I went to church and didn't combust instantaneously!

Dear nominal Christians (I'm serious, that's what you guys are officially called), and fellow heathens, for the second in 7 times now I've attended the premarital class at the church yesterday. Not surprisingly it is composed of mostly Christian couples. Coincidentally, it was just as boring as any other religious venues I've visited with a speaker... after being told the second class in a row that non-Christians are not blessed with never-ending-love-capable souls and that unions of baptized Christians are the only true soul-mate unions, and that you should keep making babies until they just fall out of your body (they are gifts from god!), I can only keep assuming that the "good stuff" is at the end (regarding household conflicts, communications, finances, etc.) and in the mean time try to entertain myself into not falling asleep.

So I took notes to stay awake - interestingly enough, I had a coffee about 30min before attending class and it had no effect whatsoever; however I could not sleep until 1AM

At the insistence of my soon-to-be-non-soulmate nominal Christian fiancé, I posted them here. Hope they can mildly entertain you as well (click on image for larger version)

life as a bum who tested the waters of P90X this morning

Round 1 - Time Elapsed: [2:00]
Guy on TV:"Let's do squats!"
Doremish does squats.

Round 2 - Time Elapsed: [2:45]
Guy on TV: "let's do easy single-footed-pushup!"
Doremish: "Hmm... let me try do my pushup from the knee until the next round"

Round 3 - Time Elapsed: [4:00]
Guy on TV: "let's start this banana-back-flip-squat-pushup!"
Doremish: "Alright... let me try and do some more knee-pushups until the next round."

Round 4 - Time Elapsed: [6:00]
Guy on TV: "let's do this running-while-turning-around-banana-sideways-pushup! YEAH!!!"
Doremish: OK **** this.

I can't f-feel my f-fingers

I'm so ccccold here in facking m.dot.... My parents keep the thermostat at around 17 degrees and wear a goddamn jacket around the house. Lol asians in montreal. So here i am with my cardigan and scarf, freezing. I wouldn't even type if not for the area heater thats sitting right in front of me now. I didn't want to take my hands out of my pockets the whole morning. I sure hope i don't need to poo or pee anytime soon.

So I left my job, I feel happy and relieved in general, but it hasn't really sunk in yet, and i know precisely what time it will start sinking in, i.e. tuesday morning the day i would normally be at work. Then i will probably put on some boomboom music, pour myself a celebratory whiskey and wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle yeah.

(I just turned a quarter of a turn so i could get toasted evenly.)

Hopefully find something suitable soon. Got biiiills to paaaaay.

whoa guys I just had the most craziest day at work ever

All I'm gonna say is the most dramarama that I've ever seen or heard in a professional setting, happening to yours truly.

i can smell that last straw it is close.

it's TAIWAN, not Thailand, you ignorant fool.

So several times a year, I get asked where I am from and whether or not I'm Chinese. It used to be that Quebecers would ask me first if I was Vietnamese, due to the large french-speaking Vietnamese population in Quebec and lack of french-speaking-other-asians. But that was excusable. And for the record, I don't mind the question at all.

But when I answer soberly, and clearly enunciate that I come from Taiwan (and trust me, depending on the audience in question, I often slow down and do a TaiWAAAN), and you get back to me and tell me all sorts of boners you have for curry and ladyboys from Thailand... congratulations, you've just earned yourself a big bright star in my book of ignorant fools. In this book, you're just as good as the American that claims his family's going overseas to Canada for a trip in the South.

That’s like me saying "Oh you’re from Sweden? Man, I loved The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo!" When you’re from Switzerland. (The previous claim is usually followed by "Oh it's a book? What's a book?")

"Indonesia? I loved Slumdog Millionnaire!"

"Oh Austria? Gosh I love kangaroos, mate."

"Oh Pakistan. Damn those Jews!"

Wait hold on that one works....

Com'on people. It's geography. It's not that hard. How do these people not end up attacking their allies’ home base at RTS?!

I once had someone telling me how they loved their trip to Thailand and it was enlightening, and they learned a lot about another culture and country. They got edumacatated. Well sir, you apparently have not learned where it is, and that it doesn't have a second name pronounced differently.

Yes, yes it is my pet peeve... and seriously it would be anyone's pet peeve. You don't know where my tiny-ass country is? That's fine, you only have to let me know and I will nicely give you a judgment-free Taiwan 101. But don't go ahead and assume that it's the other country that sounds good-enough-similar. Use the internet, or be humble and honest. That'll impress me more than going "Oh cool what's a good Thai restaurant around here?! I looooove sushi!".

RRRRRAGE!

(Don't worry guys this is NOT the annual new year blog, that one's still in the works and far less emotionally driven, LOL)

...some things never change.

The Internet has come a looong way. I was too young to remember its early years what with the IRC stuff and all that, but I was right there in the thick of action during its teenage years, and that was when people still used to go to chatrooms, and use ICQ (uh-oh!) and all that.  I had been the first person to register my Hotmail account in my name. Yes, the Original Gangsta, the non-extra-numbers-attached-to-my-Hotmail-address person. All that 2 megabytes of space, belonging to the first doremish to ever claim the account.

I have to say, I am glad that my lack of originality for a clever name is now indicative of foresight. Talk about dumb luck... As any geek would understand, there's always a bit of pride when you are the first one to get your name registered. Forever and ever a big eff-u to all the people of the same name.

Then, slowly, everything required registration. Hotmail's ironically puny inbox started filling up with dozens of emails per day questioning the size of my manhood. If not that, then it's this distressed Nigerian prince that seems to constantly get himself in trouble (well gee if you can't learn from your first mistake, I can't help you, there's no bail out in my book of principles... all about tough love). Next thing you know, Reader's Digest tells me I'm winning millions every day, too. Done are the days of eagerly waiting for one new unread email to pop up - new mails were popping up everyday, and most of it was junk.

An then GMail came along with, gasp, one whole gigabyte. So guess who again eff-u'd all the later-adopters-of-gmail-of-the-same-name? Yeuuuup. So the perfect arrangement was born. An email was sent out to all the 15 whopping contacts in Hotmail to officialize the transition, and it seems to be responded by as many people requesting the sought-after-Gmail-invite.

And Mish called the new gmail account legit; 
and the old hotmail account garbage bin: 
and Mish saw that it was good.

Alas, insert that same stupid cliché about history repeating itself (if you are bored, wiki Historical Reccurence like I just did, that's another interesting time sink). Even with my best effort of keeping random registrations to Hotmail and real life impacting registrations to Gmail, there are all those "subscriptions" that end up going through Gmail. You want to create a profile on the career website? Sure, we'll send you a Newsletter for some crap every week. Honestly, I think the best way to ensure people don't read the content of your email, is by having "Weekly Update" or "October Newsletter" in your subject line.

My problem now is that, after finding that minuscule link buried in the 176523 words disclaimer that says "unsubscribe", and doing what is necessary to tell them to stop, I keep receiving some of those boring crap.

For me, lately, Internet has been lackluster. There was a long drought of more of the same stuff, and BAM prolification of user-generated contents and everybody's grandmother is on Facebook and following your tweets. But really, except for going to reddit and reading wikipedia, there's hardly anything that gets me excited to go online anymore... my routine became that of cleaning up my inbox (gotta be diligent or otherwise it gets 716523 groupons and travelzoo deals) and a quick scan of facebook (that replaces calling up friends to catch up), maybe the frontpage of reddit.

Maybe I am just getting old and grumpy, and change resistant. It's sad to see that with all those changes, the only thing that stayed with me through thick and thin is that my email inbox is still questioning my manhood (but now it's actually grown to 7GB - the inbox, not my manhood), and Nigeria still has very distressed royalties. Gone are the wild wild west days of Napster and easy p2p sharing, the intimacy of an ICQ Chat (not the uh-oh! one, but the real time one), dingey home-made HTML angelfire websites and the anonymity of your online persona (damn youtube celebrities breaking the 4th wall!).

I kinda miss the good ol' days. What do you miss the most about Ye Olde Internet?

Everyday I'm Shuffling

Every evening I leave work with my work-in-progress file folder, so I can do some reading or some light review work at home.

Every morning I pick up my purse near my door, with the same file folder intact and untouched from the night before, on my way back to work. I don't know why I still kid myself every evening and bother bringing the file back.

On my way to work, I use roughly 6 minutes to imagine what it would be like to win the lottery. After I pass by the lottery booth (another 6 minutes left!) I can't help but think about the to-do list and reaffirm to myself that, since I didn't win the lottery this week, they will be completed.

"I'll be extra efficient today and go through all that in the morning, leaving my afternoon open for the conf call".


Obviously reality begs to differ. The doremish hamster runs in the wheel again, and again and again.

Anyhow, while the long term plan of getting out of the rat race is still under development, I need to take care of what is going to happen in the next few weeks first. My hectic month is ahead, now that we are getting pretty close to closing date for the condo. I need to find a tenant, fix my blinds in my condo, pack and take care of about a gazillion little things while keeping my sanity at a workplace that demands about 45+ hours of my week.

I don't know how that is going to work out, but it'll have to... :(

...with the next exhalation, let go...