Dinhternet

Hmm… that last post was kinda short, too. I’ll make it up to you guys with another story about a cool high school nickname of mine…

So when I transfered to Laguna Creek, there was already another Dinh there. Two, actually, if you count the girl one. But she’s not important. The important thing was how similar the other male Dinh and I were, and how we needed cool nicknames to easily differentiate between ourselves.

First off, we were both male. Hella similar already, huh? And we both had typically Asian hair. He had the shaved sides, long top that’s gelled straight back look going, while I alternated between the crew cut and the short spikes look. (Mostly because I didn’t like gelling my hair every day.)

… and that’s basically where the similarities ended. He hung out with a ghetto Viet gangstaz crew, and I kicked it with the Chinese over-achievers. He would sleep through his morning classes and ditch at lunch. I played chess for fun in my math teacher’s classroom at lunch. He failed his senior English and Pre-Cal classes, and I got 4s and 5s on all my AP tests. I got a 1600 on my SATs, and he got an 810. So… some of my friends came up with a a catchy, easy-to-remember way to tell us apart. I was SD, for “Smart Dinh” (not Super-Deformed), and he was DD, for “Dumb Dinh.”

Then, as senior year came to an end, one of the hottest topics for seniors was college… who accepted them, where they were going, etc. I had applied to Franklin Olin College of Engineering (don’t worry, no one’s ever heard of it), UCB, UCLA, UCD, CalPoly, and SacState. And that was basically my order of preference, too. Thinking back, I don’t even know why I checked the “UCD” box on the UC application… I think it was because my parents wanted me close enough to home to commute.

Well, the letters started coming in, and to my surprise, I was rejected from Olin. I had set all my hopes and dreams on attending there. Even though it was out in Boston, and was thousands of miles away from any family I had, it was such a great school! That’s OK, though, I still had plenty of other choices. Or so I thought. I got my online rejections from UCB and UCLA as well, and it kinda crushed my soul a little. So yeah, the only schools I was accepted to were UCD (and who the hell wants to go there? ) and CalPoly. (SacState never got my application, because of the way the CSU applications work.)

But the worst part was the next day, when I heard that DD had been accepted to UCB. How the hell did that happen? To this day, I’m still baffled. The running theory, though, is that the admissions officer dropped our folders and mixed up our files.

Anyways, after that, my friends started calling me DDDD, or “Double-Dose of Dumb Dinh,” because I must have been dumber than Dumb Dinh for him to have been picked over me.

Tags: Family, Friends, Work

This entry was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2005 at 10:05 and is filed under Friends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.