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.