The Old School Lunch

For the past two Saturdays i’ve gone to the same Chinese buffet with a friend. It’s not that bad and it’s 15 bucks. Big fan of the seafood but not of the kids who run around without supervision making a general mess of the place while their parents sit and eat…

My friend works for Cingular and he was telling me that Sprint/Nextel recently reviewed thousands of their customer service records, looked at thousands more of their customers in their database and terminated the contracts of 1000+ customers for basically being shitty, verbally abusive customers and wasting Sprint’s time by constantly calling to complain with issues of little substance. “A first in the customer service industry” my friend calls it…

Heroes is surprisingly good. I was pretty skeptical but i’m hooked probably even more so than Lost. It’s nice to hear an Asian language on TV being spoken at the actual pace the actors would naturally speak it unlike Lost where everyone is speaking Korean 5x slower to make it less obvious that Daniel Dae isn’t a native speaker…

And Weeds is pretty good. Though they really put it on thick the first few episodes with the whole “Oriental whore bitch from Thailand” bit. At least Nancy corrects her…

Saw But I’m A Cheerleader after I heard the writer/director talk about it in This Film Is Not Yet Rated. Both are pretty awesome, the latter moreso than anything i’ve seen in a long time. In my hyperbole I may have called Jack Valenti a “nazi” when talking about the documentary to a friend. His response: (gasp) “I believe the man was there was president Kennedy was shot!”…

The two co-workers I am probably most buddy-buddy with at work both told me recently that when they first saw me, they both thought, “What a nerd, i’m not going to talk to that guy at all” and “that guy doesn’t look cool, i’m not going get to know him.” Oh, it’s like that?…

A female co-worker was talking to us at the lunchroom about how she couldn’t decide what to wear at the upcoming auction that she is basically running. She has an outfit that is she looks better in but she doesn’t want old farts who are donating money to hit on her or to stare at her all night. As she was talking about this dress conflict, she stopped herself and apologized to me saying that she felt bad that I as the only man in the room at the time had to endure this conversation because, of course, I just naturally wouldn’t be able to understand any of it. “No, I get what you’re saying. There’s a different between what you’d wear as a guest coming to donate money and socialize and there’s what you’d wear if you’re board member or something and then there’s what you’d wear if you’re working at the function up on stage, etc.”…

The 10th issue (and the 3rd Anniversary Issue!) of Shameless was released and it has a column by your 3rd favorite blogger who abruptly quit blogging then came back to blog but doesn’t really blog that much. Big shoutout to Editor Megan for giving me this tremendous opportunity, for all of her thoughtful advice and words of encouragement, big shoutout to Founder Nicole for putting my name in the running to even be a columnist, big shoutout to Renée because I wouldn’t have known about Shameless otherwise, and a big shoutout to the Shameless community for just simply getting it.

It’s another fall season and yet again i’m sitting here wondering what to do with my life. There’s little as frustrating as not being able to decide (or is it just not knowing?) if you want to go one of several directions. I was so hell-bent on going the grad school route and teaching but then yet again the research scares the shit out of me. Is that something I really want to do? Law school almost made a strong case for a while and then it just sort of sputtered out because I got caught up in work. Then I thought, “hey, why not just get that domestic violence focused MPA in Colorado and work for a bunch of cool non-profits…you know, climb the ladder?” Then it became, well, if you’re not going to go for the full Ph.D then should I just go for the M.A.? But won’t I only be able to teach at “really, really small community colleges” as someone once told me? Will that leave me with enough room to go for the eventual Ph.D later on? What the hell do I want to know about public administration? I want to write and teach, not crunch numbers and work on policy and committees. Then, I realized that I basically want to do what Jackson Katz does for a living: talk to men and young men in particular about sexism, homophobia, racism, etc and be able to “coach boys into men” as the Family Violence Prevention Fund saying goes. I think he went Masters in Education and now he’s getting his Ph.D in something but obviously he had a pretty unique experience in the movement. I think I have an opportunity to do my own very, very small scale sort of “coaching” men against sexism at my workplace because I work closely with men who act as mentors for young men and boys but that’d mean i’d have to stick around for a bit which isn’t something I originally planned on doing because the pay isn’t so great. But maybe I should.

When I shelled out for a premium flickr account, I decided to make the most of it and really put a bunch of stuff on there. One idea that popped into my head was to put online the stuff that I had saved up on my computer, namely, scans of magazine ads which had really sexist advertisements. This became a series of a few dozen different advertisements and i’ve gotten a bit of view here and there. However, I start to wonder when the pictures that get the most views are the ones that are more revealing/crude…

So 3 months of “training” are done and over which means that I am now covered with the job’s insurance. Which is good. This was made effective September 1st and I had all my paperwork in order and on the insurace provider’s website (where I was a member with my old job) it gives me my member ID and new group number so I went down to the local drug store to pick up a prescription of some stuff that i’m running low on, really need and, of course, is ridiculously expensive. I tell the pharmacist my info and say that I don’t have a card yet. He says “i’ll give it a try” and 5 minutes later while waiting in the magazine aisle, he calls my name and he says that nothing came up, “sorry.” I somewhat knew this was going to happen with the weekend and especially the long weekend but was still cautiously optimistic given that my information was already on their own website and it seemed like everything was in order.

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 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″

UPDATE: If you’re going to pay full cash for prescriptions, you should probably call Costco beforehand (always lowest prices) and then go to your pharmacy with that and ask for a price-match. The folks at your pharmacy should suggest you do this anyways but nooooo, they didn’t do this for me today. I’d like to think that they just didn’t know and they’re new on the job but i’ve seen these folks there at this pharmacy for a while.
Well, shit. I knew it was going to be a lot but I didn’t think it’d be that much.

My workplace doesn’t give insurance to full-time employees until their three months of “training” is done so i’m about two months into it which means paying cash for prescriptions. Which wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t get/need two new prescriptions by the new doctor (old somewhat unreliable one retired). You know it’s bad when the pharmacy tech person at Rite-Aid, before you even say anything, says “very, very expensive…”

Let’s just say that it’s cheaper than what I paid for the body of the Canon Rebel XT but it’s just barely cheaper. Barely.