Classical forums

Of all the places to get me pissed off - I happened onto a classical forum thread discussing metal (rock).  OMG, there are some stupid, pompous, arrogant, elitist assholes who think that because metal isn't on their Oxford music curriculum, it has no artistic merit whatsoever.  Trolls exist everywhere I suppose, but it makes me want to bash my head into a wall.  Why can't people just agree to disagree?  Even something as "scholarly" as musical theory can be highly subjective.

Ageism & Homophobia

http://bayarea.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/suit-charges-elderly-gay-couple-was-forced-apart/

There was a press release Sunday, I think, about this.  It makes me so sad.  :'(  Even if there is a settlement or money is awarded, the damage has already been done.  Nothing can fix the injustices already suffered.  I hope at the very least, the case becomes an important example that separate is NOT equal.  Those who want to will use any excuse they can to deny equal rights.  Sadly, it may take many more stories of these situations for people to realize that their prejudices hurt peoples' lives.

urges

Sometimes I get overwhelming urges.  When I decide I want to do something, I usually just do it because I know if I wait too long, I'll forget and then I'll regret it.  One of the things I hate the most is deciding to do something and then not following through on it (issues from my childhood).  However, sometimes I get urges to do things that take planning, long term commitment, or lots of invested time and money.  Some of these urges get acted on to my eventual benefit or detriment.

For example:
I've got a ton of straight knitting needles and random yarns I bought off eBay over 5 years ago that I will never use.  However, I am also now at least a moderately advanced knitter and crocheter.  I bought a rigid heddle table loom, cones of weaving yarn, a drop spindle, and I've attended spinning and dyeing classes.  I can't say I've spent much more than a few days doing either weaving or spinning.  I also have beads and wires squirreled away somewhere from my jewelry-making phase.

I've gone through phases where I really, REALLY, wanted to start roller blading again, buy and ride a bike, volunteer at a non-profit, join a common-interest social group, and raise a pet.

So what is it this time?  Well, this one has been re-occuring for a few years now.  I really want to learn the violin.  It would require time and money, but I've always loved violin music more than piano or erhu (apologies to my erhu teacher who is the sweetest person ever).  There was a phase when Lawrence bought a guitar and I thought I would try to learn that with him.  Lawrence also prefers the cello so I considered taking private group lessons with him to save on costs, but no.  What I really want is violin lessons.  Ugh, unfortunately our money is going towards other things right now.  Losing weight takes priority and I'm already paying for personal training sessions twice a week.  We're also trying to cut down on expensive food costs.  Even if I cut the personal trainer sessions, it wouldn't be prudent to instead spend the money on violin lessons.  If I'm working out and cooking dinner when I get home from work, I probably won't have time for practicing either.  SUCKY.

But I really want to learn to play the violin!  Of course, I also have to worry about how much I'm over-hyping it in my mind.  What if it turns out I just don't have a knack for it?  Would I then go try the cello?  I would like to be good at the drums.  No woodwinds or brass.  I don't have much lung power.  I feel like the problem with guitar is that it seems you're only playing chords to accompany your singing, which is the actual melody, and my singing sucks ballz.  Maybe I can do classical guitar!  That was actually what I wanted to do when Lawrence bought his electric guitar.

This is turning out way too long for a rant on how I want to play the violin.  Hah, this blog is like my whine-fest for stuff I don't actually want to whine about out loud.

Long posts

Ugh, long posts make me tired.  I have a post waiting to go about my trip to SF from a week ago but it just gets longer and longer.  I decided to remove the food reviews and turn those into separate posts...but that means I need to write even more to properly get down my thoughts on the food.

Maybe tonight.  I kind of want to bake some more.  Maybe cake?  Bread is waiting for me to get off my lazy bum to clean out my dough bucket.  It's got leftover dough from seriously....three months ago.  I'm scurred.

Developer rant + other news

Have I already complained about how much JavaScript frustrates me?  AJAX + ASP.NET = headdesk.  I guess it's because I'm really not that familiar with AJAX, its integration with .NET, or the gritty .NET stuff involving authentication/access/webservices/etc.

I'm trying to figure out how to do certain things with my code, and it seems like it should be simple enough.  I mean, functionally it's pretty basic.  The problem seems to be with the way I'm implementing it.  I don't know how I'm *supposed* to implement it so I've just got to try something that looks like it should work...until I realize it doesn't and then try something else.

_______________________________

Grr.  It doesn't help that I've been getting only 6 or so hours of sleep each night.  I missed my workouts Monday and Tuesday.  Tuesday, I partially made up for by digging out the DDR and doing 40 minutes of cardio.  It was good, and I can still do medium difficulty songs easily.  The heavy songs with tricky footwork are still beyond me.

So on Saturday I went to Salon Sessions in Pasadena to get a hair cut.  Angela was really cool and even gave me a card for a free makeup session (because I'm a n00b who doesn't know how to put on makeup and she's really sweet and wants to teach me)!

Lawrence picked up my bro on Friday after going out to Riverside to pick up Phillip from his job interview after Phillip's car broke down.  We ate at Shabu House in Little Tokyo.  We walked over to Wurstkuche afterward, but they were packed and so I didn't get to buy my bro a beer.  Saturday, he went out with us to the IMAX at the Ontario Mills mall.  We met up with Lawrence's cousins to watch Avatar.  After that, we went to Rowland Heights for some sushi at a HK market plaza that was surprisingly not bad.  We went to William & Cathy's house to hang out and I taught my bro to play Cantonese mahjong.  I knit a bit and ended up falling asleep for a few hours.  We didn't leave until close to 4am.

Sunday we went to Golden State Cafe (finally!) in Hollywood.  Lawrence and Wilson got the burger, with a side of sweet potato wedges and fries, respectively.  I got the grilled chicken caesar salad.  We all agreed it was yummy! :)  I also got to try some Scoops gelato, Brown Bread flavor...omg, delicious!

Blech

:( No workout last night.  I ended up staying late at work and I was too tired to try to rush to make it.  I didn't want to bother Lawrence by asking him to pick me up & drop me off at the gym.  I had also planned to use the extra time to get some cleaning up done.

Well, when I did get home, Lawrence cooked dinner.  He cooked up the 1.3lbs of shrimp we bought into 2 Chinese dishes - ketchup chili shrimp and shrimp with eggs.  I put rice in the cooker and he made one more dish - steamed ground pork.  We sat down at the dining table to eat dinner together, awwww.  We then ran the three new WoW instances (3.3 patch was this week).

Blech, that's when things went downhill.  I got tired pretty quick after that - it was about 10pm.  Granted, I've been pretty tired at night and have gone to sleep early this entire week.  However, I ended up plopping into bed while waiting for Lawrence to finish chatting with one of our guildies.  Maybe I was feeling crabby or something but I didn't bug him about cleaning up.  Apparently he was confused that I plopped into bed and was waiting for me to start cleaning so he could join me.

We discussed this at length when I woke up in the middle of the night at 3am because all the lights were on and he was making (what seemed like) a ruckus in the kitchen.  I didn't fall back asleep until 4-4:30am.  I woke up tired and with bags under my eyes at 8am.

And still - cleaning didn't get done.  We realized again how different our philosophies are.  Yet again, I feel like I do things wrong because he is all about the doing, which gets stuff done, and I'm about the planning, which gets stuff done efficiently (when or if it ever actually gets done).

And STILL we haven't cleaned.  I can't decorate.  We can't get a tree yet.  Tonight perhaps?

Parents

I had lunch with my parents on Sunday. I taught my dad HTML in the afternoon. It's interesting talking to them about various issues because most of our conversation for the past 5 years consisted of them complaining about me or trivial daily talk. We started talking about religion, and it only came up because I didn't know the name for Christianity in Mandarin. I brought up a bunch of other religions that I didn't know the Mandarin names for, and Lawrence brought up Scientology. It turns out my parents even know about Scientology! Haha, initially it was the religion that Tom Cruise is into, but my mom told us about how there were people she knew who got into Scientology. She had a middle school friend who used to be a devout Buddhist, vegetarian and all. Turns out she had a change of heart and turned to Scientology. My mom, and I love her for this, exclaimed at how she could drop one thing she devoutly believed in and pick out another devout belief. It didn't make sense to her that one could just pick and choose a religion, swapping for other religions whenever one felt like it. I agree. Go mom!

Stress, stress, stress.

No WoW tonight. I'm exercising from 6:30-7:00pm, picking up my dinner from Gelson's on the way home, and then doing stuff that needs to be done in the apartment - vacuuming, scrubbing floors, washing dishes, doing laundry, throwing out trash, etc. Maybe I can do some stuff to relieve stress because I am seriously getting stressed out.

Stupid cat has started peeing on stuff around the apartment. It could be because we switched her litter around. It could be because we've been switching her food around. It could be because his brother has been in the apartment and she's feeling territorial. Maybe she has a urinary tract infection. If she does it again, we should probably take her in to the vet.

Stressed?

Argh, I skipped out on working out again last night. I just started the monthly yuck again and I was stuck on a programming bug that I still can't figure out.

I minimized the news feeds on my iGoogle homepage so that I wouldn't have to read headlines about things that would piss me off. But, I still visit Yahoo and read the Ravelry forums, both of which provide me plenty other news to get stressed over. It's rather frustrating because I'm only interested because certain things are rather important to me. But, because they're important to me, I get stressed our reading stupid stupid things.

I thought I was the queen of being laid back and relaxed? I used to actively try to relax myself so maybe that will help - listening to classical/ambient music, focusing on breathing slowly and deeply, and following set routines like stretches before bed.

Urhghghg

I'm feeling very high strung right now, and I have to force myself to take some deep breaths.

I'm so busy, I probably shouldn't even be posting this right now but I need to do something to release the pent up stress.

Muffin, my kitty, threw up a few times on Friday. Twice in the kitchen, and once all over the bed. Lawrence threw away the blanket cover because it was too nasty to try to clean up. She didn't eat anything until Sunday. Yesterday I took the day off from work to take her to the vet. We went to the Pasadena Animal Medical Hospital on Colorado Ave. where they took x-rays and told us she has a hairball blockage. It figures that's why she's only hacked up one hairball since we got her last August. They gave us some laxatives - 4 pills to take twice a day for 2 days and a tube of paste to give her once a day. Because she had a slightly higher temperature than normal, we need to take her back in a week for the regular shot she's overdue for.

At the vet, the vet tech showed us how it was "easy" to open her mouth and pop in the medicine. Just squeeze at the sides of the jaws and her mouth opens. Well, we spent at least 30 minutes this morning trying to holder her still and open her mouth. She struggled a bit and mewed very sadly. I was up for trying it until we got it right but Lawrence felt we were doing something wrong. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay home from work today so he took her to the vet himself to they could show him how it's done.

It turned into a big argument this morning because he was very frustrated. He was also up all night and didn't get into bed until 6am...after which he got about an hour of sleep. I don't like to nag at him about this stuff but it just frustrates me so much because it seems like there's nothing I can do. Yesterday he got up late, at like 1pm and wasn't hungry so didn't eat (even though I told him he should). He got really frustrated around dinner time when I mentioned that I hoped the chimichurri sauce I made was still good (raw garlic in olive oil = botulism). We didn't eat dinner until around 8pm.

The reason he stayed up so late last night was because he was trying to fix our 2nd computer. He still couldn't figure it out at 6am, and couldn't decide what to do because every option was a bad one. Buy a cheap motherboard that isn't forward-compatible, and that may or may not be the problem? Potentially buy a new CPU for that new motherboard and end up with an old system that costs almost as much as if he just replaced all the parts with new, forward-compatible parts? Wait another 3 months for when prices may drop by 25%? Not to mention, with Muffin's vet visit, we really don't have the extra money to throw on all this? But, if we don't we only have [potentially] 1 working computer that can run WoW, meaning we can't play together?

He also has a lot of work to do today for the business - printing cards, designing things, submitting forms and ordering signs. He can't run illustrator or photoshop until he gets one computer working too. It's times like this morning that I wonder at what we can really do. I can't handle it when he puts himself in a situation where he gets irritable and frustrated. I wouldn't want to subject my kids to that and I guess I wouldn't consider kids until it gets addressed. The sleeplessness and frustration only increases when you have a kid.

Lawrence's ability to focus single-mindedly on a task is great and very useful. However, just as I have issues with playing computer games to the neglect of all other household tasks, he has to figure out how to make himself stop and pick up again at a later time. ::sigh:: He knew he had business work to finish during the day today too. WHY stay up till 6am? I guess he was right when he said he wouldn't sleep in late today. Lawrence - when you read this, remember that I love you but I think this is an issue.

So, that was a stressful start to my day. Once I get to work and go over the stuff I have to do, I realize that I really probably should not have taken yesterday off. I've got a LOT of stuff to do and it needs to get done by Thursday when things need to go live. It's not brain-intensive, but time/effort intensive. There's also some old stuff that needs to be addressed by this weekend. I have to meet with my boss this afternoon too, to go over the progress. URGHGHHGHGH.

This is one of those times when being a calm person helps, I suppose. At least I have mechanisms to deal...take deep breaths, clear the mind, and focus on one thing at a time. I have no problem staying late to work on this stuff, but I think they shut off the lights in the building at 7pm. That certainly makes things more difficult.

"Discussions"

It gets so frustrating having discussions about controversial subjects with Lawrence. They often turn into something more like arguments. It's hard for me to distance myself emotionally from the subject matter when it's something that I feel strongly about. This makes it worse for me because I can't put my thoughts into a coherent argument...and I don't even know if I have a valid argument or not.

I do appreciate his efforts to get me to think about the world differently, but it's hard because I feel like I've already done so much solidification of my worldviews while in high school and college.

Is science as a worldview the same as religions as worldviews? I feel that science is separate but not mutually exclusive from religion. They're just different things like how the subject of math is different from the subject of history. Lawrence would argue that I only feel this way because I grew up in a society that taught me to think secularly. If I grew up in a more religious culture, religion would tinge everything in the world around me. Scientific arguments would have no weight. Religion and science are both ways in which we interpret the world around us, and he would argue that as worldviews, their relative utility is irrelevant so I can't use that as a reason for denying them equal status.