had an awkward 5pm PT start (and an even more awkward ending time).

So I've concluded that the East coast sports bias does in fact exist, but that's only because it's physically impossible for people on the west coast to follow sports (due to time).


Also, today my sister got interviewed on the streets of NYC about what it's like wearing Spanx.

How many s'mores did you eat this s'morning?

I've been rewatching Battlestar Galactica with Kevin (and somewhat with his roommate Ben*). Gah it's good. I'm appreciating it so much more the second time through. I mean, I'm not obsessed with it like some people are, but it's not really sci-fi, it's like cool sci-fi. Like Game of Thrones (or so I hear, I haven't read or watched any of Game of Thrones).

* There's too much name overloading on Ben. There's high school Ben, there's Ben with a hyphenated name, and there's Kevin's roommate Ben. Oh, speaking of high school Ben, apparently, according to Facebook, he just got engaged.

During my first week here, during my orientation, I was having a conversation with a couple of people. They were full-time hires so they were older.

Person 1: My son is still young so I wanted to stay closer to home.
Person 2: Yeah I understand. What's your son's name?
Person 1: Hunter (or something like that, like Chase)
Person 2: And how old is he?
Person 1: 4 years old.
Person 2: Oh, 4 is a great age, isn't it? They start talking and can do things.
Me: Yes 4 is a great age, I can remember being that young.

I can relate more towards that end of being 4 than on the other end. #AdultConversations.

Coffee in a Warehouse

That photo is from a cool coffee shop* (yeah yeah, coffee shops are the cool, hip places to do work outside of work in SF).

* Haha, I was just reading the reviews on Yelp just now and they're so snobby, it's funny. Oh, hipsters.

In other news, this past week I've seen 3 different people wearing 3 different shirts that I own. I guess that's what I get for buying a whole bunch of new clothes. Also yesterday on the street in SF there was someone wearing my same exact hat.*

* Also, I find it slightly off putting that people bundle up in SF in the winter just as much as people do in the Northeast winter.

One thing that I noticed that I really like is the whole retro-fitted warehouse feel (like that of the coffee shop above). I think it would be really cool to have an apartment like that with a loft and such. I don't know why this appeals to me so much, maybe it's because I watched too much Burn Notice (Vance Munson has a lofted apartment like that). I hear there are plenty of those type of apartments in SoMa (South Market). I'm slowly trying to learn all of the different neighborhoods of San Francisco. I tend fall into the habit of living in places without learning of the surrounding neighborhood (e.g. my summer in Seattle). I'll try not to this time.

The Commute

A Conversation on the shuttle:

Dave: What are you reading?
Me: My Kindle
Dave: Ok...what are you reading on your Kindle?
Me: The Handmaid's Tale
Dave: Never heard of it.
Me: It's by Margaret Atwood.
Dave: Still no.
Me: I'm not liking it so far.
Dave: What's it about?
Me: It's sci-fi. Well, it's like feminist sci-fi.
Random Guy on bus: That sounds awesome!

Since I'm staying with a friend in SF (Dave) right now, I have to make about an hour-ish commute to work every day (there and back). It's actually been quite conducive to my reading and writing.

I've been able to think of more ideas for my various TV shows, one-act plays, or fan-fiction that I write. And I've also been able to get some reading done. Though, now, I do wish I had a Kindle Paperwhite since it's fairly dark by the time I get back and the reading light on the bus doesn't quite seem bright enough.

If I could read multiple books at once I would do it right now. It's just that I find it hard to keep it all in my head. The problem is that The Handmaid's Tale is really somber and I don't like reading it the first thing in the morning. It kind of sets the wrong mood for the day. I'd rather read something lighter.

Endless traveling, insomnia galore

The Las Vegas Airport has slot machines. I've been mistakenly telling people that they were roulette machines. So if you were one of those people then I apologize.

I've been traveling a lot recently. One thing I noticed is that by having a Kindle, people can't see what I'm reading. I say this because when I'm at the airport, I can look at the books that people are reading and judge them. Since I have a Kindle, they can't judge me back for my reading choices.

Another thing, it seemed like there were many more people traveling with dogs* out west. On my DTW to SFO flight, the person next to me had a dog. It seems like traveling with a dog would be the most annoying thing to do.

* Travels with Charley, heh

Another thing that goes along with traveling a lot are cab rides. Well, I'm not really taking a "cab" from and to the airport; it's called a super shuttle but it's essentially a shared cab. On my way back to my apartment from DTW, I had a creepy taxi driver who kept telling me about his crazy New Years party in New York and how he met some random girls from Denmark and Israel and partied it up all night.

My second cab ride to the airport was way more annoying. Since my flight was in the morning, I had to leave relatively early (also I didn't sleep much the night before, as per). So I got into the cab half-asleep. There was already another customer in there. Fine. But she wanted to strike up a conversation and talk the entire 40 minute cab ride. Shoot me in the face.

Anyways, I'm in SF now, so hopefully no more travel for a while. For a few months at least.

Pet Peeves

Before we all got to Cornell, they tried to make us sign up for this social networking site (not Facebook), where we were able to see online profiles of other people in our incoming class. When Conlon and I first got our housing assignments, we tried to find other people in our respective halls. I went back through my chat logs with Conlon and found this gem:

Me: [link to profile]
Me: this guy is across the hall
Me: one of his favorite books is great gatsby
Conlon: haha
Conlon: friend him on face book
Conlon: i had two hall mates friend me already
Me: lol
Conlon: oh check it out
Conlon: he's an Eagle Scout
Conlon: and politically he's not too far off from you
Conlon: except he's a registered dem
Me: yea
Me: lol
Me: fiscal conservative
Conlon: right
Conlon: he seems like a cool guy
Conlon: u'll have to introduce us

(Yeah, that was Raj)

Anyways, they had a section where you could list your pet peeves. Will put the "Chuckie Finster's dad." It's where someone has a crick in their throat and keeps talking without clearing their throat.

(Sidebar: I've stolen a lot of Will's jokes and have sort of reused/reapplied them. Especially when first meeting people, so when they actually get to know me, they're disappointed to learn that I'm not actually that witty. The most notable aspect of Will that I've stolen is his pronunciation of Mario).

I've been trying to think of my pet peeves. It's a lot harder than you think. I got one though: ugly jump shots that somehow always go in. (Side story (but not a west side story): one time we were playing basketball with a guy that didn't look very athletic, he had a chunky sort of build, a Paul Pierce type build, but he was making a lot of weird jump shots. I guess that's another pet peeve: seemingly chunky guys who are good at basketball.

Exhausting the Internet

Sometimes I find myself exhausting all of the Internet. If I find myself bored in front of a computer screen then I usually cycle through a bunch of sites until I've read all of their updates. Hence, exhausting the Internet. Then I go back an incessantly check and refresh their pages.

Here are my regular sites (which are sometimes visited through Google Reader; these are just the sites that I visit 3, 4, 10 times a day because they're updated frequently):

• Facebook. When I open a new tab in Chrome, I default to typing in Facebook and then navigating elsewhere
• Grantland
• Twitter
• Tumblr
• NYTimes
• The Atlantic
• Slate
• New Yorker
• The New Republic
• Hacker News
• Hardball Talk