My little brother and I walked out expecting it to be just snow we needed to shovel off the driveway. Boy were we wrong:
My boss called me sometime soon after we went outside. He wanted to see if I could come in to cover someone’s shift tonight. This is why I said no:
Way too many fails in this video. I gotta admit though; it was pretty fun 
It’s OH SO great to be back in good old Maryland! 
Can I just go back to San Diego now?
Happy Chinese New Year everyone! I’m so glad I decided to take today off from work because I was way too tired from my plane ride back last night.
If you’ve read my last post or my recent pulses, you probably know that I’ve been in California for the past few days, mainly in San Diego and Los Angeles. I wish I could have planned to stay longer because there were so much more stuff I didn’t see, but I nonetheless saw and did many things during my time over there.
I also got a chance to meet up with Xangans in real life, which is a first for me. I haven’t met any of them before this, so I was excited. How did everything go? Let’s take it day by day, shall we?
*Note: This entry will be very long, but hopefully I wrote it in such a way that you can just skim through if you don’t have the time to read everything*
Thursday: San Diego (Mount Helix, La Jolla Shores, UCSD)
Before I even talk about California, I gotta mention the plane rides over there. On my connecting flight to Chicago, I found out that one of the flight attendants is a member at my tennis & fitness club. She recognized me and gave me some free cookies, which was very nice of her. Small world!
On my flight out of Chicago, I found out that a pilot I know (coincidentally enough is also a member at my club) had emailed the flight crew and told them about me and that they should take extra care of me. I ended up getting a personal greeting from the whole crew and shook hands with the pilot. They also treated my friend Kenny, the person sitting next to me (who I didn’t know), and me to free warm nuts and wine! Hell yeah!
I arrived in San Diego a little after noon, where we were promptly picked up by Hong (aka BomCamChuoi). She ended up hanging out with us all vacation, housing and driving us all over California. Thank you so much Hong!
After a quick stop at In-N-Out, we took our burgers to eat on top of Mount Helix. What a view of San Diego!
Some extra pics (click to enlarge):
Once we left there, we planned to go to UCSD next, but ended up stopping by La Jolla Shore first. I’m glad we did, because we got to see a beautiful beach filled with seals!
After that long detour, we finally made it to UCSD where Mai (aka InlUvWiTuRsMiLe) took us on a fun little tour of the campus. For some reason it reminded me of UMBC, except bigger and better. They have singing trees! Perhaps in another life I would have loved to have gone here for school.
Click click boom:
Friday: San Diego (San Diego Zoo, Coronado Bay, Tet Festival in Balboa Park, Ocean Beach)
We spent the first part of the day seeing all the animals in the San Diego Zoo (the best zoo I’ve ever been to!). We saw so many animals and took way too many pictures.
A small selection of the 59680321 pics we took:
Stopped by briefly over at Coronado Bay, which was somehow even more beautiful than the beach before! I felt like I was walking on water.
Playing in the water:
Later that night, we went to a Tet Festival in Balboa Park, ate at Bennigan’s, and viewed Ocean Beach at night. I ended up not taking too many pictures that night because I was bummed about something. That’s a story for another time though. I was able to recover from that the next day after reading aJoLLyDork‘s comment on a pulse telling me that thinking was not allowed on vacation haha. Good call.
Our last full day in California! We decided to do a day trip in Los Angeles. We briefly stopped by John’s (aka wutuwaitn4) place in Irvine. He brought two of his other friends along (which, coincidentally enough, he met through Xanga); Regina (aka blahblahfishy) and Susan (aka bobaShop).
We all continued on to UCLA, where we met up with Jennifer (aka jeNNi_RoX). She proceeded to give us a very good tour of UCLA. The campus has so much open spaces and was very pretty to see. I was expecting it to be a lot bigger, but it was still big nonetheless. Yet another college I would have loved to go to in another life.
After eating, Jennifer unfortunately had to leave us to go study. The rest of us drove over to Griffith Observatory, which overlooks Los Angeles. It was so crowded there! I think it was because the sun was about to set and a lot of people wanted to view that from way up top. I know I’ve been using “beautiful” a lot in this post, but seriously the view up there was exactly that.
Saturday: Departed California back to good old Maryland
Not too much to say except we woke up at the buttcrack of dawn to catch our flight at 6:17am. Got just 2 hours of sleep the night before and barely any sleep on the plane ride back. Lovely.
That concludes my time over in California. Can’t wait until I go on my next trip, whenever that may be. Hmm, where should I visit next? Canada? New York? Florida? Texas? We’ll see!
—-EDIT—-
Oops, forgot to add the video clips I took on here. Here’s a YouTube link below of videos taken at the San Diego Zoo and the Griffith Observatory. Btw, I know I wrote “Griffin” instead of “Griffith” in the video caption. Whoops!
I’m leaving Thursday morning on a 6:35am flight and will arrive at San Diego hopefully around 12:30pm. I will be traveling with this guy (a good friend from my college club tennis team):
We are still working out on the specifics of where to go and etc. right now. As you probably heard, I will be staying over at BomCamChuoi‘s place during the trip. If I suddenly go missing for a long time, you know the main suspect 
If she doesn’t go all Audition on us (YouTube clip is not for the faint of heart), she will show us all that San Diego has to offer, as well as accompanying us to LA (where we might meet up with wutuwaitn4). Along the way, we’re suppose to get a tour of UCSD and UCLA from InlUvWiTuRsMiLe and jeNNi_RoX, respectively.
Honestly, I really don’t care what we do. All I really want is to leave this cold Maryland weather for a few days and enjoy myself in a new environment. What matters is the journey, not the destination 
.
P.S. While I’m away, I will only be bringing my iPhone and not my laptop. I’ll probably still be reading people’s posts, but probably won’t be able to leave as many comments or replies as I would like to. I will try though!
Also, I will attempt to use Pulse Twitter-style over the next few days to give you all an idea of what I’m doing. Who knows, perhaps one of you California Xangans might spot us! Stay tune.
Here’s two additional pictures along side the original picture I posted:
Yup, I was attempting to dry the wet carpet using this propane-powered, industrial-sized heater/blowdryer/torch (more on that coming up).
So how did I ended up doing this?
That day, I came in to work to sell membership (hence why I was dressed a little bit more nicer than my usual zipped up club sweatshirt). The first thing I noticed coming in was that soaked carpet, so I asked my manager what happened. Apparently, the water treatment people came by the night before and forgot to connect a pipe correctly, so when my manager came in that morning the place was pretty much flooded. Nice right? They were able to dry up the tiled floor, but the carpet was still obviously wet.
Now this is where that crazy huge machine comes in. They ended up purchasing this machine that is used to heat up a place rather quickly. In other words, it’s pretty much an oversize propane-powered blowdryer. When I first saw this, I totally pictured Tim Allen using this on Tool Time (Home Improvement reference ftw!).
Initially, they had the machine placed about 5 feet away from the carpet as it was blowing hot air to that general area. Unfortunately, it didn’t exactly cause any noticeable difference in the carpet. In fact, all that really did was 1) make the room extremely hot, 2) made it hard to hear anything (imagine how your typical blowdryer sounds next to your head and just generalize that sound to the entire room), and 3) made the room smell like gas (which was probably poisoning us ever so slowly).
I didn’t feel like passing out from CO2 poisoning that day, so I decided to pick up the flamethrower heating machine and hold it right over the carpet to see if it could quickly dry up before the room catches on fire or something. After about 10 minutes, I gave up and just turned it off since it was causing far more problems than it was helping. I later found out that was a smart idea. I read the manual and it stated that the machine should ideally not be used in such a confined space as the room I was in.
Don’t you love it when you do things outside your job description?
As promised, here’s a shout out to everyone who guessed correctly. If you more or less mentioned something about drying a wet carpet or anything similar to that I’ll give you credit for getting it right:
*The Beautiful BomCamChuoi
*The Xeric xJanetirax (look up what that means)
*The Dangerous darth_cosmos
*The Lucky Lynn1013 (carpet wasn’t wet because of snow though)
*The Majestic Mirravin (even though you guessed two things, cheater! haha)
*The Awesome AzureRecollections (I was indeed doing a blow job!)
*The Bombing BabyGurlDragon88
*The Crazy ch10n9 (eh, close enough. Hmm, vaccuming it probably would have been more effective)
*The Dumb d2H5b (hehe)
*The Blazing B1ANCACACA
*The Kickass Krissy_Cole
*The Magnificent makethemakersmile
*The Hot Hotpuppies (that was an easy adjective haha)
*The Sexy s_h_a_sha (okay, maybe I was slightly posing)
*The Charming CanadianConspiracy (I know right? They should have taken care of it!)
*The Original one_eared_batman (What exactly is a sport mat used for?)
*The Smart Simbathe2nd (Not snow, but close enough)
*The Luxurious LadyAsianInvasion (It does kinda look like a t-shirt shooter…)
*The Yummy yan_ni
*The Mellow mashandra (Apparently the obvious answer was the correct one!)
Hmm, I guess my picture wasn’t totally odd if this many people got it correct.
Honorable mentions goes to immaairheadxl’s and XxFtbllGrlxX’s comments because they made me laugh out loud in real life:
Nice.
I was suprised that so many people thought the machine had something to do with shooting tennis balls. The tennis shop background was a good red herring 
. However, I’m pretty sure if a kid threw a tennis ball into that thing it would have flown out flaming (literally), so you guys probably would have been right had things went horribly wrong.
Alright, next entry I will write up an update of what’s going on with my life lately, including what’s going on with the upcoming trip to San Diego (that’s coming up this Thursday!). Time sure flew by quickly!
EDIT: Er, let’s make that Saturday instead. I got a lot of time-consuming errands to do while running on 3 hours of sleep X_X, so I’ll write up the post after my Saturday shift.
P.S. Even though I haven’t replied to any comments on here (due to the nature of this particular post), I have definitely read all the comments I’ve received. Thanks for guessing! Don’t worry, you’ll find out soon enough
I was chatting with BomCamChuoi the other day trying to plan out my trip to San Diego later this month. I was telling her about all of the things I was afraid of that could possibly go wrong with my flight, such as falling seriously ill the day I leave or getting stuck at the airport (which is a strong possibly since I’m passing through Chicago O’Haire Airport! Pray for decent weather for me!). After she read some of my concerns, she wrote back saying “For a hopeless romantic, you can get kinda pessimistic =)”
This got me really thinking about myself, specifically three traits of mine that a lot of people have noticed of me but doesn’t totally capture my character; I’m optimistic, I’m a romantic, and I’m a confident and cheerful guy. Now, if I told you I wasn’t any of those traits I would obviously be a liar. However, I’m not exactly sure how accurate those traits are of me, at least the initial impressions people get when they hear those descriptions. A little confused? I’ll try to describe the complexity as best as I can.
1. I’m an optimist. I’m a realistic optimist.
I find that I generally have a lot of hope and belief that things will work out for the best. I always like to think that in the end, karma will come full circle and good people will receive the good things they deserve, be it sooner or later.
I’m not totally foolish though. I know that things aren’t always like that and good people can get crapped on over and over again without any sign that something positive will come to them soon. However, I like to think that many times it’s the bad things that ultimately leads you down the path to something wonderful. We just don’t know it until much later on, when we have time to reflect back on our past.
In response to what BomCamChuoi said before, I told her that I tend to worry about things by thinking about all the possible ways something can go wrong. That way if something does, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised by the outcome. While I might sound pessimistic at first, I’m actually very optimistic that the trip will go more or less as planned. I’m just aware of the many possible obstacles life enjoys throwing at you just to test you haha.
2. I’m a hopeless romantic. I’m a romantic with (more or less) realistic expectations.
If you ever read any of my past blogs you can probably guess that I’m, at heart, a romantic. In response, I would say that for the most part you’re definitely right. What can I say? I love doing silly romantic stuff and trying my best to be a good man for a girl to have one of these days. I enjoy watching rom-coms because I see how happy and enjoyable these fictional characters get when romantic things happen to them, so why don’t we just bring some of that into our world as well?
With that being said, I am actually very in tune with how the world works. I know that rom-coms are very unrealistic and, for the most part, portrays a skewed version of the world. Nonetheless, I don’t see anything wrong with taking away some of the things that these movies like to encourage onto us, such as doing the right thing, being understanding, doing silly things for girls, etc. I think that if you’re a romantic to a certain degree and not go too crazy it’s quite alright and should be encouraged. If more people felt this way, the world would be a lot happier and heartwarming place, no?
Hey, while I would ideally like to find a great girl I can be with for a long time, I don’t mind just having fun and going on dates or whatever. I know not to expect huge things everytime I meet a girl. Still, it’s nice to dream once in a while.
3. I’m a confident and cheerful guy. I can be happy-go-lucky and have a strong belief in myself, but I got my fair share of worries and insecurities as well.
I smile and joke around a lot. Even when things are stressful, I tend to have a smile on my face and actively look at the silver lining to any obstacles I run into. Thus, people tend to think I’m cheerful all the time.
My past experiences, whether in my love life, social life, or my school life, have also made me very sure of my abilities. I know that if I work hard, I can acheive whatever my heart desires. That has turn me into a rather confident person.
For the most part, that’s a rather accurate description of me. In conjunction with being an optimist and a romantic, I’m usually in a good mood and thus feel pretty good about myself.
Still, the worrier in me comes out often, despite all of this. Maybe I just hide it very well, but I have just as many concerns and sadness in my life as anyone else. Trust me, this past year has humbled me in more ways than I can count. Nothing like losing out to your dream job three times within a year! Oh boy, that sure knocked me down from my past, somewhat naive view of how the world works.
Anyway, I just try not to dwell too much on all the bad things and instead focus on the good things in my life. In doing so, it really lets me keep my head up high. It helps to think that the bad things can only makes you tougher ultimately, so I just embrace the bad things that come my way. What matters the most is that I keep getting up each time I’m knocked down. I don’t care how cliche that motto is because it has allowed me to have a bright, hopeful view of the rough world we live in.
I hope that helps some of you see me in more clearer, accurate light . Eh, if nothing else writing this down has helped me understand myself a bit more.
Drowning. Death of a friend. Being utterly helpless. Those are three of my biggest fears in life. All together, they combined to make one awful and way too realistic dream of mine. It also doesn’t help me that I tend to remember my dreams and the details rather vividly. I was thinking about using my Dad dream that I describe a few entries back, but I’ve been meaning to write about this other dream I had for a while now and I feel this would be as good of an excuse as any to tell you all about this odd dream.
When the dream first started, I’m on some inclined city street. I began hearing something in the distance but I didn’t recognize it initially, although I knew it sounded familiar. When I looked over at the direction of the sound, I saw a variety of animals (i.e. dogs, birds, mice, rabbits) running towards me in a hurry. When I looked past the animals, I finally saw and realized what I was hearing before; a gigantic flood was rushing up the street, seemingly swallowing up everything in it’s path.
Needless to say, I began running like my life depended on it along side the animals towards the opposite direction of the flood. As time went on, more and more people joined up with me as we all tried to find higher ground. It soon got so crowded that I was thinking if the water didn’t drown me I would just suffocate or get trampled by the mass of people.
When I got near the top of the hill, I heard a good friend call out to me. He was standing at the entrance to some cave and told me to get in if I wanted to survive. Apparently, he was working for the Navy and was housing as many people in here as he can in order to protect us from the impeding flood. Once I got in, he shuts the door and told me to go as far deep into the tunnel as possible. I tried to get him to come with me, but he told me he had to stay there to watch the entrance and prevent anyone else from coming in.
I reluctantly followed his command and went as deep as I possibly could into the dimly lit cave. When I got to the end, I noticed there were all these smaller rooms fills with scared families and children. As I tried to comfort them (but ultimately failing), I hear my friend yelling out in extreme pain. I tried to see what happened but I couldn’t find him at all. The sound of his voice, the only thing that was letting me know that he was still alive, suddenly disappeared and became replaced with the sound of rushing water filling up the cave.
Before I knew it, I’m about waist deep in freezing water with two children along side me. I tell them to just hold on to me as I tried to break open a crack in the wall, perhaps in hope that it would get us out of there. I keep pounding and pounding but it wasn’t bulging. When I looked down again, the children had disappeared under the water and the water was quickly flowing up to my neck level. I tried to stay afloat as long as possible, but with no end in sight I slowly started resigning my fate.
Feeling absolutely helpless and alone, I just closed my eyes as hard as I could. I must have subconsciously realized I was dreaming, since this was a trick I used to do in dreams when I wanted to get out of them. I opened and shut my eyes repeatedly for what felt like forever before I finally opened my eyes in real life.
Those were all the details I could remember (actually there were a few extra ones, but they’re kinda weird so I’m excluding them for now haha). I still think my dad dream hits me the hardest emotionally, but this one was pretty scary overall. What a crazy dream, huh?
I just blogged about my scariest nightmare to enter The Uninvited Scariest Nightmare Contest for 1,000 credits. You can earn free credits too! Brought to you by The Uninvited – In Theaters January 30th.
Excerpts from this new article:
Scientists discover true love
“SCIENTISTS have discovered true love. Brain scans have proved that a small number of couples can respond with as much passion after 20 years as most people exhibit only in the first flush of love.
The findings overturn the conventional view that love and sexual desire peak at the start of a relationship and then decline as the years pass.
‘The findings go against the traditional view of romance – that it drops off sharply in the first decade – but we are sure it’s real,’ said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook.
The researchers nicknamed the couples ‘swans’ because they have similar mental ‘love maps’ to animals that mate for life such as swans, voles and grey foxes.”
Score one for the romantics out there . I find the results of this study amazing and hope that there will be much more studies on this interesting topic. I really hope the results are reliable and valid enough. I think it would be fantastic to find my “swan”. Well, at least one of our expectations of love that we gain from stupid rom-coms aren’t completely unrealistic haha.
————————————————————————————————————
So some of you may have read my recent pulse about visiting California. It was very random how that came about. My friend and I were just talking and he mentioned something about going somewhere that we haven’t been before. As we threw out names of places to go to, California popped up in both of our suggestions.
Just for funsies, I went to look at ticket prices and they were actually really cheap right now! I’m not 100% sure yet, but it is looking like I will be visiting the San Diego and Los Angeles areas of California for a few days later this month. I’m planning on going there Thursday, January 22nd and then head back to Maryland Sunday, January 25th. I wouldn’t have mind leaving on Wednesday instead, but for some reason the ticket more than doubles in price, so lets X that.
So to my Californians and people that have visited California in the past: what are some good places to visit and sightsee in the Las Angeles/San Diego area? Any particular landmarks or California/West Coast only things I should check out?
The splendid Miss BomCamChuoi has already graciously offered to house and drive my friend and me during our time there (thank you very much 
). Hope to meet up with some of you other Xangans I’ve gotten to know over there in CA! Some of you (i.e. InlUvWiTuRsMiLe, wutuwaitn4, rygurl, jeNNi_RoX) have already mentioned maybe meeting up. If you want to come hang out with me, let me know and maybe we can work something out.
I’ve been lacking some motivation to write up an entry lately. I’m still commenting, checking out people’s site, and making minor updates on pulse, but I’ve been um, enjoying myself doing several other things as of late
I finally bought myself an iPhone 3G the day after Christmas and I’ve been extremely attached to it ever since. It really was a great investment. Now, whenever my old computer freezes up (which has been happening more often recently) I can just go to my iPhone as my backup browser. Bejeweled 2 on the iPhone has especially been distracting. I tell myself I would just play one quick game, but by the time I’m done I’ve wasted a half hour on it!
When I’m not messing around with my iPhone, I’ve been playing Rock Band 2 too much. That always eats up at least a couple hours of the day. I made a character in the game that is sorta modeled after my current profile pic, except the character is waaaay too skinny, has an inverted groin area, and is very Caucasian looking. Here, take a look yourself (if you haven’t seen it already):
On New Year’s Day, I went to watch Slumdog Millionaire. It’s a highly raved movie about a poor boy who is accused of cheating due to his ability to answer all the questions on the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” (as seen in picture below). The story basically shows how he knew the answers based on his life experiences (he got a lot of help from fate btw). At the same time, there’s a very intense story between the boy, his older brother and a girl he grew up with.
I don’t think I have a bad thing to say about it. It was just a great story, almost like a modern day fairy tale about the underdog rising to the top. Very uplifting movie, and it certainly didn’t dwindle my hopeless romanticism. However, don’t be fooled into thinking this is some fluffy love story, because it certainly not. While there are some wonderful, joyful scenes in this movie that made me want to cheer, there were other scenes that can really make you feel the harsh reality that the main characters have to survive through.
This is the first movie I’ve seen in 2009, and it was really one of the best movies I’ve seen in the past year. The acting was great across the board and the movie did a good job showcasing the modern Indian world. Fantastic soundtrack as well (you can listen to one of the songs, “Jai Ho”, in my playlist at the bottom of the page). Without any big negatives I can think of right now, I have to give Slumdog Millionaire a 5 out of 5.
So in case you were wondering, the reason why I had all this free time to have fun is because I wasn’t scheduled to work a lot this past week. That’s going to change very soon though; once one of my co-worker leaves for college, I will be taking up her hours and work full-time. I’m glad, because I’ve only been doing part-time and I could use the extra money to help me save up for a new laptop and to help me pay for my college loans. As the schedule looks now, I will be working at least a few hours every day of the week, mostly morning shifts. I’m definitely going to get used to waking up at 4:45am X_X . Not sure If I’ll get used to going to bed at 9pm.
Okay, I need to get ready to go play tennis soon. Before I head out, I just want to leave you all with the following two unintentionally (or intentionally?) hilarious commercials I saw today that were featured on Failblog. How do the commercial makers NOT notice the blatant innuendos?
Recent Comments