My blog
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Wang Wei
Monday, Oct 27, 2008 5:40PM / Standard Entry
For those of you who don't know, Wang Wei has joined AnD. There's a bunch of pictures and a couple of videos up, so feel free to go check him out! :)
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Blog: Wednesday, Oct 22
Thursday, Oct 23, 2008 1:41PM / Standard Entry
First of all, thanks to everyone who replied about me going back to school. :) Made me feel special! To answer your questions... I'm majoring in Chinese which for the moment means I'm taking beginning of 3rd year Chinese language classes, and the history of Chinese language. I will have to take other Chinese courses including history and poetry, classical literature, etc. I am hoping to have my degree in two years. To complete this program, I also have to take one year of another language, so I'm taking suggestions. I was considering doing something really different from Chinese and taking Arabic or some such, but a lot of my classmates are taking Japanese. We'll see.
On a second note, because I have a paper due tomorrow that I haven't started nor done the readings for yet, I'm procrastinating... which means that you get to see my lovely answers to this game that JRS posted. :) Enjoy!
You.
Can.
Only.
Type.
One.
Word.No.
Explanations.
1. Where is your cell phone? pocket2. Where is your significant other? outside
3. Your hair? messy
4. Your mother? downstairs
5. Your father? passed
6. Your favorite thing? reading
7. Your dream last night? forgettable
8. Your favorite drink? water
9. Your dream/goal? degree
10. The room you're in? bedroom
11. Your ex? excommunicated
12. Your fear? failure
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? unsure
14. Where were you last night? here
15. What you're not? rested
16. Muffins? blueberry
17. One of your wish list items? Moola
18. Where you grew up? California
19. The last thing you did? Homework
20. What are you wearing? clothes
21. Your TV? None
22. Your pets? None
23. Your computer? laptop
24. Your life? busy
25. Your mood? lazy
26. Missing someone? family
27. Your car? Honda
28. Something you're not wearing? makeup
29. Favorite Store? Any
30. Your summer? momentous
31. Like someone? definitely
32. Your favorite color? blue
33. When is the last time you laughed? dinner
34. Last time you cried? yesterday
35. Who will/would re-post this? nobody!Jenn
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Quick Entry
Wednesday, Oct 22, 2008 11:11AM / Standard Entry
Just so you know why I haven't been here....
I quit my job, moved back home, and have gone back to school to get a degree in Chinese. Am prepping for midterms (first one tomorrow) and trying to get back into the swing of having homework.
Other than that, it's same old same old.
TTFN!
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Pneumonia
Friday, Feb 29, 2008 9:38AM / Standard Entry
So in order to let you all know where I've been, I'm blogging. I've been sick. Isn't that exciting?
Seriously though, I love to talk about the progression of me being sick. It was the most exciting thing that has happened to me that incurs pity in quite some time. hahahah At least without making me look like an idiot, cuz you can't help getting sick to a certain extent.So here's the long story ha! My boss had pneumonia (or at least that was the rumor) but we were in the process of doing budgeting for next fiscal year which starts in July, so we had to project how much money we are going to need to do advertisements for the next year (which actually isn't so bad) and how many people would call in off said advertisements (which is a bit harder) and then predict how many of those people who call in for more information would actually enroll in the school (which sucks posterior cuz how the bleep am I supposed to know how well the call center does their job in changing leads into students, but I still have to say how many ppl will start in the budgets I give to the client), so needless to say, this is like one of the most important times of year for our company because it determines how much money we're going to be making over the next year, and therefore, my boss came in to work when she was sick.
Now, because this was my first time doing budgets, and having two of the most difficult markets to deal with, I spent a lot of time working on them, and therefore, sort of wore myself out, not to a huge degree, but I was definitely brain dead when I went home each day. Then, the day before budgets were due, my boss finally had the time to go over my budgets with me. She has to look over each set of budgets and make changes before they are submitted to the client, and she'd been really busy doing everyone else's, and because my markets were harder markets, she kept putting them off so she'd have time to do them and "really focus". Which meant that we STARTED looking at them at 5:00PM, and I was supposed to leave at 5:30. Well, anyways, after a couple of hours, we finally finished them, but because my boss was "rushed" she told me to make the changes, and then show them to her again the next morning, so I took them home, and worked on them almost all night.
Somewhere within the time I was working, I started coughing. I got to work bright and early the next morning, ready to show them to her because we had to submit them to the client by 3:00PM, and then she wasn't there. 9:00 passed, and then 9:30, still no sign. At this point, my manager was stressing a little bit because even if the entire budgets were perfect, I still had to put them into the proper spreadsheets, and make sure everything was set and ready to go with no typos, etc. The tickle in my throat that had developed overnight, started to grow into a real irritation, and I started sucking on cough drops. Finally, at 10:15 she drove into the parking lot, but then, she had a meeting to go to so she didn't even get out of her car, she just picked up the other people who were going to the meeting with her and left. At this point, I was like, so now what? It wasn't until 11:45 that my boss called and said to have the other two managers look the budgets over and then go from there. The only problem with this was that the two managers aren't familiar with my markets, so it took a lot more time than just the few minutes to look them over. So, at 1:45 I finally got the go ahead to input my numbers into the spreadsheets. That's 10 spreadsheets I had to fill out. The harder I worked, the more often I coughed, and the longer the coughing spells became. Just as I was finishing, my manager called me and said that she had been wrong, and the "start rate" couldn't be the same across the board. I had to switch them to vary, but she not only hadn't told me this before, but she also had no idea how to go about doing it. So I had to figure it out on my own. At this point, I went to work again, calculating formulas, and coughing violently. Long story short, I finished my budgets with 2 minutes to spare, so had no time to look them over or anything. After submitting the budgets, I spent the next couple of hours before going home trying to do the regular tasks of my job, and trying to keep from coughing up a lung.
After work, I went home feeling lousy, but thinking that a good night's sleep would rid me of any illness. Unfortunately for me, I couldn't sleep. Everytime I lay down, I would start coughing so hard, I had to sit up or get on all fours to regulate my breathing. I tried lying on my side, on my stomach, you name it. I even tried sleeping sitting up, but nothing was working. By this time, it was the middle of the night, and my husband was sleeping. I didn't want to wake him up because there really wasn't anything anybody could do, so I just kept running the shower and inhaling the steam to try to soothe my throat and keep myself from coughing. I must have spent at least 3 hours in the bath that night. There really is nothing worse than being up by yourself in the middle of the night when you're not feeling well. I kept drinking tea with honey, or rock sugar, or hot water with lemon and honey, but nothing worked. My ribs hurt from coughing, my throat felt like it was on fire, and I was starting to get a real headache from lack of sleep and exhaustion. But there was really nothing I could do except sit on the couch and wait for morning.
More when I get home...
~Cyn...
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Relief!
Friday, Nov 30, 2007 3:56PM / Standard Entry
I shouldn’t have been worried about anything hiding in the darkness, lying in wait to pounce upon me. As the room was illuminated, I could see that there wasn’t nearly enough room, even for the thinnest of monsters. Before I could breathe a sigh of relief however, I looked around and noticed something else. There was no toilet. There was a sink that was providing the dripping noise I heard, and a flushing mechanism, but no toilet. The shock of this almost led me to forget why I was in there in the first place. But my stomach only stayed shocked for a fleeting moment. Just as I was about to give it all up, I noticed that there was a slight groove in the floor near the back wall just in front of the flushing mechanism. I moved a couple of steps closer and saw that indeed, there was a porcelain trough of sorts in the floor with a raised area facing the door, and a hole in the side nearest the wall. It was somewhat oval in shape, more like a rounded rectangle, about 3 inches deep, 6 inches wide, and a foot and a half long. I pressed the flushing mechanism, and water sprayed out from the side closest to the door to flow down the hole near the wall.Well, it looked like this was it. My stomach suddenly lurched up again and I turned back toward the door to lock it and give myself some semblance of privacy while I figured out how to use this thing. Now I suppose it was a good thing that my stomach was giving me trouble, otherwise I’m sure I would have overanalyzed how to use this thing. I’m not a man after all. It’s not a matter of standing and aiming. And with what I had to do, I’m not sure how much aim even a man could claim.
I unbuttoned the jeans I was wearing, pushed them down to my ankles and for lack of a better word, squatted down facing away from the wall. The necessity of me using the facilities gave me no time to ponder about how to do this. It was only after I had released my bowels finally that I started to worry about whether I was doing it right. At that point, there wasn’t much I could do as the violent nature of the physical aspect of it left me no choice but to continue in the method I was currently using. But after the initial relief of being able to finally relax and let nature take its course, I started to worry. As I’d never done this sort of thing before, all sorts of questions started to pop up in my mind. The most disturbing of them all for me was “Is everything going where it’s intended to go?” I couldn’t really stand up and check to make sure my aim was true. So I just squatted and hoped; hoped that I wasn’t splattering my pants, hoped that I wouldn’t stand up and find waste all over the floor, my shoes, or myself, hoped that I wouldn’t have to clean up a mess (of my own making) that nobody ever wants to clean up.
Because of the fact that I had extremely painful stomach cramps even when I was going to the bathroom, I was trying to think of anything else to not focus on the pain. I had definitely eaten something that did not agree with my stomach. So while trying to think of anything else, the above questions ran continually through my mind. I figured that I should probably prepare for the worst case scenario. I looked around the small room, fixing my eyes on the sink. I supposed that if I had a stain on my pants or shoes, that I could wash the worst of it out in that sink, since wet clothes were less embarrassing and disgusting than soiled ones. In thinking this through, I realized that if I were ever in this situation again, which I had a feeling that I might be as my stomach was far from feeling better, that if I could lock the door, I might as well just take off my pants altogether. It seems like a pretty drastic measure, but I only had so many pairs of pants.
Once I had this possible problem solved, I moved on to the next possibility. How would I clean up the mess? I continued to look around the room and didn’t see any sort of janitorial equipment. No such luck in that department. Then, I suddenly realized that there weren’t any paper towels to speak of. This worried me a little bit, but I figured I could just use a bunch of toilet paper. After all, it’s what you use to clean yourself, it could be used to clean the floor as well. I didn’t think there was much chance of clogging the toilet as there wasn’t one. I then looked next to where I was squatting for the toilet paper. It wasn’t there. I looked on the other side, but there wasn’t any there either. There was no toilet paper. It wasn’t like it had all been used up. There just wasn’t any, anywhere. There wasn’t even a dispenser.
Up to this point, I hadn’t used any “public” restrooms in
By now, I was pretty tired from squatting for this length of time. Although I had been doing wushu every day for at least an hour prior to this trip, I guess my “drop stance” needed work, and the muscles still needed to be strengthened. I know that a lot of Asian people are accustomed to squatting down and consider it a resting position, and now I knew why. They had had lots of practice. I, however, was unaccustomed to the awkwardness of squatting over a trough in the floor. This fact added to the general feeling of weakness I was experiencing after emptying my bowels, made for a interesting dilemma. The Kleenex package was still in the pocket of my pants which made it virtually unreachable as my pants were bunched around my ankles. I couldn’t pull them up without straightening my legs, and that didn’t seem to be very much of an option as I couldn’t fathom how to stand up and pull my pants up without pulling them up along with me. So I squatted there a bit longer trying to figure out what to do.
Then, inspiration struck. I kept my hands on my pants, and just straightened my legs so that my butt was sticking halfway into the air. I’m sure it was quite a comical position, but as there was nobody there to see me, it worked out pretty well. I was able to pull my pants up far enough for me to be able to reach into my pocket and grab the Kleenex packet, but not too far as to make any more of a mess. At this point, seeing as how I had my head down by my feet, I took this opportunity to look through my legs behind me to see if I had to be concerned with cleaning up any sort of a mess. Multi tasking at it’s best. Fortunately, there didn’t appear to be any mess, and in checking out my clothes as well, there weren’t any questionable stains that I could see from this vantage point.
I got the Kleenex out of my pocket and tried to figure how best to use what minimal supplies I had. Of course, I was a bit squeamish about the whole situation, as tissue paper is inevitably very thin, and not the best at holding up under “clean up” circumstances unless you have quite a bit, and quite a bit is not what I had. I figured I could fold it multiple times to increase the thickness, and therefore absorbency of the tissue, but then it would be a very small square. So then I figured I could unfold each tissue and put them together that way, but that might not be a satisfactory thickness or absorbency. In the end, I decided to do a combination of both. I took out every tissue from the packet, placed them one on top of the other, putting opposite folds together, and then folded all of those in half. It was a decent size tissue, and it had more thickness than the tissue by itself would have had.
After I had gotten my tissue all unfolded, put together, and refolded, I faced another dilemma. Trying to squat and wipe at the same time was a strange comedy of errors, it seemed, because I couldn’t turn at the waist and keep my balance very well when both of my legs were bent underneath me. And again, I couldn’t straighten up entirely as that would mean that I would have to let go of my pants, and they would probably hit the ground or go into the trough. Unfortunately, I didn’t think that sticking my butt up in the air would help this situation though. Finally, I decided that the half crouch was going to have to get the job done. I pulled my pants up to my knees, clamped them together to hold my pants in place, straightened up to almost a sitting position of sorts, turned at the waist, and wiped myself off. Finally, I could stop hanging my bare butt out to the world, and so I pulled up my pants.
I turned around and flushed the sewage down the little hole and noticed that I had hit the mark pretty well. At least there was no mess to clean up, and I congratulated myself. I then checked my shoes and my pants to see what sort of damage had been done. Fortunately for me, there was little to no evidence left on any of my clothes or anything, at least none that could be seen in the dismal light of the bathroom. I went and washed my hands, wiping them on my pants as I had used up all of my tissue, and finally was able to escape the dingy bathroom reasonably intact. I reached for the door and then remembered the issue I had had with the light. I decided just to leave it on, as since my stomach was feeling so dodgy, I might have to make a mad dash back here again (the horror!) and wouldn’t want to have to chance reaching that chain in the dark a second time, especially since I now knew that there was a trough only a few steps beyond the chain that I most definitely didn’t want to be stepping in.
I opened the door, and the light outside was almost blinding. I had just survived my first major bathroom experience in
