The Old School Lunch

For the past two days, someone has been calling my cell phone from a private/blocked phone number. They’ve called at all periods of the day and by no exaggeration, today they’ve called about 40 times. They don’t say anything when I answer and no message left when it goes to voicemail. I’m pretty sure this is some sort of an automated computer dialing system somewhere that is just bugged…or someone is just really messing with me. Either way, it’s annoying as shit. So I called my phone service provider to see what they could do, assuming there was a setting so I could block incoming private calls (as land lines are always capable of doing so) and I was given one of two options: upgrade to one specific phone model they had which they said is the only phone they offer which can block private calls or get a new phone number completely. I’ve just about had it with my cell provider and this is likely the final straw.

[A recent Letter To The Editor in SI. I couldn’t agree more.]

After years of seeing athletes being convicted of spousal abuse, the lopsided outrage over dogfighting shows the insanity of our society. Dogfighting is bad but nowhere near as horrible as a man beating his wife or girlfriend.

- Jamey P., NY

I’m tired of getting glares/odd looks/rude questions when I take pictures of food that i’m personally eating and that i’ve personally paid for. But I never thought that I would be asked to put my camera away.

Today, I was not allowed to take pictures of the conveyor belt at a sushi joint. This isn’t a high class sushi place we’re talking about here. This is a college kids walk in in their sweats and parents bring kids in their strollers sushi place. There’s little shwanky about it yet I was abruptly denied. Has anyone ever been told not to take pictures of food and or anything inside of an eating establishment before? And no, I wasn’t being obnoxious with my camera.

I guess the honeymoon phase of “I like/don’t mind my new job” was bound to come to an end at some point and this week was it…

This has proven yet again why I wanted to go to grad school in the first place. Sometimes I’m sitting at my desk thinking “what am I doing?” I don’t regret the work and life experience, but I miss school and i’m afraid the longer i’m out of the game the harder it’ll be to go back…

It’s funny who you think you’ll get along with at the office after first impressions then after first week, first month impressions…

I probably take things too personally for my own good. I don’t like confrontation (because anyone does?) so I won’t really say things when I should when it comes to certain issues…

Today was the first day for our new CEO. We had a brief donuts and introductions meeting in the morning and then as we started to pour out of the room, I was standing there with a few co-workers and the new CEO waiting for the elevator. Our new CEO has been in contact with us since she got hired and all she talked about beyond how excited she was was how she was in China for a few week with her kids. China this and China that. I get it, you went to China.

So one of my well-meaning but not so think-before-she-speaks co-workers cracks the joke/makes the waiting for the elevator small talk of “so…when you were in China, you must’ve stood out as like the tallest person there!” to which the new CEO goes “Yea, on average, I was the tallest.”

And yes, she’s “speaking from experience” and by her own words, the CEO didn’t say anything inflammatory.

And keep in mind that i’m standing right next to both of them and i’m one of two asian people in the entire office.

As I was telling a co-worker this, he suggested that maybe she realized it was a rude joke to make especially since i’m standing right there but since she doesn’t know anyone and since it’s her first day, she doesn’t want to step on any toes. I’m willing to believe all that, but i’d be a whole lot more willing to believe that if she stopped by my office today and said as much…

Is it too much for me to ask that she send me an email, give me a call, stop by my office to say “hey, I just want you to know that I didn’t think that joke was funny”?

The only thing worse than this article are some of the blog-links at the end of it.

The first few minutes of this just gives me chills considering how close we still are to the Benoit double-murder and suicide. For a business that supposedly has been reeling since the massacre, I find it absolutely ridiculous that they use “storylines” like this. As i’m sitting here listening to Kurt Angle (and, yes, I know these are fake, soap opera storylines with scripted dialogue) talk about how much of a “loving, caring and compassionate” person he is, I can’t help but remember how the wrestling community swarmed around Chris Benoit to say how great of a guy he was, how much of a “family man” he was and how professional he was with his work. All of this despite how he had murdered his wife and son.

It would be a great understatement to say that this is simply in poor taste but TNA wrestling doesn’t stop there. If you don’t watch the entire thing it’s basically an eye-roll enducing characterization of an abusive husband, the woman who is being emotionally (and suggestively physically) abused and the knight in shining armor protector who comes in to kick the abuser’s ass and save the abused woman as she tells the abuser that she’s leaving him. One could say that this is in some way a positive portayal…that the abuser (Angle) got his ass kicked and that his wife left him, all of which resulted from his asshole personality and the way he treated his wife. But of course at the other side of the coin we have the Somoa Joe character, the fan favorite, who comes to Karen’s aid after Angle begins to berate Karen. But is it a positive portrayal? I don’t think it is necessarily. I don’t buy that since our standards for wrestling are so low, we have to say “yea, awesome!” to what we would otherwise just scoff at–the focal point being the male hero coming to save the day. If I saw this on any other TV show, which is hard to imagine since nothing else is so hyperbolic in its forced drama than wrestling, it’d be pretty troubling to see. Yea you could say that the woman telling Angle tell basically fuck off is pretty great…but she leaves the ring, the camera isn’t on her anymore as the attention is all on Joe as he is who the audience now identifies with and cheers for.

(To be continued…)

Always interesting what you find in the office printer tray when people forget to pick stuff up. Today was a list of interview questions for an applicant and one of the q’s was “What is your experience with diversity?” which is either the dumbest “have you worked with them colored folk?” question i’ve ever seen or either just brilliant in a “you can tell a lot with how they answer to such a vague and weird question” sort of way.

“The shortest guy I went out with was 5′11 and I thought I was going to puke the entire time.” - officemate (who stands 5′0)

“Ewwwwww, that’s disgusting.” - officemate from above after hearing me say “my ex-girlfriend is about 5′10″