In reference to my going to Japan...
(19:38:02) Oxxxxxxxxx: Hehe let me know if you want me to bring you stuffs back :)
(19:39:59) mxxxxxxxxx: oh
(19:40:01) mxxxxxxxxx: hehe psht it's ok
(19:40:09) Oxxxxxxxxx: Haha sure?
(19:40:09) mxxxxxxxxx: bringing yourself back would be nice... :-\
...when the instant someone says they'll do something you automatically say "sure" while thinking to yourself "it's not going to happen."
...when you realize that you're probably right...and you wish you weren't.
Yesterday I went to a party at Alex's (he's my supervisor at work). I went shopping for alcohol with him and Allen (a coworker) in the morning, and we ended up spending something to the tune of $300+ on all the alcohol in total. I picked up a bottle or two of alcohol for Louise and myself as well, with my "new flavor of the week/month/however long it takes me to finish it" dessert wine, Asian pear.
I decided to invite Tammy (a friend from last semester's math class) so she could meet some folks and see if there were any people she found interesting. I'm kind of sort of halfway in the midst of convincing her to let her boyfriend go because he's rather far away and she doesn't seem very happy with the relationship. Not that there's any ulterior motive going on here. My attention goes elsewhere (specifically, school/work, though by no means is it an attraction). So she got right down with it and got to know a number of people, and by the end of the night had one curious fellow hitting on her (which was nothing short of pure entertainment for me). Tammy said she wasn't much of a drinker, but I managed to get her to have a couple drinks with me...hopefully she's come to the conclusion now that alcohol really isn't all that bad.
On the topic of alcohol, I've come to the conclusion that beer is the bane of my existence.
During the earlier part of the night, I had a midori sour, an adios mother fucker, a b-52, part of a pina colada, some of a cosmopolitan, this other drink I don't recall the name to, shots of some other alcohol and whatnot, and was feeling pretty good still. And then we started having flaming dr. peppers. What a flaming dr. pepper consists of is this one alcohol (the name escapes me at the moment, but it's almond-y...Bailey's maybe?) in a shot, topped off with some 151. You light the drink, drop it in a mug of beer, and chug the whole thing at once. Now, everything up until that moment when I had that flaming dr. pepper had been totally fine with me. But from the instant I started chugging that beer until sometime today afternoon, I had this aching desire to vomit all that beer out. Of course, the irony of it is that the hard drinks didn't faze me, and yet a tiny, weak little iddy biddy beer killed me. Terrible.
Eventually, the party started winding down as people began to leave, one by one. I ended up walking Tammy back to her place, and then hanging out at Alex's some more trying to keep two friends (Allen from earlier, and Jason, another coworker) from having too rough of a time from having too much alcohol. After some amount of vomitting and flushing with water Allen was good to go, and I walked him back to his place (only to hit my head on the ceiling of his stairs while I was leaving...brilliant). The rest of the evening consisted of a little chilling here and there, a little keeping Jason company while he was recovering (anyone who's ever been wasted to the point of vomiting can relate to it), and then crashing at Alex's. I'm sure I'd have gotten a much better sleep if the words of my optometrist telling me how her husband (my other optometrist) had gotten ulcers in his eyes from sleeping with his contacts on weren't constantly playing over in my head.
Alex throws a good party. Maybe next time I'll get off my lazy bum and try picking up on some girls. I could use some more trouble in my life.
I can never think of titles for my entries (most times, anyways). Maybe this is why I always miss all the questions on my Japanese tests that are of the type "What is an appropriate title for this article?"
I went to an earlier Japanese class today. I had to work on my CS70 homework (due at noon) so I figured I could go to Japanese early, then go work on my homework until noon. Two friends of mine in that class told me that they had heard back from Japan about studying abroad, and it seems they both made it into Doshisha's program. Good for them. So after class they wanted to go pick up their packets, and were telling me that I should ask if I got in or not (responses weren't mailed out yet because all packets hadn't arrived yet). With a bit of hesitation, I went over with them to the EAP office to see if I was accepted into any of the schools I had applied to.
What do you know, I got in to Osaka University.
Now all I've got to do is decide whether or not to go...though in all likeliness if I can somehow weasel parental approval for it, I intend to go.
In other news, I've finally come to know the identity of my mysterious visitor yesterday. Suffice to say, it was a bit of a surprise and a touch of a shock (though somehow, despite being surprising, it was at the same time unsurprising). More on this as events warrant.
In the meantime, party at Alex's at 9pm. Iron Bartender....I love it when my ideas take off, even if I'm not credited for them. Too bad the barbecue part didn't go too.
I haven't had a chance to write anything in a while, so despite my urge to simply go to bed at this point I'd like to get some thoughts out of me.
My weekend was spent in more or less what was adequately described by this particular fellow's quote "happy single's awareness day." I didn't really do anything besides work on projects, labs, homework, the like. Cooked a bit and whatnot, but didn't really do anything interesting. Other folks had their own agendas with their loved ones and it wouldn't be proper to intrude. So I hung around and somehow passed the time. I got some excercise in, which was nice. It's good to feel my body reforming into a more coherent piece, rather than this gelatinous mass that I've been staying in for quite some time now.
These past few days have been consumed with working on getting my CS project together. More correctly, these past two days or so. Two of my partners went off on their own agendas for the weekend and came home late Monday night, so we worked Tuesday and today to get a project that was due today done. It was a good amount of work, and I'm glad it's done and over with because it was really draining me.
Shannon's mentioned before that it seems like a lot of what I say, and all my rants, begin with "there's this girl...." How so very right she is. There's this girl I had tried asking out a while ago. I asked her if she was busy that night, and she said she was going out with a friend. Since she didn't offer a "how about _____ instead?" I took that as "no hope, move along." So I didn't think I'd ever see her again, and put her out of my mind. A few days ago I dropped by payroll to pick up a tax form, and what do you know; there she was, working. There's a certain irony to my life, where every time I think all the wacky things that can happen have happened, something else comes along and makes me raise an eyebrow again.
Now; what to do about this other girl? I could leave her be and never speak to her again; it'd be easy. I could ignore her. There's no real reason for me to have any sort of inclination to be around her. When she speaks poorly of others, I can't help but think to myself that, in all possiblity, when I'm not around she's speaking just as poorly of me (if not moreso, if she's speaking of me at all). She brings her troubles upon me and tells me how things are going wrong for her. But then so often it's her own fault, when it's so simple to ask someone to please let you be and yet she refuses to do so. Why does she try to hold on to something that, in all ratioinality, really isn't worth holding on to? Why try to keep someone who only brings headache and frustration around? In hopes that maybe you can heal them? In hopes that maybe you can make them better, or that they'll change, they'll come around? That you can be the one to tame them and make them well?
Now this is the part where a few readers (if they are reading) think to themselves, "is he talking about me?" And the truth of the matter is, I'm not talking about one person. I'm talking about several. Though they've treated me well enough, I cannot help but look and listen to the way they treat and speak of others with a saddened eye and ear. There was a time, long ago. where this sort of thing drove me away from a person. A person who had shown me nothing but kindness, but her way of treating others finally drove me off.
And now this is the part where I wonder if history will repeat itself. Once more. As it always does.
It's been two weeks since any sort of significant update on my journal. There have been things here and there that have happened, most of which are being lost to the sands of time, one finite time slice at a time. Maybe I'm losing my memory. Or maybe I've just stopped caring enough to remember. There was a time before when remembering things came easily, readily. But now I don't remember, and only a few things linger in my mind for more than a few hours.
There have been a few of those moments in these two weeks.
There was one night a few days ago when a friend of mine came to me asking for a bit of commentary and insight on a situation he had found himself in. He felt like there was a part of him, and evil part of him, residing within himself and intruding upon his life. He came to ask me how to resolve his conflicts, and I advised him as best as I could. Nothing teaches as well as experience, though. I hope I was of some sort of help. He had told me he thought that I might be able to relate, that I might be able to understand his situation.
I smiled a little when he told me that.
On Thursday of this past week, there was a meeting for the computer lab staff at Haas, the business school here at Berkeley where I work. There was a staff social building event, in which each of us had a piece of paper taped to our backs. We were to go around to each other and write a nice comment about them, or something we had learned from them. One of them wrote "Randy, you know you seemed kind of intiimidating at first, all in your black and long hair but you're just a big softy!!"
I smiled a little when I read that.
There was a time, a few months ago, during the beginning of school, when I was out working at night with a coworker of mine in the dorms. As we finished up for the night and were heading back, he said to me "You know, I think it's all just a front, and you're a nice person underneath all that."
I couldn't help but smile a little at that.
Earlier, on Friday, I had an interview with the folks at Residential Computing, in particular for a sys admin job I had applied for. The interview started off well enough, but towards the middle things started coming to pieces on me. By the time the obstacle course came around, I completely died on it. The prospect of not getting the job isn't what bothers me; it's in knowing that I was unable to solve some problems that bothers me. I don't like leaving loose ends like that, but the time constraints left me with little choice. I think I'll send the interviewers (the root staff, plus one programmer) an email later tonight asking them if I can play around with that machine a bit more. I imagine there's something I can learn in there, and expand my horizons just a bit more. It's not about money, it's about knowing for the sake of knowing (and then some, of course, as is most always the case).
And then, when I figure the solutions out, I will smile a little to myself, and I will carry on.
Tomorrow morning, I will be meeting a friend of mine, and we will have a little sparring session. I haven't done that in a long time now, and I look forward to it. I have much violence in my blood that demands sating, and I'm sure it will be a good release for me. It's been a long time. A long time indeed.
And when tomorrow morning comes, and I have slaked my thirst for combat a bit, I will smile to myself once again, and carry on in this existence.
Just for reference, another journal of mine can be found at http://www.livejournal.com/users/akukami
Just for posterity's sake...
I'd always thought it'd be a good idea to put a journal up on the OCF webserver, but I'd never gotten around to doing it. Too much inertia. With the coming of my CS162 project, however, my group and I decided that we should put up some sort of messaging system, and since ikonboard was down that night, I went with movable type instead. I hate not having my old entries with me. I feel like I lost a piece of myself that way. When I moved from blogger to livejournal, I imported every entry with painstaking care. And now I guess that doesn't really matter too much. But such is the way it goes; what can you do?
But in any event, this is a new entry, for a new blog, for a new day.