Stephen

I was reading some LiveJournal last night and came across some lists so I thought I’d do my own. Here are my fondest memories during college:

1. Playing CounterStrike with my roommates till 3am in the morning and challenging the 4th floor to a floor vs. floor battle
2. Finally giving in to a shot of vodka after holding out for an entire year.
3. Going to the Bowles Halloween party with Anthony, Eleanor, Richard, and Pat and watching Anthony dance, haha.
4. Watching the World Series on a 13-inch TV.
5. Late night cock-talk and Fifth Wheel, Elimidate, and Initial D sessions w/ the roomies.
6. Winning the shyest award and having Patrick say, “he’s too shy to get the award”, when I hesitated to get it.
7. Working at lab during Thanksgiving day when I was sick and having company too.
8. Getting 20+ teenagers into a 21 and over club, Glas Kat, with the help of our old friend Jack
9. Worrying about my clothes being permanently stained by paintball paint, washing out the paint no problem, and then getting permanent paint on my clothes a week later when helping Ming move.
10. Waking up with spasms in my legs due to the intense training of Taekwondo. Good thing I have a blue green belt to show my accomplishment.
11. Trying free wine at V.Sattui and having my allergies act up on a trip to Napa with the freshman crew.
12. Seeing the night markets in Taiwan the summer after my Sophomore year and going to Europe for the first time that same winter.
13. Routing the internet from our neighbor with a LAN cable.
14. Dressing up as a lumberjack and almost being stampeded at Castro.
15. Attending my first concert ever, Weezer opening with Jimmy Eat World. Missing Surf Wax America and other songs because Tim wanted to leave early. Going to a surprise party that same night that wasn’t a surprise after Marcus told me right before we got there.
16. Playing basketball with my friends at UCI and visiting their apartment, which had a bong sitting on the living room table for everyone to see like it was perfectly normal.
17. Teaming up with Philip Pan to create the intramural basketball team Donkey Kong, a mere group of friends up against some of the best basketball players in Berkeley.
18. Encouraging people to sign petitions to allow Taiwan into the WHO in front of Sather Gate.
19. Having someone bang on the door of our dorm room at 3am the night before a midterm yelling, “Who’s in there!? Let me in!?” because he was so drunk.
20. Coming home drunk and sick after a night at the Irvine Spectrum with Marcus and Allen, only having drunk a Cape Cod, a Long Island Iced Tea, and a shot of vodka, and throwing up the nachos I ate in the toilet at my parent’s house while my dad was watching TV in the next room. Once I was done he said, go brush your teeth and go to sleep. I love my dad, hehe.
21. Going to my first and only frat party in a crazy nice frat house with endless drinks and having it broken up within minutes because the cops came to break up a fight between the security guards and some high schoolers.
22. Volunteering at an AMSA camp for disabled children by myself because Richard hurt his ankle playing basketball the night before.
23. Watching my first meteor shower from near Tilden Park.
24. Walking my bike home from Soda Hall in the rain at 5am in the morning because someone popped my tires.
25. Marathons of Full Metal Alchemist with the best anime company, Ming, Eric, Wendy, Yimin, and Tia.
26. Eating West Coast Pizza at 2 in the morning with Pat and Richard.
27. Having my Organizational Behavior research professor call me unmotivated and say, “You don’t have to come back next semester”.

It’s not New Years yet, but I have made an early resolution to start writing more, reading less, and talking more, listening less. This is in order to overcome my passive habits and try to get into a more active and assertive mood. To do this, I started off simple by writing reviews on Yelp.

I’ve been reading Yelp reviews for over a year but have never contributed comments, mainly due to laziness and the “someone else” theory that someone else has already said what I’m going to say. This may be so, but I have my own voice and perhaps the content may be the same but the way I say it may be more interesting or straightforward.

This Thursday is going to be both a sad and happy day for me, sad because my close friend Patrick is leaving for Japan and happy because it’s my girlfriend Karin’s birthday.

Patrick has always wanted to go to Japan and I’m happy that he can finally go and live there. He’s going to study Japanese in Osaka and hopefully find a job so he can live out the rest of his life there, or else he has to go back to his home Hong Kong. I saw him a few times recently and I think the time we went out two weekends ago was representative of our friendship. We went to eat at Nini’s in San Mateo, a quaint breakfast place that someone in Eye on the Bay recommended. I really enjoyed the food and so did Patrick, who seemed more eager to give me stuff he didn’t need than sad that he was leaving. After that, we went to Hillsdale mall, where I bought sandals from American Eagle and went shopping for cologne. Patrick was talking about Chanel No. 5, a perfume for women. It was funny because I didn’t expect Patrick to know about perfume, since he’s studying or playing DOTA most of the time, but he did and he said it was one of the most popular perfumes. Sometimes he amazes me with his random knowledge and his interesting work stories (like how one of his coworkers filled his personal cube closet with diet coke cans).

Once we were done shopping, we went to watch Kanon at his work. It’s a very gripping drama anime and Patrick and I both enjoyed it. After we went to eat, I drove home and while I was driving I thought how much I’d miss those enjoyable carefree days that Patrick and I would have.

Recently, I’ve had religion come into my mind, probably for the first time since high school.

The first time religion entered my mind recently was when Eleanor, who goes to school in Pennsylvania, asked me if I was religious, to which I responded no. She went on to tell me that a lot of people on the east coast are very religious, either Christian or Catholic. Since she’s from the more liberal west coast, I don’t think she was used to this environment. I told her about my discourses about religion with Philip in high school and how I found it difficult to believe in God because so much of it relied on faith, not reason.

The second time was when I finished reading Life of Pi (Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD), just this past weekend. I’m doing the book a great disservice by simplifying it, but it’s about an Indian boy who gets stranded in the Pacific with a Bengal tiger on a lifeboat and his journey to Mexico. So when he finally lands in Mexico, a man working in the Maritime Department of Japan questions Pi, the main character, about the sinking of the Tsimtsum, the transport ship that Pi and his family rode. He gives them the story that is told in the few hundred or so previous pages and the man does not believe him. Pi then tells another that involves humans, which the man says is not as good as the one involving animals.

“So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without animals?”
Mr. Okamoto: “That’s an interesting question…”
Mr. Chiba: “The story with the animals.”
Mr. Okamoto: “Yes. The story with the animals is the better story.”
Pi Patel: “Thank you. And so it goes with God.”

So there are two stories that Pi tells, one with animals, the other with humans, and either could be true. Then there are two stories in our lives that are told, one with God, the other with Love. No one can prove which story is real, but the importance is not in the reality, but in the meaning of the story.

Odd how I haven’t mentioned much about work in my journal despite having worked for over a year and a half now and despite most of my time being dedicated to work and work-related activities. I guess I just don’t think much about work in my free time.

So today one of my friends did a code review of code that I wrote a while back, basically the infrastructure for alerts in a trading application. As he went through and refactored my code, I couldn’t help but feel injury to my pride since I spent hours laboring over that code, trying to make it efficient, extensible, and readable. And in only a few hours he identifies and fixes the unnecessary code, the bloated and over-ambitious classes, and the modules that lack structure. It’s almost as if someone pointed out all my flaws, clear as glass even to me, and proceeded to fix them. It would annoy me mostly because I hadn’t seen what was so obvious to someone else even after all that time and effort spent trying to improve myself. So this was the way I felt with respect to something that I had done so painstakingly, even though I knew that it was for the better and that it would help me improve my programming in the future.

Here’s one of my few bad experiences at work. Last Monday, I arrived at work in the morning at the usual time and had my usual cup of tea to keep myself hydrated. About an hour or so after drinking the tea, my stomach felt queasy and I ended up making a trip or two to the men’s room, you know, to drop the kids off at the pool. I was suspicious because I felt fine after breakfast at home and the only thing I drank or ate after that was the tea. So of course it wasn’t the tea since it comes in a bag, so it must’ve been the cup. I couldn’t imagine what kind of bacteria was on there. Scared of unclean mugs at the office, I used paper cups the rest of the week. This morning, I walk into the kitchen and see a bottle of dishwasher detergent on the counter, and I was not happy. So what you’re telling me is that someone put the dishes in the dishwasher last week without detergent and played them off as clean? Yeah, that’s what I’m saying and I remember checking last week for dishwashing fluid and couldn’t find any so I’m almost 100 percent sure I’m right. Lesson learned: never use office mugs.

Two weeks ago we won our first basketball game, after two winless seasons. The core Randomwalk team was there to score 43 points against a pretty mediocre team that only scored 34 points. We were ecstatic and to show it, we celebrated with shots of Jaeger at Northstar after the game. That was fun.

Sometimes I’m surprised at how sensitive I am. For example, today, a good friend of mine basically said I was an idiot in response to something that I said. Even taken in context of the conversation, the name calling was unwarranted as I had said nothing idiotic. I’ve known this friend for quite a while and he is the type of person who will say obscene and offensive things without hesitation. It’s just part of his nature and something I did not fully realize until now. I remember talking to him once and he had nothing nice to say to me so I asked him if he was in a bad mood or if I had done something to piss him off (I did do something to potentially piss him off, but I can’t remember what it was) and he said, “Dude, you should know me by now. I’m not pissed off.” And of course even after all those years of friendship, I still did not understand his nature. I thought about his nature then and I think about his nature now and I finally understand that he treats everyone the same way, so there is no reason to be personally offended by what he says. So one of the reasons why I’m so sensitive is because I believe that people single me out and treat me a certain way, but in fact, they treat everyone like that, most of the time at least.

So I’ve made a resolution to think of all the good things that happened to me each day at the end of every day. I’m doing this because I consider myself to be a pretty negative person and want to change this attribute of myself. Today, I got free samples of Ben and Jerry’s new milkshakes at their store near MacDonald’s on Market. Only the chocolate tasted good to me, but my coworkers liked the cherry and the “Chunky Monkey”, whatever natural flavor that had. Also I was listening to a morning show on the radio and they were asking what would someone rather do. They gave the guy two options and asked people to guess what he would say. So the lady goes, “Would you rather punch your wife and kids as hard as you can or…”, and the guy goes, “Yeah, I don’t care what the other choice is. I choose that.” And the lady goes, “or eat whatever comes out of your backside”. Of course the choice was easy for him. But then he goes, “Yeah, my wife would let me hit her if I had this choice. And she’d say, ‘go ahead, hit the kids too while you’re at it’. She’s a good wife like that. But after I’d done that, she’d make me eat the crap too.” Man, that was funny. Yeah, so I’m trying to keep this resolution as long as I can and hopefully I won’t be so critical and negative all the time.

On the bus ride home, I was thinking back on the time I spent at 17 Tracy, and all the good times I had there. While I was there I kept saying how I would move out and how it was too small, but I have to say I had some pretty good times there.

So last weekend I went on a trip to LA with the usual group, Ming, Eric, and LP. This time there was an extra girl though, Amy, who turned out to only be 17 years old. So of course Eric brought her along and so we had to fit five people in our Chevy Impala. At first, I was kind of skeptical of bringing a girl along on our trip, since it would hamper the fun we would have in the car, but it turned out to be fine since Amy did not mind our crude jokes.

The trip down to LA wasn’t that exciting since it was at night and we were all pretty tired after a long day of work. When we got to LA, we crashed at my place for a few hours and then everyone else went to pick up Wenjie from Carlsbad and I met up with Anthony and Richard in Santa Monica. I checked out Anthony’s new condo, which was awesome, to say the least. It was good to see Anthony and Richard, both of whom I had not seen for about a year. Anthony got a new girlfriend by the name of Katherine, whom I got to meet, so that was cool. Richard said all the Asian girls in Penn State were ugly and a lot of the girls in general were married. He didn’t seem to mind and was having a good time with his new friends there, whom he basically saw every day.

So after that, Vashti and Henry came over and we headed down to Huntington Beach, where we met up with Eric and the rest of the group. We played football and waded in the ocean, but unfortunately, we did not get to play basketball, which I knew Richard and Anthony really wanted to do. I felt bad but I think they had fun playing football with everyone else, so I was happy. Sometimes you just can’t make everyone happy, despite your best efforts. Oh yeah, and we also saw a dead seal floating back and forth in the water. After the beach, my freshman year friends and I ate at Volcano Burger per Anthony’s request. I’m glad they enjoyed it, but I’m not too big on Volcano Burger since they give you too much food and I can never finish it all even though the food is excellent. Once we filled ourselves, we left for Santa Monica to go clubbing at the 18 and over Century Club. It ended up being just me and Vashti since Anthony and Co. didn’t want to wait for an hour in line so instead went drinking in Korea town. It turned out only to be a 20 minute wait to get into the club so it wasn’t too bad. The club was big and played a lot of music I did not recognize.

Waking up today, I felt like eating a traditional American breakfast with eggs, sausage, hash browns, and waffles. It was the first time I felt like eating this kind of breakfast since I moved to my SF apartment. It reminded me of the times when my dad used to take my brother and me to this homey breakfast joint in Westminster with a nearby arcade. From what I remember, the restaurant was dimly lit and had the ambience of a family owned diner or steakhouse. My dad would take us to go on Sunday mornings (back in the days when we actually woke up before 12pm) and it would just be the three of us. After eating the traditional American breakfast there, we would go to the arcade and play Street Fighter 2 Turbo or Super Street Fighter 2, the game where you could do double jumps in the air. I enjoyed going to that place on weekends, just to be with my dad and brother, and whenever I think of cherished moments in my life, I think of eating breakfast at this diner. We stopped going after a while probably because my brother and I had too much work to do or we didn’t want to wake up that early. The diner also closed sometime later, which I find sad, but most small diners do.

I just came back from a business trip to Southern California. I was in Brea from Tuesday through Friday and stayed in Seal Beach Saturday and Sunday. Before I describe that I will write about clubbing on Karen’s birthday, which was a week ago, on the 11th.

For Karen’s birthday, we went to LuLu’s on Folsom and 4th and then to Ruby Skye for clubbing. Lulu’s had a nice décor, but the food was disappointingly bland and was definitely not worth the 30 bucks I paid for dinner. Karen seemed to like the Banana Republic gift certificate Ming and I bought, which I knew she would since she loves BR. We met some of Karen’s friends, who were mostly from Berkeley and were working. Although dinner didn’t excite me, clubbing at Ruby Skye sure did.

Ruby Skye had clubbing atmosphere that I expected, large, loud, and stylish. It had an upstairs balcony looking down on the main dance floor and a stage on the ground floor where performers did acrobatics. They were playing trance and house music, which was a new and exciting experience for me although Ming didn’t seem to enjoy it.

So that was last weekend. Last week, I went to Brea for the client project with Lily from RandomWalk New York. Being on an expensed business trip, Lily and I went to the priciest and most popular restaurants we could find. We ended up going to Taps, Thai Specialty, and La Vie En Rose. Out of all of them, Taps Fish House and Brewery was the most memorable since it was the first restaurant/bar/lounge place I’ve seen to have all three separated. The restaurant part of the place looked and felt different than the lounge/bar area, which I thought was very original. The drunken Mahi Mahi was excellent and was definitely worth the 25 dollars I paid for it.