Discernible Taste

Food disappoints me easily.

I don't have a sophisticated palate. My food vocabulary is limited since I only use three adjectives to describe taste: bad, alright, and good. Anything else would be overkill.

So it's hard for me to grasp the concept of food so good it's a revelation. Whenever anybody recommends a "great" restaurant to me, I take it with a grain of salt. The number of times I've walked out of a recommended joint feeling ambivalent is too many.

Do I have faulty taste buds or unrealistically high standards?

Maybe delicious cuisine is just that rare.

Speechless

Work is work.

The only days that stand out are the first few, when things are still fresh and novel. After that, the days begin to blur. We fall into the steady rhythm of work, gaining such familiarity with our tasks that what was once challenging is now an old hat.

The first few days are always the most memorable, but nothing could've prepared me for the hideous scene waiting for me at work. The only word that can describe such a miserable state of affairs is...

...tragic.

The gaming set up that I had to work with was an insult to me, my hobby, and my job. There was an impressive stack of games next to the 360, except that some of them were obviously pirated and therefore unplayable on an unmodded console. Every unwired controller from Wiimote to 360 pad had dead batteries; 360 games were stuck in the PS2; composite cables were connected to an HDTV; and PC games were bought as console games.

It is up to me to remedy this situation with my expertise.

I sure got my work cut out for me.

Tutoring

I'm a slacker and a scrambler.

The former causes the latter. I have a bad habit of putting things off. I'm not special in that regard, but its a habit that always puts me in an awkward situation.

I got myself a tutoring gig at GradePotential, a sort of third-party liaison that connects tutors with prospective students in need of proper tutelage. Most people don't need tutors for English (even though they do), so I was called upon for my "expertise" in economics.

I was to meet my student on a Saturday morning and since economics isn't really my area of expertise, I was going to do a little studying so that I could do a little teaching. I planned to research the subject during the week, but I put it off until Friday.

I planned to do it right after work, but I put it off until night.

I planned to do it right after dinner, but my older brother started watching a pretty interesting Korean drama called "My Princess," so I decided to put it off after a couple episodes.

I tried accessing the online textbook but server maintenance from 12:00AM-4:00AM forced me to put it off until after a couple hours of sleep.

Since my meeting was at 10:00AM, I wanted at least a couple hours to study, so I set my alarm at 7:30.

Of course, since I went to bed at 3:00 in the morning, 7:30 was probably too optimistic.

So began a long course of nodding on and off at ten-minute intervals for an hour. I finally got up and read the two chapters I was supposed to review with my student.

Feeling confident that I had grasped enough of the material to wing my way through it, I drove off to UCI to do some tutoring.

As soon as I reached the school, my student calls me and says that an emergency has come up and that the meeting is canceled.

Did I just get bailed out, or did she?

I was going to come in and tutor her with one hour's worth of reading, an extreme disservice in my opinion. But she cancels a meeting and makes me waste 25 miles of gas, hours of sleep, and some piece of mind.

How many times have I scrambled only to have tests pushed back or deadlines extended?

Too many to count, and truthfully, this is the kind of shit that enables me to continue slacking and scrambling.

Pay Day

There's something about getting a wad of cash that threatens one's frugality.

The penny-pinching proclivity begins to waver in the face of potential purchasing possibilities. With all this money, I can actually buy stuff now! I can afford products and services that I couldn't enjoy before because of the lack of purchasing power that I now possess!

It is this same principle that has gotten many a credit holder carried away. Resist the temptation to spend hard-earned cash on nonsense. I suppose its because we spend the bulk of our early life not earning anything that the moment we do, we give ourselves the privilege to spend without consequence, and since we're all piggybacking off of our parents anyways, we are free to rack up debts without compromising our living situation.

Don't buy yourself into an unsavory statistical category and exercise a little restraint.

But everybody loves a payday, so why not celebrate?

How To Get A Job After Graduating

The goal of getting a job always looms over any fresh college graduate. It's an enterprise rife with disappointment and self-deprecating revelations. It makes us wonder:

"Will I ever get out of this hole?"

You have to do things in order to do things. Once you start an action, it makes all subsequent actions a lot easier to stomach. It's like pushing a boulder down a hill. The hardest part is getting it to move in the first place. Unless your name is Chris Redfield, punching boulders don't come natural.

For the rest of us, we need help. It could be through friends, family, a mentor, connections, a network, or just plain luck. As with most things, it's an amalgam of factors, not one, that gets us what we need.

So begins a new job for me that I got through my brother-in-law.

The first time I met my boss, Arthur, was like any other meeting with a slightly deaf seventy-year old. It was too early to be patronized so loudly. He had rough hands, a rigid posture, and one tone of speech: commanding. His interrogatives might as well be imperatives.

My job was simple: look after his 33 year-old handicapped son.

Before you fret, it's not a physical disability, but a mental one. He has a severe case of "I can't remember what I ate for breakfast" syndrome, or short-term retrograde amnesia. It's almost Memento status, but he still has the ability to make new memories -- it just takes awhile.

Arthur went on to explain the job duties, detailing all of his son's quirks and ways to deal with him. From the sound of it, Noah sounded like a micromanagement nightmare.

When I first met my charge, Noah, he greeted me as if we were old friends. I hypothesized that the nature of his condition necessitated a friendly demeanor to any and everyone since he'd never know if they'd actually met before...that, or he was just being friendly. He's a big guy, towering over me by at least a head and a half, with Asiatic features.

For all of Arthur's build up, Noah was surprisingly friendly and easy to look after. Arthur told me of his son's excellent NBA 2K skills since he plays a lot of sports games. His double digit blowout loss, courtesy of me, said otherwise. I played the Lakers against his Rockets and owned him easily.

He forgot it ever happened. If it was me, I wouldn't want to remember either.

I'll give the job a shot.

Rio

You know the influence of games is powerful when everybody associates Rio de Janeiro with Call of Duty. Dudes with guns running in the favela does not a Call of Duty reference make.

It's hard to discard mental associations though. Rio de Janeiro will forever be linked to memories of multiplayer slaughter.

And maybe Fast Five.

Fast Five

Simplicity is underrated.

When things are simple, it's hard to screw up. This is the principle behind Fast Five.

It's not a terribly complex story, but it works in the movie's favor. It's about fast cars and explosions, character depth is unnecessary by design, so try to ignore the forced relationships, shallow characterization, and empty dialogue. You'll enjoy the movie a lot more that way.

I enjoyed the movie, even though it still suffers from frenetic Hollywood shaky cam syndrome. If it weren't for the nonsensical "gritty" screen shaking, one could actually appreciate the complexity and composition of the stunts. Alas, the world of action movies is forever tainted by the Bourne Supremacy.

Curse you Paul Greengrass.