Canadia

The summer before I started college, I made a double vow. They are as follows:

1. To never become a customs official.

2. To pray that I had not inherited my father's neurodegenerative insanity.

Last August, my parents and I went up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a brief holiday. Now, going to Canada in August sounds a little counter-intuitive for a vacation spot, but it makes more sense than going north in the winter. At any rate, it was a cute little city, right on the ocean (not even Boston is that close to the actual water, except the Aquarium area), really nice food, close to the parks and beaches, attractive Canadian guys, and all that stuff.

Most of the actual vacationing passed without much incident. It was when we approached the Canada-Maine border that my father must have inhaled some unknown airborne pathogen, succumbed to madness, and nearly got us deported, or brought in for questioning at the very least.

So we approached the border, stopped the car at the booth, rolled down the window, and proceeded to answer the standard gatekeeper questions: Where do you live, what are your names, may I see your passport, blah blah blah. Everything was going smoothly. Then, the customs official asked the question:

"So what do you all do in Massachusetts?"

In a very strong Chinese accent that was much more marked than his usual one, my father looked the guy dead in the eye and said, a little louder than necessary: "Have some job."

Now, this customs official was about six feet tall and built like a rock, bald, wearing dark glasses that completely obscured his eyes, and had an excellent poker face. He did not look like a particularly sassable man. Nonetheless, he did a barely noticeable double-take at this unconventional response. "Pardon, sir?"

The little bugger virus continued to wreak havoc on Dad's neurocircuitry. "Have some job," he repeated, this time in the tone you use when speaking to a hard-of-hearing senior citizen.

The official, having recovered his composure, repeated the question, very slowly and clearly: "What kind of jobs?"

At this point I have to conclude that Dad had lost all control of his mental functions, because what he did next completely belied his Ph.D in biochemistry and extensive knowledge covering at least five other scientific fields. Putting on the obnoxious and exaggerated Cantonese accent that is particular to Hong Kong and Chinatowns across the US of A, he screeched:

“WE OWN LAUNDROMAT, AND DIM-SUM RESTAURANT –”

The customs official tried to make himself heard over the uproarious laughter that was shaking the car with minor seismic waves. A frown was now visible between his eyebrows, above the frames of his shades. "Sir -"

"We're scientists," Dad interrupted in his professor voice, as though he were an intellectual giving a radio interview. That guy can get serious real fast. It must have something to do with bullying his children whenever they got anything less than an A-. "I'm a biochemist, and my wife does cancer research."

Then he jerked his thumb at me. "That one has no job," he quipped, the Chinese accent becoming more apparent by a notch. "That one still student."

I nodded, trying to look as scholarly and intellectual as I could. Unfortunately, it's more than a little difficult to look scholarly and intelligent while biting your tongue and attempting to control violently twitching lips.

"Right," our questioner said coolly. "Well, that's all for now." As we were about to drive away, he added, almost as an afterthought, "Welcome home." If he could have heard the howls of mirth that ensued once the windows were rolled up and the car was a good 800 feet away, he probably would have retracted that statement.

And that's how my father nearly got us all deported by sassing the U.S. customs official.

The Stalker's Guide to the new Facebook

As many of you young, hip, up-to-date Internet users have no doubt noticed, Facebook has this mildly irritating tendency to change its layout at excessive speeds. If I didn't remind myself regularly that Mark Zuckerberg does want to make money, I would start thinking that he's intentionally trying to confuse us all.

Being one of those young, quirky, up-to-date Internet users myself, there's no way I couldn't have seen the changes. What I didn't anticipate was my overwhelming hatred for the latest version of Mr. Zuckerberg's capitalist, money-driven insanity. It was like love at first sight, except I wanted to kill something.  (I didn't, though. Instead I went out and considered buying a bloody and violent video game like Metro 2033, but then decided against it since I have the bank account of a college student (it's a joke, get it?) and went home to study for finals.)

It all started when I read this article about how our young brown-jacket-wearing friend was bitching at college students to stop complaining about finals. Apparently the word hit for 'finals' and 'stress' was enormous around mid-December, and the flood of people getting on to vent almost brought the site down. Then, with typical broomstick-up-the-arse arrogance, he said something along the lines of "Maybe you should stop whining and actually study for your exams. Otherwise drop out and be a multi-billionaire like me, the greatest thing since sliced bread."


After posting a scathing retort as my status (involving Mr. Genius Dropout's favorite word, of course), I went to post on my friend's wall. Except her wall wasn't just a wall anymore, but a collection of status updates, posts, and photos splattered on the page in no particular order. Okay, I thought, ignoring the vertical line going straight down the middle. Confusing, but I can still find the text field...wait, what's that?

It was a timeline. And I mean, a timeline. And not just any old timeline, but when combined with all the other creepy elements that have been incorporated into the social networking site, it becomes one that has turned Facebook into the most effective stalking machine since the invention of the yellow pages. Oh, wait. Most of you probably don't remember what that is. It's ok. If you Google it, it'll tell you. Google tells you everything, which means it comes in at a close second in the Stalkeronicsathon.


So to honor this new invasion into our privacy (or at least the illusion of privacy, since the concept itself actually ceased to exist quite a while ago), I have put together the following tutorial for all of you who have yet to grasp the ropes of the new stalking-m -- I mean, Facebook.

1. Facebook is the new Google Earth

This new level of stalkerdom is pretty self-explanatory. Simply put, you can now add locations to your photos, which then nicely summarizes all the places you've been to and what happened there for every creeper who wants to know.

2. The Timeline


I'm not talking about the actual content of the timeline, where all the posts and updates and stuff goes. No. I'm talking about this, on the upper right-hand corner.

 

 Now, if I wanted to get really creepy, I can zoom in, like so:

So if you are a socially awkward and possibly pathological person who wants to stalk your object of affection/demise, this is for you! You can zone in on a specific decade, pick a certain year, zoom in on a particular month, find one day, and then discover who your victim met with, what they ate for dinner, where they slept, what happened at school that day, who/what they were angry at, why they punched their boss, and any other tidbits of interest. 

Then, of course, you scurry home and add all that to your ever-growing file that could rival the CIA's on Al Qaeda, except unlike them, you are forced to keep it in an old-school filing cabinet because either a.) You can't afford a laptop or b.) You're completely paranoid and convinced that your next-door neighbor, an old cat lady who only leaves her home to buy groceries or hobbles out onto the porch to yell at partying teenagers, is going to infiltrate your home with a SWAT team and hack into your computer while the Navy S.E.A.L.s stand guard.

But wait! It gets better! Take a closer look at the bottom of this timeline:

And look again:

Because you see, there are no planet or lightning bolt symbols that I know of on a computer.

 Which segues perfectly into the last step of this tutorial...

3. You can now Like every aspect of my life, including my birth

You can stop laughing now.

Alright guys, buckle up. This is the best part.

There are some things you can take off of Facebook, like certain embarrassing photos or wall posts that could potentially get you blacklisted in the job market. You can prevent people from commenting and liking said embarrassing things just by deleting it, period. Unfortunately, my birth seems to be pretty permanent.

Fuck You

I caught a strain of dorm sickness over October break. It wasn't the flu, which was good, but it was one of those annoying coughing colds that have multiple stages of illness. First, your nose starts to run, which in most cases is manageable. In my case, however, my left eye also starts to water at inopportune moments.

One awkward instance took place last week in my Intro to French Literature 215 class. Basically all we do in this class is - big surprise - read French literature, which mainly involve love triangles and the death of either one or both of the lovers at the end. We were discussing one of the said deaths when suddenly, my left eye began to water. It would have been okay if my bangs didn't do such a superb job of covering up my right eye, thus making me look as if I was moved to tears at the death of two highly idealized and annoying characters.

The next stage of the cold is the nonstop coughing, which is pretty intense for a few days and then tapers off over a week or so. One night I was sitting in the common room with Muffin, a really adorable and super-Asian Korean girl who lives in this big-ass, corking great apartment triple when I started to hack away.

When I finished, Muffin said, "Bless you. Wait, that's just for sneezes. I don't think people say that when you cough. Do they?"

Being too busy groping for the tissues, I did not answer in the conventional way. Instead, I believe I said something along the lines of "Hurrrrrridunnlllouhuhewoeurog?" I tend to forget consonants when I'm sick. It must have been the virus affecting my brain, except colds are bacterial infections.

Muffin continued her train of thought. "No, I don't think you do. What would you say to a cough? Fuck you?"

I thought that was hilarious and laughed uproariously. Except in my coughing, inflamed-throat state, it only translated to more coughing, hacking, terrible lung-regurgitating noises, and intermittent howls of mirth. It was bad enough that I thought I would be mute by sundown the next day. Interestingly enough, by then most of it had already gone away.

But the original question was never answered, so I'll ask you now: what do you say to someone after a cough?

Pheonix Rising (The Layman's Term: Boy)

I go to a women's college. From an academic standpoint, the lack of men is pretty awesome. There's no testosterone flying around in the air and interrupting you while you're trying to make a deep and profound point about the connection between the self and political thought. (To the guys reading this, please don't think I hate you. On the contrary, I happen to like you very much. I've dated quite a few of your kind.) 

This is my visualization of testosterone. Imagine trying to speak up in class with that in the room.

On the social scene, however, the lack of men is not so hot (unless you don't prefer them to begin with, but that's a different story.) For a while, whenever my friends and I walked around campus, our eyes seeking in vain for the semblance of some masculine figure, we would groan and grumble to each other about how we would be celibate until graduation.

Luckily, it was not our fate to live like nuns for four years. My school has a consortium with four other colleges around the area. The first is another women's college. The other three of those schools have guys! And because the five colleges interchange students through classes, once in a blue moon we would catch sight of a guy sitting in a class. Or waiting for his lunch order. Or standing at the bus stop. Or walking around looking lost, or maybe just awed by our Lothlorien-like campus. I got kind of excited at these boy sightings. I mean, we all did, but in retrospect I think it might have been a little extreme to point excitedly while yelping "Boy!" in a high-pitched Japanese anime voice.

Eventually the solution was figured out by 006 (double-oh-six) and Panda, two clever girls from the dorm down the street. The trick was to think up of a good phrase that would be immediately obvious to those in the know, but otherwise unobtrusive to the innocent observer, in most cases the boy. The term coined was "Phoenix Rising". We used it liberally for a few days, and all was well.

Then one fine morning, the four of us - me, Purl, 006, and Panda - were strolling down the sidewalk of the village commons when lo! and behold, a dark, tall, sultry, resplendent, and Damn Smoking Gorgeous specimen of the male sex came our way. After we were done gaping, Purl turned to me and whispered in awe, "Red Hot Phoenix Rising." 

Now we had a basic rainbow color system to refine our observations, red being the hottest and violet for...not. 

I will also point out that Orlando Bloom as Legolas is more pretty than anything else. He is extraordinarily pretty in those movies.

Next comes Red Hot. This term is reserved for special sightings.

They are so cool and thoughtful.

Red Smokin' Hawt would be for...actually, I don't think we've come across one of those yet. That would be way off the charts and our brains would probably short-circuit and blow up.

But I couldn't leave it at that. No. I then took it a step further and decided that extreme cases of overall heinousness merited a title as well. The following recorded conversation then took place:

Me: So what if we saw a guy but he turned out to be completely hideous?
006: No one cares about those, Primp.
Panda: Yeah, that's why you only point and stare at the cute ones anyway, right?
Me: (ignoring 006 and Panda's sage remarks) How 'bout "Shriveled Phoenix"?
Purl: What?! That's disgusting.
Me: Why? Don't you remember that scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when he first sees Dumbledore's bird?
Purl: Just say it out loud. Try it.
Me: (opens mouth)...oh. Right. (I ponder for a moment.) Well then, how about "Dying Fawkes"?
006: But then it just sounds like he's old and senile.

Seriously, Edward is actually 107. But don't read the books. Your time should be better spent and not wasted on Sparklepires. If you really want to validate that, go read Dan Bergstein's Blogging Twilight on Sparknotes. It's a great blog and he's hilarious.

Why was I the one to come up with the more unattractive and possibly repulsive term? Questionable. Let's skip over that part and just say that we eventually decided on Dying Fawkes because the word "shriveled" has some suggestive connotations. So does the word "penetrate". I don't know about you guys, but I find that those two words are almost always followed by awkward pauses, no matter how subtly one tries to slip them into a conversation. Unless I'm playing Hot Seat. Because in Hot Seat, anything goes.

Background Challenge

Hey guys, random challenge for you. Can anyone tell what the background image for this page is/where it's from? If you know, I'll do something special for you, like write a poem or make my next post about whatever you like. First person to leave a comment/email me about it wins. \(^_^)/

Here, have a shoop:

The Dorm Room Matrix

College freshmen have it rough. 

The other day, my roommate left our cozy little double on the third floor to print out her Spanish paper. She reaches the top of the stairs (which is about 15 feet away, not a terrible distance) and realizes she forgot her sunglasses. She comes back to get said sunglasses and goes down two flights before realizing she forgot paper. She runs back up the stairs for paper. This time she gets downstairs to the computer room, loads the printer, and clicks print. End of story, yes? 

No. Some dum-dum left a job running and that uses up two sheets before she figures out what's going on. Back up she goes for more paper. So far I've been giggling and waving and making semi-snarky remarks each time she comes in, but on the last trip up she looks like an angry mermaid. Remember the second task from the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire? I stop giggling.

So she finally prints the paper...and guess what? No really, guess. 

She forgets to staple it. But at this point it doesn't matter anyway, since we had already planned to brave the world outside our room (gasp!) to stock up on desperately needed provisions at a deli near our dorm. Thus our intrepid shield maiden treks back up the stairs to fetch the silly roommate, and then finally, we leave the room. For good.

It's usually not as bad as I made it out to be. That day was an extreme case. It was rainy outside. It was misting. (Did you know that according to certain weather apps, 'misting' is a word?) It was humid. Everyone was sweating through their clothes even though it was only 65 degrees. It was also late September, which when compounded with all the other things I just listed was enough to make everyone into sea cucumbers, their mental capacities reduced to sitting in their rooms and staring out the window with their heads cocked to the side.

But this was not the first time something like that has happened. It all started with little things. Going to class and running back because you forgot your books. Leaving for dinner and shuffling sheepishly back in after realizing you didn't have your keys. Going out on a sunny day - oh, woe! - and leaving your nice, reasonably-priced, rich amber-tinted, subtly pointed cat-eye sunglasses from H&M on your desk. The latter scenario is especially heart-wrenching because I love H&M. H&M is magical.

It took a week or two, but at some point it occurred to me and Purl (my roommate's name in this blog is Purl. That's a knitting term, by the way. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I still don't know what exactly it means. I may Wikipedia it someday when I'm feeling less sluggish) that there was clearly some higher natural law at work here. The basic premise is that when a college student attempts to leave the dorm room, he/she will always be forced to return at least once out of some unforeseen necessity, thus rendering the act of exiting the room successfully on the first take something like trying to determine the exact location of an electron around the nucleus of an atom. It simply doesn't happen. We decided we needed a name for this phenomenon, but all we could think of at first was Murphy's Law. Not quite the same thing, but the feeling's pretty accurate. "F#@%, I forgot my keys...and my wallet...and my books...for the third time today...why does this keep happening to me?"

We floundered around for a few weeks trying to figure out a name. Then we took a six-mile hike at 8:20 AM this morning, and click, everything fell into place.

Remember that scene in the first Matrix movie where Neo sees the black cat run by twice in front of the door? Remember how he says "Deja vu" and then how Morpheus and Trinity completely flip? And how deja vu in the Matrix means that the programmers have made some kind of change? (Poor Mouse. It was the Woman in the Red Dress who did him in. I know it.) It's like that for our dorm room.

Review time, class.

The Dorm Room Matrix, also known as the Dorm Room Matrix Law:

Leaving one's dorm room on the first try will never work. Something will always be forgotten, or some other necessity will be contrived in order to force the occupant to return.

Purl and I are now that much better off now that we can precisely pinpoint the cause of our misery. Of course it doesn't actually change the dorm law, but it's a small consolation. Besides, we got classes off today so we could go climb that mountain. And by extension think of that name. Although as soon as we got on the bus, Purl realized that she forgot her apple in the minifridge. Dorm Room Matrix.