Summer

We've all heard that there are two certainties in life: death and taxes (I'm not sure if this was originally said by Aristotle or Ben Franklin). I've recently found that there are two certainties in summer: weddings and moving. During the past couple days, I've attended my cousin's wedding and helped Olivia move into her apartment, thus the revelation. Another stunning observation is that summer is hot. I must have sweated off 20 pounds today.

But actually, the heat is one thing I can bear about summer. It's the construction that drives me nuts. Every freaking year without fail, they are tearing up some major highway and slowing traffic to a near halt for nearly a whole summer. I don't understand, is there some law to ensure that people must be stuck in traffic for a certain amount of hours per year? I could swear that right now on I-55, they are blocking off an entire lane when they probably won't even work on it for another month. Someone, somewhere is laughing at this cruel joke being played on us.

Plus, you'd think with how technologically advanced our society is today, what with tiny cell phones, electric cars, and computer mouses with a wheel in the middle to scroll up/down within a window, they could have found some more advanced methods to pave roads. Come on, you civil engineers out there. All I know is that no matter how pretty and nice they make the roads after construction, in like 2 years or less they are back on the same road fixing it because it is ripped up again. Simply pathetic, and it's almost suspicious. I don't really want to accuse these construction companies of sabotaging their own work so the government will have to keep paying them, but is there really no way to pave our roads with some longer-lasting material? Hard to swallow.

One thing that amuses me about construction is those signs that say "Please slow down, my daddy works here. Signed, Katie." It's cute enough of an idea, but how many people actually think there is a sweet little girl named Katie somewhere who made that sign. Anyways, usually when I see that sign, it's late at night when no construction workers are around anyways. Otherwise, it's during the day and I am moving at 5 mph if lucky. If I slow down, I will be going backwards. Is that what you wanted, Katie, telling me to slow down so I can stop and say hi to your daddy? I really wonder how much good those signs do, but honestly, I hope they do end up saving some lives somehow. Maybe if they are shown to be effective, the government can erect some billboards around the country: "Please don't fly a plane into this building, my mommy/daddy works here. Signed, Timmy, Amber, Nicky, Ashley, Keisha, Jiang-Wen, etc..." Well, probably not. There's really no chance in hell that would ever work, especially because it seems that terrorists are generally meaner than the typical person. Yeah, don't even get me started on terrorists.

Joseph Chen

It might sound kind of dumb to write about this, but throughout my life I have found, to my dismay, that there are many other Joseph Chens in this world. It only figures, because Chen is one of the most popular Chinese names, and Joseph is a Biblical name which is also very popular, at least in the Western world. So I guess my mom and dad, in addition to the many other mom and dads named Chen, put the two together and a brand spankin new little Joe Chen is born. People named David Kim or Esther Lee probably know exactly what I'm talking about here.

One of the guys my Dad did business with in Taiwan when I was little was named Joseph Chen, and I remember he had a business card which I always wanted to get. What a 8 year old kid needs a business card for, I don't know. So back then and there, I knew there was another Joseph Chen in this world, which I guess might have seemed cool for a little kid. Then, when I lived in Taiwan my freshman year of high school, there was a guy named Joseph Chen there at Taipei American School, who happened to be the same year as me too. Even better, the lockers there were assigned by alphabetical order so his locker was right above mine. Suprisingly, though, our paths crossed only a few times that year. I think the longest conversation we had went something like this:

Him: Oh, so you're the other Joseph Chen I heard about
Me: Yep, that's me
Him: That's kind of weird, man
Me: You don't say
Him: Ok, well vote for me, Student Council Treasurer next week
Me: Yeah, ok I will

Seriously, that was about it. And even that much was somewhat awkward. After that, I don't think I met any more same-name buddies in person. But recently, when I was trying to sign up for a new email account to replace my students UIUC email, I ran into some problems. I think a lot of other people basically just transferred their students ID to a yahoo or hotmail ID. Pretty standard, really. (that's a line from Dr. Evil, if you didn't know. Austin Powers III, July 26th anyone?)

Unfortunately, it didn't work out that simple for me. First I tried entering "jychen@yahoo.com" but that was taken. "Fiddlesticks," I cursed... but to no avail, someone else got there before me so what could I do. Yahoo is pretty big, and to be fair, they probably weren't all named Joseph Chen anyways. I figure there's got to be quite a bunch of Joshes, Jameses, Jeffs, Johns, maybe even a couple Juwanna Chens too. So I moved on and tried "josephchen@yahoo.com" but that didn't work either. Now I was kind of mad. I thought about hunting down that kid from TAS cause it was probably him, but common sense won out.

The last straw was when I tried "josephychen@yahoo.com," and that didn't work. No, I am not joking. I wanted to throw the computer out the window. Someone else is named Joseph Y. Chen, and registered his name on Yahoo??? What kind of crap is that! I was getting so mad I couldn't think straight, and I even tried to rationalize that maybe there was someone named "Josephy Chen" before I realized that I was losing it. Yahoo was no help either, they offered me the accounts "josephychen1980@yahoo.com" and "josephychen1@yahoo.com" as alternatives. Yeah right, like I'm gonna be that desperate to use an email like that. "josephychen@yahoo.com" is already more tedious than I wanted, why would I sink even lower to be "josephychen1"?

So in case you are wondering what I ended up doing, I just stuck to my original "dudo509@yahoo.com" account. Yes, good old dudo509, lets just hope nobody else gets that nickname. So my resume now lists "dudo509@yahoo.com" as my email, which probably doesn't sound too professional, but if potential employers have a problem with that, I don't really care anymore. They can email me at "bite.me@screwyou.com" if it makes them happy. I'm definitely not going through any more of this stress just to find a more official sounding address.

Do Not Let Advertising Sell You On Drugs You Don't Need

A couple days ago I wrote a short thing about how I don't like taking medicine. Then earlier today I saw this commercial on TV that said "Do not let advertising sell you on drugs you don't need." Basically that's what I was trying to say... nowadays there's all these drugs that people take just because someone made it and marketed it well. You think people didn't have allergies for hundreds of years before today? They all seem to have made it fine without Claritin or Allegra.

I was all patting myself on the back for being insightful and having a TV commercial back me up, but then I noticed that the ad was a public service announcement by AARP. What's AARP, you ask? American Association of Retired Persons, if I'm not mistaken. So that was kind of a downer. A bunch of old people agree with me. I'm still wise beyond my years though, so screw you all...

R. Kelly

It never fails to surprise me how our quick we as a society can turn on someone. I mean, this is supposed to be a country where people are "innocent until proven guilty" and we are all entitled to due process by law. It's also strange to me how there is a double standard when it comes to certain crimes or sins compared to others.

I am not trying to defend R. Kelly here or anything. If you asked me my opinion, I would probably say that I think he is guilty of this whole underage sex thing. But it's troubling to see how people have reacted to these allegations against him, when nothing has really been proven about any of it.

WGCI has been playing his song, "Heaven I Need A Hug" since last week, which is supposed to be his defense to all of his critics. (If you haven't heard it, I can send you an mp3). Anyways, because this radio station is choosing to air this song, activist groups are already organizing boycotts and protests against WGCI because they are promoting a child sex offender. This is the kind of thing that bothers me. First of all, even if he was guilty, there is still this thing called the First Amendment. The song's lyrics aren't that great, but it's not like he is promoting sex with underage girls or even disrespecting anyone. It's not like WGCI is causing more sex crimes to happen by playing this song. Secondly, if you personally don't want to hear R. Kelly's music, just change the station yourself. Organizing a boycott is basically something you do out of spite and only adds fuel to the conflagration (Chip Caray-ism).

The other thing that is weird is how people react with such shock and disbelief against R. Kelly for this scandal, meanwhile the rest of the rap world is filled with killers, pimps, and drug dealers, which is glorified. I'm not saying what he did (or at least is accused of doing) is ok, or is a light offense, but neither are those other things. Yeah, let's kill all we want and shoot up heroin every day but *gasp* when someone has sex with a 17 year old and tapes it, now that's not allowed.

Plus, aren't there more important things to worry about in this world? I mean, kids in Africa are starving, and have been for as long as I can remember. There's a war about to break out between Pakistan and India, two nuclear powers. The US economy is still slumping, terrorism is still a threat, and huge corporations like Enron and WorldCom are frauding people out of billions of dollars. Yet all people seem to care about is R. Kelly this, R. Kelly that. What is it about us that likes to go "tsk tsk" and is so fascinated with stuff like this? Can we really learn anything from following this story? Yes, thanks to the vigilant reporting by the media and investigative work by the Chicago Police Department, I now know that if I am ever a 33-year old R&B singer, I should NEVER, EVER engage in sexual activity with a minor. But if I do, definitely I should NOT videotape it.

Believe me, I wouldn't be surprised if he's found guilty, and if he is, then I say punish him to the fullest extent of the law. As for us, "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you" (Matthew 7:1-2). In his own less elegant words "Church folks ya'll need to stop judgin... or you will be the first to be judged."

For now, everyone needs to just chill and mind their own business. Just let the courts handle it, and if justice is not served by them, I believe that he (and everyone else) will have to answer to God someday anyways.

The Origin of Dudo

Yesterday, in my Starcraft essay, I talked about where 509 came from. The tougher part is explaining the whole "dudo" thing. Honestly, I can't give a great explanation about how I got that name. I can give a story relating to it, but none of it really makes sense.

It goes back once again to freshman year. You can picture me back then, when I had longer hair which I parted in the middle. I was also even skinnier than I am now, maybe about 125 lbs to my imposing 140 lb figure today. Not to mention entering U of I as a Koehler Outstanding Freshman in the ECE Department and James Scholar (based on my SAT/ACT score). The point is, I was a bigger nerd back then, if you can imagine that.

Anyways, I was kind of the "smart, dorky" one out of all the ~509~ boys who were all about picking up girls and stuff. You can ask them and they would tell you the same. It was all good though, cause we had so much fun that year and we all got along like bros for the most part. And I could tell so many stories about what kind of dumb and crazy things happened. Sadly, no girls ever noticed me, but it was ok since I would probably be too scared to talk to them if they did. Basically, I am the same person now except I have shorter hair and 15 more lbs of weight.

So back to the story... for some reason, one night Will and Andy decided to rent The Big Lebowski from the front desk of FAR, and the three of us started watching that movie in our room (509). I'm not sure if those two had been drinking that night or something, or more likely they were just being obnoxious like usual, but they weren't really paying that much attention to the movie. As for myself, being sober and not having Attention-Deficit-Disorder, I was actually trying to follow the story and hear what they were saying in the movie, a lost cause at that. Yet strangely enough, they were paying enough attention to the movie to find it so funny that the main character (Jeff Bridges) called himself "the Dude" and had an answering message of something like "Dude is not here, leave a message."

That's a frickin hilarious story, eh? "Dude is not here..." so they decided to change our answering machine to say "You've reached Andy and Dude's room..." which of course I didn't like but what could I do. Then one weekend Will and Andy went home and when they came back, they found that all their Mountain Dew was gone. I know I didn't drink it, cause I don't like Mountain Dew, but they accused me of drinking it all anyways and started calling me "Mountain Dude." Ah, to be immature freshman again...

Nobody likes to be called Mountain Dude, let me tell you that much. But you know how it is, the more I didn't like it, the more funny they thought it would be to call me that. Somewhere along the way, it changed to "dudo," I'm not sure but I think it was something to the effect of them saying I looked like "Where's Waldo?" when I wore glasses, and morphed "dude" to "dudo." Whatever it was, the name started to stick for no good reason. When they would introduce me to people, they would introduce me as "dudo." When people called on the phone for "Joe," they would be like "who? oh, you mean dudo..."

Eventually, I had no choice but to get used to it. When we all started Starcraft names, what else would I pick but Dudo~509~. Andy ended up with the name "Walro" cause Steve Buscemi's character in that movie kept saying "I am the Walrus," and me and Will thought he reminded us of Andy. Will was just "Willo," and the others ended up with 509 names all with their own dumb stories.

It doesn't really make much sense, but I got used to using a name I didn't like at first, to the point where almost all my accounts are named dudo509 (AIM, blog, Yahoo, fantasy baseball), probably more due to lack of creativity. Now, I don't mind the name and sometimes I even get confused when people call me Joe. All because of those two homos I lived with freshman year. Oh, but those were good times. When I see Will or Andy or any of those guys nowadays, we still always talk about the stupid things we did back then. Like I said, there's a million stories, but now that you've heard this one about how I got the name "dudo," I'm sure you are thoroughly confused and I'll spare you the rest of our dumb pointless anecdotes.