Half a day, half a world, and an entire week late

SUCCESSSSSS.

After agonizing over a perfect storm of horribles, I was finally on my way to THE CITY.



I flew Air New Zealand, which served some sort of puffed root vegetable chip in lieu of the usual peanuts/pretzels and produced an admirable attempt at dinner (potato salad, crusted chicken, and pineapple/carrot cake). Between kiwi music and the Irish head steward's numerous loudspeaker announcements, I watched three movies whose progression revealed a possible degeneration of my mental capacities: Easy Virtue, Bolt, High School Musical 3.

Ha-ha-ha-SHAME.

In other news, I now live here:

The location is pretty good aside from the fact that since I live in the City, everything closes at 6 pm and even Pret a Manger is closed on the weekends. I also live along the siteseeing tour bus route so I periodically hear loudspeaker snippets of tours being given while I go about LIVING. This sounds charming but is actually irritating.



YES the flowers are real.



I started on a Friday so here is a picture I snuck of the dessert course during a faboo lunch. I will likely not talk about work as that would make me 5000 years old.

Old Skool

Sometimes I reminisce about childhood and breathe a sigh of relief that I was lucky enough to catch the tail end of Old Skool Skoolin' when I was at my most impressionable. Yes, back in the day when teachers had decades of experience and understood that young minds needed them to be more than just "cool" tutors.

Alas, the slow corrosion of teacher credibility began somewhere around middle school. Suddenly newly indoctrinated educators were over-sharing and under role modeling (broke up with your bf and crying in class? GREAT! Having secret affair with fellow faculty member? AWESOME!). Although the preteen me was predisposed to respect authority, it was middle school that finally got me thinking that sometimes, teachers don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Although there were still a few old skool gems here and there, most of the lot were freeloading off of our indoctrinated AzN Academic Anal-ness and calling it "effective methodology evinced by scholastic aptitude."

Nowadays I wonder how I could ever have thought otherwise. With no real filtering mechanism in place, it's safe to say that even I could probably become a teacher. Can you imagine that? This fireball of hateration having disproportionate influence over kids at their most vulnerable time? Yeah. It's a wonder we all grew up to be somewhat functional. Though it's uplifting to see that those of us who didn't are actually now teachers. Payback?

Poorly Written b/c I'm Sleeeeepy

I am on vacation but it feels like anything but. I don't know when home transformed from a much-anticipated getaway to a place I can't wait to get away from. Is it the weather? The infestation of hybrid car technology on every road? The fact that my nonfat, sugar-free, vegan, organic LA perception can't seem to accept free convention tshirts + jeans + sneakers as viable fashion choices? It's hard to say.

Lately I've been mentally perusing that fine line between friendship and acquaintance. Although I used to be perfectly fine with possessing a gaggle of the latter, my post-undergrad self is now more and more interested in the former. I know, I know, apparently not so much of a robot after all. It's hard for girls to give up the dream of "being popular" and as Mean Girls said, "I guess she just likes the attention." Ahhh so true. But I am tired of accommodating the mental handicaps, the emotional fuckwittery, the hypocritical complaints, and the general bemoaning of unsubstantial hardships so very popular with mopey quarter-life-crisis-sufferers the world over. What they want is sympathy that the icebox where my heart used to be lacks the capacity to produce and what I manage to conjure up instead sounds eerily similar to Whitney's post-LC-crisis dialogue on an episode of The Hills.

I've also thought about writing more about school on this blog but I don't want it to turn into a law school blog. It doesn't help that the only 1L law school blog from my school is written by an uber boring chick with the personality of cardboard, the writing style of drying paint, and the content coverage of QVC. I did recently attend one of those holiday booze sessions hosted by Generic Firm LLP where I saw the usual crowd of attendees from many past receptions. As we stood in our awkward business casual gear and metaphorically compared penis size through our mastery of small talk, I wondered when my peers had taken the time to morph into hideous men with couch upholstery-status ties and judgmental women who really needed to evaluate the intensity of their make up application.

Goal for next semester: BE LESS ROBOTIC, make more friends, avoid scary competitive ppul at all costs

BRAIN DYING

It's easy to be negative when a vague sense of inevitable failure looms over your shoulder day in and day out. But alas, such is the lawskoo life. I wish I was able to come up with a cogent topic for this post, but the truth is that I no longer have a personality. Yes, I am a robot. And one with poor taste (or so I've been told). A sampler:

Things that make my days bearable:
- The Hills
- Gossip Girl
- horrible reruns of that tila tequila dating show on mtv
- silently judging the plastic-y sorority girls at the gym (I know it can be argued that I am being hypocritical in this sense)
- froyo

What can I say? When it comes down to crunchtime (haha), my brain seems to allocate former sections dedicated to "being human" to "schoolwerk" leaving a monstrous husk in its wake. And this was a boring entry because I no longer have entertaining things to say (but did I ever...?)

PS: I have no costume for Halloween and I was secretly looking forward to this fiendish holiday (Duh, I'm a mouse!)

Alas...

It’s hard to blog when you find yourself inexorably ensconced in the deadly quicksand of time-wasting vices. Perhaps that previous sentence was a bit overreaching, but here’s a taste of how my days have been magically filling themselves up with no substantial content what-so-ever:

1) wii hunting: Okay, I feel like I am Juan Ponce de Leon hunting for the Fountain of Youth in the wilds of an uncharted Western Hemisphere. But instead of being able to settle for the secondary achievement of discovering Florida, I am just left with the empty vacuum of an out-of-stock notification in Firefox.

2) crunchyroll.com: It’s hard to fight my guilty pleasure addiction to wuxia soap operas of the uber-cliché variety. Flying? Obscure martial arts manuals and questionable wardrobe choices? Irresponsible boozing from gourds? Yeah, I’m there.

3) television: The last time I watched television with such devoted regularity was in the Dark Ages of awkward teenagedom where my show of choice was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and my wardrobe was marked by a suspicious favoritism towards Old Navy performance fleece (Did I really need so many sweaters? Or vests? In periwinkle blue??).

Factor in my chronic short attention span and we can see exactly how I managed to waste several weeks in the pursuit of absolute nothing. Oh good times. But among the muddle of quotidian mundanity lie gems like the following, which still manage to invigorate my wasting capacity for self-expression into vomiting out a few syllables of disdain:



Are you chuckling? Because I am.

There are just so many reasons why this picture deserves to be immortalized on a commemorative plate of some sort. Because I mean, nothing says, “In honor of Princess Diana” like a man whose lyrical prowess has produced gems like, “It’s a celebration, bitches! / Grab a drink, grab a glass / After that I grab yo ass.”

Plus I do like Kanye’s subtle fuck-you-very-much to Diddy by testing the limits of “indoor sunglasses” trend, very popular with douchebags the world over. Ahh and Harry, my how you’ve stealthily surpassed the receding hairline plagued shadow of your elder brother to capture our hearts as the Better Looking Prince.

The Cop Out: Of all the majors in the world, you had to choose this one, did you?

Most Asian-Americans who major in Asian-American studies are unproductive and self-involved.

Now before you come at me with your plebian (oh yes, I went there) retorts and vulgarity-laced diatribes about how I am sort some of self-hating wannabe twinkie, let me assure you that my disdain is an inclusive, equal-opportunity emotion.

I’ve always approached academia with a scientific perspective favoring objectivism. We learn our material, we investigate unknowns, we analyze our findings, and we argue our hypotheses in a giant orgy of intellectual professionalism. And this is all very hugs and puppies when we’re broaching abstract topics like Renaissance literature or physics, but when touchy-feely “relatable” topics come up like cultural anthropology or race studies, the shit hits the fan.

Politely speaking, I’d call it an “unfair advantage.” But let’s face it, no matter how professional you are in your exposition; you’re never going to win a debate against someone who can reference genetic evidence as street cred and deal a deadly K.O. with the lethal finishing touch of, “You can never know what it’s like to be (insert race here)…”

Aaaand this is why I feel that most AA classes are general bitching sessions for embittered Asians who are too passive-aggressive for radical action and too entrenched in denial for support groups. Come on! This is higher education, not The Plastics. Remember the reason we’re discouraged from butchering our essays with an overdose of “I’s”? Overindulging in personal sentiments often trivializes the merit of an argument.

But doesn’t this tactic, disparaged in other disciplines, often take center stage in AA class when almost every group discussion degenerates into someone declaring, with the self-righteousness only found in smug martyrdom, “Well when I was an immigrant child living in the intolerant neighborhood of (insert city here)…”?

Isn’t it utterly remarkable when we can major in an area of study whose main focus is essentially … ourselves? Doesn’t anyone see the hypocrisy here? It’s like me majoring in MYSELF. Of course I’d be the best student since I have an impermeable body of evidence that no other student could hope to access. I’d be the unchallenged champion of all debates since no one else could ever possess the privileged insight I hold of simply being me.

To be fair, I’m not saying that Asians shouldn’t major in AA. Your heritage certainly affords you the capacity for passion in your studies and a vested interest in the AA agenda. However, being Asian doesn’t mean you’re automatically two steps ahead of your non-Asian peers, having fulfilled some physical prerequisite. It doesn’t mean you can bully dissenting opinions under the P.C. code of ethics where it’s impossible to win an argument against a racial minority concerning racial minorities without looking like a racist monster.

Why not give yourself a real challenge and go outside your comfort zone? Learning is (go figure) about discovering different points of view, not lamenting your suburban, middle-class bullshit angst. If I wanted hear the mopey, whiny explanation of someone's fake problems, I'd watch an episode of SatC or Grey's. Stop enacting the academic version of “My Super Sweet Sixteen” where it’s all about youyouyou and start being proactive.

I Spy: The Baller Edition

This entry doesn't really have a purpose that exceeds "chuckle-worthy."

P. Diddy's Vegas party for the De La Hoya/Mayweather fight was like some over-hyped music video inflated with gratuitous cameos:







Can you find the following?

1) Nelly
2) Diddy
3) Fiddy
4) Jay-Z
5) J.D. (Jermaine Dupri)
6) the bling bling ring where my vision used to be