Mild Amusement

I try to be good about using the English language correctly.  I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it's not my first language, so I had to learn some of it by the book.  Because I had to put in some effort to learn the spelling & grammar, I notice mistakes a tiny bit more readily.  I'm also slightly anal about things, so that's probably the other half of the justification.  Regardless of the reason, though, I try to make a concerted effort to avoid mistakes when speaking or writing. Unfortunately, this means I'm fighting a never-ending battle (against myself) to not screw up.  And in that process, I've noticed that certain words & phrases seem to come up again and again.  They've become nemeses of mine.  Every time I spell one of these words incorrectly, even if momentarily, a tiny piece of me groans.  If I actually publish something (e.g., send an email, post a blog entry) with that kind of a mistake, that same piece of me dies...

I think I've mentioned it before, but I try to do at least one good deed every week.  It doesn't have to be something spectacular, just something that somehow makes the world a slightly better place.  Helping to get someone an answer to a problem they had at work counts as a good deed, for example.  So does doing the dishes for someone else.  You get the idea; it doesn't have to be a grandiose production, but my aim is to do my part to not let the world suck. Regardless, I've been having a tougher time lately with this.  I will volunteer to help other people out in some capacity, and they callously blow me off.  It's disheartening, really.  It almost makes me want to give up on this whole good deed thing. Take my coworker/friend who also happens to be a software developer.  She was in the final stretch of a project, so she was understandably busy.  Seeing her plight, I offered her a simple snippet of code to try to make her work go faster...

I'm not sure that I ever planned it this way, but somehow, I turned out to be a fairly active person. In elementary school, I always one of those kids that would line up at the door to literally run out to recess. I even got into the bad habit of wolfing down my food as quickly as possible at lunch, because that meant I had more time to play. What's more, I distinctly remember playing basketball in the rain or in high winds ("whatever, just take better shots if you're worried about the wind"), and pretending like we couldn't hear our teachers calling to us to come inside. Anyhow, as a natural result of this activity, I'm no stranger to minor injuries. If you play basketball long enough, you're bound to roll an ankle or do something to your fingers. It just happens. Obviously I'm not happy when these things happen, but they're minor enough injuries that I just move on. The first time I went snowboarding, I ended up with all sorts of aches...

Remember when a guy decided to defend my dancing ? The guy's heart was in the right place, but it just made me look bad. Well, I think this lady at Costco just topped that. I had just finished working out, so I was a little sweaty from the exercise. It's not like I was dying by any means, but it usually takes me ten to fifteen minutes to completely cool down. I sweat a little bit for a few minutes until I cool down, and then everything is back to normal. From what I've gathered, this isn't completely unusual, so I don't usually think much of this fact. On this day, that changed. See, I was making a quick run to Costco with a couple of female friends, and we had to pick up one item that was slightly larger. We didn't need tons of stuff, though, so we decided against a cart. That more or less left me to carry it, since I didn't really want to make them lug the thing around. Besides, they had other things they wanted to buy, so it gave them the freedom...

I have a bad habit of listening to music over and over again. To a certain extent, we all do; sometimes you're in the mood for a certain type of music, so you'll listen to a particular song more frequently. For me, these moods can last for a couple of days, and I'll actually listen to one track a bunch in that period of time. This phenomenon is even more pronounced when I first discover a song I like, as I'm more likely to play it a bunch then. It's slightly neurotic, I know, but habits die hard. Actually, I also tend to do this at work. I tend to work with headphones on, as the music helps me concentrate. Having the white noise helps me to concentrate, so I tend to play the same song over and over again. Since I end up hearing the same thing repeatedly, my mind naturally tends to drift away from the music. And since I'm still stuck in front of my computer with work to do, the end result is usually that I'll have a sharper focus on said work. I'...

The company I work for is looking to lay people off later this year. It's a stressful time for everyone involved, and no one quite knows what's going to happen. People are understandably worried, but my take is that I can't control it, so I'm not going to spend time worrying about it. Yes, I know that I could lose my job. But all I can do is do my job, and hopefully do it well. After that, I'll let the chips fall where they may. In fact, if I start getting too caught up in all of this, I give you permission to smack me to keep me honest about it all. However, this attitude, combined with my natural smart ass tendencies, means that I tend to laugh at things that might not seem so funny to others. For example, we get email updates about news items pertinent to the company, and the most recent one had the following two (paraphrased) headlines right after each other: "Company well positioned for future, doing well" and "Company needs to restructure...

If you've been following the blog for any amount of time, you know that it's pretty common for me to be around little kids. And little kids tend to say & do things that are comical. Like I said the first time I blogged about this, it's not that I'm making fun of them. No, they just don't know their way around the world yet, and they say things that reflect this. Often times, this results in pure comedy. For example: Me: "Hey [Kid], I heard you went to school. What'd you guys learn?" Kid: "Nothing" Way to go California educational system. Kid: "Ew! I'm not eating that!" Mom: "And why exactly is that?" Kid: "That's dirty rice" Mom: "No, [Kid], that's brown rice." Kid: "I don't want to eat dirty rice, tia" Honestly, I probably though something very similar when I first encountered brown rice at the dinner table. And like this little girl, I ended up eating it, too...