My Mom is a Squirrel, My Dad is a Chipmunk, and I Am a Taco

for the first time this week i've been able to get off work at 5:40-ish, so hooray for that!
i've fallen into a terrible habit of coming home, inhaling my dinner, then passing out for the night around 8:00 pm...i feel like people will yell at me and tell me i'm not fat, but weight concerns aside, this CANNOT be good for my health.

anyway, in celebration of coming home slightly earlier than usual, i am now updating my blog (also in hopes that blogging will keep me from falling asleep at 8). i'm actually supposed to be working on a flier for our church, but i can't seem to get the formatting right so i'm taking a break.

my mom is a squirrel. i have no doubt about that. if i were buddhist and believed in past lives (and also bet), i would bet my next paycheck that my mom had been a squirrel in her former life. seriously, when my mom "cleans" (which mostly consists of her shoving stuff into closets, boxes under beds, etc., but never, NEVER throwing anything out), things magically disappear into a black hole or something. when i (or sister/dad) ask her where she put it, her answer, without skipping a beat, is that she doesn't know. she cleaned it; how does she NOT know??

case in point (or point in case): my sister and i were trying to bake a cake for her friend andrew's birthday. well...by "my sister and i," i mean my sister did most of the work and i cracked 1 egg and crushed some oreos (hey, it takes skill to crush oreos that finely, ok?). and by "bake," i mean we bought cake mix from walmart at 11 pm, but i digress. anyway, we were almost done with decorating the cake so my sister was trying to look for her cake container/carrier thingy. however, when she went to where she THOUGHT it would be, lo and behold, my squirrel mother had meticulously hidden it away. we spent about half an hour looking for that thing, because it wasn't as if we could wake up our mom and ask her where she'd cleaned (hidden) it, and even if we could have, she would've just told us that she didn't know -_-;;
finally, after about 30 minutes, skimchi found it hidden away in the WAYYY back of one of the cabinets; i tell you, my mother is GOOD at hiding things. if you ever need to hide criminal evidence/treasure, my mother is the go-to woman (j/k, but not really, haha).

this week, my dad is a chipmunk. he, at the tender age of 50 (soon-to-be-51, in sept.) got his wisdom teeth removed on monday, and the swelling still hasn't gone away. he got a cool looking ice pack thingy from the dentist that wraps around his face like so:i seriously think i should have just gone to art school, like i wanted to do back in high school...

i've been a good daughter and trying to lift his spirits by telling him he looks like a chipmunk. or better yet, like a pokemon:actually, my mom looks kind of like this too...skimchi says it's our mom saying "야!" ("ya")

finally, this gem came from a most unexpected source: ian/ina/isabel. he basically equated me to a taco in our facebook chat today (this is not verbatim, but this is how i remember it):

i: you weren't on gchat!
i: i wanted to talk to you
i: so i was upset
e*: oh, sorry...i wasn't logged into my gmail
i: but then i had a taco for lunch and everything was okay :D

i don't know how you interpret this, but i take it to mean that my worth (to ian, anyway) is equal to that of a taco. i mean, look: no e*-->upset-->taco-->happy. in other words, his disappointment at not being able to talk to me on gchat was not just mitigated (which would have been bad enough), but completely reversed and replaced with happiness from a taco. that better have been a dang good taco, ian.

anyway, my dad is asking me why it's taking an hour to make a simple flier, so i must go...until my next post, adieu!

**UPDATE**
i stand corrected. ina has just i.med me on fb to tell me this:

i: you need to correct that equation
e*: how?
i: Taco > you
e*: -_-;;;

this chat IS verbatim...and there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth...

On Interviews

if you have met me in real life, you will probably know that at times i can be very awkward and inarticulate. maybe this is why i feel sick when i'm offered an interview, rather than being happy like a normal, articulate person.

anyway, by some stroke of luck, someone from my church submitted my resume to a korean company called dongwon autoparts technology, LLC, and dongwon in turn called me to schedule an interview. now, i'm sure any rational, normal human being would have been happy to be asked for one, since it usually means the company/organization is considering you as a strong candidate, but me being who i am, just felt...well, BLEH. i know this sounds ungrateful, especially given the job market these days, but i really didn't want to go and i was annoyed that they wanted to interview me.

the day of the interview, my parents decided to drive me to the company's office/headquarters in georgia, partly for moral support and partly because i'm hopelessly bad with directions. my dad, being the rational person that he is, decides NOT to take directions given to us by the church person who very kindly submitted my resume, but rather decides he can kind of guesstimate his way there (for the record, he is even worse with roads and directions than i am -_-;;). so we're driving down this one-lane road (too small to be a highway...) going farther and farther into podunk, who-knows-where, and i'm starting to look like a little kid doing the pee-pee dance because it's getting closer and closer to 10 am, my scheduled interview time.

by some stroke of luck, we encounter a really big dongwon sign, so the three of us exclaim in happiness as my dad turns onto the narrow, gravel road. that's where it starts to go downhill. as he keeps driving, it becomes increasingly obvious that it's not the right place. rather than a big office building/factory that we were expecting, we're approaching a one-family home with no cars in the driveway and a dog tied up on the porch...we all think that's a little off, but this MUST be it, since they have a sign up, right?

as i'm getting out of the car, my dad tells me to call him when i'm done with my interview. NO JOKE, my dad was just going to drop me off, out in the middle of nowhere with ABSOLUTELY NO cell phone reception (gee, thanks, dad -_-); luckily, my mom yells at him and tells him they should just wait there...so i walk up to the front of the house and the dog starts jumping around, wagging its tail and generally going crazy, and i'm teetering in my heels trying to keep my dress clean from its muddy paws. i ring the doorbell but no one comes to the door right away so i start playing with the dog. after about 3 minutes of me doing this, all of a sudden my mom sticks her head out the window and starts yelling and waving frantically, saying that we're at the wrong place. what. the. heck.

we finally get to the RIGHT location, which is hidden away and DOES NOT HAVE A SIGN OUT FRONT, and at that point i'm already 10 minutes late for my interview. as i walk in, the guy at the front desk greets me and asks who i'm there to see, and i realize i have no idea who my interviewer is...talk about being unprepared >_<. i guess i looked so pitiful and confused that he decides to go and look for someone who could potentially be interviewing me.

fast forward 5 minutes, and i'm sitting in a room with two people, a korean man and a caucasian woman, and both are taking turns to ask me typical questions. to be honest, i don't feel like the interview is going too well because i'm too hung up on the fact that i was more than 10 minutes late for the interview to actually focus on anwering the questions well, and i feel like the korean-speaking part of the brain decided to take a vacation when i needed it the most; after all, they were looking for a bilingual person, and i had kind of exaggerated on my resume that i was fluent in korean (fluent conversationally, but when it comes to professional/academic settings, i lack the vocabulary to be completely fluent). they wrap up the interview after 15 minutes or so of me blundering through questions, and as i leave the building, i'm thinking how i totally would have been hired if it had been the dog interviewing me. seriously, that dog LOVED me and couldn't stop licking me :)

on our way back home, about 15 minutes after the interview was done, i get a call from the senior HR person (the woman who interviewed me), offering me a job as an HR assistant and telling me to come in next monday.

i guess the moral of this story is to give people hope, that even if you think your interview went terribly, you could still be offered the job (you are your own harshest critic, after all). i mean, come on...if i was offered a job after that ordeal, who's to say that you won't be hired as well? and last but not least, i'm trying to say that God works in mysterious ways...i mean, i wasn't really trying to look for a job (in fact, i wanted to enjoy my funemployment a little while longer), and i feel like under normal circumstances i would NOT have been offered a job, especially given my great first impression of being 15 minutes late and not knowing who my interview was scheduled with...but God is good, and i now have a job!

(sorry for the pseudo-narrative/prose style writing, my regular writing style will be resumed in my next post; i promise!)