CTY is Awesome!

So, usually I tend to use the word "brilliant" instead of "awesome," but truly RA-ing at CTY has really gotten me saying awesome to it. It's been not even a week of being an RA, and yet it feels like I've known my fellow RAs for forever (in a good way) and I'm really loving this place, though its temperature is so much more weirder than LMU.
Today Jake and I duked it out with Robot Wars - an activity originally started by my RA Geoff and Tom in 2004 at LA. Basically, the kids get to suit up the respective RAs, and the RAs just pretty much clobber each other in true gladiator style. And so, in the end, even though Jake won, everyone won - every kid got to enjoy it, and quite honestly, it's all about the kids, right?

And I got a nice bruise from that - totally worth it man.

Whahaha - Thug Story?!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

LOLs.... This is so hilarious. Esp. since it features both T-Pain (of comedic I'm On a Boat fame) and Taylor Swift (whose music I guiltily like). The beeping part is the best.

Consolidation of Emails

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If you're like me, then, you probably have a gajillion emails to take care of - for me alone, I have four emails that I actively use, and that's not counting the three or four others that I have but don't use because a) I got it in like 2002 and have never used it since or b) I got it without knowing (ahem, AIM Mail, ahem). The ones I use most often are my Princeton email and my kungming2 [at] Gmail ones.

However, it was some time at the start of the year that I realized how quite juvenile "kungming2" really was. I had chosen it in 2004 - in order to pay homage to Zhuge Liang (styled Kong Ming), and express my own personal wish to be the 2nd Kong Ming in the world.

Three problems: One, I misspelled the pinyin and have been using a misspelling for five years now - it's kind of like having an email that says "albert.enstein.2" for that whole period of time. Two, no one has ever gotten the reference. Most people assume that I couldn't get kungming as a username, so I got kungming2 instead. Aiya. Usually my discussion on this topic ends with a swift "ah don't worry about it..."

But the last and most important reason is perhaps because it seems very unprofessional in the age of being an adult and not a pubescent 14-year-old. Honestly, I can't even imagine sending resumes with this email (I use my Princeton one for that), and my Princeton email will one day expire (as Thomas so kindly reminded me).

Hence, now I'm basically streamlining it down to two emails: qinzhilau [at] gmail [dot] com and my regular Princeton address. I'm going to be phasing out my other emails over the next few weeks - I guess it was a great time aspiring to be the second Zhuge Liang, but it's time to be my own person and find my own direction in the world.

Credit Card Confusion

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Let me start out by firstly, condemning the culture of credit Americans have got with themselves. With the average American carrying more credit cards than Al Capone carrying guns and owing huge amounts of debt, I'd love to go throughout society carrying little more than my trusty debit card (I hate cash... The only place I ever use it is in New York's Chinatown).

But the realities of the world catch up to my idealistic tendencies, and I got the impetus to get a credit card after receiving a copy of my criminal check from CTY - of course everything was blank, since I've never been arrested on anything, and I've never gotten anything needing credit.

But with a blank credit history, I guess I figured I needed to do something to build my credit. Otherwise, I might be stuck in the future with an absolutely blank credit history, and as a result get terrible rates on a loan. Not a very palatable idea, I must add. So I went to BoA and got one.

I still don't like credit cards - and I'm pretty much going to use my new one like my debit card. Even the fancy kittens you can apparently now put on your personalized credit card don't faze me.

Maybe when they release an LOLcat version of a credit card. Or a walrus and his bukkit.

kthnxbai.

Eek, Bronchitis

I finally broke my long-standing policy of not going to the doctor/ taking medicine unless absolutely necessary because... Well, I felt it was finally absolutely necessary, since I've been coughing every day since May 20th with no let up whatsoever.

The doctor tells me I have bronchitis, and usually he wouldn't give me antibiotics, but since this has been going on for more than three weeks, he would. So yeah, I'm breaking my "anti-biotic free... since 2003" (I made that up, I like the way it rhymes) rule and taking them. Stomach feels queasy already.

Check back in a week, and hopefully I'll feel right as rain before setting off for the East Coast again.

I Hate Sundays.

Image by Hans Vink via Flickr

Sundays were my favorite days at Princeton. What with Dragon Dance practice, lazy lounging around in the sun, huge (10+) people dinner discussions (<3), and the inevitable last minute homework reading crunch (ok, maybe I don't miss that so much...)

Yet I detest Sundays during this time, in my limbo between college and my summer job at CTY (10 days away). Why? Because nothing's open. Everything's quiet (even more so than Ukiah usually is) and I can't go to say, the library and catch up on a good book. Neither can I go to DVS and mess around.

So I'm just stuck home cleaning up. I found lots of things that I had lost over the years, like my scattered books of Artemis Fowl and even a random Nostradamus book which published in 1990, purported to predict a huge earthquake in LA in 1995 and human cloning in 2000. Needless to say, neither came true, though their confident predictions are amusing to read all the same.

DVA Reunion

Was fun! Well, it was grounded in important topics, but I have to concur with DM Shun regarding his point of a generational gap - there's a full 12 years difference between me and some of the other graduates. It's great though, to hear so many different viewpoints on the future of DVS, regardless of whether I agree with them. Most people know of my very strong views on how I think the school can be improved (hint: drastic changes) and I probably spoke way too much at the conference, but it felt great to get those ideas and feelings out. Unfortunately, I've promised to write them out in a report detailing those policy ideals and changes, and I've yet to decide how to detail them yet. Plus, I'm supposed to be finalizing the Emcee Script for this year's graduation.

I've realized that I've written every Emcee Script for graduation since 2005 or 2006. Not too bad... DVBS is also having their election according to the ASC constitution, four candidates. Will be interesting to watch.