Weekday Recap

Monday: I watched the Average Joe Schmoe Millionaire Show Finale. I have to say, I was more than a little surprised when she picked the "hot" guy Jason over the "average" guy Adam (yes I know their names and yes I watched the whole season). I mean, even if she doesn't like Adam that much and isn't attracted to him, Jason had about zero personality. Here is her chance to prove to the country, on behalf of all women, that they mean it when they say "looks don't matter", and she blew it. As if a beautiful girl like her couldn't get any random cookie cutter baby faced guy ("Joe Pretty Boy", if you will) after the show anyways? Anyways, the difference between guys and girls is, most guys are at least honest about where they're shallow. No, the #1 thing we look for is not a girl's "sense of humor" or "emotional sensitivity". Oh and by the way, another difference is we also don't care how much money the girl makes.

Tuesday: Watched the Illini take a 6 point lead into the half against Providence. So far, so good. Drove to Dave's, stopped for gas along the way, and by the time I get there, they're down 15. SWEET. Guess we can't handle this crazy thing they call "zone defense". Oh well.... hopefully by the end of the season our young sophomores will have matured into the solid ballers I know they can be. Later that night, I got to know Greg and Rich quite well when we played for an hour or two as the final 3 in hold'em. We went back and forth for so long that at the end, everyone left, and even Dave said good night and went to bed. Also, we determined that "two-pair" is not as strong as it seems.

Wednesday: Everything was going fine until about 11 am, I was just harmlessly sitting at my desk here at work, when I got attacked by a huge wave of coldness. Literally, all of a sudden I just started shaking and shivering out of control, and it was so bad that I just had to log off my computer and go home. Where I proceeded to wrap myself in my blanket and fall asleep for 2 hours. At which point I woke up with this massive headache. Then I fell asleep for another 4 hours and woke up with the headache still there. Then I watched TV for a while and fell asleep until the next morning. When I woke up, the headache was mostly gone and I went back to work feeling almost normal. Weird, I still don't know what it was. The flu usually lasts more than a day, and it wasn't food poisoning cause I wasn't throwing up or anything. Maybe it was detox effects from my recreational heroin use. Just kidding, I don't do drugs. So yeah, I really have no idea what my 1-day headache/shivering thing was all about.

Thursday: Worked till about 7 to catch up on the time I missed the day before. I know with all the people who work crappy hours that read my blog, I shouldn't complain about this, but I'm still gonna say, it sucks. Especially when you're still kind of recovering from being crazy sick and scrambling the whole time to catch up on stuff. I haven't worked any overtime for a while now, and I forgot how much it sucks when it's so dead quiet at night, all the lights in the hallway are off, and the parking lot is empty by the time you leave. Although, I usually do get a lot more work done when everyone else is gone for some reason.

Also watched some TV at night. HBO was showing this Bill Maher standup comedy thing. As expected, it was mostly political, and his views are mostly too liberal and cynical for my taste, but he can still be a funny guy at times. My favorite part was when he was talking about how girls dress so slutty these days: "You know who I really feel sorry for? Whores. Because when you're a whore, what can you really wear anymore, so that people know you're a whore? It's like 'No see, I'm actually a prostitute... I'm charging for this ass'" hahahaha

A less positive TV experience was the Ozzy Christmas special on MTV. I never was huge into the Osbournes stuff, but some of it was funny at times, and for the special yesterday, I caught the tail end of the intro when Britney Spears was in Ozzy's dream so I stopped on the channel. Then it started listing the guests of who was gonna be on the special, and Britney Spears was listed, so I decided to watch the whole hour so I could see her. About 58 minutes later, I realized that the only Britney Spears part was the intro, of which I only saw like the last 3 seconds of. What made me madder is that the rest of the show was really crappy. At least half of the stuff they show of Ozzy being stupid is so obviously staged, and no, I'm not talking about the skits. At some point it's like, OK, we get it, the dad has a completely fried brain, the kids are spoiled, and they are all proficient users in the various forms of the F-word. Now get off the TV and stop wasting my time.

Friday: I'm in love.... Actually, I have no plans for the evening. Call me if you wanna do anything.

*****

One more thing I wanted to talk about, all we are hearing during the baseball offseason is Red Sox this, Yankees that. I hate both teams and I'm so sick of everything being centered around Boston and New York. Great, so you guys have money to throw around. I hope both teams choke horribly in 2004 and get owned by a small market team and/or the White Sox. Oh, and I'm also happy we signed Mark Buerhle. Now can we please get a good leadoff hitter or something? Cause that's what I think teams really need in order to win, more so than Gary Sheffield or Vlads or Pudge or whoever else is getting all the attention.

Thoughts

- Over the weekend I got to go to a birthday party for a 4-year old. Don't ask me why I was at 4-year old's birthday party, but hey, it was fun. They had a magician and everything. He did a bunch of cool tricks, brought a real rabbit for the kids to pet, and made balloon airplanes, dinosaurs, and Little Mermaids at the end. The only bad part is, I didn't get a bag of party favors at the end. I kept wishing I was 4 again. But I think for my 24th birthday, I'm gonna have to get a magician too. Then I'm inviting all you guys to my birthday party so you can get me awesome gifts like sparkle lotion and books about horses.

- My week and a half break for Christmas/New Years is still a couple weeks away, but even before I get to enjoy it, I'm already worrying about how much it's gonna suck to go back to work after it's over. Mondays are already enough of a pain after a 2-day weekend, that I can't shake the feeling of how miserable a Monday after a 12-day break is gonna be. I've figured out that the problem isn't really because working sucks that much, it's more because "not working" is just that awesome. By now, I'm pretty much used to working Monday through Friday, and I think my job is pretty good overall. But obviously when you compare it to weekends, holidays, or vacations, of course it's gonna suck. Anyways, I should probably stop thinking so far ahead, it's gonna prevent me from enjoying my break in the first place.

- When I signed up for a cell phone plan, it was supposed to be for $39.99/month. But every month, I end up paying about $47-48 on my bill. The thing is, I don't ever go over on my minutes, and I don't use any of the optional services like downloading ringtones and stuff. This month, it reached a new high of about $49, which is just getting ridiculous. So I finally decided to look up my account info online and confirmed what I already knew, my monthly charges are supposed to be $39.99. The problem is, they tack on all these other charges in the form of fancy names so I don't know what they are. Basically, what it comes down to is that I'm paying about 8-10 bucks worth of "Taxes, Surcharges, or Assessments" and "Other Charges and Credits".

Also, as I was digging through the Cingular website and stumbled some fine print about a "Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee" which is supposed to "help defray costs incurred in complying with obligations and charges imposed by State and Federal telecom regulation". I'm taking this to mean that it all has something to do with the new law that forces wireless companies to let you keep your phone numbers, but I could be wrong. Now, hopefully this is only something that applies to new customers, but if I find out that I'm being charged this fee, even without switching companies, I'm definitely out the door. No hesitation whatsoever to leave this 2 and a half year relationship behind.

When will all these little fees and charges and assessments end? I'm tired of all this stuff adding up on my bill. As if I don't get "nickel and dimed to death" enough from playing Dave Chan in poker....

- The other day I saw this commercial for "Hip Hop Barbies". Hmmm... what's wrong with that picture? Now, I don't remember their names, but they were like "Tisha", "K.K. Lulu", or "Z-mo". It was pretty ridiculous, especially cause they all still have the smiling, big blue eyed Barbie face, just wearing hip hop clothes and their hair in braids. At least replace some of her pearly white teeth with gold fillings or something.

- There was also another Barbie commercial where they were casting spells and mixing up witches brew. Now that kind of stuff just really bothers me. If people don't want to believe in God, that's one thing, but is it really necessary to be promoting Satan by making something like witchcraft into a kids toy? I mean, Satanism is probably one of the last things you should ever want to mess with. But for some reason, our culture seems to think the subject is "cool" or "funny", I don't know what it is. With all due respect to the Harry Potter fans out there, I think it's horrible that the top selling books for children today feature a hero that is a witch. Can't we think of any other good subjects to write about? I also don't like the fact that so many TV shows and movies have these kinds of themes, as if Satan was just another genre of entertainment. I don't even understand why so many sports teams like to have mascots such as "Blue Demons" or "Red Devils". Now, I don't think I'm an extreme conservative when it comes to religion, but I definitely don't think this kind of stuff should ever be taken lightly. Or, maybe this does make me a conservative?

I-L-L...

So the Illini lost last night to UNC. At the time I was watching, it was infuriating that they couldn't grab a forking rebound. But by now, I'm over it already. It was close enough down to the end, where it could have gone either way, and on the road against a good team, you probably don't expect to win them all. Overall, I think this team is gonna have a great year. I don't think it matters a whole lot that they lose this early in the season, it's better than being overconfident and playing too cocky for their own good later on.

Anyways, watching the game made me think about the experiences in college when we "normal" college students had random encounters with the basketball players. I don't have a lot of stories myself, but between all the people I know, there's a good amount of stuff to list:

- My sister had some class with Nick Smith, and she says he just sits in the corner and nobody ever talks to him. Poor guy. Also, there's the the time when she met Dee Brown at the Union (I posted a picture of this a few weeks ago). According to her, he was very quiet and polite.

- Rod had class with a bunch of the players throughout his college years, and probably the most contact with them out of all of us. I think he said Lucas Johnson was a clown in his Rhet 105 class. And I vaguely remember some story about Marcus Griffin randomly asking him on the street if he knew where to get some weed.

- I don't think I ever had class with any of the basketball players. The closest thing would be when me and P took summer school, and there were these two girls basketball players in our Leisure Studies 100 class. As for the guys, the most that ever happened was near the end of that same summer, when a bunch of them showed up at Kam's. On my way to the bathroom, I bumped into Frankie Williams and I was like "sup man, thanks for staying one more year", and then shook his hand. I wanted to berate him for costing us all those games with his wild shooting when he was a freshman, but he seemed like a nice guy so I didn't. Also, he made up for it with lots of good plays later on so I guess it's all good.

- Other reports include: Damir Krupalija was a ladies man, and Luther Head is dumb as rocks. I'm sure there's other stuff I'm forgetting, but I can't think right now.

One of my favorite memories is of freshman year, when we would "finger" the players on UNIX. We knew all their account names from PH-ing them, like "ldjohnson" or "rarchiba". We'd usually find them logged on at CRH or IMPE, and Chras or P would send them a banner message like "FINAL FOUR 2000" or something. Yes, all of this borders on stalking, but it was fun. Too bad they changed the UNIX accounts to not accept those after freshman year. Maybe it was because of people like us?

These stories are all the kind of reasons why college basketball is so much more entertaining and meaningful to me than pro ball. As a sport, I don't really think basketball is that fun to watch compared to baseball or football. It's like you play 3.5 quarters which don't really matter that much, and then it just comes down to a couple bounces of the ball either way, or a couple critical calls by the ref and free throw shooting in the end. Especially after the Bulls dynasty ended, and the NBA started being filled with all these cocky 19 year olds, I really lost interest in that league. But then when you can watch the Illini on TV or live at the stadium, and be able to identify with the individual players like "hey, I go to school with these guys" and have stories that relate to them as ordinary people, it's that much better.

Go Illini... and please try not to steal any more PS2's, guys.

My Bits and Pieces

- The first time I heard the phrase "Rolling Ghettos" to describe the town where I work, I thought it was just a joke. I always figured that the northwest suburbs were all nice, otherwise why would Walter Payton live around here? But, now after about a year, I am starting to see that the area actually is kind of ghetto. It's the only area outside of the city where someone has ever come up to my car at a stoplight, tap on my window, and ask for money (by the way, the guy was not wearing a yellow vest that said "Help retarded kids"). Also, yesterday I saw someone hitchhiking for the first time in my life, about a block away from the NG building. Maybe hitchhiking isn't that ghetto, but I honestly didn't know people really did that, outside of movies and books, or on dirt roads in the countryside. So it seemed ghetto to me. Anyways, hopefully Rolling Ghettos is the exception, not the rule around here. P-tine must be where all the action is at.

- I think one of my useless talents is identifying where scrub actors/actresses are from. You know how all these sitcoms, commercials, and movies recycle the same pool of scrubs for the minor characters? I'm pretty good at seeing a face on screen and immediately being able to say "hey, that guy was Chandler's crazy roommate in that one episode of Friends", or "that's the kid from The Sandlot". Hmmm.... yeah, I don't know if my talents get any less useful than that.

- Illini basketball plays their first big game of the season tonight against UNC. I haven't watched any of their games yet this year, but tonight will probably officially kick off the next 4-5 months of Illini madness in my life. By the way, there's a Illini vs. UIC game on Dec. 30th at the United Center. I know from talking to a few people that we could get at least 5 or 6 of us to go, anyone interested, let me know soon and maybe I'll try to get tickets and organize something for that game. For reference, prices are as follows: $40 per 100-level seat, $30 per 200-level seat, and $25 per 300-level seat (I don't think UIC students get discounts for this game). I'm not sure what's still available, but if you want to go, also tell me how much you would be willing to pay, so I know what to get.

- "An apple a day keeps the doctor away". We'll see if this old saying is true. Starting this week, my latest addition to "Joe's daily routine" is a morning fruit break. Since oranges and bananas spoil too fast, and I'm too lazy to go to Jewel all the time to buy more fruit, my fruit breaks will mostly be apples.

Thanksgiving Weekend Recap

- As usual, the Chens did not have any turkey on Thanksgiving. Instead, we enjoyed hot pot. I don't feel like explaining what hot pot is again, so for those who don't know, refer to last Thanksgiving's entry.

- Played mah-johng with grandparents and lost all my money. I honestly don't know what I can do to play the game better, but I always lose to them for some reason. It can't all be bad luck. Oh well, at least I got a t-shirt once for winning a TASC mah-jonhg tournament. It was way back in freshman year of college, but still.

- In my last week of teaching Sunday School for a while, the kids listed things they were thankful for. Most just said they were thankful for their family and friends, as expected. But some of the more interesting ones said they were thankful for "being a boy", "my video game called Crash Team Racing", "my cell phone", and "fish". I think when I was their age, I was most thankful for my Topps 1990 Frank Thomas rookie card, worth $4.50 at the time.

- Did not do any shopping, Christmas or otherwise.

- Did not go out at all, even on the "second-biggest party night of the year".

- Watched "Elf". A good movie, especially if you like Christmas.

- Watched "Home Alone" again on TV. That movie never gets old.

- Had a miserable fantasy football experience. Starters score 2 TDs, bench scores 6. This was not helped by Jeremy Shockey being a cackmaster and Bubba Franks rubbing it in my face for starting the cackmaster over him.

- Played the usual Sunday night cards, came out about even. As always, it was a nice and chill way to finish off the weekend, which, despite having twice as many days, still wasn't long enough for my liking.