Shameless Plug and Random Stuff

i can't believe my 23rd birthday is coming up this friday...every year i get really excited during the days leading up to my birthday, but this year i feel NOTHING. does it mean that i've lost my inner-kid? maybe it's just because 23 isn't really a big deal. if anything, i'm waiting for my 25th birthday (as is my mother, but for a completely different reason; she wants me married by then -_-;;) just so i can say that i've been alive for a quarter of a century. due to my somewhat pessimistic, misanthropic, doom-and-gloom outlook on life and the world in general, i think that's a pretty commendable feat, and something worth celebrating. 23 years? meh, not so much.



anyway, the reason for this shamelss plug isn't to advertise that it's my birthday (well, actually, never mind, it kind of is), but to advertise the fact that rather than birthday gifts (although those are nice too), i'm asking friends and family to donate to a cause i support. i know not very many people actually read my blog, but i'm trying to advertise my birthday wish any way i can. i also know that many of my friends may not be too well off in the financial department, so although the facebook page may ask for $10, i'd be happy with whatever people can afford (i only donated $10 myself, so it'd be a bit silly of me to expect people to donate more).



on a related, but kind of random note, apparently the causes application on facebook thinks i'm nearing the century-mark:


maybe this is the reason i'm not excited about my birthday anymore (because i'm a jaded, tired, near-centenarian)?


now on a completely unrelated note, i start my LSAT classes tomorrow. it's just the diagnostic test tomorrow and not an actual class session, but i'm still excited. and by "excited" i mean "i have a herd of elephant ballerinas in my stomach and i feel like a little kid who gets so excited (s)he pukes." wish me luck!

Engrish Gems

since i haven't really been blogging as of late (due to a drought in amusing blogging ideas), i have been compelled by one of my two very loyal readers (suma) to update my blog. i think i've fallen into a slump lately and i'm too lazy to come up with something entertaining, so i'm going to cheat and make this post about some engrish gems i found while pretending to do work.

ok, sign face

oh those confusing chinese...i'll take a glass of manicure, please. and by "manicure," i mean "moscato."

more from the confusing chinese...are there no regular hospital rooms?

and my love for poop is showcased once again. browntooth, anyone?

yup, pretty much sums up my life; i've got the hot basics covered.

Also, my new internet infatuations as of late: STFUmarrieds and postcards from yo momma.

"My Boyfriend is..." Part 2

i am now convinced that my boyfriend is a coin mint. i have come to this conclusion using my very astute skills of observation and deduction (both of which are obviously my strong suits, haha). how, you ask? well...i've been noticing a trend where we'll be doing the most mundane of things, e.g. eating, sitting/talking, kissing (ew, i know), and all of a sudden we'll hear a coin drop from him. they show up in the most random places, like his arm, his leg, the underside of his foot, his butt, etc.

so far there have been about 4 pennies and a nickel produced, and i've been getting on his case about minting coins of more value so we can be rolling in the $$$ and never have any financial woes for the rest of our lives. apparently he can't, though, since he needs to eat and sleep more to level up in order to produce dimes, quarters and half-dollars. i've recently started cooking things out of a korean cookbook my mom sent to me about 3 months ago in hopes that he will start cranking out those gold sacagawea dollar coins (is it too much to hope for him producing bills??).

right now it's 9 cents and counting, but check back in a couple of years to see how much he's produced...

My Boyfriend is a Secret Agent

i'm almost positive i'm sick. i ended up sleeping in until 8:04 yesterday, and made a last-minute decision not to go to work because i felt like crap. i ended up sleeping on-and-off for the rest of the morning and into mid-afternoon. i woke up around 2:30, but it wasn't until around 4 that i decided to go with zammez to his apartment complex's leasing office to figure out a solution to his current living situation/predicament (long story short his roommate/flatmate totally bailed on him, ran off with a bunch of money borrowed from various friends and gave his cell phone to zammez so we didn't really have a way of tracking him down...). the guy at the office told us that the best way would be to turn his keys in to the office by friday (i.e. move out) and set up a payment plan with the corporate accountants, and that hopefully he'd only be responsible for his half of the rent.

after meeting with the agent at the leasing office, we went to zammez's apartment to try to clean the place to facilitate an easy moving-out. this is no easy feat; in short, i feel like i need a full-body biohazard suit with a gas mask just to walk into the place, and i wouldn't be surprised if one of us contracted salmonella or e.coli just from breathing the air in the apartment. anyway, i go to clean off his desk, which is littered about with bottle caps, bottles, cans, and tons of paper.

that's when i found evidence which undoubtedly prove my boyfriend is a secret agent, a ninja, a fugitive from the law, or all of the above. he had 3 different bills addressed to his address, but to 3 different names: James Kong, James Quan, and James Kwon (which is supposedly the correct name, but now i'm not so sure...). what kind of normal person needs 3 different aliases? when i asked him about the bills, he just laughed it off and walked out of the room, which further fuel my suspicions that he's leading a double life that he's not telling me about, and i have now vowed that i will get to the bottom of this.

in other news, i'm making myself stay at work until 6 today, tomorrow and thursday in order to make up for my sick day yesterday, because i don't want to use up a valuable sick/vacation day. clearly this initiative is proving to be productive as i haven't been able to complete a single task my supervisor has left for me in his week-long absence, and i'm just sitting here blogging -_-;;

Blargh.

i think i'm starting to come down with a cold or something, because my throat has been feeling scratchy and weird the past couple mornings. luckily my throat doesn't hurt thanks to the tonsilectomy i got about 2 years ago (the one that led to my near-death experience, *eye roll*), but i keep getting this bad feeling that i'm going to get sick and i'll have to miss work. apparently i only have 4? 3? and a half sick days left to use until july, so i really need to start being picky about how often/when i get sick, haha.

last night i took my first bubble bath in YEARS (i think the last one i took was when i was in middle school, maybe?), and i loved it. i got this raspberry sorbet bubble bath/shower gel/shampoo from philosophy on wednesday; it worked okay as a bubble bath although the bubbles weren't as numerous or as big as i would've liked, and it worked nicely as a shampoo/shower gel. i think it made my hair smell good, but i'm not sure since my hair is up in a ponytail right now and it's not long enough that i can bring a strand around the back of my head and sniff it. anyway, i digress.

i've signed up to take LSAT prep classes at kaplan in march, and i feel like i've just signed my life away. the hefty price tag ($1,299) doesn't do much either to alleviate my feelings of apprehension.

this has probably got to be THE most disjointed, random post i've written so far, but i'm too lazy to come up with a theme for this post (more like i'm running out of ideas). maybe i just shouldn't have written at all, but i'm bored at work.

oh, and before i go, check this out.

Wikipedia

i'm pretty sure the government would be extremely displeased to discover the disproportionate amount of time i spend traipsing through the cyberworld (barring many, many sites which have been blocked by WatchGuard at my work for various reasons, e.g. "shopping," "arts," "entertainment," "personals and dating," (i.e. facebook..sad face...) etc.) compared to the actual amount of time i spend working on automating court forms, since i basically signed away a year of my life and took an oath swearing that i would use this year (and the government's money) to help low-income communities. however, to my defense, i'm waiting for people to test the forms i have automated and offer me feedback, so i'm only going to waste time on the internet until i get back all the feedback i need.

some of my time is spent on MLIA, my mom is a fob, unrelated captions, and customers are always right looking at their updated posts, and for the past couple of days, updating my blog. however, there is a finite amount of time i can spend at these websites before i run out of new posts to look at, and so as of late i have been delving into the seemingly infinite depths of information that is wikipedia (although i was too lazy to do so for yesterday's post, haha). i seriously think i could spend months just reading through all the articles on wikipedia; now THAT would be a fun job to have.

here are the top 3 facts i found out from wikipedia today:

1) louis althusser was a crazy who strangled his wife to death.

ok, so there were probably many better, more sensitive and politically-correct ways to phrase that little tidbit of information, but i haven't really been known for my sensitivity or political correctness. if you (all 3 readers of my blog) have been offended, i apologize. anyway, getting back to the point...i think i remember hearing something about this in my literature in theoretical perspectives class last year, but i could just be making that up. in any case, it was pretty jarring to read about a pretty prominent (or wait, was he prominent? i feel like i know almost next to nothing about philosophy...) marxist philosopher strangling his wife. apparently he suffered from numerous bouts of mental instability, and he was probably going through one when this incident with his wife happened. i didn't need wikipedia to tell me he was crazy though; i knew it as soon as i read his hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo about "interpellation" and "mis-recognition" and "ideological state apparatuses."

2) according to wikipedia, despite my denials, i am a hipster based on how i wear my scarf.

i've received a lot of flack from people because of my not-so-well-informed fashion purchase a couple of years ago. i thought it was just a cool looking black and white patterned scarf, but apparently i bought something that closely resembles a keffiyeh, with the coloring conjuring associations with the fatah movement. to be quite honest, i don't really have a stance regarding the whole Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but apparently there are many people around me who do and have given me a hard time for wearing a politically-incorrect/insensitive scarf. on a completely unrelated note (but still related, actually), i received a lot of crap from koreans when i wore said scarf in korea because a boy band (big bang) had popularized the scarf a couple months before my study abroad experience. koreans made fun of me for being a fangirl and wearing the "big bang scarf," and didn't even listen to my protests that i had, in fact, purchased this scarf long before i even knew who big bang was.

ANYWAY, according to wikipedia, i'm a hipster because (and i quote verbatim): "hipsters folded them in half to make a triangle, then gathered the scarf around the neck to leave one point facing down in the center of the chest." to my defense, i don't wear my scarf in this manner because i'm a hipster or a wannabe, but because i can't think of any other way to wear this particular scarf; if anything, rather than being a hipster i'm just unoriginal and too lazy to come up with another way to wear my scarf.

3) there is a plane that has pikachu painted on it.

apparently, all nippon airlines has three planes that have pikachu liveries. it is now one of my life goals to fly in one of these three airplanes.

taking "kawaii" to whole new heights.

Music Obsessions

before i start with this post, i'd like to preface it with a disclaimer that i am NOT a hipster, not by any means. i'm actually quite indiscriminate when it comes to music; i used to jokingly call myself a "music whore" (this was before i realized how problematic this self-proclamation was).

anyway, getting back to the post. i've found myself listening to certain artists on repeat when i'm listening to my ipod. i'm also very bored at work, since i'm waiting for people to give me feedback on my forms. so, put two and two together and voila, you have a blog post. in no particular order:

1) marina and the diamonds
this lovely gal hails from wales, but is london-based. as far as i know, she only has a couple songs that have been (relatively) widely distributed, but hopefully she'll release her full-length debut album soon. i've fallen in love with all of her songs that i've heard so far, in part because of her interesting vocal stylizations and in part because of her lyrics. my favorites are "obsessions," "i am not a robot," and "seventeen."

2) alphabeat
i really should try to at least wikipedia all these artists i'm writing about, but i'm too lazy. all i know about this band is that they're danish, and i love the male/female harmonies in their songs. they have a pop-ish feel (not like bubblegum, but more like an 80's pop), and my favorite songs by them are probably "10,000 nights" and "fascination.

3) the bird and the bee
i'm not really sure how to classify this duo, but if i had to i would probably describe them as indie/synth pop flirting with twee. makes sense why i like them, given my long-lasting love affair with twee (5 years and counting; that's long for me...). i like the general electro-synth feel of their songs, juxtaposed with the girl's (i REALLY should wikipedia) soft, understated, breathy vocals. i do, however, have some qualms about listening to their song "love letter to japan" just because of the exoticization, generalization and appropriation that goes on in the song, but other than this minor glitch, i really like this duo.

4) shugo tokumaru
i fell hard for this guy back in late 2008, and my love for him still hasn't abated. i REALLY don't know how to classify his sound, but i think he and his music are adorable, and i love him. his album "exit" is the only album i've EVER downloaded off iTunes, and that's saying a lot since i'm usually cheap and obtain my music through more shady and surreptitious methods. i keep saying i want to get my hands on more of his music, but i've yet to do so...oh well, maybe i will once my year of being AmeriPoor is over.