burrito as weapon.

in more food happenings... so my brother jon has been back this week, and his roomate came with him. we all went down to the anchor bar this afternoon for some yummy wings. i think my appreciation of the anchor bar wings has gone up on this trip... though i still wouldn't say they are better than duff's. my mouth is still a bit sensitive... but it's good and all... it builds character.

maybe i should've paid more attention in chinese school. my reading's atrocious, my writing's even worse. my speaking's still ok, but i sound more and more like a foreigner speaking the language than someone who's spoken the language since they were young. my parents don't even speak chinese with me anymore. so with the emergence of china... what will india's role be? both those countries have good days ahead of them.

sweet... oxycontin stolen from the drugstore. this is the rite-aid right across the street from my old high school.

i'll have to get together with some people and watch these games after my finals are over. it's been ages since i've seen hockey on tv. game 6 of the '99 cup finals? ask me on may 27... maybe i'll watch it and get my heart broken all over again by brett "no goal" hull. right now... i'm not planning on catching that game. i'll be sure to catch the toronto game though.

it's been awhile since i've met someone who's both intrigued me and found attractive in a "my type" kinda way. i suppose if you were to see her walking around you'd even say that she's ridiculously my type.

do you think most people as they go searching for someone to pair up with keep on finding a "better version" of the previous person that they were with? or do you think most people go out and just look for something different and go from extreme to extreme to narrow their "type" down? i've known friends that have done both, and i think i go through periods of both, but it's the prior that i stick with.

these 2 organizations need to catch up with the times. they have indicated in their forms to order additional score reports that,

Coming in the fall of 2004, ASR's can be ordered on the GRE Web site at www.gre.org.

unfortunately that's NOT the case. it's almost summer of 2005, and i've had to order my report by mail. one of the programs i'm applying to is in their first year, so they don't have an institution code yet. so on the asr form, they give you a small little ass box to write the address down in. i got a confirmation for the additional score reports i ordered a couple days ago, and of course with the school that i wrote down, they changed it to some other school. of course when i call them up today, they say they can't do anything about it, so i'll have to spend another $15 to send another report out... so in total, that one report cost me $30. not only that, they already made like $200 off of me on the fucking test, and another $200 on the other score reports i've ordered. that is total bullshit. the first time i called up today, i got a guy named gary, i got a bit irrate and asked for his manager. he "transferred" me to the dialtone. i called back again after the line went dead, and got... gary again. he transferred me to the toefl division. so i called up again, and and got... GARY! what's there only one person working at the office? he said some stuff to get me off the phone. he wanted me to fax a copy of the asr i sent and he'll "see what he can do", which is nothing. obviously i don't have a copy, but i suppose i can write up another asr form and fax that like it was the original. thing is, i don't think it'll change anything. i don't even have a fax machine, so i'll actually have to do some work in faxing this thing out, so i'm pretty much resigned to the fact that i'll have to pay $30 for a fucking piece of paper that tells some school how shitty i did on my gre.

i'll tell you one thing though, i know it's NOT gary's fault (gary's just a pawn in the massive disorganization that is the ets) that the gre can't make their website useful, and are still stuck in the fucking stone age, but damn it felt good to call back and get gary back on the phone again after he was trying to leave me at a dead end. i was totally hoping he'd be picking up the other line each time i called. he'd pick up give his name, and i'd just be like hey gary, remember me? the guy that just called 2 seconds ago? the one you transferred to the toefl division?

so how come these big organizations have no way of correcting MISTAKES? should we really be surprised that worldcom, enron, and adelphia imploded. i can't be the ONLY one who's had this problem before. you'd think that they'd make bigger boxes on the forms they use, or use different forms, or GET THEIR FUCKING WEBSITE WORKING so mistakes can be cut down. if i made a mistake, no... if i even had the chance of making a mistake on this one, it'd be different. however, i certainly did not select to have the report sent to csu bakersfield, cause i specifically had to write down the address for csu ci. now if someone couldn't read my handwriting, it's not my fault they gave me a little box to write it it. they had my phone number, they could've called me to verify what i wrote. they could've just plain left out the report and not charged me, but instead they took the money, and selected the first csu institution on the list that they had a code for. i haven't been this angry in a long time. argh, i'm down another $15 i don't have. any other service firm, they'd be out of business, but since people need to use ets to get into college/grad school/whatever, we're pretty much screwed, and we can get screwed, and we can't do a damn thing about it, except to call up gary. this is kinda like how government works sometimes. they work for us, the money we pay (taxes, tests) pay these people's salaries. shouldn't they have an obligation to be more responsive? instead, we settle for something that's less than perfect.

so just gimme the rest of my rejection letters by the end of the week.

1) i am addicted to freecell
2) i frequently run out of time to do things
3) i'm not a very good bowler
4) i just got my first me-zzo-RAH quarter today
5) i am running out of time as i type this
6) i have bad luck
7) i haven't had mister softee in almost 9 months
8) i really like the kill bill vol 1 soundtrack
9) i really like kill bill vol 1
10) i need a vacation

Deliver Me, Moist

Fell on hard times
Purely dysfunctional
Tried so hard to find it
Tried so hard to find it
What comes and goes

Please still deliver me
From myself
All is forgiven me
Someone else
God don't know
Time will tell
We don't know
Time will tell

Prayed by desire
Magellan story lines
Tried so hard to find it
Been so cold beside you
It comes and goes

Please still deliver me
From myself
All is forgiven me
Someone else
God don't know
Time will tell
What we don't know
Time will tell

And what did you want
And what did you need
And what if we all came clean
I'm questioning life
I'm questioning you
And what if we all came through
And what did you want
And what did you need
And what if we all came clean

i just got back home a little while ago. went to the chapel twice in one day... they had a joint 4:30 service with zion dominion. zion dominion is the church that's taking over the space that the chapel is now at when the chapel moves to a new facility @ crosspoint. both congregations are growing so it works out for each one. what was great about this service was you had a predominantly african-american congregation and a predominantly caucasian church getting together and just having fellowship with each other. not only that, but zion dominion's current home is in the city itself, while the chapel's location is in the suburbs. the whole crossing of boundaries in the pretty segregated region of western new york was just really good to see, and be a part of. people were excited, it was crowded, kinda like being @ a concert of sorts. the combined choirs... wow! it was quite loud, but in a really really good way. hopefully there will be many more joint services when the chapel finally opens up it's crosspoint quarters.

i ask if you can, please keep leng, his family, and his father in your thoughts & prayers.

it's been so nice for the last week. everyday's been sunny, warm enough that you can go without a coat, blue skies, slight breeze. i just wish the semester wasn't ending so quickly... i've been locked inside studying for stuff... ALWAYS stuff... never frickin NOT stuff. all i want to do is go down to the waterfront and take pics... but i don't have the time.

oh well.

    He remained annoyed with himself until he realized that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural.
    We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
    Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone?
    There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the ground-work for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.
    Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

                                -The Unbearable Lightness of Being

it's a non descript hulking public works project from the 1930's. it became home to the buffalo bison's pro hockey team in the 50's and later the sabres of the nhl in the 70's. it's the place where my brother, my dad, and i grew to love hockey. way back in the 80's when tix for games were $20 for good seats. there was no room for movement when the place was packed, unlike arenas today which gives everyone a certain amount of 'personal space'. perhaps that was the beauty of the aud... the invisible line between personal and public space... the sharing and blending of lives for three 20 minute periods and two intermissions. or maybe it was just the unheralded dirty-grittiness of the place, so fitting for an old steel city like buffalo. it sits underneath the ramps of the skyway downtown, and the roadway takes your focus instead of the building. it was a place where role players were embraced as much as star players (think lindy ruff, rob ray, brad may). it's been sitting idle for the past 9 or so years. in a couple of months, the place will be totally gutted, reconfigured and a bass pro super-mega store will move into the building. it's kind of sad. even though no hockey was or would ever have been played at the aud after it closed, at least it was still the aud... almost everything was still inside. in a couple months, it won't be the aud anymore... and childhood memories will be without the solid evidence of an ice surface, and the orange, blue, and gold seats that surrounded it.

a good editorial about the aud i just read.

why switch back to 'normal' time at all? the whole process throws me off.

everyone's been excited about the new maps feature in google. i must admit, even though the satellite images were all freely available before, google's pairing with a map feature that's able to pinpoint the location on a satellite image is pretty cool. here's the old apartment in brooklyn. 

my parent's house 

so i've been thinking lately. about this whole pharmacy school thing. i know i don't want to be a full time pill pusher @ duane reade (nothing against duane reade, i'm actually a fan) upon graduating from a pharmacy school. i would really like to work in a clinical pharmacy setting, or hospital setting. a couple things that interest me are psychoactive drugs that treat things like depression, cancer drugs, and pediatric pharmacy. if and when i do get into a pharmacy school, i'd like to do a year residency as well after graduation if possible. so... with all this in mind, i've been thinking and am gonna apply to some other masters programs... 9 total between biotech and pharmacology. i think the research experience will help down the line. if i don't get in anywhere else... i'll just get my mph first... but it's always nice to have options. cal state has a biotech/bioinformatics masters program... that'll be the furthest one... and hey... maybe i'll end up in cali for awhile like i orginially planned.

in the episode of malcolm today... dewey has a football field bed... and you can see buffalo written in the endzone.

i wonder what it's been like in greenpoint these last couple days with its large polish community and the pope passing away. it's a bit on the somber side here in buffalo... with our large polish community.

i don't even know how to respond to this...

The Minuteman Project is a grassroots effort to bring Americans to the defense of their homeland, similar to the way the original Minutemen from Massachusetts (and other U. S. colonies) did in the late 1700s. Like them, we want to bring to this effort only what few personal possessions we can carry...plus our heart, mind and spirit.
This call for volunteers is not a call to arms, but a call to voices seeking a peaceful and respectable resolve to the chaotic neglect by members of our local, state and federal governments charged with applying U.S. immigration law.
It is a call to peacefully assemble at the Arizona-Mexico border to bring national awareness to the decades-long careless disregard of effective U.S. immigration law enforcement. It is a reminder to Americans that our nation was founded as a nation governed by the "rule of law", not by the whims of mobs of ILLEGAL aliens who endlessly stream across U.S. borders.
Accordingly, the men and women volunteering for this mission are those who are willing to sacrifice their time, and the comforts of a cozy home, to muster for something much more important than acquiring more "toys" to play with while their nation is devoured and plundered by the menace of tens of millions of invading illegal aliens.
Future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold them together, and a certain guarantee of the death of this nation as a harmonious "melting pot."

The result: political, economic and social mayhem.
Historians will write about how a lax America let its unique and coveted form of government and society sink into a quagmire of mutual acrimony among the various sub-nations that will comprise the new self-destructing America.

when was the last time we elected "mobs" of illegal aliens to any public office? when was the last time an illegal alien voted? most illegal aliens come to the US and keep a low profile. they take jobs that americans don't want. when was the last time an illegal alien became ceo of a fortune 500 company? i would venture to say the illegal aliens coming over work much longer and much harder than any volunteer of this project. where do they get the time to sit around and watch the border? yes... this is where our tax dollars go... to support medicaid, and welfare for these bozos who don't want to work.