with the night of reality tv drawing to a close (i ended up watching my big fat obnoxious fiancee AND average joe 2, i put in some quality time with this blog setup. and while i made significant steps in the right direction, i don't have any changes to show for my work. the ability for you, america, to comment on my posts is coming soon. as soon as i can figure out how to resolve this silly little errors that my server is telling me about.
he picked the little people skateboarder chick. she's dope. but yeah, i think i would have probably chose the hot southern girl.
my brain is mush.
i know people probably won't agree, but i'm watching "the littlest groom" and i love it. maybe because i love watching any kind of tv. or maybe because i'm not discriminating about what i watch when i'm in the mood to just sit here and let my brain turn to mush. whatever. that's not the point. the point is that this show is a boatload of fun. and it's only two episodes long. none of this having to following a show for weeks and weeks. i've only been watching for half an hour and he's already eliminated 8 girls. that's efficiency, america.
and as of right now, it's down to two. an average sized girl, zoe, and a little-people girl, mika. and they're both really really pretty. mika rocks. she took him on a skateboarding date. that's dope. she looks kind of hapa, too. a hapa girl who's beautiful and knows how to skateboard? i don't think i'd really care that she was only 3 feet tall. but zoe has a mild southen accent, making her irresistable. yes, i'm beginning to analyze girls on tv more than i analyze girls in my own life. yes, this littlest groom gets way more action than i get. yes, i'm upset. no, i don't want to talk about it.
i ask, "how about we all try to be not stupid today?"
they reply, "well, i don't think we should do that because blah blah blah....."
and then they ask why i seem so upset.
we're smoke testing the sewer lines on a military base here. (basically, we have a fan that blows smoke into the sewer lines. where ever a crack or leak in the line is present, we'll see smoke rising into the air.) and while we spent a good deal of time calling and faxing and emailing and knocking on doors in our attempts to notify people, some people just didn't want to listen. that leads to all kinds of fun.
we were smoking the sewer lines in a training area called "area X". (it's apparently the offical name of the area. you can follow the signs to get there. there actually are signs. area X. ok) it's a big field with a bunch of concrete pads all over. on one end of the field are about 200-300 soldiers broken up into groups of 10-15. each of them are carrying a large gun, and they're taking turns shooting at their targets. these targets, luckily, are in the opposite direction of us.
all day we hear these firecracker-sounding pops and cracks. just like a firecrackers, except they're louder and are intended to kill a man. every once in a while we'd hear this much louder BOOM. and we'd see a large cloud of smoke rising from further away in the distance.
from being out there, you learn a simple correlation: smoke + noise = thing that is used to kill people.
usually these sounds and smoke signals are not right by you. close enough for you to keep an eye open for it, but far enough so you know that, at least in the very near future, you're not in any serious danger.
so what happens when the smoke is, say, billowing around you as you step out of the front door of your office building? ...and on top of that, you haven't read the notices that we've sent you? well, the answer is simple. you run out past the smoke and stare me down and shout:
frantic officer man: "what the hell is this smoke?"
me: "we're smoke testing the sewer system. the smoke is safe and non-toxic. nothing is burning. we'll have the smoke off in a minute or two."
now less frantic officer man: "do i need to do anything about this?"
me: "nope. everything's fine."
now calm officer man: "are you with DPW?"
me: "we're working with them, sir."
him, revealing why we should have total faith in our military: "oh good. (muttering)...DPW...sewers... (shouting again) are you here to trim these trees? they really need trimming."
me: "uh...we'll get right on that."
i think it takes a long time, or at least a lot of effort, to post useful and fun-to-read things. or maybe just more effort than i'm able to put in this week. i'm out in the field for work. more sewer stuff. no, it doesn't get any more fun. 10 hours of sewers makes me smile. or something.
being in the office on a saturday is not so bad when there's no one else here.
my music is loud and mcdonald's is sitting happily in my stomach and all my little cares have been thrown out the window.
happy valentines day to you, too.
it's friday the 13th. and it's been and down kind of day. i had some really productive hours at work. then i had some fun times and some good laughs. then there were the depressing episodes and the conversations revealing disturbing and frightening information.
i kind of feel that today has been a snapshot of what's been going on for the last month. i feel like i'm on the edge of something good and something horrible. and maybe there's this rubberband connecting me to the middle. something wonderful and amazing will happen to me and i'll feel like everything is perfect. then, snap! i'm back in the middle looking at some kind of horrible coming toward me. and i sink back into this funk that i can't seem to get myself out of. maybe quicksand would have been a decent metaphor. but quicksand doesn't really allow that intermittent euphoria i've been feeling.
maybe the simplest explanation is that i'm having a bad month. not the worst month of my life, but definitely a month that could go down as a fairly bad month in my life. the confusing part is that nothing that has happened this month has been particularly bad; some things that happened this month have actually been notably wonderful. so what's the deal?
i read an article that had to do with happiness. the article said that when asked whether a person would rather put up with a very bad short term problem or a barely noticable chronic problem, people would choose the mild chronic problem. the example they used was choosing between a broken leg and a bum knee. given the choice, people would put up with a chronically, though mildly, sore knee rather than a temporarily broken leg.
the psychological researcher quoted in the article discussed how humans are notoriously bad at choosing what will bring them future happiness. we underestimate our ability to deal with and come to terms with significant hardships and often decide to put up with minor annoyances over the long-term rather than deal with a large inconvenience in the short-term.
maybe the last month has been a bunch of little problems that have worked on me and broken me down (i'm reminded of the scene in jurrasic park 1, where the small 6" tall dinosaurs swarm and eat the fat guy just after he tumbles into the ravine). so will they all just go away? do i have to adopt the obsessive-compulsive habits of my father and brother to eliminate all these small things? wouldn't that just put me into a different kind of funk? when will britney spears come and save me from all this madness?
the site is looking better, but when it's a competition between site improvements and sleep, i think the site might just have to wait.
so a quick explanation on the welcome picture for those who aren't as familiar with chinese history as they should be: (i'll put it in very general terms so you can remember it)
back in the day (~1950), in china, there was this guy named Mao Zedong who's maybe the most important figure in china becoming the "people's republic of..." (quick timeline of china's leaders. you'll hear his name in connection with the "red guard", his "little red book", the "great leap forward", communism, and andy warhol.
his face is on watches, lighters, tshirts, ridiculously huge posters all over china. a ton of propaganda is out there showing how wonderful he is, much like the image on the welcome page. he was called "chairman mao", which happens to rhyme with "chairman lau".
now that i've spelled out everything and gave a rather poor summary of mao's life and importance in china's history, i'll go back to trying to make things pretty.
so there's this reoccuring dream that i have. i probably have it once a month or so, on average. i haven't really been able to pin-point what triggers it or really anything to correlate the dream with. and it's not exactly so much of an entire dream, but more of a certain element of the dream that occurs in whichever dream i'm having.
i could be dreaming of reading a newspaper on a train going through europe, or dreaming of eating chocolate ice cream out of an industrial waste-filled 55-gallon drum, it won't really effect whether or not this happens to me in the dream:
my jaw is clenched tightly. so tightly that it almost hurts my jaw bones and facial muscles. it doesn't feel as if i'm being physically controlled by anything, yet i can do nothing to unclench my teeth. next, i start to move my lower jaw forward and out towards the front of my face, only i don't unclench my teeth. and since your front teeth hang lower than your bottom teeth when you're teeth are closed tight, my top and bottom front teeth meet and strain against each other as i push my bottom teeth forward.
ultimately, i strain tooth against tooth until one of the top front teeth breaks. i don't feel any physical pain during the dream, but i do feel this horrible scared and worried feeling even after i awake. and upon getting up, i always check the condition of my teeth, which make it through the dream unscathed.
considering all the dental dramas that i've gone through in my life, it makes sense that this kind of dream would bother me. i'm not sure, though, what is more bothersome: the idea of having more troubling dental issues like the ones brought up in the dream, or the fact that years after my teeth problems have been solved, teeth are still, on whatever conscious level dreams are on, an unresolved issue for me.
or maybe it was just something i ate.
i think maybe the tone or content of my blog will have to be changing. momma found out. then she started one of her own:http://kittylau.blogspot.com/. i don't think putting a link to momma's blog on my blog makes me a very cool kid, but maybe she'll actually post to it regularly. that'll give you some insight into how amazingly normal i am considering my childhood. my parents are crazy; the proof is coming.
it raises the question pondered in probably everyone's blog: who am i writing all this to? is it for the random public to read, or is it something more for my own benefit? i don't know. it's really a mix between the two. sure, i want people to read it. well, some people. reading parts of it. but it's also something i'm doing for myself. perhaps it's the motivation to actually start putting effort into writing for the first time since high school; i should write well instead of writing more. or maybe i should only write more if i'm writing well. and writing about useful things. unlike this last paragraph.
why are the weekends so short and so good? and why is it that i can spend weeks missing the mainland and being sick of being here, and then a single day can make me do a complete turnaround?
i spent the day, sunday, out on the west side surfing places i've never surfed before. i'd come in to shore every hour or so to drink some ice cold water and eat some poke and fresh fruit. the beach was fairly empty, (the probowl was going on right then) so it was almost perfect.
the waves were clean and fun, the sun was bright and warm, and the girls on the beach were doing the tanning where they untie parts of their suits so they don't get certain tan lines. good food, good surf, beautiful, partially undressed, less-than-bikini wearing women in the hot sun...
later that night we ended up at "maitai's", an open air bar with a ridiculously long happy hour on sundays. and while it's a place known for being too loud, too crowded, too smokey, and too hot, on sunday night it none of those things.
the day was simply beautiful and beautifully simple. it was just what i needed just when i needed it.
if you haven't seen it, check out that chinese guy from american idol. there's an entire website devoted to him. it's kind of scary. i wouldn't take it as far as these people are taking it, but it's worth it to go check out the video.
www.williamhung.net
something evil is on my laptop. i don't know what it is or how i know it's there. but it's there. and it hates me.
work related: i went around military bases yesterday lifting up manhole covers and inspecting the condition of the manhole. and we get to watch the poop flow by. sweet.
home related: my place is a mess, i rarely do laundry, and i still have a bunch of home improvement-type things to do. i think i've run out of milk.
health related: i'm officially the heaviest i have ever been. i'm nearing 170lbs and i'm not sure i can attribute it all to my increased lifting. i'm also signed up to do this island perimeter run at the end of the month. maybe i can drop weight by then; it'd probably help lighten the stress on my legs. ugh.
i'm already looking into where i can get my own metal solar nipple medallion.