DM to me: Yer pretty petite, I can see you fitting under quite a few beds.

To backtrack, I had set my YM status to another lyric. I love using lyrics as status lines because they’re so full of drama and it’s not your own drama, so it’s okay. My stat read, “From the moment the lights went off, everything had changed.”

DM asked where I was when the lights went out. I replied, “Under my bed. If I could fit under it, that is.”

“Yer pretty petite, I can see you fitting under quite a few beds.”

DM claims it was a compliment. Sure, DM, sure!

On the lyrics, it came from a Maroon 5 song. I had Maroon 5 fever early last month, though this type of song wasn’t in my top faves. I generally prefer the more intense songs, but this one grew on me as they all do when I’ve listened to them for fifty times:

I know that my co-workers think that a day off in the middle of the week throws things off rhythm, but I happen to like it. First off, because 3-day weekends KILL me in terms of work load, and second, because I get another chance to catch up on rest. I haven’t gotten much this week because of a full weekend and visiting relatives. My aunts also hogged the PC since they were busy trying to beat my 800k score on Bookworm Deluxe (hence my lack of posts here).

Though I didn’t get any quiet time after work, it was nice to see my little rascal of a cousin. He enjoyed showing off his karate skills by “sparring” with my dad. Let me just say - boys play rough! Or being gross. Gotta love how the rascal screamed when my dad immobilized him and stuck out his tongue like he was going to lick the rascal. The house shook from the chaos, I swear.

While they messed around, I built the rascal a speedster with his K’nex set. The set was made for little kids, but I can’t imagine a little kid putting together the items in the catalog. It’s a lot harder than it looks! Still, it was fun. Wish I had a huge Lego set when I was a kid.

I spent today sleeping in, catching up with Clary, and getting in some preventive maintenance. Later tonight, a family friend is having a party so we’ll be heading to that, though I dread to think about going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 5:30am again…

Oh yeah, happy 4th of July!

Aaaand add to that my BFM (the other best friend, Mike) is being ‘bitchy’. (That’s right, I said you were bitchy!) I swear, his sarcastic level has gone up at least 50% over the past week. Luckily Clary balances it out with her cheerful gab.

Ohhkay I must sleep. I’ll find my way to and fro somehow. And if I don’t, I’ll call people in a panic. No biggie.

As the title says, Google Maps rocks! I still rely on traditional paper maps when I’m driving, but for getting directions and studying routes, I look to Google Maps. It’s pretty awesome in terms of features. No surprise that it still remains at the top of my list, despite Yahoo Maps catching up on the AJAX-y side. I love how Google Maps has a hybrid version where you can see what the area actually looks like as opposed to the clean straight lines in regular maps.

I just discovered this new feature - you can change the route that Google Maps gives you! Just drag the blue line around and the directions are automatically adjusted. I loved it because it’s exactly what I need - I was trying to compare all the possible routes to south of the bay. It turns out that taking either the 880 or 101 is about the same distance. A good thing to know.

Now, to memorize directions. I’m kind of anal when it comes to driving to places I’ve never been to on my own. I don’t like the idea of getting lost (though I’ve mellowed out on that aspect a lot since I got lost that first time), so I print out tons of zoomed-in shots for reference. I still need a traditional paper map, which I don’t have owing to poor planning on my part. Argh. I’ll try to stop by the AAA office tomorrow morning. Hopefully the vending machine will have it…

I have two best friends. One, I could trust my life with, and another… well, if you put us together, we’d implode. Clary and I, we can get pretty hyper when left to our own devices.

Clary came to the States recently for grad school so we’ve been able to talk over the phone pretty often. (It’s kind of a relief not to worry about expensive overseas charges.) As an intern at a big charitable org, one of Clary’s projects is to throw a party for the branch. The catch? It has to have something to do with the org’s five corporate strategies.

We were talking about possible games for the party. One involved charades. We were really getting into it, figuring out how to eliminate people pera-or-bayong style and how the teams would work. Just as we were finalizing details, Clary realized something:

“How would they do a charade for ‘market penetration’?”

“…”

We decided to scrap the whole charade idea.

During a weekly meeting, one of the ops was talking about his plan for switching over to a new server. He wanted to do it in one swoop, giving prior warning to users and then cutting them all off. An engineer suggested a seemingly seamless solution where users would be placed on the new server as they logged in, until all the users were moved over to the new server.

The op nodded in agreement, saying he had thought of that method but, “I thought it might create chaos and confusion,” he paused, added, “which I’m in favor of, but I thought this way would be less emotionally upsetting.”

So I paraphrased, but I have had co-workers who talk like people do in books. It’s so cool. I find this fact funny because one of my friends at another job used to laugh at the way I talked and the slightly formal words I used. (That’s my 3rd-world English flashing though sometimes.) If only she could hear these people. The words they speak are so big that they don’t qualify as fifty-cent words — they’re more like a dollar coin words.

I need to start carrying a dictionary around with me. Strike that. I need to get wireless on my laptop so I can carry that around and look up definitions online.

So after a dismal end to last week, I recharged over the weekend. That’s right - I plugged myself into my bed!

No, not really.

I did get in my requisite preventive maintenance time, which is a Good Thing because I spend most of my time sitting on my big arse typing in front of the computer. Ergo tip I got from my big corp job: take time to get up and stretch. I typically try to get up and walk around whenever possible instead of simply emailing or IM’ing. If I need a record, though (coz there’s always that problem of “but you said…”) then email is the way to go.

While I’m thoroughly a ‘net kid who often prefers instant messaging to talking aloud, when it comes to work I find that I’d rather talk to a person. Digital just can’t replace that experience, good or bad as it may be. Besides, all of us come off differently online and offline. The nicest people in person can be the curtest in email.

During the weekend, I also got some fun, snarky buttons from Walmart. I couldn’t believe it - one of those buttons costs $2.50 each at the mall. Whereas in Walmart? $2 for a whole pack.

I’m totally gonna pin my cube to death. My goal is to have every inch of space covered by the next office reconfiguration (and by that, I mean the next time we swap cubes). There’ll be buttons, and postcards, and calendars, and posters, and everything else that’s pin-able and non-perishable. It’ll be like a scrapbook wall, only better!

I was bugging the artists like I usually do. It’s just so easy because one glance and you know what they’re up to. Whereas if you ask anyone else, they have to stop and explain everything.

Anyway, I saw one of them designing shirts. They were dark and moody.

“We don’t want it to look girly.” The graphic artist explained when I picked on the designs.

I looked at one design again - it wasn’t that bad actually. It was dark blue with trendy dotted lines running across it. “It does look… manly.” I conceded.

JD looked around for support. “What do you think, TK?” he asked an artist who’d come by to see what the fuss was about.

“Oh, I don’t like manly shirts.” TK responded, his face completely straight.

Looked like JD didn’t get the answer he expected. Actually, neither did I!

Because this is a public blog, I’m going to throw in entries that may or may not be true, or may be partly true such as a half-truth. Gotta mix it up somehow! Proper warning will be given for entries like these - they will be labeled with the words “Half-truth” followed by the title of the post. It’s up to the reader to decide what to believe.

On to “Downward”

So you’re feeling pretty down one day, all sad and distracted. Then the next morning you get up, smile to yourself, and determine it’s going to be a good day. And for the first part, it is. You have breakfast with a new friend, chat with some other people you love, get a surprise visit in your cube, and spend lunch watching some funny episodes of a Japanese game show. You wince when the announcers narrate how a player eats dirt and gets “double fisted” at the end, and laugh when a guy crossing a twisting bridge gets shot off by a ball.

And then noon passes. As the sun wanes downwards, you follow suit. Every minute that passes drains you until you have barely enough energy to form words. What words you do get out are ill-phrased and badly taken, and later on you feel bad but it’s done and you’re just tired. You scowl because smiling takes too much effort, and around you there are ripples of reaction. Someone pulled you down, and now you’re pulling someone else, and so on it will go because that’s how the world works.

You come home and write, thinking you’ll feel better but you must not be at the bottom yet because you still feel yourself plummeting.

Then you brush your teeth in preparation for blissful unconsciousness. The minty fresh toothpaste perks you right up and you’re almost back to normal.

You thus vow to brush your teeth more often.

Because this is a public blog, I’m going to throw in entries that may or may not be true, or may be partly true such as a half-truth. Gotta mix it up somehow! Proper warning will be given for entries like these - they will be labeled with the words “Half-truth” followed by the title of the post. It’s up to the reader to decide what to believe.