叫んでも聞こえないこの声

I'm tired of studying, so I'm going to take a moment and go ahead and offend everyone.

Be kind to your local engineer; s/he's overworked, underappreciated, and ridiculously underpaid.

Here to help highlight the plight of our poor fool the engineer, for we shall soon see that only a fool would ever want to become an engineer, are our two friends the Pharmacist and the Optometrist.

Since the Optometrist is less of an asshole than the Pharmacist, we'll start with the Optometrist. You go through med school like all your doctor buddies, and for that you have the sympathy of us engineering folks. Nobody backstabs better or is more adept at stealing your homework, copying it, then burning yours than our neighbor Physician (but he's saved for another rant). You go through school, doing what you can to keep your head above water, and you somehow manage to graduate with your optometry degree. Your family all turns out for your graduation (even the people who hate you, you snobby little med student you), and everyone's oh so proud of you.

Then it's off to the job market! While your other friends are stepping over each other's dead bodies trying to find a job you suddenly realize, wow, there are a lot of positions open! But it works out for you so you don't bother finding out why. Otherwise, you might discover that universities keep the number of optometry degrees artificially low (i.e. even though lots of people are qualified only a few get them), leading to a ridiculously high salary for an optometrist (200k/year), which makes everyone want to be an optometrist, which makes them give truckloads of money to the universities so they can study there, and the pattern becomes clear.

So there you are at work, and you discover that your daily routine is roughly chatting with your secretaries and occasionally using a machine (guess who made those) to help diagnose a patient. Only by "diagnose" you mean read what the machine printed out so you can look at the patient's record and sound smart when you ask them "your vision's getting worse, have you been watching a lot of TV?" But every now and then you find your daily rhythm interrupted by having to do something sort of resembling real work in the form of dilations and other work slightly more advanced than asking "one? Or two? One? Or two?" So you realize your job isn't quite as bad as our comrade in arms Pharmacist's job.

Our buddy Pharmacist goes through school, being a good little university sponge and absorbing zounds of knowledge on drug interaction, side effects, and all the other minutia that comes with your profession. And so Pharmacist comes out of college, all ready to hit that job market which, lucky for him, has already been primed because there are fewer pharmacy degrees given out than there are number of job openings. So he lands himself a job, and if he's somewhere in the middle 50% of pharmacists then, according to US government studies, he's making between 66k and 87k per year. Enough money to pay the rent, buy a car, eat well, and start saving towards that symbol of the American Dream, the Home.

Of course, around week two of being on the job you realize that the sinking feeling you had in week one was indeed a premonition of what was to come: your job is completely, utterly pointless. Your job more or less consists of deciphering physician writing and doling out drugs (a small step above that other friend of ours, Streetside Pharmaceuticals). What about all that drug interaction and side effect knowledge you so diligently absorbed during university? Taken care of in the computer database (courtesy of the Engineer and Researcher). And for your convenience, it's also written on the side of the bottle in that neat little printed label from the printer (also, coincidentally, made by the Engineer).

So here you are, working at a nice little pharmacy in the neighborhood giving drugs out to old ladies and reading the labels for them (as if they can't read) and you're paid a king's ransom for doing menial work a junior high school student could do. The only difference is you use big fat words to say small simple ideas. Sounds like our friend the Politician! (and we all know how we feel about that friend) God forbid the machines you use at work should ever break, for you'd actually have to take responsibility for a change and try to remember all those chemical reactions you studied about in university; only by this time you've probably forgotten it all. Naughty naughty.

Now here comes our friend Engineer. Despite having a considerably more difficult job, he's (and it is mostly "he", get over it) only paid between 48k and 78k a year. Somehow, debugging an operating system (which, should you screw up, can do evil things like bring down an entire coastol patrol unit or launch a nuclear warhead without any way to stop it) strikes me as a bit more difficult than taking a bottle, reading the side (turning it to the side so you can actually read it might be a bit more challenging though), and exchanging your goods and services for the customer's money. Lifemate Engineer builds bridges, X-ray machines, that thing you're using to read this, all that and more! Without him your world would grind to a screeching halt (throwing everyone off the face of the planet, according to Mr. Physicist). Your way of life would grind to a halt without the Engineer. Your grocer wouldn't be able to scan your items. You wouldn't be able to use a credit card or an ATM card. You couldn't drive to school, you'd have to actually use those two oddly shaped appendages you call legs to get from point A to point B. Your entire life is granted you by your bestest friend in the whole wide world Engineer, and what do you show him? A low salary and a backbreaking workload. Thank you, you're a true friend.

Now just to make it clear (because I, like all other tortured and starving artist souls, am oft misunderstood), I don't hate the people who work at those jobs. In fact, I really like my optometrists (look! I have two!). They're patient with me and are fun to chat with while the machine finishes checking my eyes, and they didn't complain a bit when I had to constantly try out different brands of contact lenses trying to find one that fit my right eye properly (I gave up and just learned to deal with it). I've got a friend whose mom is a pharmacist, and is a dear lady who's always kind to us young'ns when we go over to play. My beef is with the professions themselves, which are granted a salary disproportionate to the actual difficulty and necessity of the job. Take away the pharmacist and leave a minimum wage attendant with the computer and you'd be fine. Take away the optometrist and leave the machines and you'd be fine. Take away the engineer and you can only stare ahead in confusion with a blank look on your face. For you slightly more graphical people, that means:

Difficulty of being a pharmacist/optometrist < Difficulty of being an engineer, BUT
Salary of a pharmacist/optometrist > Salary of an engineer.

So be kind to your neighborhood engineer. He keeps your world running, lets you have a life of comfort, all while being paid in crumbs and without uttering a peep (except for me).

This has been a public service announcement brought to you by your local Save the Engineers Society.

Monies

It has come to my attention that, despite only being here for 9 days in August, I will still be awarded scholarship money for that month. After exchanging it to US dollars, it will come out to the amount of approximately $754 and some pieces of metal. This raises the curious issue of...what should I do with it? Assuming I spend about $20 a day for food (this is a very conservative estimate), my nine days of living here will leave me with $574.

So...what should I do with it?

10 years too late

Every now and then I wonder how it is that old folks can listen to the same tunes from way back when over and over and never get bored of them. Sometimes I wonder if maybe there's something I'm missing when people talk about how great the Beatles were, or how Elvis was great, and so on so forth. When I listen to their tracks, it doesn't really do anything for me, and I'm not particularly impressed. I wonder if I just don't know what to look for in the song, like how the untrained palate fails to find the nuances between a fine wine and a pedestrian blend.

Mostly, though, I kind of figure it's because I grew up in a time when songs like that were already heading out of vogue (casually ignore the observation that there are people my age or younger who like the Beatles, Elvis, and other artists of old).

Every now and then, though, I find myself rummaging through the datastreams and bit dumps on the internet looking for a track or two from an older time, back 10 years ago. Back to when I was a much more impressionable kid who would take the word of kids barely a few years my senior as gospel and follow their opinions exactly. I'd imitate what they say, adopt their opinions, and basically try to emulate them in every way (it didn't work very well).

Childhood idolizing sure does some strange things to you.

10 years ago is when I had my first run in with modules. Back then they weren't things you plugged into other things, nor were they some sort of strange touchy feely software thing that would eat your computer alive as you clutch the monitor crying for it to give you your final paper back. They were simple things, a number of sound samples along with a timing cue sheet of when to play those samples, and at what frequencies.

Thus, digital music.

This was way before mp3's came along, and when you got a song you could see what instruments they were using and what the score looked like. You could even rip the samples (yes the word "rip" was used back then), modify them, and claim them as your own (or not even bother modifying them and just be a sample thief).

There were eventually some modifications to the whole module thing, and you got formats like S3M (Scream Tracker 3, coded by one of the guys in a demo group called Future Crew....demo groups don't seem to exist much anymore), XM (I forgot what this stands for), IT (Impulse Tracker), and some other ones that don't come to mind offhand (along with the classic MOD).

So that's how way back 10 years or so ago I started listening to music on my computer...and it was awesome. When I compare the music I listen to now to the music they had back then, the older tunes sound much better. Well, the samples sucked, but when 8 bit sound sampled at 22 kHz was an amazing feat, you made do with what you had. Times were simpler back then, get over it.

Maybe it's simply a difference in genre, but the pop music that gets played on the radio these days really just bores me. Listening to old modules makes me a much happier camper. Sometimes I'm told it's because the music that was composed was by other geeks, so it has some sort of inter-geek connection (only I'm in the closet still). It seems like a bit of a stretch, but seeing how some of the bigger industrial and EBM folks are geeks, and how the crowd that listens to the stuff tends to be pretty geeky, the idea might have more merit than it seems to have at first glance.

Anyways, this entry's getting way too long when all I wanted to say was old music with poor samples sounds better than new music with bright flashy in-your-face EXTREME DORITOS samples.

Engrish

After getting hit by a car last Friday, I took off for Tokyo for my gay buddy Dickson's birthday party, one of the EAP student orientations, and seeing Shannon after having spent around 2/3 of a year without seeing her.

Back in August and September when I was living in Tokyo, Dickson, our group of friends, and I would go out partying, drinking, and have other fits of youthful immortality four nights a week. At these gatherings, shady going ons were the norm and the only time people weren't engaging in questionable behavior was when we were all passed out from drinking and partying too much. Somewhere between Dickson doing a stripshow, dry-going-down (?) on this guy, and other fits of strange behavior, the thought occurred to me:

Some things just don't change.

I saw Shannon again, and we went to a couple of places in Tokyo to show her around. There was shopping at Shinjuku and Shibuya, some good food places in the area (including a place with Kobe beef, 500g of meaty goodness for under $20), and basically getting a feel for how to get around in Tokyo. I also helped set her up with a cell phone, so now her mom can call her and bug her at all hours of the day. That worked out particularly well for me because her mom had been calling my cell before to ask me to give Shannon messages and whatnot. Back home, there'd be people's parents calling me from time to time asking me if I knew where their kids were, if they were out with me, etc. etc. I swear the parents of all of my friends had my cell number or something.

Some things just don't change.

I met some new people, and met up with some old people, and caught up on all the people who had gotten together, broken up, been hired, been fired, been high, been down, been living large, been ghettoing it up, and somehow in the midst of all of that people still say Shannon and I look like we're either going out or are brother/sister.

Some things just don't change.

As my time here draws towards an end, I'm beginning to see the way I've changed since leaving the states. Things I've done wrong, things I've needed to fix about myself for a while. Time to get back into the game, shift into gear, and tear off into the sunset on my 50cc go-cart.

I win again

Today, on my list of Things To Do During Life:

#142. Get hit by a car..............DONE

That is all.

Egads!

My scholarship here pays for my flight back home. They gave me my flight info today, so I (being the curious little critter that I am) decided to pop by the airline's website and see how much it cost them.

Japanese people are nuts.

A month and change

There are thirty-one days in July. I've already lost six of them, leaving me with twenty-five days.

Twenty-five days to go to the box lunch (bento) place next door to buy lunch on the days I eat at home, where the ladies who work there all know me and say hi when they see me on the street.

Twenty-five days to make midnight trips to the ramen place next to my dorm, where the guys who work there know my roommate and I, and on those days when I'm not that hungry they always ask if I'm sure I don't want the usual potsticker (gyoza) set with my special ramen.

Twenty-five days to hang around lab, going to dinner with a labmate or two and lamenting the lack of attractive women in the engineering department...but luckily the cafeteria there also sees a lot of medical students.

There's so much here that I've put a part of me into and so much here that's put a part into me that I can hardly believe that I'm going to have to tear myself away from it in little more than a few weeks' time.

The rhythm and meter and ebb and flow of here and now are wired into me, tightly bound sinews that grip the bones and move the limbs in a dance that goes from day to day so simple and determined; yet so enchanting and binding.

I miss the people at home dearly.

But I'm not ready to go back yet.

The end of me

I've come across my bane and joy once again. After another clubbing event (Midnight Necropolis), a random guy I met there told me about this bar in the area that caters to the goth scene. This past weekend, I got curious and decided to take a look.

That place is going to be the doom of me.

It's essentially the same as the place in Tokyo, only the drinks aren't as good (but the place is a good deal cheaper, so hopefully there won't be any more $300 weekend excursions...aie.) By itself the bar probably wouldn't destory my life, but!

I've also found some DVD's at the rental store of this old series I saw when I was a kid and really liked ("Shie Diao Ying Xiong Zhuan" by Jing Yong, for the curious.) Somewhere between spending all my time watching that series, the Chinese Ghost Story thing, and that bar, and buying Guilty Gear XX Reloaded, I can feel all productivity draining from heart to shoulder to elbow to wrist to finger to...nothingness.

This wouldn't be a problem if my research paper and source files weren't due in less than two weeks.

I'm weak

There's this old old Chinese trilogy I really liked when I was a kid. It's translated title is "Chinese Ghost Story," which I guess is kinda...functional. It's Chinese title (in really crappy pinyin) is "Chien Nur Yo Hwen." Very awesome. There's this drama thing of sorts ("Lien shur jur") that's based on that story that's come out in the past few months, so I stopped by the video store to check it out.

My god, it's like being a kid again.

I spent an entire Saturday just watching one DVD after the other. Luckily, the video store only had up to the 4th DVD of the series or I'd have ended up watching the whole damn thing in one day. Meteor Garden? Meteor Garden sucks. This is way more awesome. Though speaking of Meteor Garden, the girl in that drama ("Shian Tsai" or some such) plays the main female character in this drama (a ghost, who's supposed to be uberhot...whether or not they got that right or not is up to your taste, but seeing her in the ghost costume's really made her grow on me.)

The story's changed a lot in the drama adaptation, but given the simplistic nature of the story it's kind of hard to blame them (the director guy actually comes out and says that in one of the making of clips). At first it felt kind of like a bastardization of a beloved treasure of my childhood, but after I started taking it as it's own separate thing it was pretty entertaining. Lots of cheesy special effects and silly postures and whatnot, all characteristic of Chinese dramas.

I love it.

So in an effort of sorts to recapture some of the magic, I ordered the DVD's of all three original movies. Classic 80's movies, all captured on DVD. I'm kind of sad I'll be missing out on the crappy quality and washed over coloring that has such close ties to videos from my childhood, but I really have no idea where the videotape of the second and third movies is. I imagine somewhere in the living room back at home...but hrm.

On a semi-related note, my brothers and I used to watch a lot of martial arts-related dramas. Mostly drama adaptations of books from this one writer named Jin Yong. Very awesome stuff. They had some great opening and closing themes, so my brothers and I, being the silly 9/12-year olds we were around that time (maybe even earlier) decided it'd be a great idea to record the songs on tape. So we'd get together with a little tape recorder and sit by the speakers, press play on the VCR, and start recording the music while trying out best to keep quiet so we could get a good recording.

So ghetto.

But so treasured. That tape is, by far, the coolest tape I have ever heard. If only I knew where it was!! >:| I was asking one of my brothers about it and he doesn't know either. Bloody hell! Come winter break when I go back home, I'm going to go nuts looking for that thing. I will turn the house inside out and upside down! >:O