Resolutions! (2012 Edition)

Gonna make this a short post because I’m not really “feeling it” today (kinda tired). 

I just wanted to list my New Year’s resolutions for 2012 in hopes that they’ll get accomplished this time (even though I didn’t do all of the ones I made for 2011). 

Lose weight (again) – At the end of 2010, people pointed out that I was a lot thinner than I used to be, so I stopped watching my weight and relaxed my exercise routine a bit.  I guess it paid off because now I’m finding my stomach sticking out a bit more and pants fitting a little less than they used to.  So I’m getting back into shape…..or trying to; I’m almost thirty and am wondering if I’m just starting to gain all the weight that people do when they get older. 

Find a new job – I always say I’m going to do this, but the company keeps pulling me back in with offers of promotions, my own business cards, and a higher salary.  The inter-office co-worker drama is starting to show, though.  So hopefully this is the year I finally break free from the job that’s been so good to me. 

(Re)Start writing stories – I just miss doing this.  I hope I still haven’t lost whatever talent I had at this….! 

See more shows – this includes seeing more plays & going to more shows to see bands / artists that I like.  It’s going to be tough (and expensive), but I’m off to a good start – They Might Be Giants is playing at UCLA Live at the end of the month & I already have tickets!   

Use Wikipedia for reasons other than looking up plots to popular TV shows – self explanatory. 

Lastly, I’m switching back to Xanga; Blogspot is nice and all, but I really miss the sense of “community” that I had with Xanga and none of the bells & whistles of the other blogging sites can match that. 

Thanks for the domain, blogspot!  I’ll keep you up & check in from time to time!  

About the journey....!

So it’s January again (2012 edition) and I’m back once more to tell you all about my annual pilgrimage back home to see family and friends.  

My high school class met up at held an unofficial “ten-year reunion” at Kochi’s this year and while I didn’t go (it was scheduled for a few days before I went back), I got to hear from a few of my friends who did what everyone’s been up to. 

LONG STORY SHORT - A lot of us are still in school (as teachers or students). 

Hearing about everyone this year showed me how “grown-up” we’re all becoming; several of my friends have already bought their own houses.  It makes me feel like I should start looking into that too.  But I can’t picture myself living in Hawaii (or LA) long enough to do something like that yet. 

It’s like that movie, “Big Fish,” where the young Edward Bloom, played by Ewan McGregor, finds the perfect town of Spectre.  It’s a wonderful town where the grass is always green, you never need to wear shoes, and everyone is really relaxed and happy all the time.  

And while everybody likes him and wants him to stay in Spectre, he says he can’t because he “arrived there too soon.”  To him, it was a place you “end up at, not pass through” and if he stayed there for a while, he knew he’d never leave. 

That’s how I feel – if I ever move back to Hawaii, I know it’ll be for good, so I don’t want to until I’ve had my fill of the rest of the world. 

PS – Big Fish is a good movie; if you haven’t seen it yet, I suggest you do.  Don’t worry, I haven’t spoiled the plot for you. 

OTHER THINGS I LEARNED IN HAWAII THIS YEAR: 

• There’s a secret ingredient to Zippy’s Chili; it’s either mayonnaise or peanut butter. 
• Hawaii has way too many geckos. 
• Television is my Kryptonite; it makes me lazy and gives me an amazingly short attention span
• Some of my friends from high school are now amazingly racist against Filipinos. 
• Generally speaking, people in Hawaii are short.  I’m only 5 ft, 6 and I felt tall there. 

Xmas on a budget

Two blogposts in one week?  Insane! 

But I figured, since it’s the Christmas season – and I have a Christmas-related blogpost – I might as well post it while it’s timely. 

Anyway, I just wanted to ask those of us who give gifts:  how many people do you give gifts to during the Christmas Holiday season? 

I ask because I’m at a point in my life where I can no longer use “I’m broke” as an excuse for not buying friends / family members gifts anymore.  But if I end up buying gifts for everyone on my list….I think I *will* go (broke)! 

I can see where I *could* shorten the list, but I don’t think I should; a lot of the friends I’m getting gifts for have boyfriends or girlfriends…and usually they’re inseparable.  If I give a gift to one, I kinda have to gift a gift to the other, don’t I? 

Here’s my list so far:  Is this too many?   

• Mom
• Grandma
• Brother
• Cousin
• Aunt
• Friend 1
• Friend 2
• Friend 3
• Boss
• White Elephant gift
• Office Xmas party gift 

Everyone's a critic

Now that I’ve fully transitioned to my “new" (old) department, I thought I would try this old thing out again….seeing as I now have a little more free time to update this……at least for now!

While I was away, a new guy started working here (as my replacement) and since I’ve been back, we’ve been chatting & getting to know one another; he seems like a pretty cool dude with similar tastes & preferences for things like Lord of the Rings and Batman….! 

…or he did until I mentioned The Dark Knight to him. 

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

Even though he’s a big fan of the Batman comics (and loved Batman Begins), he thought that The Dark Knight was terrible – not so much as a regular action movie, just as a Batman movie.   

Needless to say, I thought he was nuts.  But then he handed me a 4-page essay, outlining his reasons for disliking the movie (and citing specific examples throughout the movie).  Having a written essay handy for just such an occasion worried me for a bit, but I’ve also been known to write a few choice blog posts about movies I thought were less than great too, now haven’t I? 

So I read it – and while I readily dismiss the majority of his arguments (ex. Movie inconsistencies, plot holes, etc.) as movie goofs -- he had many issues with Batman’s new costume, his “Bat-cyle” and the scene where Harvey Dent & Batman set a trap to catch the Joker – I have to admit that his character issues are pretty strong. 

For example - the backstory for Harvey Dent / Two-Face differs from comic to movie adaptation.  Harvey is a lot more bi-polar in the comics, being secretly abusive to his wife and family while generating a clean-cut image for Gotham’s media.  In the movie, he’s “Gotham’s White Knight” through and through.  And while this may have served the movie’s theme better, my co-worker’s problem with this is that it’s not true to the comic.   So, praising this as “the best Batman movie ever made” is a false claim. 

The same issue comes up with Heath Ledger’s depiction of the Joker.  

While Heath Ledger's Joker was indeed a great villain for the movie, my co-worker felt that he just wasn’t the same Joker that he grew up with in the DC comics.  Not only is the physique wrong (the Joker is always depicted as being a lot thinner and more feminine than Ledger’s character was), but he also got the very essence of the Joker wrong.  According to my co-worker, the Joker isn’t a psychopath who orchestrates grand schemes in order to prove a point to people like Batman, he’s just a random doer of evil, changing plans on a whim for no reason other than “he feels like it”.   (This one I’m a little iffy on, but I’ll take his word for it for now)

But while he may be right that this movie may not have been as ‘true to the comics’ as Batman Begins was, it was a pretty damn good movie.  And maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up with Batman like he did (I went with Marvel over DC), but I personally think these discrepancies from the comics made the characters *better*. 

And now that I’ve said that, I almost feel dirty after my last rant about how untrue to comics X-men: First Class was.  

"Just Roll w/it."

I would have to say that it’s been a crazy couple of months for me.  In addition to getting into that car accident and everything else, there have been a lot of really big changes for me going on at work. 

First of all, somebody in my old department got fired let go a couple of weeks ago, leaving them an employee down.  And since they’re a pretty vital department to our company (they work very closely with our database system), the bigwigs at the company made asked to step-in and help them out for a few weeks since I still have a pretty good working knowledge of said system and it would take a while for them to hire a replacement. 

A few days later, after I had a chance to re-acquaint myself with the job, they called me into their office and asked me if I’d like to return to my old department….that I only left a year ago to advance my career. 

Apparently, aside from my old boss, I was the only person in the company who knew the system so well.  And with my old boss being so indispensable (enough so that she can’t even go on vacation), they realized how vulnerable this potentially left the company should she decide to retire / leave.  As an incentive to return, they promised me an increase in pay as well as some managerial duties with a promise to promote me once my old boss retires (she’s sixty-one right now and will probably retire at sixty-five).  

Ultimately, though, they said the decision was mine; I could either move back to my old job and return to the boring old system-work that I used to do, or stay where I currently am and leave the company to fill that position from the outside. 

Initially, I was pretty hesitant.  It felt like a step back in my career (such as it is).  Plus, I didn’t particularly see myself being there for that much longer considering how overworked I’ve been lately (barely enough time to blog).  Plus, as much as I complained about how stressful my current job is, I have to admit it’s never boring: I now deal with multiple aspects of the company (billing, service issues, contracts, etc.) and have acquired quite a few job skills in the short time I've been doing it.   

Plus, commiserating with your co-workers is half of what makes the job fun. 

After talking it over with my mom and a few others, I decided that it’s better to not look this ‘gift horse’ in the mouth (especially in this economy).  So I’m taking the “senior position” that management created for me (along with a hefty pay increase – or so they promised; otherwise I'm staying where I am) and waiting for the job market to heal.  

Hopefully this means I’ll have more time to blog again.  I’m not sure how much more work will be required of me (more money = more responsibility), but hopefully I’ll have a little more free time on my hands. 

**NOTE** For those of you who know where I work, please don’t say anything on this blog.  They have this “tracker” thing that catches anything that mentions the company online and I’d rather not have this post show up in the company E-Newsletter, okay?  I’M TRUSTING YOU HERE. 

"First World Problems"

So I finally found myself having a few minutes of free “internet time” to give you a quick update on my doings. 

Things have been kind of rough the past couple weeks and I’m a little wary of posting this because of my policy on “whiny” blog posts.  But I figured that I should let people know in case they wonder why I’m not my usually chipper self: 

First off, my orthodontist told me I have to start wearing rubber bands over my braces.  This means I can’t really open my mouth too wide (yawning is kind of difficult now) and my teeth are more tender than usual due to the extra pressure from the bands.  Plus, I look like that much more like an awkward teenager.  I’m not really sure how long I’ll have to keep them on (*at least* five weeks, maybe longer, according to the orthodontist) but I hear that it’s best to just keep them on all the time (except while eating / brushing) to keep from having to wear them too long.  

@#$%^& Hate this

Right after I heard the “great news” about my teeth, my car got “sandwiched” on the freeway after a guy a couple cars in front of me stopped a little too suddenly for the guy behind me.  It didn’t look like a big crash but after taking my car to a mechanic, I found out that it sustained about $1400.00 in repairs.  Fortunately, we all had insurance no one was hurt.  And I’m now driving a rental for the next couple of days while the mechanics repair the damages to my car.  I’m driving a (gas-guzzling) Ford Escape right now and I feel pretty big on the road.  Good news, though – the mechanic called this morning saying I can pick up my car today! 

Not Actual Accident, but you get the idea

After I got home that day, my roommate told me our apartment lost it’s internet service.  I’m not 100% sure how that happened, but my roommate told me it had something to do with the online business he’s starting & how he tried to re-direct the phone number he created for it to his cell-phone.  Apparently, he also re-routed our landline (which we use to run our DSL), cutting off our access to the world wide web.  So now I can only go online at work.  Supposedly this’ll be fixed by Friday (9/23/11), but I’m not holding my breath….!  

A few days later, I got a big scare at work.  I’d rather not mention what happened, but it’s caused a lot of us to wonder about the security of our jobs. 

So yeah…..a lot happening in the past two weeks.  I figure I’ll let the older stuff go unsaid for now…..! 

Unrealized Dream #243

Did you know that Twitter doesn’t allow you to create a username with the word “Twitter” in it?  

I realized this when I had a brilliant idea to create a joke Twitter account named “The Twitter.”  The plan was just to follow everyone I could find with this account, and tweet as if the self-named account had somehow achieved self-awareness and was gathering information similar to how newborn children do. 

This was how I planned to achieve greatness…..even Godliness. 

This was going to be my Profile Picture

But unfortunately Twitter had foreseen this and prevented my tomfoolery from commencing. And my dream of greatness was never realized.  

I’m sure someone else already thought of this before me, probably around the time Twitter was becoming popular. 

But on the small chance that no one has, I’m writing this post to TM my idea.