Mild Amusement

I have mentioned it on occasion, but I sometimes get mistaken for a Filipino person . Honestly, I'm never surprised when it happens. For one, it's happened enough times that I recognize that it is a thing. For another, I have a complexion that looks very much like what a stereotypical Filipino person looks like. All in all, it sort of makes sense. Still, it's amusing when it happens. What makes it all the more confusing for people passing by is that I sometimes hang out with a whole lot of other Filipinos. For example, any time I am with the Mild Wife's family, I happen to be one of many people who are/look Filipino. Given the context clues, I can't fault someone for assuming that I am simply another one of the family. I mean, there are people in the family who are lighter than me in skin tone and there are people in the family who have a darker complexion than me. I'm somewhere smack dab in the middle, so it's a perfectly reasonable assumption. If y...

Every year, companies work with United Way in a coordinated week of volunteering effort . Basically, it is a way to try to make a difference by getting a bunch of people to all focus their efforts in a set amount of time. I usually try to pitch in, because I think it's a worthy cause. Hell, I think it's a bunch of worthy causes, and doing my part in some way has always seemed like a good idea. This year, my willingness to volunteer led to some unexpected laughs. You see, this year I volunteered with an organization that has a big yearly yard sale. I think they might make some money off of the effort, but the general idea isn’t actually to be a fundraiser. Instead, the idea is to have a sale of affordable items for their constituents. To give you an idea of what they have in mind, they sell items of clothing for five bucks. I think they might make actually make some money from the process, but that’s almost incidental at that point. I thought that was pretty c...

The Mild Wife and I live in California, which means that we had to contend with the recent power outage . For those of you who are unaware, the local utility company preemptively shut off power in select areas to avoid any raging wildfires. The rationale was deceptively simple: the last major fire in the state started because winds and a power line combined to create a spark, so if there are going to be high winds, they wanted to remove the power in "power line." I actually took/take issue with this (it shirks some of the responsibility around doing proper maintenance), but it did lead to some unintentional hilarity. Since the company announced that there would be waves of shut-offs, they announced start times for when those waves would start. However, because the ultimate impetus for this was the weather, the timing was also highly dependent on mother nature. More specifically, whether the power was shut off or not depended on whether our weather reports had accurately pre...

Every now and then, the fact that I am not the same age as the people that I spend time with is amusing as all heck. The folks older than me know things that I don't or have life experience that lets them see things in a different way, so they will occasionally poke fun of me. We all have a good laugh about it, and life is better all around. However, my favorite moments are the ones that involve kids. It's basically the same scenario as the first one, only I get to play the part of the older person. Heck, it's why I wrote ten parts to the " Little Kids Are Awesome " series. In this episode, I start with the fact that I once realized that some of the kids for our family friends did not grow up with some of the same video games that I did. I forget how it came up, but somehow or another, the Mild Wife and I realized that the kids of our family friends (also family friends, for the record) had no idea what Street Fighter II was. Now, this is a classic video game. ...

Every now and then, I get into a mood where I want to listen to a particular style of music. I don't think there's any discernible pattern as to when I want to do this. I just seem to randomly decide to listen to a particular genre or artist. If I'm really feeling like that genre, I will listen to the same song on repeat for hours . It's not really that I love that one song as it is that I feel like listening to that particular sound or set of lyrics. For this particular blog post, I'll point to an episode where I was listening to 1990's R&B. Again, I don't quite know how this started, but I did start listening to a few songs from that era. There were a few fun trips down memory lane in the course of that mix, since my adolescence was from that general time period. Let's just say that I knew more of the lyrics from memory than I expected. Still, I didn't know all of them. When it came to Des'ree's "You Gotta Be," I couldn...

I mentioned it recently, but I have a bit of an opinion about valid units of measure. Specifically, I am a fan of the metric system when it comes to temperature . As I mentioned in that post, a system that tells me that the temperature is "negative four degrees" is much better at explaining that it is flippin' cold than one that tells me the temperature is "twenty four degrees." The negative sign matters. Now, as soon as I mentally conceded that the metric system made a ton of sense for temperature, I immediately started thinking that it probably makes sense for other units, as well. I mean, if I'm going to apply the whole "this just makes sense" standard to the ambient temperature, it makes sense to think about mass, volume, and length in the same general way. Why force people to remember that there are sixteen ounces in a pound? Or that, more confusingly, there are eight  fluid  ounces in a cup? The conversion rates just seem arbitrary at that ...

My sister was in town recently, so that means we got to spend a little time with her and her family. It was good seeing them, as always, though the fact that she has young children means that seeing "them" includes having interactions with little kids. This, as you can imagine, means all sorts of amusing anecdotes. In this particular case, it was less something that a kid said and more what was said about a kid. You see, the Mild Nephew has a decent memory. He will remember specific things about people, the sort of things that amuse him. I guess on some level we all do this ("oh yeah, I like so-and-so. They're nice"), but it's not nearly as refined in a little kid. Apparently, he will flat out say to his mom that he wants to go visit so-and-so because they have dogs and he wants to see the dogs. The same sentiment applies to other people, and other attributes. What's more, he has an impressive-for-his-age mental rolodex of people and attributes. When...