The following was written yesterday afternoon but I forgot to post it before leaving work. Since I am going to be mad busy today with Design Review fun and probably won't have time to write anything, I'll just put it up anyways and you can all pretend that today is yesterday.

A Glimpse Into The Life

- I have been suffering from a sore throat and stuffed nose for the past few days. Yesterday after work I made a cornish hen because Olivia said it would help me get better. God bless her soul, but I ended up burning my tongue on the soup and now I have no sense of taste in addition to losing my sense of smell to the cold.

- It's a great luxury for my day when a lot of people update their blog/xanga pages. Sometimes I feel like Grandpa Simpson and his mail: "Maybe if I go to sleep for a few days some good mail will build up." So maybe if I stop checking everyone's pages for a few days, some good updates will build up. Props to all the regular updaters out there, you know who you are.

- I watched parts of "Saving Silverman" on TV last night. Normally I don't watch movies on TV, because I always switch the channel during commercials and forget to turn back, and also I don't like the fact that they are edited. But for some reason, I stuck to that channel and caught most of the movie. It turned out to be ok actually, stupid with some funny parts. Although I probably would've been pissed if I had paid money to rent it or watch it in the theater.

- Other than the obvious negative of having to go back to work, another bad part about Mondays is that the baseball schedule is usually much thinner. This hampers my normal routine of keeping my eyes glued to my monitor, following the CBS Sportsline MLB Scoreboard and Yahoo! StatTracker windows. And I guess it also ends up causing me to do more retarded things, such as watching Saving Silverman on TV.

- Today was yet another instance of waking up to the video for Linkin Park's 'Faint' on MTV. It wasn't one of my favorite songs on the CD, but maybe the repeated exposure I get every single morning is making it grow on me. They should've released 'Numb' as a single, that is the best song on the CD in my opinion.

- My daily breakfast consists of cereal with lactose-free milk. When I run out of milk and/or cereal, the backup option is a jelly sandwich. Both options were chosen for their relative ease of construction. Occasionally, I will have some leftover cake or a couple slices of pizza, and those days often turn out to be spicier than the others.

- The drive to work is short and sweet. I could probably make the trip with my eyes closed by now. Usually, I only catch about half a conversation on some morning show. I don't know why I listen to the radio at that time to begin with. What I really need is some music that will put me in a good mood and fire me up for the day. Not much help from the CD changer, which I have managed to fill with sleepy or depressing stuff. I think I need to bust out Doggystyle and put that CD on repeat. Or, just burn a CD with that Ying-Yang Twins song over and over... "to the WINDOWWWWWWW to the WALL" ... I still have no clue what that song is about. But those Ying Yang Twins, they sure have some catchy and ghetto music. Last year's favorite for me was "A-YI-YI-YI-YI", and I don't know what that song was about either. The repeating of syllables seems to be a trademark, maybe they just have a stuttering problem.

- My daily lunch consists of a sandwich (usually turkey, roast beef, or chicken on wheat), chips, and a Capri-Sun Big Pouch, Mountain Cooler flavor. I've found that turkey does indeed make me sleepier in the afternoon. Sometimes, I substitute pretzels for chips, but only if I feel like being spicy that week. Occasionally, I upgrade the lunch experience by treating myself to some fruit.

- I try to drink water regularly at work. The rage these days seems to be those Nalgene bottles. Everyone and their mama has one, except me and my mama. I guess it must be good, and comforting to know that you can run your water bottle over with a car without it breaking, but I've decided to drink my water out of good old plastic cups. Partly to be different, but mostly because I don't like to wash and reuse a plastic bottle. I choose disposable, baby.

Sports Talk

For those of you uninterested in sports, fantasy or otherwise, you are advised to skip this entry.

- Up until the past year, I never realized how shady the world of college sports was. It's so sad and disturbing to hear about all the kinds of stuff that goes on - and that's just when they get caught. I guess most of it is caused by the fact that a lot of money is at stake. At least in professional sports, everyone knows that it's all about money and profit. But in college sports, all the schools try to talk about how academics is always a priority, while it's obvious that it isn't. So you have all this stuff happening behind the scenes and a lot ugliness that is swept underneath the rug. You gotta wonder, what scandal or tragedy is gonna be uncovered next?

- Yesterday was the McNown league draft. I went into the draft pretty unprepared this year, but came out feeling ok about how my team turned out. Had the 8th pick, which excluded me from getting any studs (Tomlinson, Ricky Williams, Portis), but it's aight. I ended up with a top 3 of Ahman Green, Terrell Owens, and Daunte Culpepper, which is not fantastic, but decent. And I'm also especially excited because this is the first time I have had Brian Urlacher on my team.

More importantly, Week 1 already looks like it could make or break my season. I have still yet to ever beat Dave Chan's team and my boys desperately need some confidence to start the year off right. A preliminary look at the matchup follows:

*Taipei Dudalisks vs. Dudo Dominators*

QB: Daunte Culpepper vs. Kelly Holcomb
WR: Terrell Owens vs. Randy Moss
RB: Ahman Green vs. Deuce McAllister
TE: Bubba Franks vs. Marcus Pollard
WR/RB: Eddie George vs. Fred Taylor
WR/RB: Rod Gardner vs. Hines Ward
WR/RB: Curtis Conway vs. Isaac Bruce
K: Jason Elam vs. Joe Nedney
D: Brian Urlacher vs. Ray Lewis
D: Derrick Brooks vs. Takeo Spikes
D: Roy Williams vs. Mike Peterson

Hopefully by the end of Week 1, his team name will have to be changed to Dudo Dominatees.

- Usually by the time football season starts, I can focus all my attention towards football instead of baseball because the Sox are out of the pennant race and my fantasy baseball team is pretty much locked into 2nd place. But this year, the month of September looks like it will be very exciting baseball-wise. Sox have a decent chance of winning the Central, if they could find some way to beat crappy teams and win on the road. Two big ifs, but oh well. At least we have something to hope for. And in fantasy, my team is almost dead even with P's team for 1st right now. It should definitely be a interesting final month and a half of the season.

Currently playing on my Winamp: Maxwell - Lifetime

Ups and Downs

Earlier today I had a "farewell conversation" with the intern that's been working in our department this summer. He was telling me that he didn't want to go back to school, how working life was nice because "you go home at 5, and you're done". I was tempted to inform him that after my first few months, I thought that was the coolest thing about working too, but afterwards, the novelty of that wore off significantly. But my conscience kicked in, and I decided not to rain on his happy parade, so early in the life of a young one.

You know what though, I do believe that life depends so much on your perspective and how you choose to view things. I think that most, if not all of the grief you experience in life is self-imposed. Here is this kid who can't wait to graduate and start working, which was like me, 2 years ago. Now here I am, graduated and working, and I miss being a student. What happened to me?

Since graduating, I can look back on my life since then and divide it into a series of stages:

Stage 1 - Just got out of school, started working for my dad, but continued to look for a permanent job. Somewhat discouraged by the setbacks and frustrations that come with job fairs, interviewing, resume-whoring, etc. Felt like all my problems would disappear, if only I could become an electrical engineer at a large corporation.

Stage 2 - Became an electrical engineer at a large corporation. Enjoyed the excitement of starting my new job and discovering the working world. Began getting weekly paychecks and watching my personal bank account grow. Personal ego also grows as parents treat me more like an adult, and I feel more independent and important to this society.

Stage 3 - After a few months, work life starts to take its toll. I physically start to get tired from the daily commute and the lack of good sleep. Emotional decline also occurs as I realize that I'm still only a newbie at the job and I'm not all that important to society or even to my coworkers as much as I originally thought. The realization also occurs that I need to move out from under my parent's roof because A) I'm 23 years old, and B) I'm wasting 2 hours a day just driving to/from work. I miss college, I miss meeting new people, and I'm getting sick of having a daily routine. The situation is not helped by the gloomy weather of Chicago winter, and further deteriorates as I start to work overtime hours. Convinced myself that all problems would disappear when overtime schedule ended and I moved to Palatine.

Stage 4 - Overtime schedule ended and I moved to Palatine. Suddenly able to enjoy more free time and a return to life with a level of freedom not experienced since college. The new situation allows me to spend more time with friends and develop good relationships. Work related stress is relatively low, and I feel more inspired to do stuff, like learn to cook or plan for the future (investing my money, starting a family, navigating a career path, buying a house, etc.).

Stage 5 - Pretty much settled into life in Palatine. Haven't done much more than buy a cookbook and flip through it. Haven't really done much planning for the future. The demands at the job start to build up again, and life starts to fall back into a routine. No major problems in my life, so I can't focus on figuring out how to make them disappear. But I've definitely experienced better times than these.

The progression of stages described above is shown in the following chart:



Well, if nothing else, that was an example of me using a sophisticated and expensive software drawing tool at work (Visio) to create a crappy-looking diagram and save it as a jpg. But, hopefully it was able to somewhat illustrate my point, which is that life is a series of ups and downs.

If I had more time, I would try to analyze the cycle of ups and downs in depth and devise a theory about how to optimize your life. But I don't have more time, so I'll just say this: since I don't think it's possible to eliminate the down stages and only have ups, I'll just make it a goal to keep my life as steady as I can, while minimizing the downs the my best effort. So my ideal chart would still have waves of highs and lows, but hopefully progress to a point where the corners are rounded and I'm living in the "Smiley-face Zone" as much as humanly possible.

What up GANGSTAAA

- I can't wait for Xanga to come back to life. The suspense of the entries I haven't been able to read is killing me. Also, I'm counting on plenty of angry postings to follow, like "XANGA SUCKS" in flashing red size 24 font, or other entertaining shows of disgust.

- Sox and Cubs are both 1 1/2 games back from making the playoffs. This would be an awesome time for both teams to go on a tear, and ultimately meet each other in the World Series. Or am I just living in a world of delusion?

- It seems like all of my 40-something managers have shoulder problems of some sort. I'm not looking forward to being 40-something.

- Literally every morning of this week, the first video I saw when I woke up and turned on MTV was Linkin Park's 'Faint'. It really seems like each week, they decide on the one video they are gonna show in the morning when I wake up. Last week, it was Fabolous feat. Tamia, the week before that was Beyonce, and the week before that was Justin Timberlake.

- I've been wondering, couldn't David Banner have come up with a ghetto name? Someone responsible for a song such as "Like A Pimp" shouldn't have a name that sounds like a guy from some boy band or a character in Full House.

- Fantasy football drafts are almost here, and I have done basically no research. Every year this happens, but I always end up feeling good about my draft after it happens. And then my team always proceeds to suck when the season starts.

The Rape of Nanking

A few months ago, I started reading The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. I got through about 1/3 of it in the first week, then it just sat next to my alarm clock for a long time as I forgot it was there. Well, a couple nights ago I finally decided to finish the book, and I thought I would write some thoughts about it in my blog.

First of all, the event itself is not very well known, despite being comparable to a lot of other human disasters, such as the Holocaust. When you learn about WWII during high school, the Rape of Nanking is usually either discussed only in passing reference, or not mentioned at all. The reasons for this obscurity in our view of history were discussed in the book, and in short, it was mainly a matter of world politics and economics in the time following World War II.

Since I know nobody is actually gonna read this book themselves after reading my blog, the summary of what happened is as follows. During World War II, Japan invaded China, and part of this invasion involved taking the city of Nanking. Throughout history, Nanking was probably the Chinese city that was richest in tradition, also serving as the capital for many years. You might consider it the "New York City" of China.

Anyways, as the Japanese army did to a lot of other nations it invaded at the time, they arrived at Nanking and performed pretty much every atrocity you could imagine against the people there. The soldiers killed whoever they felt like killing, raped whoever they felt like raping, plundered all the stores, and destroyed a lot of valuable national treasures in the process. Nothing was sacred, as evidenced by the fact that girls as young as 8 and women as old as 70 were all raped, and Japanese newspapers routinely reported contests between soldiers about who killed more Chinese people, as if they were scores of last night's sporting events.

The book also includes some pretty graphic pictures, such as Japanese soldiers posing in front of a pile of human skulls, using live bodies for bayonet practice, and dead naked bodies of raped women, some mutilated. It's some of the most disturbing stuff I've ever seen.

When the war finally ended and the dust settled, Nanking was left with a few hundred thousand people dead and a city in complete ruins. It has recovered and rebuilt somewhat since then, but most likely the city and its people will never be the same.

After reading the book, the first inclination I had was to hate Japanese people. Hate them for the brutality of everything they did, and hate them for covering it up afterwards. But given more time to think about it, I'd have to say that if this was my only reaction after reading the book, I would be taking a step backwards, not forwards. As we were always told in school, the whole point of studying history is to learn lessons from it and prevent future mistakes. And of course the Rape of Nanking is no exception.

Not to let the Japanese off the hook, but the Chinese army was not without responsibility in this tragedy. By the historical accounts described in this book, it was clear that had the Chinese leadership been less cowardly and selfish in their actions, much of these events would have turned out much differently.

After 9/11, the popular mantra for this country was "United We Stand". Meanwhile, most of us either forget or ignore the phrase that follows, "Divided We Fall". The significance of this is well illustrated by the fact that more American lives were lost in the Civil War than in all of its other major wars combined.

As for China, if you've studied any amount of its history, you would know that it is a history filled with struggles stemming from the nation's failure to stand united. Even today, there are two countries that continue to bicker about who is the real China - one being the "Republic of China" (located in Taiwan), the other being the "People's Republic of China" (controlling the Mainland). This is a fact that makes me both very sad and very angry at the same time.

Anyways, the fact that a country as huge as China fell so easily and decisively to a small island nation like Japan shows how much internal division can hurt and weaken a country. Even as its major strongholds were falling during the war, the Chinese army still far outnumbered the Japanese at Nanking. But for some reason, they barely put up a fight when the time came to defend their people. As most of the Chinese soldiers ran away or simply surrendered to the invading army, they left themselves and their defenseless civilians open to all of the massacre that followed. In the face of this cowardly display, it's almost hard for one to fault the Japanese for their delusions that the Chinese people were inferior human beings, and that killing them would be akin to crushing a bug or trapping a rat. Almost, but not quite.

Recognizing all that happened at Nanking was also an important reminder to me of the extent of extreme cruelty that human beings are capable of. Unfortunately, things that we consider to be "inhumane" are in fact a very real part of human nature. The Rape of Nanking was an example of one race perpetrating terrible things against another; yet these same kinds of terrible things have happened and continue to happen in this world between those of the same race. Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong starved and abused their own people under their respective post-WWII reigns of the Soviet Union and Communist China. Until recently, Saddam Hussein and his sons routinely tortured the Iraqi people for many years. And right now, unspeakable violence still goes on in God-knows-how-many-places around the world, from Liberia to North Korea to the ghettos in Chicago.

As much as I hate to borrow the cheesy words from the annoying, played-out song, "where is the love"? Where is the respect for human life? I'd like to believe that society and human civilization has progressed to the point where we are beyond the capability for these kinds of things. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever be immune to that kind of ugliness.

For most of us, we're not in a position to change the world and save the millions of suffering lives. But I guess at the very least, reading this book reminds me that I need to resist the inertia to stay ignorant and pretend like nothing bad ever happens in this world. As much as I disagree with some of the things President Bush has done during his term, I have to say that one thing I do respect about him is that I think he honestly cares about the injustices in this world, and feels for the people who are being persecuted. Speaking out and acting against Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il may not have been the most popular and easy thing to do, but it shows that he isn't prone to ignore the evil things that go on. At least he isn't spending his time in the White House messing around with some intern.

Once in a while, I need to be reminded that there are much more important things to be concerned about in the big picture of life, than what I encounter daily in this bubble that is my own world. After seeing how bad life can really get, anything in my own life that I consider to be a major problem barely seems significant at all. Maybe in a twisted way, I'm just making myself feel good by comparing my life to such an extremely bad situation, I don't know. I definitely do think that it was a worthwhile experience to read this book, though. And if anyone happens to be interested, I'd highly recommend that they give it at least a quick read or a skim.

*****

Dang, that ended up sounding too much like an 8th grade book report. I guess you can take the nerd out of school, but you can't take the school out of the nerd. (The nerd being me).

This California governor's recall election is definitely gonna be something to watch. It just keeps getting more and more ridiculous and entertaining for me. At first I thought the political analysts were out of their minds when they were talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger as a serious contender. But now I look at the other candidates coming out, like Larry Flynt, Gary Coleman, and some 22-year old porn star, and I'm convinced that the entire state of California is filled with wackos, who are all headed towards eventual self-destruction. The stupidest thing is that since he declared himself available as a candidate, Arnold hasn't even talked about any of his policies or running platforms, but he's already leading in the polls. It's pretty absurd any way you look at it.

Maybe it's a sign I'm getting old, but I think I'm actually becoming a fan of Sheryl Crow. I always thought of her music as being very lame, but I like her voice a lot. All day at work yesterday I had that "Steve McQueen" song stuck in my head. It didn't help that I was in a meeting where radar was a recurring subject. Like Steve... McQueen... underneath your radar screen.... and you'll never catch me tonight wooo-wooo.... hahaha

My condolences go out to all my friends on Xanga. I notice it's been down for a while now. I don't think their servers would crash for this long, it's probably some virus, like that worm that was going around. Or maybe just some hackers doing some old-fashioned Distributed Denial of Service. I always wondered why people would go through the trouble of programming viruses, it just seemed really stupid and annoying. But then I think about all the times someone sent me a file called "funny.exe" that would lock up my keyboard and make me type something like "I AM RETARDED" no matter what buttons I pushed. After being tricked, the first thing I would do was look down my buddy list and see who I could pass the fun on to. I guess that's the mentality that makes things like viruses exist, and I'm sad to say that I'm guilty of it myself.

Mussina was pulled after 8 innings of shutout ball with a 6-0 lead. I was pissed. This kind of thing has happened way too much to my team this season. >:-O In other news, Matt Mantei is a stud.