Peter’s Blog V2

I got off a half-day today and went to Chinatown for lunch and haircut.  Stepping out of the office, I needed to walk a short distance to the 42nd street subway station.  Since it’s New Year’s Eve, I decided to walk down Broadway to check out the preparations on Times Square.

New Year’s resolution: quit being stupid.

Eleven hours (plus an extra second) to go until 2009, and Times Square was already packed with more people than I imagined possible.  Three blocks to go.  Depending on the date and time, it could be a breezy one-minute walk. Not today, though, as I worried for the weight of the massive tourists to sink the sidewalk below the street level.  Walking through this crowd was like swimming upstream against an avalanche.  People squeezed each other in all directions to a point where lungs could collapse.  I pushed forward, hard, only not to get pushed back.  If I had dropped anything, I wouldn’t expect to be able to retrieve it back.  People screamed for others not to push; people screamed at the noices from the hand-held horns; I wanted to scream only about my hunger. How do you expect a New Yorker to improve his attitude if you keep delaying his lunch?

I struggled for ten long minutes just to get from one door of Toys R Us to the other.  Swatch being a smart store didn’t even open for business today.  Okay, one block down and the station was still far away. I drifted away from the crowd and walked on the one remaining car lane on the road.  It had barricades from both sides to avoid the crowd from spilling onto it.  At the same time, when a car came I wouldn’t be able to get out of the way, either.  My risk management instincts told me that it was still less dangerous than staying on the sidewalk.

As snow covered my glasses and the gusting wind cut my face, I wondered if the folks waving the Taiwanese flags would even make it through 2008 alive.  What’s so great about counting down to just another year?  These crazies were to wait in the damn cold with no food or drink for more hours than most of them would willingly work in a day, coughing their lungs out five inches from the faces of their new best friends who were complete strangers this morning, peeing in a cup when necessary and killing time watching the pee freeze, just so that they could hug and kiss each other randomly when the ball drops from atop and sprinkles confetti that add colors to the street litter for the weeks to come.

Man.  The cheery holiday season makes me so bitter.

Check out the sheer mass of the NYPD:

I walked by the American Girl Place on Fifth Avenue today.  The line waiting to get into the store, moms and dads and young American girls of all ethnicities (but 95% white), stretched all the way to Madison Avenue.  The line blocked the entire front of an office building, some restaurants, and the chiropractic office that I visited.  I did some research later and revealed no sale or special promotion going on… people simply waited in the cold to buy dolls, accessories, and $20+ makeover sessions for their silly plastic toys.

That’s New York City.  We’ve got all the glamorous celebrities, exhaggerating stores, ridiculous sales, tramatizing tragedies, and overrated landmarks.  What seem to be once-in-a-lifetime events or sightings for most people in this country, are rarely more than daily routines that we run by over lunch break.

Every year, the Rockefeller Center lights one of the most famous Christmas Trees, and Times Square hosts one of the world’s most widely known New Year celebrations.  Walking back to my office between those places, on a day between those holidays, made me sort of anxious.  Not really anxious, actually, but I can’t tell if it was a cheerful depressing feeling, or a depressing cheerful feeling.  There wasn’t much work to be done, but it was a work day after all.  Why was I then surrounded by all these cheerful folks, some of whom probably left the state of Kansas for the very first time, celebrating Christmas and New Year and finally seeing New York?

Hong and I wondered if residents of Las Vegas or Orlando feel the same frustration - you wake up to yet another shitty work day, drag your feet to the nearest coffee shop for some much-needed morning fuel, only to find yourself in line with 20 goddamn tourists who can’t stop taking pictures of your stupid city.  Perhaps the economy of those cities are more dependent on tourism, so the residents who by large hold hospitality jobs feel more grateful toward the visitors?  On the contrary, New York would still be an overly full and crowded city without the tourists, so we’d really prefer to not have any.  In addition, if there were non-tourism office jobs in those cities, their workers probably don’t have to drive through the Strip to work or wait in a long lunch line in a theme park…

So the next time you question why a New Yorker is so pissy and rude, the answer is simple - you’re freaking in his way!

While researching the American Girl Place, I found this interesting story about their discriminatory practice.

I have the awesomest advisees.  Alison and David dropped by today with two bags of Christmas (or Holiday, if we shall stay p.c.) presents.  One was a box of Godiva truffles.  The other was - cracking me up for the longest time - a Wall-E toy.  To be exact, a “Dance N’ Tap Wall-E with Wacky Actions”.

Sure we chat about all sorts of random stuff at work, and I have no trouble admitting my love for Disney/Pixar cartoons.  But getting this “ages 4+” posable action figure from people that I supervise is still hilarious.  Meh, well, it’s great.  Others are pretty jealous that I have such thoughtful advisees.

Did Wall-E come from Walmart?

When we watch the movie and see the portrayal of Buy n Large, the retail chain super store that covered Earth, it’s pretty easy to make an association with Walmart: gigantic stores, feel-good commercials, cheap goods, and fat people.

Is this connection subtle or obvious?  How about the robot hero’s name itself?  Was Wall-E genuinely meant to be an acronym of “Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class”?  That’s a mouthful of words and not a straightforward way to state the robot’s purpose.  Perhaps, the sounding of the acronym, Wally, came directly from “Wally World” in the first place?

Wally World is a nickname for Walmart, commonly used in mainstream America (but apparently outside of major metropolitan areas).  I’d love to pick up a Wall-E DVD from Wally World.  Would you like one, too?

Another “evidence” is in the spelling of “Wall-E”.  Note how the hyphen reminds you of the spelling ”Wal-Mart”.

We returned to the city of yellow snow and black ice, from the sunshine state, after a week-long theme park adventure in Orlando.  All I could say is, “damn I forgot it’s winter here.”

We visited all four Disney World parks and both Universal Studio parks.  Here are the holiday props + park icons:

Additional photos….

Mt. Everest.  Awesomest Disney big structure and ride:

I’ve always wanted to run away from a t-rex since I was a kid:

Doctor Evil gunning down other tourists:

My shadow looks freaking like a real monkey:

“Team work”:

Whee!

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

1.

亂髮蓬頭，落枕處，周公告別。
抬望眼，鬧鐘沒電，上班急咧！
三十客戶狼與虎，八千報告日和夜。
莫偷閒，尾牙吃雞頭，自找滅！

想如廁……但是卻……
快遲到……只好憋……
擠公車踏破，老舊皮靴。
窮酸午餐火腿肉，熬夜狂飲自來水。
到月頭，待繳房貸錢，找誰借？

2.

走廊盡頭，水聲處，噓噓尿洩。
下堂課，我的媽呦，要考試也。
三十課文澀又苦，八千重點沉而甸。
快打鐘，書還沒念熟，俺的爹！

幾行字，尚未寫，
小抄紙，就被掀。
遭長鞭打破，屁股流血。
女友畢業我在哭，淪為學弟緣已絕。
待從頭，留級讀一年，我不屑！

That’s right - another Christmas-y thing that I have issues with.  Soon enough I’d be writing my own version of Twelve Days of Christmas.  Speaking of which, if I still drive to work everyday and listen to the radio, I’d hate the Christmas songs by now, too.  Good thing that’s not the case.

No offense here… but Christmas is the most over-rated and over-emphasized seasonal phenomenon in America… when everyone spends two full months per year making a big deal out of something, I’m sorry, I may get sick of it.

Nothing’s wrong with Salvation Army itself, either.  I just hate its army of bell ringers.  And it also wasn’t used to be annoying - recalling the good ol’ days when we bought groceries once a week at the local Walmart Super Center, when we’d run by the old dude in the red uniform who smiled and rang the bell, right before meeting the old dude in the blue uniform and taking a cart from him to shop the everyday low price items.  That was nice.  The crisp bell rings for 15 seconds a week brought out all the holiday spirit.

But like the expiration date on milk bottles, everything is different in New York.  Here you have an army of grumpy New Yorkers in their red uniforms, ringing the bells like mad men, in the subway stations where the beggars beg and the homeless poop/pee/sleep.  Having a red bucket or not, they look more like thugs than most beggars.  And they have to do the bell ringing in a freaking enclosed confinement where large crowds of people have nowhere to run or hide for 5~15 minutes at a time.  We already have to deal with the various loud noises the subway system creates, and now this constant high-decibel crap?  Maybe if I stay in the station long enough the bell ringing will destroy my mind and cause me to go crazy and lose my job and end up on the streets and needing their salvation one day.  Arg.  And they’re always in the way.  Did you know that New York subway stations are crowded?

I love monkeys and I love lions.  The Golden Lion Tamarin seems to be an awesome mix.