ass things

so the other day i was sitting on the john doing some thinking (really, that's the only time i actually think about life. almost everything else is instinct). and i realized that whenever people mention -ass things, i picture the opposite in my head. for example (because i'm guessing you're pretty confused), let's say you're walking down the street with a pal talking about whatever and a dog runs out into the road and almost gets hit. your friend might say "wow, that's one dumb-ass dog," and instantly, i'm thinking about what a dumb ass-dog would look like. here's a little preview below.

here's a little list of things that i've heard and the pictures that ended up in my head when somebody said them. and yes, the pictures in my head do look like 3rd grade microsoft paint drawings.

dumb ass-girl

big ass-truck

long ass-hair

big ass-mountain

and so on and so forth. who said a normal mind is any more interesting than a completely strange mind? not i! and now... back to vacationing.

getting on a team

so this past weekend i went on a ride with some guys from the cycling team up st vrain to peak to peak and down ward. it was a pretty brutal ride, mostly just because of the cold. i really want to do it again this weekend and maybe try to get 100 miles in on sunday morning. the more miles i can get in before winter sets in, the better shape i'll be in when i'm trying to get in race shape in the snow. my next step other than getting stronger faster and lighter this winter is to try to get on a team to race for next season for USCF. I'm planning on doubling up on every race i possibly can next season (racing collegiate and USCF), and i'll be a cat 3 shortly into the season hopefully and by the end of the summer upgrading to cat 2 if i can train enough next semester. i'm looking at Vitamin Cottage, Colavita/Cooking Light, and am going to ask around for what teams are good ones to race for. hopefully i can get some good racing and training advice from these guys. it's almost kinda sad that i'm not even thinking about graduation and instead am worried about bike racing and how fast i can get this winter/next spring. oh well! my new alternate life plan is that if racing doesn't work out or if i go broke trying to make it work out, i'm either going to move to denver, san fransisco, or new york city to be a bike courier for a few years. engineering can wait.

no more boredom

so the basis of this blog was to take the boredom i experienced day to day, find the things that most people would think were normal, and run them through my oh so random brain to make them somewhat funny. since school has taken my life by the balls, i don't really go through much boredom anymore. HOWEVER, my life is about to take a pretty serious turn because i'm turning my back on the systematic "get a job right out of college" plan. my plan is to train really really hard in the spring, race really hard and frequently, then after i graduate, keep racing next summer and training 30+ hours/week and hopefully make it up to cat 2 by the end of the summer, and be looking for a team starting the following spring. people tell me i'm talented at cycling, i love it, and according to a coach i saw this summer, i'm physically built well for the sport. it's scary knowing that i'm not going to the fall career fair on campus tomorrow where i could potentially get a job that'll pay well, pay for a house, food, whatever else i need and instead focus on something where i have a very slim chance of success and won't be making much money. i say screw it though. life isn't about getting a job and making money. it's about living. i'm happiest when i'm on my bike, even when it's already my job. even on nights at work where i can't feel my hands or my feet, there's nothing i would rather be doing. even when i'm high up in the mountains, can barely turn the pedals over and my heart rate is through the roof, there's nowhere else i'd rather be.

the big one

so i had to go back to court today. not so much fun. however, my complete inability to take life seriously (except when i want to, and standing in a courthouse is not one of those times) led me to find a few different things kinda funny in the courtroom.

one thing i tend to do is, when things get really serious, i like to think of ways to totally break up the mood. like, when i was getting yelled at once in band in high school, i remembered i had a little applesauce thing in my backpack and wondered what would happen if i just took it out of my backpack and threw it at my teacher. no explanation, no real reason... just... what would happen? would he have jumped at me and tackled me? just sat there and taken it like a man? today i was sitting in court, and the judge was telling me something about responsibility or something (definately wasn't paying much attention) and i was thinking what would happen if i farted really loud. is that ok to do in the court? do i need to ask permission of the judge? would it go on the record? a whole slew of questions ran through my mind, and i thought just for a second that i should do it. just to mix things up. but then i remembered that "just doing it, just to mix things up" was the reason i was in there in the first place. then another time he was telling me about how i had a lot of potential and i really wanted to say. "yes, and so does a rock on top of a hill. so what." but didn't. probably best. that's about it. court sucks, paying a lawyer sucks, but napping is awesome and so are sandwiches. THE END.

school

so it's been a while since i've written anything new. let me explain.

i got into boulder on sunday at about 1ish, did a little grocery shopping, rented a uhaul and moved a mountain of boxes into my room. sunday night, went out and got back to my apartment at 1ish. monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, and today i've had band camp from 9am until 6ish, then dinner and social stuff or going out until 1ish. no time to move in, no time to do anything. also, i'm broke as they come, and going out doesn't help that at all.

so there. maybe once school starts i can start making wild and fairly inaccurate observations about life and writing them in here.

some of the sweetest words

some of the sweetest sounding words ever spoken to me were just uttered.

i was sitting at my desk reading some very unimportant news articles when another intern came bursting into my cube, whence upon these words were spoken: "free food, let's go." We left my cube in a flash. Curious as to the source of such priveledged information, i quizzed the other intern briefly only to discover that his superior had been in a meeting-of-sorts and had left some food behind. we briskly raced forth, dodging the occasional pedestrian and copy machine user in order to get to the source of said wonder before anyone else could have learned of such heathen treasures. like ponce de leon closing quickly in on the fabled fountain of youth, everything slowed almost to a halt; our frantic manouvers through the throng of disguntled employees seemed more like a ballet than a chaotic sprint towards some material lust, more like a slow, romantic evening waltz than a pack of dogs running white-hot after a fat rabbit. we entered the meeting room and closed the door behind us, sealing out the woes and ways of this damn-ed world, and stood breathlessly in the wonder and awe of the sight of a free breakfast. a smorgasbord fit for king henry himself was laid out before us in a meticulous and very baroque fashion. rows upon rows of gleaming sterno oven trays filled with a cornucopia of french toast triangles, crusty eggs, and slick looking sausage patties danced in front of our eyes like children dancing about a may pole. after a few moments of revered silence, i gained my breath back and searched the table for the silverware and paper plates, then proceeded to fill my plate, almost the the point of failure of the plate itself with several triangles of holy french toast, a few strips of glistening, crisp bacon, and whatever amount of eggs i could forcefully remove from the bottom of the egg pan. it was then that i noticed a small gilded bowl of yoghurt and an accompanying plate of granola, whereupon i dollupped a healthy serving of yoghurt and granola upon another, smaller plate. i was getting ready to race back to my desk to indulge in as many of the deadly sins as would this bounty support when, out of the corner of a tear filled eye, i saw intruders. two women had entered our temple of free food unannounced and commenced to lament about "how difficult it is to be on a diet when there's free food all the time" and how "the bacon [looked] 'nasty'." how foolish were these women not to take full advantage of free food without first demonizing it! at this point, i felt as though our stay in this holy place had been without blemish and complete and it was time for a hasty departure. back out into the real world we pushed on, whereupon coworkers looked at our plates laden with a fool's demise with eyes searching, wanting to know the source. wary to divulge such valuable information, we pressed on back through the throngs of business back to our desks. i sit here now, fully content, and completely sick, content with our pillage like a viking crew returning to their boats with sacks full of gold, spices, and jewels, ready to embrace their conquests with drink and folly. i, too, will celebrate this conquest by returning to reading unimportant news articles, while every so often noticing the smell of pancake sirrup wafting out of my trash can. i leave you, the reader, with this post-conquest correspondence:

To: Poon, Jackie
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2007 9:29 AM
From: Walter, Jimmy
Subject:

I have had my fill of adventure for the morning. That will have to be reserved until after lunch.

_____________________________________________
From: Poon, Jackie
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2007 9:27 AM
To: Walter, Jimmy
Subject:

Fellow intern, you have now accomplished your first goal of finding quality free food…..I now challenge you to find out where the mystery door is located before your internship ends……bwahahahaha

buggin me

other than what i've been doing since i woke up this morning, today has been a good day. however, there were a few small things that stood out and really just bugged me today:

-i went to bed with pants on and woke up without pants on, making turning my alarm off (which is in the next room to mine to keep me from going back to sleep instantly) very complicated
-as i was walking to the bathroom, i saw somebody take the last piece of cake from a birthday cake, look around to make sure nobody saw him, and walk away. THAT'S MY JOB! how dare somebody go around the office looking for free food instead of doing work! i need to be way more vigilant in my free food ventures unless i want to get walked all over by other scavengers. their timing may be better than mine, but my evasion skills are so finely honed after this summer that they don't stand a chance.
-i was typing a text message with the word "consequences" in it, which my phone didn't have in it's automatic memory thing. that's a long word to try to type in a cell phone, and i spelled it wrong a few times which made it take even longer. then later on i was typing another text message and one of the word suggestions that came up was "y2k". great. it's 2007. when's the last time anybody mentioned y2k? 7 years ago? yeah. when's the last time somebody used the word "consequences"? probably in the time it took me to type this sentance. sony needs to get on that.
-i called travelocity because they messed up my online reservation thing for my flight back to colorado on sunday only to have the phone answered by an indian guy who, i swear, slipped a few sentances in there in his own language just to make me mad. after every single thing he said to me, i had to say "excuse me" or "can you please repeat that, it's very hard to understand you" or something to that effect. every. 30. seconds. then when he asked me for my email address and he was repeating it back to me, he tried using the letters in words so that i could understand what he was saying more clearly, but it came off more like this:
"ok, your emayyl addresh ish jeemeey.wohta@mahtew.cawm spelled j as in jawg, i as in (i think he said ink, no idea), dobl m as in meersh (i don't know what that is either), y as in yesh dawt w as in weg (again, huh?), a as in alpha (i got that one down), l as in lamb (i think), t as in teeth, e as in eggwash (wtf is eggwash??), r as in randy"... and it went on smoothly from there. if you're working for a big company and you need to hire people to answer your phones here in america, please, PLEASE make sure that they at least sound like an american. i love other cultures, i really do. i just don't want to have to embrace your accent as i'm trying to figure out why my $700 plane ticket suddenly disappeared from your website, and you're sitting there trying to repeat "is there anything else i can do for you today" 4 or 5 times as i get more and more frustrated with you.
-it isn't 5 o clock yet.

hopefully things will look up, i know i have dinner to look forward to. and a bike ride. yep.

ambiguous high fives and hand shakes

i hate ambiguous high fives and hand shakes. i definately just experienced an ambiguous high five situation which ended in some sort of awkward reaching motion with no closure whatsoever. maybe that's what it was meant to be... just kind of a reaching out that leaves you... wanting more? maybe? i dunno. anyways, i tend to think of myself as a pretty consistent high fiver and hand shaker. i don't really tend to go for the fancy hand shake where you bring them in and pat them on the back, unless i can tell that's what they're going for. like if you haven't seen someone in a really long time, that one's ok. i prefer to go for the straight up, hand out in front of you hand shake. official style. i also don't ever seem to get the hint that when we shake hands, right afterwards, we're going to slide hands then either snap, "pound it", or whatever. i just don't get it. i'm including a handy little guide to my hand shakes/high fives in case you encounter me and i throw you for a loop, you'll know what to do. and yes, i am this bored.

prepare to be offended

so yesterday i made another connection. as i was wandering around the office trying to kill time (and find free food), i noticed a very feminine smell that smelled... well... great. i then noticed a fairly large lady around the next corner who must have walked past and left her scent for me to walk through.

then, in the same day, i was walking around the office again and ended up following a larger lady who really smelled just awesome. it smelled like i could've been skipping through a meadow of flowers and fruit trees. seriously. so anyways, that led me to do a little bit of thinking about women and smell, and i came up with this handy chart.

if you're one of those people who think that being fat is a sensitive topic, or that somebody's perception of body size is just rude and/or demeaning, i'll leave it at this graph. if you're not, and you know how rediculous i am and how i really don't mean anything by what i type here, read on. and by the way, i used to be a fat kid. a smelly fat kid. i'm allowed.

now, a little explanation. the scale runs from 0 (horrible smelling) to 10 (makes my mouth water). the smallest women, indicated on the "small" side of the graph, usually smell just alright. this is probably due to the fact that they shower like the rest of us, and don't tend to misuse or over-apply perfume because they're probably pretty alright looking and can attract attention without the use of rediculous perfume. we get a little dip while marching up on the size axis, and this is most likely due to the fact that just-alright looking girls a. are a little bit less than "average" size and b. usually don't take very good care of themselves due to the fact that even with some help from perfume, they still are gonna be just mediocre. the next little dip we see is in the "average" range. this is due heavily to the presence of tomboys in this are. tomboys are the girls who think they are boys, and tend to dress a lot like them with baggy pants, big shirts, backwards caps, and overly pronounced moustaches. what they don't know is that while they look like guys (sometimes causing me great confusion), they also smell like a guy. which is to say... horrible. moving on. here we can see quantitative graphical evidence which supports my theory discovered by walking around the office yesterday that girls who fall just above and beyond "average" tend to smell the best. why? i don't really know. maybe it's the missing piece of the puzzle to their attractiveness, maybe they think that if they smell good, we'll ignore the fact that they're a little larger. i couldn't care less about a girl's size, really, but there's just somethign about obnoxious perfume that makes me sneeze. the scent peaks somewhere around
middle-aged, stopped excersizing when i got married, work in an office lady. from there, there is a sharp dive towards the negative, probably stemming from b.o., homelessness, or mayonaise. there you have it. my findings. i could fit this curve with another equation, but i'm way too lazy and smell a little bit too bad because of my laziness to care.

another day in my life

sit down and let me give you a run down of how a productive day of work should look. i know there are a lot of theories out there about "getting things done," "going to meetings," and even crazy things like "answering emails," but i assure you these are all a hoax. that's what the man wants you to do. in order to be truly productive in the workplace, you really need to just open your mind to the endless possibilities of staring blankly at people until they think of something for you to do to get you to leave them alone. as a prime example, here's a little rundown of my day today. call it a waste of time, call it irresponsible... call it what you will but i call it an opportunity to make sure everybody i work with knows that i don't have anything to do and am proud of it. it's like wearing two different socks to school in 3rd grade, and instead of being embarrassed about it, telling all of your friends about how cool it is until they believe you.

7:50am - arrived at my desk, hit the power button on my computer. knowing full well that my computer takes over 15 minutes to actually start up, i walked one lap of my floor, rinsed out an old styrofoam cup on my desk, made some tea, carved my name into barbie's leg with a push-pin, drank my tea, then turned on the monitor.

8:10am - opened up internet explorer and read every scrap of news i could find. digg, latimes.com, buffalonews.com, theonion.com. if it says news on it, i probably read it.

8:45am - walked another lap of my floor scouting for free food. free food has become very hard to identify. i think that people are on to me. normally, i would dismiss a plate of cookies as unwanted if i could detect that they were in a place where there was a meeting where people left, help myself to as many as i could carry, and bring them back to my desk. this morning i ran across a plate of brownies sitting on a small table by a display case. what really threw me off were the number of people sitting at their desks in the area. normally, these are the kind of people who spend all day in meetings, and since they were all at their desk, i thought that they might have gotten the brownies so they could work at their desks and still have bad food nearby. there was also the factor of the small table where they were sitting. had they been sitting around the table eating and having a meeting and just stepped away for a moment? surely if i took all of their brownies and they got back, they would follow my crumb trail to my desk and fire me on the spot. this is when i invented the 10 minute rule. i decided that if i spot some loose food, i can leave it be, come back in 10 minutes, and if it still looks unwanted, it's fair game. nobody in their right mind would leave brownies/cookies/bags of chips laying around for over 10 minutes unattended.

9:30am - started drawing pictures for a little "side project" i'm working on. i think my boss ran out of stuff for me to do, came up with a concept, and asked me to further the concept. i get the distinct feeling that as soon as i clean up my desk, these drawings and my concept will be thrown away with all of the candy wrappers they find underneath my computer.

11:30am - lunchtime.

12:15pm - done with lunch, back to the desk to watch some angry beavers episodes c/o tv-links.co.uk. seriously this is going to be my new best friend on slow days of work. while i was watching these, i drew some more pictures, played with some pennies, and took another lap of the office to see if there was any work for me to do... no luck.

2:00pm - decided that it was time for a tour of one of the other buildings, called up another intern working there, and hung around her building for a while. now, when i say that i have to get creative at wasting time, i mean that i have to get creative. this other building which houses most of the electronic games design people has an entire room. yes, an entire room devoted to video games. there is a giant leather couch, lots of squishy things to sit on, a plasma hdtv, ps3, wii, xbox360, ps2, and an hd-dvd player. and a surround sound system. i don't get any work done here, but whatever scrap of work that i do get done, simply would not get done. i don't think i would even leave the room to go to the bathroom if we had one of those in my building.

3:30pm - walked around the toy store, went to the little mailroom, discovered that the stamp machine gives "change" in 1c stamps. i now have more 1c stamps than i know what to do with... i'll probably stick one to barbie and see if the folks at the post office are kind enough to mail her to sandy clause.

4:00pm - hung around some tables where people sometimes set up hot wheels tracks or other toys to "test" them and make sure that everything works, asked about a cool looking track, and got to play with it for a half hour.

4:30pm - got an email about my intern exit interview, started preparing ways to kindly say that i hated every minute of working here because it would have been more exciting to show up to 9 hours of chinese water torture every day for 3 months than it was to work here. i'm still working on the words for that...

and now, i'm typing this thing, thinking about how much time i can spend cleaning my desk tomorrow (if i do it right, possibly the entire day) and wondering if it is still hot out and how much i want to sit on the beach this entire weekend and do nothing.

i also found this article about napping at work, which really sums up everything i've thought about when daring to nap at work. it really is dangerous, but if you plan it right, nobody knows the difference. headphones are key too, you can easily pretend to be listening to music so loud that you don't notice your boss behind you asking you how the spreadsheet is coming until they tap you on the shoulder.
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Lots of people want to take naps at work. This is very dangerous and should only be attempted by the most seasoned napper. No matter how many news magazines do stories on how taking naps improve employee performance in other countries, you will never be paid to sleep here in the U.S of A. The USA work ethic hates sleep, even the good “8 hours a night” kind. If you must take a nap you might try this idea from the “Nap Play Book”. Nap #643 -- Fill a coffee mug. Find a low traffic area in the office and spill the contents of the mug on the floor. Lay down on the floor face first with your coffee mug laying on the spill. The purpose is to make it look like you fell, passed out or tripped on something. After you place yourself in position, go to sleep. If someone finds you, they’ll rush to your aide. Have an excuse ready. They’ll think you are hurt or sick, but don’t let them send you home. You don’t want to eat up sick leave, that’s your personal time. Never repeat this exercise in the same location and don’t do it too often. This nap will be less effective if you snore. If you snore while you sleep it’s tougher to pass off sleep as unconsciousness. (Naps can buy you any where from 10 minutes to several hours depending on where you take the nap)

long line at the women's room

so i came up with a new theory today. stick with me.

ever been to a baseball game, football game, well... anywhere where there was a women's public restroom? ever noticed how there's a long line for that restroom? ever noticed how women never really seem to fart in public or take a crap when they're over at your house or at your friends house? for years and years i chalked this up to two scenarios. A: women don't crap or fart nearly as much as men, so they do it all while they're at home. or B: women just don't crap or fart, so there's no reason to ever have to do either when they're at your house. Today however, i made a startling discovery while at the zoo. I noticed that any time i've ever really spent an entire day with a girl, they have to use the bathroom at least once and there's always "a really long line", which brings me to my theory. I think that every girl, when she is very young, is told by her mother to hold it until they are in a public place, wherein they can blame the amount of time they spent in the bathroom on the "long line". That way, no matter who has to do what, there will always be a line because it's been a week since they went last, so their story holds up. it's a big circular reasoning pattern, but it had to be started somewhere, but it has been working ever since. beautifully. not only do they not have to go in front of men, but they don't have to stink up your bathroom, just the women's bathrooms in a public place, like an amusement park or something.

wasting time, wasting time

i just read a little blurb about how many people waste time in the work place and it turns out to be something like 20% of the workday is wasted by the average american worker. for me, it's more like 99.9%. i'm done with my work before 10am every single day, and even when i do get a job to do, it takes me about an hour, then i'm back to wasting time until the day is over. if there's one thing i've learned from this job (and it is certainly not anything to do with actual engineering) it's that life is too short to work at a job you hate. why would you want to work at a job where you spend a majority of the time just wasting time? granted, this internship is different because i don't really have a "place" in the company, i'm just kind of here to learn a little bit about how the company works and how businesses like this one work. one thing that i've noticed is that as this internship goes on, i've become much more comfortable about the fact that i just don't have anything to do. when i started working here, i was very concerned with getting my work done, being perfect, looking perfect, etc. now... i could care less. i think everyone who works around here knows that A: i don't have anything to do except waste time, thereby wasting the company's money and B: coming to my cubicle to talk to me about bikes is perfectly ok, and is a good way for them to get out of doing their work. After doing a little bit more thinking about how things have gone this summer, i put together a handy little qualitative graph representing some aspects of this job that have changed since i started here.

there you have it. 10 minutes until the whistle blows, then i'm back at it again tomorrow. oh yeah, and the paper that i drew my pants reference man on had some other drawings on the back of it for a product that i worked on and my boss took it yesterday. hopefully he won't be too confused by that little guy. i would be.

a tale of pants

i was on a bike ride a few days ago and noticed, on the same sidewalk, a very old man with his pants almost up to his shoulders and a kid with his pants almost down to his knees. i started thinking about the height of pants, age, and what they have to do with each other, and decided that they are most definately connected. intimately at that.

it all starts when you're born. diapers can really only sit in one place, which is right at the hips. not only that, but aside from the ocassional fumbling babysitter, your mom was pretty good at sticking that diaper right in the same spot every time. even when she had to change you on the floor in the airport to the disgust of everybody around you. as an average kid, you don't start dressing yourself until you're around 5 or 6, at which point, you are probably wearing your sister's hand me downs, which are a little too small to fit on the waist, so where else can you wear them but up a little too high. even when your mother buys you nice clothes that do fit, they fit "the right way" and sit somewhere around belly button height. around the age of 10, you start getting your own clothes, and you dress yourself nicely for class, hoping that the pretty girl that you just started noticing last week might think that you look "nice" and might want to "hang out" with you a little bit more. now here's where things really start going bad. as soon as junior high hits, the pants height takes an alarming dip in the negative. why, i can't explain. i did it myself, and still don't know why. wearing those pants as low as possible without showing the goods was definately the fashion, and making sure that you had some good looking boxer shorts was just as important as keeping your shoes clean. after you realize how stupid that stage is, there comes high school and then college, where the pants return to somewhere around waist height. this is mostly likely because you've been wearing the same pants since junior high (in my case) and you've grown a little bit, and that's just where they fit. other times, it's because that hot girl in your class (not in my case) seems to dress nicely and you think if you dress nicely too, she might notice you. not usually the case, but you try anyways. once you're out of college, you have to go get a job, and the pants rise just above the waistline as you try to impress your boss to get that all too important raise/bonus/extra day off work. the next milestone is the ubiquitous mid life crisis, where, along with your dignity, the pant line dips a little bit as you strive to be cool and hip and fit in with your kids, who at this point are probably going through the lowest pants-point in their lives at the same time. after you realize that not only is your wife not impressed, but neither is your boss or kids, so you bring 'em back up slowly over the next couple of years. at this point, resistance is all but futile. from that point until you die, the pants rise almost exponentially until they're right up there next to your pocket protector. below i've included a handy reference chart as well as a detailed (and heavily researched) graph to see where you stand next to the average male.

AND just so you can't say i never did anything for you, i fit that there graph with a quadratic curve with the equation y = 0.003x^2 - 0.1475x + 0.4082, so you can see where you should be wearing your pants. Myself, as a 21 year old, using that equation, should be wearing my pants at a height of about 1.3663 inches below the waistline. sounds about right. try it out!

and then reality set in and said "seriously? really? you know where this is going, you're not that dumb."

i think i have a problem with having an overly romatic view of life. it's probably because i don't watch tv and only read books written either before world war 2 or shortly afterwards, but i really do have too much faith in romance. too much faith in the way things could be and not the way things are. i should probably get on that though, the world is a pretty rough place and i treat it like a day at disneyland.

sure why not

"lets be brave" she said.

"do it, you know how you truly feel and denying yourself that is wasting your only chance at life" my heart told me.

"it's only going to cause you and her pain" my brain told me.

"be brave, do what your heart tells you, your logic is all screwed up from bad experiences in the past. you can't live in the past, only in the here and now. the past holds lessons which can be learned from, but should not determine the future, only how you handle what the future holds" i told myself.

living in the past is the biggest mistake i think i could make. sure, life has thrown some really ugly stuff at me, but at the same time, has thrown some really amazing stuff at me when i least expected it. a roll of the dice, a flip of the cards i'll call it. maybe there's a 2 on there, maybe there's an ace. nobody knows, and that's not going to stop me from going there anyways.

nuh uh

sometimes i get the feeling that to want what you can't have is the essence of life. i have never met anybody who had everything that they truly wanted. sure, i have all of the material possessions that i want. i have a really nice bike, decent clothes, shoes, a house to live in, lots of friends (not that they're material things, but close enough), and pretty much the only "things" that i ever want and can't have are really expensive things that i would probably just drop and ruin anyways. the problem doesn't lie with material objects, it lies with immaterial objects. things that you can't hold, can't really see. things like aspirations. things like relationships. goals, objectives, even experiences are all things that i want, but can't seem to get enough of.

i want to travel. you could argue that traveling is a material thing, but it's not the physical traveling that i want to do, it's the experiencing of a different way of life. i'm drawn to the idea of leaving this ...culture in america and seeing how other people do it. there's something about the everyday, mundane things in a person's life that they pay little attention to, that are often done differently in other cultures. that's what i want to see. that's what i want to experience.

there are a lot of other things i could really type out, but there are too many of them, and i need to get some sleep so i can ride tomorrow morning (in 6 hours... who needs sleep anyways?).

21

well this weekend is it. the big 21. i'd love to get super excited about a birthday, but really, there's not much going on that gets me pumped to be 21. i still have to go to work every day, i still have to go to bed early every night. in all reality, i don't think i'll be taking any kind of advantage of being 21 until i get back to boulder, when it will definately be taken advantage of. i'm more excited about being able to hang out with my friends without having to be like sorry guys... i can't go out with you tonight... i gotta stay here kinda thing going on. it'll be nice to be able to meet people at the bars (as smarmy as most of those people are, there have to be a few good kids out there somewhere) and be able to go see good shows that i haven't been able to go to. if the polyphonic spree ever make it back to boulder, i'm totally gonna go see them. last time they came, i was not 21 and no amount of schmoozing would convince the lady at the ticket booth to let me in to watch them just for a couple of minutes. maybe sunday night after i go bowling i'll try to find an open liquor store and buy myself a beer or maybe i'll just go out and have one monday after work. i dunno. not too excited. that's the jist of it. time for some scrabble.

random things that happen at work

today has been a somewhat productive day at work. i got free lunch, which automatically makes it better than any day of the week that i didn't get free lunch (monday and tuesday and probably tomorrow and friday), so that's a good thing. fins and i had a little brain tangle going on when we both emailed each other out of the blue at the exact same time. now, i know that someone is probably sitting there thinking "nah that sort of thing must happen all the time" but it does NOT. i have sent a lot of emails since i started working here, and it hasn't happened once. in fact, i pretty much use outlook like a kid with a broken back would use aim. i even email the guy who is 2 cubes down from me because honestly, i'm just too lazy to get up and have to deal with the possibility of him not being there, running into someone who wants to bug me, or the possibility of actually having to answer questions i don't really know the answer to. if i sit at my desk and write emails, the people on the other end really only get to ask me one question at a time, giving me time to research the answer, and make it seem like i know what i'm doing over here.

lots of random stuff has happened today, and really has been happening since i started here. actually it's probably pretty normal stuff, but in my mind it's really random because i notice it and it makes no sense. for instance, check out this character:

of all the places for him to pop up... he manages to pop up in just the right spot so as to look like he's really really excited about what's going on in that one window. keep in mind that i was pretty excited too because, as you can see, it is not work involved, and therefore was more exciting than excel. being more exciting than excel is not hard to do, and this guy appreciates that just as much as the next guy.

in all seriousness

why do extremely poor african people still have children?

take this as a racist comment, whatever you want... i just don't understand it. why, when these people know that they don't have food, medicine, or any proper way to care for their children, do they keep having kids? I know that they are smart people, i know that they are perfectly able to reason this out, so why do they have children knowing full well that they will not be able to have a future? I don't know the numbers, and i don't want to make any up, but i know that there has to be a huge number of African children who starve to death every day because of all of the famine that has been going on there. If anybody has any insight (or... if anybody even reads this at all) let me know. I'm honestly curious and not just trying to say "well look how much they suck, they have kids even though they're starving themselves." i really do want to know why. it could be a huge cultural chasm that i can't cross until i understand more about what goes on over there. my sister has been to Africa... maybe she knows.

you probably don't want to read this one

3 years of engineering school, countless nights staying up way too late to study, sleeping in the engineering center, waking up early to finish homework before class, working for 25+ hours on projects for class, not getting nearly enough sleep, food, or free time and it all culminates in me sitting here in a cubicle writing in this blog, drawing pictures of strange 3d shapes on a piece of paper. Is this what all of my hard work was good for? I know i bitch and whine a lot about this job, but i feel like if i write one big, horrific, tell all thing about why i hate my job, maybe it'll be out of my system and i can move on and get past the next 5 weeks with as little social and emotional damage as possible. seriously. i turned down an internship at BNSF railroad, which would have had me possibly inspecting rail yards, locomotives, and doing other actual work to come here. i spent about $800 on plane tickets to move out here, had to put my stuff in storage, and left all but one or two friends to move here this summer. 7 weeks ago i moved here, started this job, and have nothing to show for it. i was supposed to be here a week earlier, but due to some... unexpected circumstances, i ended up getting here a week late and i "missed" my opportunity to work on a real exciting project. because of that, the higher ups here decided that i was no longer going to work on that project (for reasons i can't possibly understand) and was instead going to be assigned to another manager who didn't have anything for me to do. i think what really happened was that they said "hey, we've got an intern coming in to work for you" and he dug around through some old files and found a couple things that needed to be updated, but not badly enough where anyone who already worked here would have done it. In short, had i not even showed up here to work this summer, none of the things that i've done would have ever gotten done. it's like that stain on the carpet underneath the couch. you could move the couch, get out the scrub brush and some chemicals, and get rid of the stain. instead of spending the time to do that, you decide to do something more important for about 5 years and neglect the stain knowing that you probably will never move that couch and nobody will ever see the stain. there were a few databases that were a little bit out of date, and everybody has more important stuff to do, so they just didn't update them for 5 years. the numbers kept getting worse, but it wasn't a big enough deal to warrant putting someone on the task of figuring out why. then they got an intern. an intern who knows nothing about how multi-billion dollar corporations work, disagrees with outsourcing important jobs, and doesn't know anyone who works here, and you hand him one spreadsheet, tell him the numbers aren't working out, and go back to doing your job. for 7 weeks.

as for what i've done this summer, i think i can think of two actual pieces of progress. i fixed one spreadsheet that took about 5 weeks of harassing, bothering, and otherwise chasing around various engineers and asking them for input. i got handed several contacts in thailand, malaysia, and here in california who might know something about the numbers i'm looking for, but after asking them, got passed off to even more engineers in asia who passed me off to even more people because either they have NO idea what i'm talking about (which was pretty much verbatim speculation from my boss who, i later found out was really just spitballing with me), or they don't have the information. my problem at this point was that i had 1 job to do, and that was to find these numbers and fix this spreadsheet. the people i was bugging had about 100 jobs to do, and the job that involved humoring the summer intern took a back seat way more often than not. after 5 weeks of chasing these people around and getting in their hair as much as possible, i finally fixed that problem, and was looking forward to maybe getting put on a current project where i would get to make some actual decisions and do something other than hump a spreadsheet for 9 hours a day, make phone calls to people who don't know what i want (and why i would even want such information, even after an explanation), which brings me to my current project

after finishing that project, my boss said ok good now that you're done with that, we have another issue with some numbers that aren't coming out right. why is it that it took 3-5 years of getting bad numbers that they decided to actually fix these problems? so i got about 8 different products to look at, 8 different engineers who are busy and have no time for me, and another smorgasbord of spreadsheets to sift through, and am expected to do almost the exact same thing that i did in the last project. this time, however, instead of having just a few people to chase around, i have 8 different engineers who are busy, so they pass me off to other engineers who are busy. when i ask them for information, i get the feeling that they humor me by sending me little emails and spreadsheets similar to the ones i asked for, but aren't actually the ones that i asked for. then when i ask them for what i really need, they either don't have it, or they give me the emails of 4 people in china who might have it, and if they don't, then it got lost because so and so changed departments 6 months ago and they don't know where he or she went.

at this point, on this project, i've only made 1 step of progress, have emailed 50 different people looking for the information i need, just keep getting answers of "yeah, that's not how we do that" or "this is how this process is done... we did it different this time" or "i don't really understand what you're looking for, but i don't think we have it", and am ready to walk out of here, quit this job, and sit on the beach for the rest of the summer. sitting alone at my desk finding ways to pass the time is a waste of my life.

there. i'm done. i turn 21 in 2 weeks, move back to boulder in 5, and hopefully i won't quit before then.

the date buzz

so everyone has been making a pretty big deal out of the july 7th 2007 (7/7/07) date thing and i decided to do a little thinking about this.

a date which has the same month, day, and year has happened in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and will happen until 2012, when the months can no longer keep up with the year. 1/1/01, 2/2/02, 3/3/03, etc. until 12/12/12. then, we'll have to wait 988 years to go nuts again, when the date is january 1st, 3001. since i'll be dead by then, i guess i should enjoy these dates as much as... possible? how do you go about enjoying them? celebrating them? i guess it is pretty neat that since a "generation" spans about 40 years or so, the last time this happened would have been in the year 1012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1012 which would have been about 25 or so generations ago.

that's about all i've got for now.

a real blog

so it's time for a real blog for real musings/rants/etc. something more substantial than a xanga... something a little bit more permanent and perhaps a little more serious or credible. i can't write every day, but i'm guessing that these will often mirror (at least fairly closely) the journal i keep in real life. maybe a little less personal, but there's a whole lot of good stuff that goes in there that nobody ends up reading, and won't at least until i die. so here's to something new to do to kill time at work, in class, or any other time i feel like someone might possibly want to read what ran through my mind once or twice during the day.