Things I just don’t understand

The barrier means for you to stop, idiot…

For the past couple months, I have been working as a Library Assistant at my school’s library.  My main duty is to watch the gate and make sure that those who enter are actually people who are allowed to be in the library.  To send the message that only certain people are allowed in the Law Library, there is a gate with swinging arms at the entrance.  Said arms will open for a patron who has swiped a valid ID card or if the library assistant manually opens it.  Every once in awhile a person will enter, see the gate and opt to totally disregard that it means to stop and either swipe a valid ID or wait for me to grant them entry.  These folks will simply walk right through the gate pushing the arms open such that they are at risk of breaking.  WTF?  I have actually come to appreciate the folks who decide to grant themselves entry by squeezing through the small space between the gate arms.

I wonder what the thought process of these people are.  What would prompt someone, after seeing a barrier, to plow right through it?  I don’t get it and I want to shake my fist at the people who do this.  It happens often enough that I am now able to identify the persons who will not stop at which point I would just open the gate for them.  Tell tale sign:  there’s usually no indication of these folks minimizing their walking speed as they approach the gate and there’s a split second where you see them realize the gate is there and an immediate look of determination to keep on plowing forward.

Toilet seats are not for peeing on!

Another thing I do not get about people, this time women:  Why do some women pee on the toilet seat?!  Do these women pee on the toilet seats in their homes?  I think not.  Or maybe they do, which is really gross by the way.  This is equivalent to men peeing all over the floor or the wall or all over the god dang place for that matter.  But it’s even worse because men can at least stand when they pee so they are able to avoid skin contact with other people’s urine.  Using a public toilet should not prompt anyone to be less considerate.  By being the one to initiate spraying your pee all over the toilet seat, you are causing a chain reaction that will result in an unnecessarily filthy public bathroom.  Women who come in after you will have to hover while peeing which makes it extremely difficult to keep your pee going just into the toilet and not onto the seat.

I have had instances were I really, really needed to pee and as such my toilet seat inspection routine is only half-assed.  I always put a seat cover down and sometimes during the moments of extreme need to urinate, I don’t realize the seat is wet with pee.  One of the worst feelings in the world is plopping down on a wet public restroom toilet seat thinking it was clean.  Thankfully this has only happened a few times in my life.

Seriously ladies, it’s not hard to put a seat cover down, sit, and pee into as opposed to onto the toilet.  And if you do somehow get your pee on the seat, maybe consider grabbing a shit-load of toilet paper to create as much space between your fingers and the toilet seat surface and wipe it down.  After all it is your pee.  Washing your hands after doing that is much easier than washing your butt cheeks after you’ve sat on someone else’s pee.

Yet another flu from livestock

With all the media frenzy surrounding the swine flu, I would think I’d be more alarmed and that everyone around me would seem more alarmed.  Maybe I’m imagining “alarmed” as being a type of panic that’s depicted in the movies or at least one that would be proportional to news of a quickly spreading infectious illness.

I read in the Examiner earlier this week that the pandemic will surely spread to San Francisco.  This should be a pretty scary thought since it’s finals season and getting sick with anything would be terrible.  Both the Stanford medical library and GGU’s Law Library have many a bottles of hand sanitizers placed not 5 feet from each other.  Still, I haven’t seen anyone in protective masks; life has seemingly gone on like normal.

Why is the media always trying frame news so that it will shock and awe us?  And why do we eat it up?  I suppose it’s an escape from our mostly mundane lives.  Still, I can’t help but to feel immune from news media’s injection of shocking news that’s suppose to rile everyone up.  “Could swine flu be tied to chemical warfare?”  Com’on.

patience

i always considered myself to be an extremely patient person.  it makes me feel silly when i run out of patience and the thing i’ve been waiting for happens.

Lizard Hunting

When you’re a kid, summers were the best–at least it was for me and my brothers.  No school for 3 months, sunny weather, swimming pools, riding bikes, playing outside, and, for the Nguyen kids on Coventry Way, hunting lizards.

Our house on Coventry Way didn’t have much of a front yard.  There was maybe 6 feet of grass and shurbs before you’d hit the side walk.  Our front yard was bigger than most of the houses in our neighborhood, though, since we were on a corner lot.  I’m not sure who could claim to have discovered the lizards, but it became known among us that on sunny days when the street was quiet, the lizards would come out of their dens between the grass and the concrete of the sidewalk to sunbathe.  The clever little creatures never wandered far from the entrance of their cave, so that they could scurry back inside to safety at any sign of danger.

One summer, we decided to capture some lizards.  The task of catching them was nearly impossible as we could never be quick enough to intercept their escape.  It seemed the only way to capture them was to somehow force them away from their den.  And so a plan was devised.  We laid in wait in the grass, two of us with supersoakers in hand, the other with a specimen container with a magnify glass lid that we got as a happy meal from McDonalds.  When a lizard emerged with the false impression that the coast was clear, the two with the supersoakers would fire at the creature aiming towards the street so that the creature would frantically scurry away from the water and thus away from its sanctuary.  Once the lizard was far enough away from its den, the one with the specimen jar would quickly scoop in to capture it.

We captured a couple lizards that summer and kept them alive by feeding them ants.  Eventually, fearing that they would escape into the house, our parents made us let them go.  So we did–into our backyard.  The next summer, while hanging out near the patio door, we saw two lizards sunbathing on the concrete in our backyard.  They were twice the size of the ones we caught the previous summer.  Our little lizards were all grown up.

The Library is Basically My Best Friend

I just realized that in the past seven years of my life, I’ve spent a butt-load amount of my time in a library or computer lab.

At Irvine, the third floor of the CS building was pretty much my second home.  Although I recall initially hating it there, it eventually became a place that brought me a good deal of comfort.  I often opted to spend down-time tucked away in one of the 20 rows of computers, surrounded by the quiet humming of the machines, and sometimes the intense typing of other CS students if the lab was full.  The stale yellowish white walls illuminated by the cool florescent lights did not lend to any distraction as my fellow CS majors and I coded our projects for our various classes: networking, operating systems, AI, algorithms, etc, etc.

CS lab was not just a place to meet up for projects; sadly, it became a hangout spot for my friends and me in between our classes.  Just a few steps from the CS building was beautiful Aldrich Park where a forest of trees loomed over the consistently well manicured lawn.  Daily foot traffic by students carved out quaint little walkways through the various fields of grass and low shrubbery.  Bigger concrete walkways cut through the park making a pretty contrast of natural green and man-made black.  All this could be seen from the single row of windows in the CS lab.  Funny how my friends and I were never inclined to lay out in the grass under the constantly shining Southern California sun.  Now living and San Francisco and going to school downtown, where trees are grown in designated spots along a concrete mass, I miss Aldrich Park and the expansive green.

Across the park from CS lab was the science library–the other place I spent a lot of my time as an undergrad.  The library was supposedly built to represent a uterus and the brickwork at the front of the library laid out a ginourmous sperm.  From the top of the stairs coming out of Aldrich Park, you can see the biological wonder in the form of clever architecture.  You enter the library by going through two tall parallel towers, which then curved around a gray cement and stone courtyard.  It was one of my favorite sights–looking up from the courtyard to see six stories of glass encircling you.  I spent many a nights at that library, pacing around the circular floors doing my memorization for Vietnamese or art history or 21st century diseases–the few classes I took where I didn’t have to be stuck in front of a computer.

After college, I spent quite a bit of time at several libraries to study for the LSATs: the Martin Luther King library at SJSU, Mission College library, and the Milpitas Library.  Then I started law school, and I found myself usually hidden in one of the cubby desks that were arranged super close together in the basement of the law library where there were no windows.  The sound of the rolling wheels from the compact shelving that housed volumes upon volumes of state statues and codes often interrupted the silence.  As a 1L, I became very well acquainted with the compact shelving.  On several occasions, while meandering through the rows of books, the shelves would slowly close in.  This was not a problem if you were at either end of the row, since a quick side-step would get you out of harm’s way.  But when the shelves started closing in on you while you were in the middle of the row, having a whip to crack at and attach to one of the ceiling pipes to swing out of the stacks to safety Indiana Jones style would’ve been handy.

Out of the dark and depressing basement and into the “fishbowl”, which opened a few weeks ago.  Here you have your choice of a cubby desk or a seat at one of the many rows of these, sort of, communal desks.  I suppose they call it the “fishbowl” because of the windows that line two walls of the room which allow outsiders to look in at the inhabitants, like looking at fish–really quiet, still, and boring law student fish who study all day.  I like to sit facing the street so my peripheral vision can catch cars, buses, and trucks whizzing by.  It’s quite serene in the evenings when only a handful of students are dispersed throughout the fairly sizable room.  I like hearing the sounds of typing on the laptop computers and the occasional cough or sniffle.  These noises are so much associated with studying for me that it induces me to study and be super productive, except now as I’m writing in my blog instead of studying for my property exam tomorrow.

Back to it.  I’m going to miss this sort of stuff when I’m all done with school I think.

Blog Secrets and Heroes

I find it interesting how for some of the people I knew in college, indulging the world with your inner most thoughts and feelings through blogging was no issue.  That included yours truly.  For a select few, revealing grudges and gripes and even openly naming persons subject to such feelings of animosity was almost a hobby.  Our teenage and young adult years were troubling and confusing times.  I deleted all my blog entries from my Xanga that I kept in college.  Sometimes I wish I kept it just to look back and perhaps laugh a little.  This topic came up because for my study break today, I decided to read people’s blogs.

***

I want to be a hero to someone someday.  One day, hopefully soon, I will be able to save someone.

***

It’s 11:30, it’s freezing, I have a slight headache, and I’m eating my last B*B*BIG Red Bean Ice Bar, which is making me colder and could possibly give me a brain freeze.  What makes it worth it is it’s so delicious! *Beams*

“Island”

It was my weekday routine–go to school and then walk home with my next door neighbor and childhood best friend, Stacy.  You would think best friends hung out at school, as well as after school, on weekends, and all throughout the summer.  Basically, having a best friend as a kid meant you were inseparable.  We rarely played together at school, though.  During the weekdays, we would only see each other when we walked home from school.

The walk home from school involved venturing over to the intermediate side (the turf belonging to the 4th through 6th graders), crossing the seemingly expansive soccer field, walking through a neighborhood street and through a walkway that lead to the overpass.  Then it was up and over the overpass, across a large intersection, and then the home stretch to our street.

It was a sunny afternoon and we were on the last leg of our journey home when somehow our conversation turned to the correct pronunciation of the word “island”.  We must have had a geography lesson that day.  Stacy was convinced that the word was actually pronounced “is-land” instead of “i-land”.  I disagreed.  Being seven years old and having no knowledge of etymology to any extent, I didn’t have grounds for thinking the contrary.  And yet I was not disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing.  My simple logic was that if the word was suppose to be pronounced “is-land”, why didn’t anyone pronounce it that way?  Mr. Miller, my teacher, sure didn’t.  Looking back, the argument was quite substantial for a couple of seven year olds–more so than our arguments about why I always had to be Ken when we played Barbie or whose little brother was smarter.  When Stacy and I wanted more time to talk on our walks home, we would walk slower.  So we walked slower, both riled up, trying to get the other to agree.  Our discussion ended with both of us agreeing to ask our dads.

I asked my dad that night and he confirmed Stacy’s belief about the correct pronunciation of the word “island”.  I still disagreed.

I looked it up today:

WORD HISTORY It may seem hard to believe, but Latin aqua, “water,” is related to island, which originally meant “watery land.” Aqua comes almost unchanged from Indo-European *akwā-, “water.” *Akwā- became *ahwō- in Germanic by Grimm’s Law and other sound changes. To this was built the adjective *ahwjō–, “watery.” This then evolved to *awwjō– or *auwi–, which in pre-English became *ēaj–, and finally ēg or īeg in Old English. Island, spelled iland, first appears in Old English in King Alfred’s translation of Boethius about A.D. 888; the spellings igland and ealond appear in contemporary documents. The s in island is due to a mistaken etymology, confusing the etymologically correct English iland with French isle. Isle comes ultimately from Latin īnsula “island,” a component of paenīnsula, “almost-island,” whence our peninsula.

And Now…

I think I’m a little OCD with my posts.

Hello World!

public class HelloWorld {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      System.out.println("Hello, World");
   }
}