Aibo… My new MINI =) He’s so cute!

I’m still twitching.  I can’t believe I actually did it.  He placed the contract before me - pointed out six places to indicate my commitment.  And I just couldn’t sign.  I sat there and stared at the line with pen in hand.  Maybe it’s a sign of being commitment-adverse.  Maybe I’m just not used to big steps in life.

Umm… no.  I didn’t get married (to the disappointment of the parental unit).

No.  I bought my first car.  It’s really cute.  It’s really aggressive..  It’s a Mini.   I love him already.  My precious “Aibo.”  Yep… I’ve named him already.  “Aibo.”  Hopefully, with a name meaning “sidekick,” Aibo will prove to be as devoted.

As much as I love Aibo already, I still can’t believe that I coughed up so much money and committed to cough-up more.

But he sure is pretty…  And he comes installed with cool geeky toys!  Like this technology where I don’t need to stick the key in the key-slot to start the car so long as the key is on my person near the car.  And heated seats.  And heated side mirrors.  And this radio that will display the title and artist of a song that’s playing on the airwaves or playing through the iPod.

I love Aibo.  May Aibo be safe and sound throughout our relationship.

People consider me a calm person.  Buddha-like in my serenity.

HAH!

Some people consider me annoyingly detailed-oriented.  Nitpicky, in fact.

HAH!

This evening proves that one Esther Ko is neither calm nor detailed-oriented.  In fact, she has the unbelievable ability to simultaneously panic and focus on one single fact.

The story begins yesterday, when Esther’s meddling mother came to visit.  The same mother who likes to lock things up right… so right that it’s wrong.  Now, the door to Esther’s garage has a chain lock on it.  When she leaves from the garage, that chain lock cannot and must never be placed.  Why?  For the simple reason that logically speaking, one cannot place a chain lock from the other side of the door.  But worse yet, if the chain lock is affixed, when one returns, one cannot enter from that entry.

So what does Esther’s meddling mother do?  She places the chain lock in place.  And Esther, being totally unobservant sees the chain lock but doesn’t consider that she should take the chain lock off.  Instead, this RETARDED Esther sets the house alarm and leaves by the front door.

Umm… yeah.  Enough with the third person POV, that was yesterday, now it’s today.  Today… I get home from work, park in the garage, close the automatic garage door, and unlock the door into the house, all following my normal routine.  EXCEPT I couldn’t open the damn door.  At first I thought the half bath’s door was blocking the garage door.  Then I felt the chain lock.  Meanwhile the stupid countdown beeper on the house alarm was beeping away.

Then I panicked.  Do you know what a pain it is for the alarm to trip off?!?  PAIN IN THE ARSE I tell you…  So I smacked the automatic garage door opener again to raise the door and ran for the opening.  As soon as there was a wide enough space, I ducked under and ran pell mell for the front door.

I get to the front door and my hand was shaking enough I couldn’t get the stupid key in the lock!  Meanwhile my head is just focused on “That damn alarm!  Have to deactivate it before the siren goes.”  I get the key in the lock and burst through the door.

Can we say, “when it’s knees vs. hardwood floor, hardwood floor wins hands down?”  OMG… I forgot that I was wearing socks, which 90% of the time, I’m not because I wore sandals to work.  Socks over slippery hardwood floor means CRASH.  And there I was, sprawled on the floor of the front entry.

With adrenaline coursing through my system, I scrambled up and slipped my way to the keypad to turn off the beeping wonder.  With it disarmed, I ended up standing there for a few more minutes (yes, minutes) trembling, knees smarting, and with my purse and lunch bag in a wretched mess in the yawning hole opening into the night that was my front door.  I couldn’t walk.  I just couldn’t walk.

Now, about an hour and a half later, my knees are stiff and I have these really nice bumps.  Lovely contusions.  I haven’t had one of these since I last smacked my ankle against the wood of my tatami bed, the ankle swelled up like a balloon and I though that I fractured it.

So there you have it.  The calm-one literally fell apart.  I’m just hoping that it’s not some evil portend of things to come.

There is a reason why I don’t eat super greasy foods.  It is a proven fact that greasy foods do not agree with my stomach.  I normally have no problems with acid regurgitation - and for folks not interested in graphic description this is the time to stop reading…

But OMG… I was so stupid today… I haven’t had those little deep fried chicken pieces one gets at Boba tea shops in years - and I mean years - because I every time I eat the dratted things, I burp oil for the next twelve hours… then flatulence sets in and people run in fear (heck, I would run in fear if I could get away from myself).   I can’t drink water during that time because it only seems to exacerbate the problem.  So I get to live with the searing sensation of acid at the back of my throat for the next few hours.  And for those of you who know what a camel I am, also know the degree of punishment that is for me.

This evening’s main event began with the acid swarming up my esophagus about three hours after I consumed some of that chicken.  It burned, it seared, it made me gag and run for the bathroom.  There are times when I wish I could be bulimic and this was one of those times.  To just expel the whole of it from my stomach in one fell swoop would would have been a coupe de grace - painful, but at least the pain would only last for those moments and the recovery time.

But nope.  There I was, bent over the toilet trying to expel the punishing chicken and all I got was acid stuck at the back of my throat.

AND… to add insult to injury, I didn’t have any TUMS in my house!  So I had to wait until I had enough control over my stomach that I could survive a run to the store without having to pull over on the street to gag some more - during which time, I had the dubious pleasure of experiencing more oily-tasting burps.

It’s now 11:00 pm, five hours after my flight of madness (considering how twitchy I’ve been lately, I’m not even going to argue that I was acting rationally), and six tablets of TUMS later (the first four chewed up in the car as I sat in the parking lot of CVS), and I’m still burping up oily burps.  It’s a mercy that they’re less frequent now, but uggghhh… it’s going to be a very long night.

I can’t even blame this on the usual suspects that control a girl’s irrational cravings for certain foods.  Nope… this was straight-up psychosis.  That’s it… it’s the Twinkie Defense!  I was so stressed out, I lost my mind, craved something I shouldn’t eat, lost my self control, ate it, and now am ruing my actions…

Tardiness bugs me.  That’s why I typically try to allot enough time to achieve a goal.  Last Saturday’s attendance at a wedding was no different.  Considering that the location of the wedding was in some vineyard in Livermore - somewhere I’m totally unfamiliar with - I figured leaving around 4:30 pm for a 6:00 pm wedding was sufficient.  Little did I know that being a girl would foil my plans.

To put it in perspective,  I knew that I would need about an hour to get ready and leave.  So as I was  laying out the materials I would need around 3:30 pm, I realized that I didn’t have bobby pins.  Now, not having bobby pins isn’t necessarily that troublesome.  What was worse was that the skin on my face had been doing its revolting molting the past two days prior to the wedding.  Exfoliating the peeling skin only made the remaining skin bright, lobster red with irritation.  Either way, it seemed like I was doomed to have bad skin.

But being a girl, I thought, “Well, they have all that make-up stuff to cover bad skin, right?  I’ll just run to the store to pick something up to smooth away the the peeling.”  My problem, I’ve realized, is that I didn’t get enough education in school.  Stupidly, I didn’t bother taking the cosmetics lecture, or the fashion study or the social niceties tutorial, for that matter.

So there I was at CVS at 3:45 pm, trying to figure out what color “liquid make-up” I was supposed to get.  I figured I’d go with the Neutrogena brand because they’re the company that produces the Retin-A MIRCRO that I use (or at least, they have similar names - Retin-A being produced by OrthoNeutrogena).  It even came with a brush thing at the end of the bottle, so I wouldn’t have to buy a separate thing to use to apply the “liquid make-up.”

Not having one of those small mirror things that girls seem to carry in their over-large bags (my personal over-large bag being too small to carry my water bottle, laptop, wallet, sunglasses, phone, tissue, etc, in addition too something as breakable as a mirror), I couldn’t see what skin tone I was to match with the “liquid make-up.”  (And that’s another thing, what the heck is “liquid make-up?”)

Being an enterprising young yuppie, I asked another customer who had the misfortune of just happening to be around where I stood bemused before a huge wall of girl-stuff, “Hi.  Sorry, could you help me out?  I’m not sure what color to get.”  Let’s just say, niceness is not a dead attribute.  The lady was nice enough to help me figure out what color to get.

3:58 pm, I’m back home.  4:00 pm, I’m in the shower.  4:10 pm, I’m out of the shower and brushing my teeth.  4:15 pm, I’m parting my hair to twist up. 4:23 pm, I’m cutting bangs into my hair. 4:29 pm, I’m moussing and blow drying the bangs into place.  4:37 pm, I’m trying to figure out how to get the “liquid make-up” out of the bottle.  4:38 pm, I have “liquid make-up” all over my hands and on the counter.  Great.  guess I shouldn’t have twisted the  base of the bottle so quickly.  Oops.

4:40 pm, why is my flaky skin still peeling off into the liquid make-up that was previously applied and brushed, in part, on my face?  Um… that’s not going to work.  EXFOLIATE!  4:42 pm, I’m washing and scraping peeling skin off my face and my face is now bright red.  Ok… Ok, no problem… the liquid make-up should cover-up the redness.

4:45 pm, I realized that the liquid make-up thing is just not working.  I’ve no idea how and how much of it to apply on my face.  Wash the face again!  4:50 pm, rush into the outfit that I’m wearing to the wedding.  4:51 pm, I realize that something is scratching my back.  I reach back and realize that the store tags are still on the shirt!  4:53 pm, I’m dressed, but my face is still a mess.

4:53 pm, I’m back in the bathroom waging war on all the cosmetics bit.  I’d given up on the liquid make-up, lipstick was easy to apply… but the eyes thing…  It gets me every time.  I hate mascara.  Every time I try using it and then removing it later, I end up losing around four eyelashes per eye.

My solution, liquid eyeliner!  Now, my natural hair color is black, the same goes for my eyelashes.  It’s the color that cannot get any darker with mascara.  So, 4:55 pm, I curled my eyelashes, did the eyeliner thing on my eyes (after fighting with the liner to actually write liquid out of the barrel), and added some black ink from the eyeliner to my eyelashes.  There!  even more black, not that you can tell…

5:02 pm, I’m finally out the door.  I would have made it on time, too, had I not gotten lost in Livermore.  Jeeze Louise…

So you see, doing the girly-thing made me late to the wedding!

I work at a place where social media is always on people’s lips.  Don’t get me wrong, social media is great… but some social media vehicles are not meant for everyone.  Case in point, Twitter is not for me.  Why?  Because I lead a very boring life - that’s Boring with a capital B.  What would be my Twitter post every day?  “Waking up.”  Followed by “At work,” as I walk into the office. Ending with “At home, doing chores, sleeping.”  Utterly boring.  My life is so boring that as of late I’ve been itching for something EXCITING to happen.  You know… exciting like a speeding ticket, a parking ticket, or something else that NORMAL people do.  It’s like, I try to get a speeding ticket, except I drive like a granny and I can’t seem to drive faster than whatever other people on the road are going.  Parking tickets aren’t actively exciting; they’re more like, “Oops, I’m stupid for parking wrong.”  So if I had my choice, I’d go for the speeding ticket - you know, like creeping over the speed limit right in front of a police car.  That way I’m not necessarily driving at reckless speeds that will endanger others, but just fast enough to be statutorily wrong.  Yes, my life is just that boring.  My interest in “tweeting” would die within the same day of my first posts.

Another reason why Twitter is not for me… I am not concise.  My stories ramble.  The meandering of my stories is what makes my life “interesting.”  It’s not so much the actual events of my life that is entertaining, but the editorializing of the events, or lack thereof, in my life.  And even if my storytelling isn’t amusing for my readers, it is amusing to me, which is more than I can say about trying to write about the events of my life in Twitter.

For example.  If I used Twitter to relay the story about my life being boring, it would be something like: “Am bored,” to convey my current emotional condition, or worse yet, “I am boring,” to convey my personality.  Neither are terribly amusing.  The fact that for some really sickening reason I am craving my first speeding ticket is… well… sickly amusing.

It’s interesting what a vanity search on Google will do to a person.  In my case, I ended up stumbling across Steve and his chain-letter-like 7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me blog entry. Two caveats before you begin reading…
1. My entire blog is about my personal life / perceptions on things I see in life - I don’t write about work, I don’t really write about other specific people - so I’m not sure how much more interesting this entry would be.
2. I really, really, REALLY loath chain-letters and their rules, so being a total “my-pace” (Japanese colloquialism for the personality type that is a non-conformist who does things on their own schedule and in their own way to achieve their own goals) type of person, I’m going to break the rules I don’t feel like obeying.

So, without further ado…
1. Half my personality is that of a hoarder. The other half is that of a “tosser.” I tend to collect things - books, CDs, papers from grade school, them sparklies (e.g., jewelry, loose gemstones), fuurin (wind chimes), stickers, anime, manga, Japanese drama - you name it (if it’s something that I’m interested in), I collect it. I’ll spend an inordinate amount of time organizing (The Container Store has some great drawers that keep the dust off the collections), cataloging (.xls spreadsheets, dude!), and working on filling in any gaps in my collections. Then comes the fateful day when I run out of room in my room and the ax falls. It’s time to whittle down my collections. I go on this culling rampage while my inner hoarder screams in pain. Talk about conflicted.
2. I drink a lot of water. So much that my brother calls me a camel. But there is a reason… I’m prone to nosebleeds. So, if I let myself get dehydrated, the capillaries in my nose decide to punish me by splitting apart and making a mess.
3. If #2 above was too gross, I can be grosser. I tend to have a practical outlook on bodily functions and am not terribly shy about talking about them. Blame it on the “you’re going to be a doctor when you grow up” brainwashing I had since I was… umm… four? Five? Truly believing it, I did a lot of things to prepare myself for the profession. One was to be utterly pragmatic about bodily functions - especially those that little boys relish giggling about (e.g.,bloody noses and GI track functions) - and stamp out any squeamishness I might have had. I have no problem watching open heart surgeries on TV while eating dinner.
4. I can sleep anywhere. Actually, it’s more like, I can fall asleep anywhere, but I also wake up very easily. You know how I “trained” myself as a kid to deal with the personal functional aspects of being a doctor? Another one was to learn to fall asleep easily anywhere, to wake up quickly, and to function on little sleep. This was to “prepare” for the years I would spend as a sleep-deprived resident. College and E&M cured me of my pre-med plans, but my sleeping abilities stay with me to this day.
5. I don’t deal with alcohol very well. I refuse to drink liquors after my cousin’s Mai Tai made me giggly like an insipid little girl after two sips. I’m convinced that he put 98% rum and 2% juice in my cup and 2% rum and 98% juice in my mother’s cup. She drank her Mai Tai just fine. I used to be able to handle a glass of wine. But after the trip to Hawaii a couple weeks ago when I ordered a glass of wine, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t drink more than 75% of a glass of wine before I get dizzy. To add a little more color to what I have to do in order to drink 75% of a glass of wine and not go past the dizzy stage… I also had bread, a few pieces of sashimi from the appetizer, a plate of salad, part of the entree, and about four glasses of water to accompany the sips of wine. I finished the entree and the dessert with another two glasses of water. Then, the wine I had last Friday night totaled about five or six sips before I had to stop. Dude, talk about a waste of good wine.
6. I am a control freak but I’m also really laid-back. When it comes to me and my performance and my environment that I create for myself, I’m totally a Type-A, anal retentive, annoying brat. I hate losing control over my actions - so I’ve never gotten drunk to the point that I can’t tell myself to stop drinking, I will schedule my personal To-Do list and stick to it until the rotten thing is done, all my collections are organized and cataloged. However, when it comes to my perspective on what other people do, it pretty much boils down to “it’s their life, I don’t care what they do, unless they do something that impacts me.”
7. I call myself an incredibly lazy person. Though I suppose other people who see me working would call it hard-working. I hate untangling messes if I could have not created the mess in the first place with a bit of due diligence. I call it my “work down payment” theory. If one can afford a larger down payment in terms of work effort at the beginning of the project and if that increase in the down payment will result in a lower marginal cost of work in terms of maintenance and upgrades, then invest the time up front to save time later. For example, I am an incredibly stupid person who can’t remember what was said two minutes ago if it isn’t written down. So how can anyone expect me to remember the specifications of a product that was designed a year ago. However, to cope, I write everything down and organize all the relevant information so that if I have to recreate or edit something in the future, I know exactly how to do it. It saves me the time I would have had to spend trying to remember the specifications. The additional benefits being that if a new person needs to learn about the product, there now exists a step-by-step guide for the product, which saves me the time of trying to explain how to do things. They only need to use the guide and walk through the process. Also, if there are multiple people who have to learn the product, there is now a single source of information - a control document - that will cut down on misinformation. Untangling misinformed people because they heard it from someone who heard it from someone is really painful. I’m too lazy to deal with that. So, if I have the time, I’d rather input the work upfront to avoid future problems… see? Lazy.

And there you have it, seven things you may or may not have known about me. At this point, I’m supposed to list the rules:

* Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I’ve obeyed the first two rules, but I refuse to do the next two, sorry. The people I know fall into four camps: 1. The Already Did This Meme group; 2. The I Barely Know How to Turn On a Computer group; 3. The Attorney group; 4. The Co-Worker group.

For obvious reasons, it doesn’t make sense to tag those in group 1. For my own sanity, I refuse to tag (assuming that they’re tag-able) those in group 2. I’m not convinced my attorney friends have blogs so that kills those in group 3. And, I’m not feeling brave enough to face possible strangulation by my co-workers for passing this along (again, assuming that they have blogs).

Waikiki - the shopping jungle in which one gets lost in all the high price-tag stores that inhabit this bit of Honolulu land.  I am a girl.  I like shopping.  But shopping for girly-girl things (except them sparkly things) can get boring after a while.  After three days of seeing store after store filled with craziness - I mean, why would Macy’s sell tennis shoes but not cotton athletic socks to go with the tennis shoes - I was ready to cry uncle.

I’m not a beach person - acne + acne medication + SPF 85 sunblock + water + sun - is just not a happy mix.  So I stay away from the beach and water sports.  Actually, the only water sports I enjoy (e.g., me, physically, participating in it and not watching it on TV) are the ones where the water is frozen over.

So what is a person in Hawaii, stuck on an island, which by definition is surrounded by water, to do?  Go HIKING!

I signed up for two nature tours with Oahu Nature Tours - a 6:00 am hike up Diamond Head Crater and a 2:00 pm Rainforest and Waterfall hike in the Koolua mountains.

Being from California and traveling to Hawaii for a wedding, the only shoes I brought with me were dress shoes and flip flops.  The nature tours weren’t anticipated activities - more an allergic reaction to the commercialization of the area I was staying.  I went to Macy’s to buy some walking shoes.  Sure, Macy’s had tennis shoes / walking shoes… but they didn’t sell athletic socks.  I walked one block over to the Foot Locker and found athletic socks galore (kind of) - but the good kind, the kind that don’t give my feet blisters, were all MEN’S L.  Umm… yeah, I can wear kiddy-sized socks, so men’s L sized socks were not going to work.

Naturally, I did the Californian thing - go hiking in flip flops!  Diamond Head in flip flops wasn’t a problem.  Waterfall hike in flip flops wasn’t a problem.  But the  waterfall hike meant muddy trails.  Muddy trails means slippery trails.  Mud = slip = Esther walks gingerly and at times splays the legs apart to walk on the “drier” banks of what would be a stream bed had water been running through it and not mud.  The step is similar to the shuffle skiers do to hike uphill in snow.

I’m actually pretty glad I wore the flip flops.  I’m not exactly the most steady person on the feet - bumbling is how my loving brother describes me - so if there’s nothing to trip over or slip on, I’m guaranteed to trip over or slip on it.  Had I worn tennis shoes, I still would be walking slowly and ski-shuffling my way down the trail. At least in flip flops I could just walk in the water as opposed to rock hopping to avoid getting the feet wet. Rock hopping would have been more dangerous for me as I probably would have slipped and fallen into the water.

The waterfall hike was gorgeous.  I loved it and the residents of that bit of the Koolua mountains loved me.  In fact, they so loved me that to this evening, a bit over four days since my hike, I’m still itching and scratching their love bites - all seventeen of them.  Those mosquitoes braved even the bug repellent that I coated all over me prior to the hike and partook of my blood.  They must have left a little extra something in their love bite because I still itch, even after slathering on maximum strength cortisone cream.

Diamond Head is spectacular at the summit.  You can see the entire southern coast of Oahu from the look out spot.  Getting to the top was pretty nifty too.  There’s the trail part, the stairmaster part, the tunnel part, the stairmaster part 2, the winding stairmaster, the low clearance that even a shorty like me had to crawl through, all to get to the lookout point at the summit.

All in all, I recommend taking a break from Waikiki and going on a nature tour to see some of the nifier parts of Oahu.

I haven’t blogged in such a long time!  Since then, so much has happened.  But for now…

You know, Hawaii’s such an interesting place.  It’s bilingual -  English and Japanese.  A majority of the store signs have both English and Japanese text.  Store folks speak English and Japanese.  Even random people on the streets (non-Japanese) will speak Japanese.

Case in point, I was walking back from Ala Moana Shopping Center, minding my own business, trying not to get blown away by the high winds.  I walked past two dudes, one of whom smiled and said, “Konnichiwa” in this really horrible American accent.

Umm… “Hi,” was my response.

So, here’s the thing, I eat Japanese food, I get Japanese haircuts, I watch Japanese drama, I listen to Japanese pop, I read Japanese comics, I am superficially a Nihon-phile.  But I am not Japanese.  I don’t even look Japanese.  But I guess to Hawaiians, if she’s Asian, has dyed / permed hair, is carrying shopping bags, and is in Waikiki, chances are she’s Japanese.  So smile and say “Konnichiwa” to be nice and maybe she’ll pour more money into the local economy.

But really, folks here are very friendly.

Just came back from a quick jaunt to Boston to attend my brother’s white coat ceremony.  I’ll do a more in depth write-up over the next week or so.  Not right now though… I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since last week…
Sunday-Monday night - 5.5 hours
Monday-Tuesday night - 5 hours
Tuesday-Wednesday night - 5.5 hours
Wednesday-Thursday night - 2 hours
Thursday-Friday night - 4 hours
Friday-Saturday night - 6 hours of spotty sleep which is often worse than solid three hours of sleep

‘Course, me being me and being able to fall asleep nearly anywhere under any conditions, I tried to sleep on the ungodly 6:00 am plane flight to Boston. My head was nodding forward, eyes visibly closed and for all intents and purposes, I WAS ASLEEP.

My mother, however, was bored. SHE couldn’t sleep. And so she decided to ask me questions, thereby engaging me in conversation so that she wouldn’t be so bored. Every time I began to nod off another question would whisper in my right ear.

In Boston, even the iPod blaring soothing music that really was supposed to be played very quietly to lull me to sleep wasn’t enough to drown out the snores coming from the others with whom I was sharing a hotel room.

Then the flight back tonight, once the computer ran out of battery life and my mother decided that she wanted to play with my NDS (even though I was in the middle of a chapter of Ace Attorney) my attempts to snooze were foiled by her whispering in my right ear to help her figure out the puzzle before the time limit killed her game play.

Now, I’m enjoying this excellent vertigo that is making moving around with any degree of speed rather dangerous. Thankfully, typing on a laptop doesn’t require the head to physically move.

OK, off to sleep now.