| 6 apr 2001 dreary rainy april day in the bay area. i woke up to the pitter patter of raindrops out in the street. the first thing i thought of was that this rain is going to put a crimp on my PMT (pearl milk tea) expedition this weekend. so it seems i'm coming off possibly the most stressful and tiring project so far and being assigned immediately to the next chip. so much for getting a well-deserved break for my hard work at vivace. no, i'm not really bitter, because i do think i'd rather be occupied rather than be bored out of my mind at the office. well, i think raymond took me a little out of context when he quoted me as saying "dating sucks." it doesn't suck. it's just the scene out here is kind of jacked. or rather, i haven't adapted to the post-college scene. it didn't help that i was in a relationship with karine for four years, half of which extended past graduation. but i just think stanford was just such an easier place to meet amazing and goddess-like people, compared to this wide-open expanse of silicon valley geek testosterone. sad to hear pizzicato five is breaking up. i'm listening to their newest release right now, aptly titled, "the fifth release from matador." it's quirky japanese discopop. sometimes i think that it'd be a good soundtrack for my life, like the opening credits for a film about me, driving down highway 101 in my car... ----- i'm just starting to establish my lunch crowd here at vivace networks. when i first got here, it seemed a lot of people just grabbed food by themselves, which made for a horrible lunch experience. my old company, teralogic, was awesome, because we were situated right next to castro, which is this downtown section of mountain view packed with restaurants. so lunch was always a large gathering cavorting to castro and having great meals. that is the biggest thing that i miss about teralogic. so for the first few months of so, lunch was always the dreaded hour or so where i would get in my car and have some fast food or something. it was pretty miserable. but today was the third straight friday where we went to milpitas and had dim sum. yeah. grease galore in bite-size chunks. with obscene amounts of hot sauce. ----- i think my youth (both literally and figuratively) really shows when i'm around engineers. i'm always being silly, goofing off and what not. i was shocked to find out that one of my younger-seeming coworkers was actually 32 years old. i was playfully trying to pull out this one conspicuous gray hair on his head, and he shimmied away and said that he wanted to keep them because he wanted to look older. that was the first time i've heard of someone who didn't want to preserve his youthful look. i don't want to get old. more mature, maybe. more responsible, of course. but i don't ever want to lose my silly edge. life is much more fun when you're laughing and creating mischief. it's sad to see the characters on _friends_ get old. they're all supposed to be over 30 now. i wonder how far the show will go into their married lives and such. i don't like the chandler and monica engagement. monica is way too neurotic and obssessive to be endearing. i'd tell her in person to get a life and stop fretting about keeping everything in the apartment in perfect order. let some entropy run its course! chill! but my ideal life would be the _friends_ show circa 1997. back when ross and rachel were together. heaven would be being surrounded by my best buddies and also by a cosmic soul mate. throw in a little taiko and a posh bank account, and that'd be pretty much all i need. (maybe that's why i cherish my stanford days so much, because i pretty much had all that except for the money thing.) oh, and i want fabulous hair and clothes like what they wear on the show. chandler definitely has the best wardrobe of the guys. speaking of hair, last summer i changed my hair so that the part is near the middle rather than on the side. i was mainly inspired by jo-ann. yeah, inspired by a girl. i thought that it would be the cutest thing that we could be a couple with the same hairstyle. ha ha. anyways, i find it to be much easier to manage, and i'm much more inclined to gallavant about without my omnipresent baseball cap. yeah. ever since japan, i started wearing a baseball cap. everywhere. i don't know why. i think i started in japan because it made me obviously american, and i liked being recognized instantly as a foreigner rather than have the natives come up to me and be disappointed that i wasn't japanese. back then, i only had one hat, a gift from my friend amy. but after i got back to the states, i just started accumulating dozens of baseball caps. now, i only wear two types: abercrombie and blue marlin. i'm pretty stubborn about that now. no, it wasn't quite appropriate for me to wear a hat everywhere. especially since it's not prevalent among people my age, or even with the college set these days, it seems. i think i just didn't like my hair back then, and the easiest way to deal with it was to cover it up. for years, i think the only person who got to see my hair was karine at night. funny. i would even bring a hat along with me to semi-formals, so as the party wound down i would untuck my shirt, loosen my tie, and put on my cap. but anyways, i like my hair much better now. i wish i had discovered it earlier. ah well. at least i'll much better in pictures at emi's upcoming wedding, as opposed to jeremy's two years ago when my hair just wilted under the summer sun and turned into a bowl! blech. can't wait for the weekend to get here. |