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You're Gonna Kill That Girl

May 24, 2005 Alpha Phi Omega / Family / Friends / Quote of the Day
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Hmm… yes­ter­day…

Woke up and worked on the web­site. Basi­cally mak­ing the “new peo­ple” page so some­one can safely help the web­mas­ters add peo­ple to the data­base. But it’s not ready yet because I can’t get it to cor­rectly check for dupli­cates before inser­tion. Guess we’ll be han­dling it our­selves for a lit­tle while longer.

Oh, and Erik has to make a “merge peo­ple” page, because I’ve acci­den­tally done many dou­ble entries on old folks. (As you can see with the “Remove” peo­ple in the fam­ily line viewer.) Merg­ing will be incred­i­bly com­pli­cated. Here’s a crash (no pun intended) course for the non-​CS folks:

To remove some­one safely from the data­base, we would have to search through it for every sin­gle time they are ref­er­enced some­where else in the data­base. This might be by name, ID num­ber, or some­thing else. Then we have to make sure every sin­gle ref­er­ence points to a cor­rect entry that’s not about to be deleted. You see, if we were to sim­ply go in and delete some­one from the data­base, and not fix all ref­er­ences first, they will either point to the wrong per­son or to dig­i­tal garbage. And when some­one tries to look up or use that infor­ma­tion… bad things will hap­pen to the website.

Got invited to Fuji’s, but I was being veg­e­tar­ian for the day. For those of you who didn’t know, I was sup­posed to be veg­e­tar­ian on Sat­ur­day and Sun­day, because it was Buddha’s birth­day on Sunday.

I’m a bad Bud­dhist because I’m sup­posed to (well, the way my par­ents do it… there’s many dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions) be veg­e­tar­ian for the day before and of every full moon. The full moon on the fourth month of the lunar cal­en­dar is Buddha’s birth­day, and the most impor­tant one of the year.

But any­ways, yeah, I was sup­posed to be veg­e­tar­ian on Sat­ur­day and Sun­day, but I slipped on Sun­day. Went to FuBQ as soon as I woke up, and had half a burger before I remem­bered. That was the more impor­tant of the two days, too. :( So yeah, I was veg­e­tar­ian again yes­ter­day to make up for it.

After I did as much as I could with the web­site, had cereal for lunch and just chat­ted and forum whored for a while. Quote comes from the con­ver­sa­tion I had with Sheena -

“Oh my god! I just real­ized some­thing…
’If you bid on my mom­mies, I will kill you!’ ”

- Sheena, quot­ing mom­mies’ dance auc­tion profile.

“Yeah, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

- Me.

“I didn’t real­ize you were so pro­tec­tive of your moms that you meant it lit­er­ally. You’re not nice Dinh any­more. You’re crazy!”-

Sheena.

If you don’t get it… I killed her in Assas­sins after she bid on my mom­mies. :twisted: I’m sup­posed to kill Eddie C, too, but he bid from beyond the grave.

Then it was time for ExComm. Except I missed the bus, so I only got to see the sec­ond half of ExComm. It was odd. It was out on the quad, and every­one was idling play­ing with their Assas­sins weapons. Miyama is like a walk­ing bill­board for Chris’s weapons store, too. His weapons are amaz­ingly good-​looking and functional.

Then time for the meet­ing itself. Things went fast. Basi­cally a bunch of “thanks for a great term.” And then LFS and DSKs. LFS was straight­for­ward. DSKs, though… I wanted to vote for every­one who was up. All the speeches were great. Good job to every­one who stuck around for all of them, espe­cially new actives. DSKs are the high­est award our chap­ter can give some­one, and it’s great that you care enough to stick around and see the cal­i­bre of peo­ple who earn them. Actu­ally, it’s more amaz­ing to see the peo­ple who have done so much and haven’t got­ten one.

After the meet­ing, MNR was at 7 – 11. But some of us wanted real food, so Joe M, Bran­don, Emily, Ian, Aaron L, Elyson, and I went to Woodstock’s. Had a great veg­e­tar­ian pizza with Aaron L, who can’t have many of the meats found on pizza anyway.

Then Bran­don took me home and I was online for a while doing ran­dom stuff. Watched a really cool episode of Top Gear (by far the best car show ever!) with Eddie C, and then passed out.

Beverly Hills

April 13, 2005 Food / Internet / Life, the Universe, and Everything / Stories / Work
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I sup­pose I should con­tinue work­ing through the back­log, so here’s a post about Chi…

Woke up nat­u­rally at 6:30 on Fri­day morn­ing. Ew. That’s even worse than usual. I guess I was just really pumped about going to SoCal, though. Packed my stuff while chatting/​watching TV/​reading Xan­gas. I had to get as many com­ments as pos­si­ble in since I didn’t know when was the next time I could be on the inter­net again. :)

Joe M called me up a lit­tle after 9 when he got out of class, and we met up at Brandon’s place. Took him to Wal­mart and Kra­gen to buy some motor oil and oil and air fil­ters for a lit­tle car main­te­nence before the long haul. Back to Brandon’s, where we knocked on the door to get Bran­don to come unlock his stor­age area to get his jack for us. Knocked and called for days, with no response from Bran­don. Sud­denly, of all peo­ple to open the door, it was Michelle J. Appar­ently, they drank a bit the night before and she had crashed in the liv­ing room. Got the keys for the stor­age area from a hun­gover Bran­don, and got to work. How­ever, the jack didn’t work very well on the incline, so Joe M ended up doing it ghetto with two spare tire jacks. (The sec­ond from Clayton’s Accord.)

After the main­te­nence, picked up Jenny, went back to Joe M’s place so he could shower. Ate. And then we were on the road to SoCal! Most of the the drive was alright, but we hit traf­fic on the 210 to Ian’s. At some points, it was actu­ally com­pletely stopped traf­fic. For no appar­ent rea­son. I hate that. I dunno if I could sur­vive liv­ing in SoCal. Oh yeah, 210 also tricked us by sud­denly split­ting to the right, with less than a mile of warn­ing. We didn’t make the turn, but it was kinda worth it. We went through an incred­i­bly well-​off part of town and saw a Lam­bogh­ini Gal­lardo. :mrgreen: In motion, no less. Took a blurry dusk-​time shot of it on Joe M’s cam­era phone, the only cam­era we had on us.

Finally got to Ian’s place at around 9 at night. Only about two hours later than pre­dicted when we left Davis. Which was two hours later than we said we could leave. Had some BBQ and some birth­day cake. Watched Harold and Kumar, then some ran­dom stuff, and then Hells­ing, which has also been brought to Amer­ica. Stu­pid Amer­i­can voice actors… they need to bring animé over and just sub it instead of dub­bing. It’s cheaper, and fans will like it more. Asked all the Rho Rho folks to look for my IC Pen Pal Kris­ten Jue and say hi to her and take her pic­ture for me. Played Mafia for a while after that. Quote of course comes from that -

“Kill Joe M! Kill Joe M! Kill Joe M!”- Aaron L, wildly ges­tur­ing in Joe M’s direc­tion while every­one was “sleep­ing” except the killer.

And the killer lis­tened. I think she’s impres­sion­able. :)

Then we got a call from Julie C’s car that they were close, so headed over to the hotel. Checked in and chilled for a while in Julie C’s car’s room until the neigh­bors started bang­ing on the paper-​thing walls, and then we knocked out.

Sat­ur­day… we were sup­posed to be there between 8 and 9 for reg­is­tra­tion. So of course sleepy-​heads want to take full advan­tage of the lee­way. Left the hotel around 8:40. Merry actu­ally called me to con­firm that we were going to show up. Good thing Chi also runs on APhiO time. Our first ice­breaker was to tape a piece of paper to our backs and run around meet­ing peo­ple and writ­ing down our first impres­sions on their papers. I got “jolly”… twice. I won­der if that word is big­ger in SoCal.

First work­shop was Boy Scout First Aid. Our pre­sen­ters were very edu­tain­ing. Sec­ond I went to Drew and Aaron L’s work­shop on how to have the Ideal Pledge Quar­ter. Orig­i­nally to heckle, but I liked hear­ing about what other chap­ters did. After that was lunch! IPhi was loud and proud on the grass. :) I reen­acted a scene from Super Troop­ers with the statue of the UCLA mas­cot. Then we took a chap­ter pic­ture and Quyet, Bran­don, and Jason G hopped on top of it. After lunch went to the LFS Forum work­shop and heard Mag­gie Katz tell cool sto­ries about APO Philip­pines. And finally the Hyp­no­sis work­shop. It didn’t do much, but I did feel less tired afterwards.

After that was the busi­ness meet­ing. A bunch of us decided to skip out on that. Joe M’s car plus Tom and Julie C’s car heaed back to the hotel. I guess the plan was at that point to meet up with Julie C’s friend and go out to eat. Per­son­ally, I kinda wanted to go to ban­quet. Yeah, catered food sucks. And yeah, it’s not our Sec­tion, so we prob­a­bly wouldn’t get any awards. (Although we did end up get­ting Man-​Mile.) But I mean… it’s what we came for, right? Plus just the… fel­low­ship, I guess.

But yeah, met up with Vince and we went to the Stan­dard Bar to eat. The build­ing was really cool. The lobby is dec­o­rated in 70s art deco, the restau­rant was like an old diner; we ended up eat­ing in the… I want to say tiki lounge because of the woven fur­ni­ture, but they had a desert theme on the walls. Chilled there for a while until the real lounge opened up… that thing looked like if Alice in Won­der­land had a rave. Oh, and Julie C and Jenny wrote Chi­nese on me. Sup­pos­edly one hand said, “You are cute,” and the other hand said, “Wanna fuck?” I dunno if that’s true. Damn devil talk! The girls also started writ­ing on each other’s boobs. I didn’t see what those mes­sages said, though.

After that we were going to meet up at the hotel, find the after-​banquet party, and go there. But the drunk­ies in the other car got lost, and some peo­ple were pretty messed up. So we stayed in. Oh, quote comes from drunk Jean­nie try­ing to hook Vince and Julie C up in the car -

“Hey Vince, say ‘em dep’ to her!”- Jean­nie, because she and I were sick of the drunken devil talk.

Oh, and for the non-​Viets, that’s how a guy tells a girl she’s beautiful.

Gifts And Curses

April 1, 2005 Cars / Food / Life, the Universe, and Everything
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Yes­ter­day cer­tainly had a lot of ups and downs. It’s kinda ironic that the night before, I was talk­ing to Peggy about how I used to be a very bit­ter per­son, and then even­tu­ally learned to let things go and move on and that con­spir­a­cies ARE crazy.

Ironic, I say, because yes­ter­day, I woke up at 5 to get ready for fly­er­ing. Did the usual morn­ing rou­tine, and called up Clint to make sure he was up and tell him I was on my way to pick him up and take him to cam­pus. Walk out­side and over to my car. Even in the pre-​dawn dark­ness, it looked kinda funny. I couldn’t put my fin­ger on it at first, and then as I got closer, I real­ized it was lower than usual. How curi­ous. So when I actu­ally get up to the car, I noticed I had a flat tire. No wait… four flat tires. Curi­ouser and curi­ouser. Yeah, they had been slashed. And it was just my car, the other cars around were still fine. Quickly sup­pressed an urge to kill. Called up Clint, asked him to pick me up instead. I would go fly­er­ing any­way, since there wasn’t any­thing I could do for my car that early in the morning.

Fly­ered our hearts out on the “last push” of Alice C’s baby. That didn’t sound wrong at all. After­wards, applied for a job at TAPS like I had planned since I was on cam­pus, and also turned in a form to apply for sum­mer school, since you have to be enrolled in Spring 2005 to auto­mat­i­cally be eli­gi­ble. Went to CoHo after that and sat around. Joe M told me about the sec­ond half of his early birth­day present for me — he paid for my reg­is­tra­tion for Sec­tion 1 Sec­tion­als! (The first half being a t-​shirt that declares, “Robots R Ur Friends.”) Thanks, man! Then he took Eddie C and me home. Called the non-​emergency line and filed a police report about my car. Then called up Bran­don to ask for his AAA assis­tance, since I would need to tow the car to get it fixed. He was about to go to class, though, so I just waited at home. Looked around town for deals on tires.

Bran­don came by after his class. We called up AAA and got them to get a tow truck for us. While wait­ing for it, we played ghetto hold’em in the park­ing lot and cleaned out my car. The tow truck dri­ver hecka scared me by try­ing to drive my car on all flats to line it up with the truck. And while we were mov­ing it, the Trooper bounced more on the flatbed than I’ve ever seen before. Too k it to Big O, and they gave me a nice deal on some generic tires (Comanches). It’s OK… the bet­ter tires in my size would have cost another $200.

While they worked on it, Bran­don and I went to Manna to try it. I hadn’t been back since that one MNR long, long ago. Sup­pos­edly in the mean­time, they changed own­er­ship and the food got bet­ter. While it was bet­ter — it was decent, and not down­right bad, like before — it was noth­ing com­pared to the stuff that Sophia and Esther feed me. :) Then we went back to Brandon’s and he worked on a new duct tape wal­let as I played Budokai 3. Wow, that game is really fun!

My par­ents rolled into town to pay for the tires, and give me a bit of a lec­ture. I felt really bad for mak­ing them go through all that trou­ble. And I get the feel­ing they didn’t believe me when I said I had no idea who did this to me. (They dont’ really under­stand that APhiO is not like the typ­i­cal movie frats.) But really… I don’t think any­one hates me right now. Why DID this hap­pen? Am I just liv­ing obliv­i­ously in my own lit­tle happy world while peo­ple are lung­ing at my back with daggers?

So after I got the new wheels, went to the 76 on Cov­ell to fill up for pledge retreat today. Took me $50! Ouch! Oh, and their lit­tle pay kiosk is the quote of the day. (Clint had men­tioned it to me that morn­ing, because he filled up there, too.)

“Wel­come to 76!”- Kiosk dis­play.
“Come inside for hot”- Kiosk dis­play, refresh­ing.
“Meal, cof­fee, and ATM.”- Kiosk dis­play, refresh­ing again.

What a tease! :) While there, I also scraped off all the bugs from my wind­shield. They are get­ting pretty crazy. Espe­cially on the causeways.

Went home and talked for a bit, try­ing to gauge inter­est in Spaghetti Feed. No one wanted to go with me, though, so I went by myself. It was pretty fun. I sat at the IC table between OZ and KS. The IC dis­cus­sion is always inter­est­ing, because they aren’t privy to the usual IPhi gossip.

After the feed, I was gonna go home and get ready for Pledge Retreat today. But then food coma set in and I went to sleep incred­i­bly early. That’s why I woke up at 6:30 today.

OK, this will be my last post before retreat, so see you all when I get back! As one last note before I go, I just wanted to say, “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Thanks again to every­one who helped me out yes­ter­day, espe­cially Bran­don! :)

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