i'm sitting in my cousin's now, with my laptop. of course i should be wrapping up my personal statement but i'm procrastinating cause my a.d.d. is all acting up, or something. i have a southern exposure view of manhattan.there's still something fascinating about all the buildings and lights on at 1am. it's officially dec 31st, and in less than 24 hours it'll be 2005. two thousand frickin five. so i'm gonna change up the pic to the right to start off the new year. it's a maple leaf of course!

ummm... so when i was @ the terminal in buffalo, there was a line... and no one was using the e-kiosks for us airways. i was all there's a bunch of empty e-ticket check in thingys available wtf? there were 2 people ahead of me, this pissed off old lady from like texas southern accent and all, and some pissed off guy... and i asked them why they didn't use the kiosks? they all were i don't know how to or some crap like that. so when people were walking in, they saw the line and started to go directly to the kiosks, and by that time a pretty long line had formed cause those 2 bozos in front of me just stood there waiting for the one ticket agent to call on them. so of course they started complaining that people cut in front of them. the ticket agent then yelled at everyone to use the damn kiosks, but they still wouldn't move, the old lady just said she didn't know how. i whatevered it, and just went to a free machine. while getting my ticket, the agent yelled at the 2 people again, and the lady went to a machine, and stood there all grumpy. the ticketing person who was still helping other customers told her to follow the instructions, but the old lady was all, you do it, i don't know what i'm doing. by that time, i wanted to punch her. i mean, how frickin hard is it to follow the instructions on the screen? people are such dumbasses.

so that's my story... i hope everyone has a safe and happy new years. wish you all lots of luck, and goodness, and stuff... and stuff.

ok... back to staring @ my laptop and not working on my essay.

in a few hours. really psyched for this trip. it'll get my head off of apps and school for a little bit.

will probably update sporadically over the next week.

ub's imap and smtp service is down, so if you've emailed me with plans and stuff gimme a call cause i can't get into my inbox. or just send mail to my nyu account.

i'll give a new years shout out pre-new years. ok sleep.

this is just funny. some kids these days are just plain spoiled. i remember when i was a youngun... i had to walk 89 miles wearing sandals, to school, in 30 below weather, through 4 foot high snow drifts, because we were too poor. no... that's not true... but being asian, you had to respect the bamboo... or any other object that was oftentimes grabbed by the 'rents in a fit of desperation. hey... i suppose it happens when you have 2 boys... and the parents were brought up in a society where getting smacked for misbehavior was the norm. while effective, this may be just as effective... having your own father kill christmas in order to get his point across. sure it's sad... but it's also frickin hillarious!

a good wingman is hard to find... so i suppose like any skilled position in demand, you have to pay for a person's services.

merry xmas y'all. thanks for reading and writing. jeez, that sounds like one of those "stay in school" slogans or something.

anyways, i'm thankful that this semester is over finally. i didn't finish as strong as i wanted to. so... i guess we'll see... it's up to the big guy up above to see if i get in anywhere.

speaking of the big guy... it's His time of year right now, for that i am thankful. there's a lot of crap all swirling around, but i really believe that it's all in His master plan. somehow, it will all work out ok.

so with that, i say merry xmas again, and hope you all have a happy new year! i'll be off to the city next week... so i'll update when i can.

peace, joy, and goodness!

"school is cool, stay in school" =]

ugh, i hate writing personal statements... and i have to write one. i've been putting it off... but no more. rough draft tomorrow hopefully (somehow i know that it's more likely that i'll put it off until the night before it's due though, but i'll try really hard to not postpone).

odd todd, new cartoon. lobster... i think he/she's my fav, cause it's a frickin lobster. who puts a lobster in a cartoon? NO ONE! that's why it's funny.

i'm trying to decide if i should bring my skates to the city. i think an afternoon or evening @ lasker rink in central park would be fun. i wonder if anyone would be up for that (or wollman, but lasker's less crowded). i experienced my first taste of really cold air for the season yesterday. it was so good. there's nothing better than being outside and have crisp air to breathe. no more crappy humid sticky air that feels dirty to walk in for the next 3 months.

you know... the bills are looking pretty good right now... they'll win in s.f., but i have a feeling they'll blow up against the steelers, and won't make the playoffs.

2 movies i want to see... meet the fockers... fat albert. on a semi-related note, it'd be funny if they made a fat abbot episode on south park.

i cried out 'uncle' even before i entered norton 112 today, but physics just kept hitting me. ac, lc, rc, rlc circuits, electric and magnetic flux, it just kept coming. i left a blob of goo, having been throughly pummeled.

boy that sure sucked.

Waiting is not a very popular attitude. In fact, most people consider waiting a waste of time. Perhaps this is because the culture in which we live is basically saying, "Get going! Do something! Show you are able to make a difference! Don't just sit there and wait!" For many people, waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go. And people do not like such a place. They want to get out of it by doing something.


In our particular historical situation, waiting is even more difficult because we are so fearful. One of the most pervasive emotions in the atmosphere around us is fear. People are afraid - afraid of inner feelings, afraid of other people, and also afraid of the future. And fearful people have a hard time waiting.


- Henri Nouwen

i'd say that normally i hate waiting... but right now... i wish i had an extra day to study for physics. the end is so near... it's so close... i'll be relieved when monday afternoon comes around. hopefully i'll feel relieved and good, instead of relieved and bad (if i don't do well on my exams).

when cheney talks about the economy, he's actually talking about himself (and the other very well off 2% of the US).

sprint agrees to buy nextel. it may be good and may be bad. this is a good way for sprint to expand in order to compete with verizon and cingular. there definitely won't be a cellular standard in the US for the forseeable future. i wonder how sprint's cdma technology will combine with what nextel uses? will it be a hybrid? you have cingular's gsm, and verizon's version of cdma. maybe the new combined sprint-el or next-int will buy up t-mobile. then they can also pickup gsm as well, but i think integrating all those specs will be hard.

the japanese are some weird people.

i'm gonna take the gre's in jan... and apply to some mph programs. i'm already set on buffalo, and columbia. anyone recommend any others? i'm kinda interested in boston u's. i suppose i should consider albany, since they actually have a sepreate public health school (unlike buffalo), and it's suny so it's cheap... but i've never really liked albany. the city's name doesn't agree with me. albany... it sounds gross. plus you can't shorten it to anything cool sounding. "alb"? "bany"? no... it just doensn't work. i'm not a big fan of syracuse either, but at least you can shorten syracuse to 'cuse.

that's all, i'm out.

this is a break from the books. i've decided i'm just screwed in physics... and that's all there is to that. i also decided that i'm going to send in an app to columbia's mailman school of public health and try to get into their mph program along with buffalo's program. i suppose i could try nyu too, but their program is more nutrition and exercise science focused and not so much policy or health administration focused. if i don't get into pharm school this time around... i guess maybe after an mph degree i could try again? i don't know... kinda feels like drawing @ straws. i could do a million things and also do nothing. i don't have that one thing that some people seem to find and are totally focused and dedicated to it. eh.

so i'm growing my hair out, i haven't had a haircut since august. it's passed that gross stage on the sides of my head where i feel like i need a haircut, and it kinda actually lets me brush it back and not stick straight out so i look like i frickin got electrocuted. i can put it behind my ears and it will stay... sorta. i guess i'm just trying this out... some people have been telling me to grow my hair out... but i still don't know about it all. it's starting to get to be a hipster mullet of sorts i suppose... but my hair's not wavy or curly... so it's just a mass of straight asian black hair... and i think makes it look more mullet-ish... which is kinda ew. also now that the sides of my head aren't being bothered, the back of my head feels gross with the mulleting. i wonder if it's a stage and i just need to wait some more? in any case... if i get an interview for a school, i think i'll have to clean up a bit and that will be the end of this experiment.

for those of you w/ high speed connections. check out how you can help with research by joining the world community grid. it's just a giant distributed computing network that uses your processor cycles when your computer is idle. it's just like the seti@home project, excet more health sciences related, and from the looks of their site, i think over time they'll offer you a choice of which projects you want to donate your computer time to help. here's the link.

people have been waiting longer to get married and start families and all that. i know this has been the trend over the last decade... and sometimes i think it's a good thing, and sometimes i don't. it's good cause people get to figure stuff out before getting into anything. i can see how it might not be as good for kids in the future though. our society is getting increasingly more complex and for the most part, both parents have to work, kids are more independent, education's more competitive, it's just this endless cycle. i wouldn't be surprised if 50 years from now scientists figure out a way to "teach" a fetus in the womb, and when they come into the world we'll hand them their B.A. or B.S. even though i don't know what the hell i'm doing or where i'm going to be in the next 10 years... i hope if i do have a family, i'm not like 60 years old when i start. it'd be nice to have working legs to do stuff with my kids... and not have to worry about my bones breaking, or a heart attack, or whatever. though it'd also be nice know what the hell i was doing. i suppose this is one of those things that you just can't "win" at huh?

i wish i was around to ride one of the old school trains.

donald grump. that's awesome. i love sesame street.

microsoft=blah

it's been awhile since i've smoked a hookah. mmmm... strawberry tobacco. i think a trip to sahara east or a light touch on a is in order this trip.

yup. i'm out.

sorry... but it's going to be sporadic for the next 2 weeks or so... for my 3 readers. i have 2 posts that i haven't finished yet saved as drafts. haven't had time to finish them. i wanted to get this out though, as it'll only be viewable until sunday i think (due to the nytimes 2 week window until it gets archieved). the religious right can suck it... and i'm glad people like al sharpton and jim wallis are engaging them.

so i caught a bit of a charlie brown christmas on the tele-vision a couple nights ago. i love this line by linus. "of all the charlie brown's in the world, you're the charlie brownest." that line is just one of the best lines ever. man i love peanuts, i'm talking old school peanuts tv specials with the bad audio and old school animation. it's just so classic.

ok... gotta go.

i really wished that i was able to be in new york for the vintage subway riding weekend. i still have to check out the renovated transit museum when i visit this time.

"Hair falls out. Teeth fall out," Walters said. "That's not sexy."

but doesn't that happen to people anyways? the "drug czar" on meth... not really on it... but talking about it... ummm... yeah. i wonder what meth is like?

reversing paralysis in dogs. you know, it's cool and all, but i wonder how they came up with formulating something to inject into living things? i think now that i'm taking this orgo course i can really start to appreciate how much has to work out right for anything to work. so much of finding something that works is luck, not only in finding a certain structure that's effective, but also being able to think about testing a chemical compound on whatever small or large problem we're trying to make better.

stuff about benzene, which is an aromatic and one of my favs to draw.

that's 3 chem related articles from the news... yahoo must be in a chem mood, or i'm in chem mode. i could've done better on my orgo tonight... there were somethings that i couldn't for the life of me remember. not too worried though, i think i did ok, and i'm doing pretty well in the class overall so far... i'll just rock the final. i'm trying really hard not to think about physics, cause it makes me mad.

this is nice of the usps to do.

done... sleep.

i booked my flight to new york, i should be studying, but i can't concentrate... not surprising.

so seeing that i'm in a new york mood... i found some good stuff on gothamist.

-the one thing that's always fascinated me about new york is the amount of change it goes through over a given period of time. sometimes the change happens slowly with subtlety and other times so incredibly fast. the amount of time it takes for a neighborhood to mature and start pricing people out due to gentrification is completely absurd. you can even go down to the most gerneral and trivial of things like subway lines, and see that the mta is forever rerouting trains, taking lines off service and adding lines back into service. in the beginning of my 6 years in new york, i seem to remember an express train for the yellow n/r line running in manhattan, then the express was taken offline for track work and station improvements, then reintroduced as the q/w towards the end of my stay. the yellow q line switched over from the orange q line, and then they did a lot of orange line time reworking around 34th st. what's interesting is you are faced with change so much that you get used to it... it feels like stasis. new york is certainly a model of contained (re)development that many cities strive for. anyways, here's a link to a gothamist entry about photographers who've journaled the changing face of new york. there's always been something, maybe a connection to a "romanticized" ideal or just the possibilities that a historical picture of new york always imparts on me. i'm pretty sure it's not one or the other, but rather a combination of many different aspects.

-things that piss me off... people with no subway ettiquette. i don't mind the kids selling candy, or the people asking for money. there are 2 things i really hate though... people littering, and people who cut their nails on the train (which i consider littering anyways). hell, i don't even care if you eat on the train, frickin throw your garbage in a garbage can! how hard is it to do that when you get off the train? there are plenty of garbage cans on the platform as you exit the train. oh, and people that cut nails dropping their clipping onto the floor and seats of the train... that's totally nasty... fingernails are just gross. i cringe when i hear someone cutting their nails on the train.

-i don't know why... but i think i think mustaches are more funny than most people. it's a combination of weird-funny-disgust maybe. i even told b that he should send out an email to all the buff crew to show up on new years with mustaches... cause i think it'd be quite funny (in a weird-funny-disgusting way)... though he'd have to have planned it well in advance for me, cause it'd take me like half-a-year to grow out my asian 'stache from the sporadic patchy stubble that it would be for the 4 months it was growing.

here's some gwb stuff...

-turn your back on bush. not much to say about it, visit the site... it could be effective if done correctly.

-bush calls for americans to volunteer because non-profits and social programs are getting their budget cuts. meanwhile, taxes are cut (yes... including taxes on the rich), and government money is shifted to defense spending (in essence halliburton). i mean really, why aren't people more pissed? yes, volunteering is GOOD! i heartily support it, but having someone ask people to do something while not helping yourself is just wrong. forget "compassionate conservative"... how about just compassionate?

-so yes, there are lots of things that i don't agree with bush/bushies on (in fact many that make me downright angry), but occasionally good things do happen. i think this credit report plan is a really good idea. it provides credit reports for anyone that wants to see their record. this makes information easily accessible for people that may not want to pay $10 or more for their own damn personal report that other private companies have access to but we have to pay for each time we want to review it!

other...

-this is a good thing. i'm glad the court of appeals reversed the previous decision to allow colleges to ban recruiters from the armed forces from recruiting on their campuses. if we are to have a truly open society, people should be allowed to make their own choices (if it doesn't hurt others) without having to be silenced. it seems the rest of our government allows people to be themselves (we have openly gay and lesbian mayors, sheriffs, etc.), how come our military won't allow people to be themselves? things are getting better... we still have a ways to go... hopefully these next 4 years won't reverse all that's been done up to now.

-stress it bad for everyone... but it's really bad for women. which is why women need to smoke some fatty j's. no... (well, yeah if you want) i don't know what's going to happen in the future, but it just seems like generation after generation people are getting more stressed... so it doesn't bode well for our health as a people. is it going to come down to whether we want to maintain ourselves to keep dealing with all the stress, or whether or not we should all feel healthy and feel good about ourselves? i hope it's the latter, but i think it'll be the former, which is just sad.

sports related...

-man... i'd hate to work for the penguins.

-this was a classic game... i totally remember feeling like crap in the beginning, and then the hope and excitement building up to the win. these are the games that totally make it hurt 100 times worse to be a buffalo-anything fan. getting your hopes up only to know that in the end, they will be crushed by fucking texas (or whoever). even this season, we're almost at .500, i'll even put the hope of making the playoffs out there... but something will go wrong... and not just wrong like something small... something hugely, grossly wrong will happen... in that only to buffalo kinda way (*ahem* foot IN the damn crease hull, wide right, cowboys, cowboys, redskins, homerun throwback... i really hate dallas, perhaps that's where i get my twisted sense of humor from... cause it's totally twisted that i was born in dallas, of all frickin places).

i don't know what's wrong with me... i really, really, seriously, need to be studying orgo... like... now. i'm not though.

alex liked his bday present. i got him the avs alternate jersey... he got me the sabres old blue & gold jersey for my bday... so now we can really get into our hockey battles... and perhaps he'll be able to string together some wins for once.

in other news, ken jennings lost on today's 'jeopardy'.