Act 1: Vampiric Summer
It was a warm, humid Saturday night. Humans weren’t intelligently designed for the outdoors, yet I was outside anyway, out of courtesy for a friend’s birthday party. Throughout the evening, while I was playing my games and trying to socialize, I was repeatedly skewered by insects like a pincushion. By the next day, my skin had erupted in scratchy, itchy irritation. Why do I have so much blood? Had I been aware of God sending a mosquito plague, I would have first taken a dip in a bathtub of DEET.

Act 2: The Predator in the Corner
Not long after was another incident in the middle of the night, after I had woken up from my beloved REM. My throat parched, I made an attempt to retrieve water from my household plumbing, which is inconveniently not placed next to my bedside. As I swiftly zigzagged my way to the sink a corner jutted out right in my path. And as I walked past, I swiped the edge of my pinky toe, leaving me to cringe in pain. The initial jolt subsided, but a dull pain remained. As I scurried back to my bed (in the post-college years, I no longer run, I just scurry), I noticed this dull pain getting stronger and stronger. I finally get up to inspect for any broken bones on my very fragile pinky toe, only to discover it covered in blood (blood that had not already been sucked by critters the night prior). Hastily I bounded out of bed to give it medical attention, and also to find that I had unknowingly splattered blood across my pristine white carpet during my nocturnal scamper.

Weather
You’re probably not too curious about life here, but I will share anyway. Of course, the weather is much warmer and the air is saturated with moisture. People who have dry skin may enjoy the revitalizing nature of the humidity, but for everyone else, it just means you’ll have to get used to having your skin secrete extraordinary amounts of fluid like some sort of Zerg alien (Starcraft 2 in a few days, what).

Racial Diversity
You know you’re in a white neighborhood when the only Asian person at a Chinese restaurant is you. I haven’t seen any Asians yet, but I’m sure they exist somewhere. It doesn’t matter too much to me though, I’ve never been a person who minded being in the minority, especially during my summer at New Zealand. I sometimes fantasize about pretending that I know kung fu or am related to Bruce Lee.

Health
People seem fatter here. This probably stems from the fact that there are absolutely no sidewalks or crosswalks on the streets and everyone has to drive everywhere they go. Also, there’s tons of fast food. I haven’t given up wings yet, I recently ordered Inferno wings from a bar, and they were remarkable.

Ok that’s all, work starts tomorrow and I need to stock up on Walmart. Good bye.

Oh, you’re asking about the title. I don’t actually know that answer, but I’m looking for a larger male readership, and hopefully, crafty, eye-opening entry titles will help my blog show up on Google more.

We shall start with all the stuff underneath the hood of your car, so that the next time you open the thing up, you’re not just doing it so you can stare blankly at it.  For demonstration purposes, I introduce my family’s 1998 Toyota Sienna, 145,000 miles.

INSTRUCTIONS

Step 1: In order for you to show off correctly, you need an excuse to open the hood of your car.  So drive around with your friends or that special someone enough until your clunker stops working.

Step 2: Tell everyone, “Don’t worry, guys, I got this.” (You probably don’t, but it makes people feel better.)

Step 3: Open the hood using the lever usually located underneath the steering wheel.  Then, walk to the hood of the car and release the hood latch (this might take some peering to figure out where the latch is).  Lift it up, and place the prop rod in one of the holes underneath the lid of the hood.

Step 4: Stare inquisitively at the components.  Unless you have a 1998 Toyota Sienna, it probably won’t look anything like this:

The first thing to know is that there are 5 different fluids that you can check underneath your hood.

Coolant:  This does exactly what it sounds like.  Ethylene glycol runs throughout the system to make sure your car doesn’t turn into a torch.  (For tips on how to fry an egg on the hood of your car, see “How to Fry an Egg on the Hood of your Car” in your owner’s manual.)  To check, simply take a lesson from your graduated cylinder days in high school, and examine whether the fluid fills up just between the “FULL” and “LOW” line.

Engine Oil: The engine oil ensures proper lubrication of your internal combustion system.  Mechanical components are like 2 Peruvian fighting frogs; putting them directly with each other causes extreme wear (see “references to things that no one gets”).  Therefore, lubrication oil is used to go in between the components, and is the reason why your car lasts longer than a day.  To check this, simply pull out the engine oil dipstick, and wipe it off (If you don’t want to mess up your cardigan, you can also lick it off, although it isn’t recommended).  Place it back in, and pull it out to make sure the oil level is between the two notches at the end of the stick.  This is probably the easiest thing to check, hence the phrase, “Dipstick, you dips**t.” (DYD)

Transmission Oil:  If you’re cool enough to drive manual, then you won’t have one of these.  Automatic transmission fluid, or ATF, could be used as lubrication for your gears and sometimes, if you have a fancy enough 4WD car, hydraulic fluid.  DYD.

Brake fluid: This is a hydraulic fluid, which your car uses to brake.  Whenever someone says hydraulic fluid, simply think of the way a syringe works.  Instead of having the plunger shaft push the piston, it’s pressurized fluid instead (usually some form of oil).  There is a min/max line for the brake fluid.

Steering fluid: This is also a hydraulic fluid, which allows your wheels to move in the direction your steering wheel does.  Again, use your graduated cylinder reading skills.

(I guess there’s also the windshield washer fluid, but I hope I don’t need to explain this one.)

Well, that’s all you can really do besides check for corroded wires on your battery, unless you bring your tool kit everywhere.  Chances are, if you’ve tried everything, including pushing your car to get your engine started, you’re going to have to call for a tow.  But hey, at least you impressed the heck out of your friends and wasted 15 minutes you could have used to call a tow truck.

So this is what you’ve imagined engineering to be like: staying up late, debugging for hours on the solderless breadboard until you realize that the integrated circuit has a faulty port, so you fix that. Then you find that there’s no way to program the motor without mounting an encoder on the motor shaft. You scream and shout at your group members about how there’s no way we’re going to mount an encoder onto the shaft without the whole thing looking like K’nex. Then you suck it up and mount the encoder, until there are so many different colored wires on your machine that it could have been mistaken for a 2-year old’s coloring book. You decide that you’re gonna turn it in anyway.

Then your parents call. I’ve grown accustomed to the same yes/no questions they ask, and I wonder what it would be like if I just answered them all in one go.

Me: Hello?
Mom: Hi Simon, did you eat—
Me: Yes mom, I ate dinner already (with vegetables), I’ve been sleeping enough hours, I haven’t been working too hard, I don’t have a girlfriend, and I’ll be coming home in 2 weeks.

But I don’t. I usually entertain them by letting them ask their questions individually. All parents have a desire to fulfill at least the 1 minute quota talking to their children, and I will certainly not deprive them of this privilege.

Just the other day I sat with several acquaintances at a McDonalds, a local provider of free napkins and homogeneous sandwich selections.  Valerie ordered a Happy Meal, which also comes with what looks like a dog chew toy.  As with all drugs, the chew toy came with a health warning: Certified to be safe for children 1 and over.  How sorry did I then feel for those children who weren’t of age!

Readers, don’t you all remember that day when you were finally going to turn 1, and so you invited all your friends to hang out at the Toys ‘R Us that night?  There was partying and dancing, most were just sipping on their warm milk, but the naughty rebellious ones drank soda and got high off of bubblegum blow pops.  Then, finally then, the clock struck midnight, and you turned 1, so you marched into that Toys R’ Us, and said to the cashier, “It’s my 1st!  Can I get that stuffed polyester Spongebob?”

The cashier turned, pointing toward the sign in front of all Toys R’ Us that read, “We know you LOOK like you’re over 1, but we still need to see identification.”  So you whisked out your wallet from your back pocket, flashed the cashier with your ID, who then inspected it for fraudulence (toddlers these days make a killing off of selling fake IDs).  Then, after he was satisfied, would hand you the Spongebob, saying, “Happy Birthday!  This one’s on the house.”

How happy were you then!  You squeezed that toy in euphoric mirth, relishing in its choking hazardness, until finally the customer service came and stopped you before you blacked out from… being too tired.  Babies are supposed to sleep about 15 hours a day, and 1 am was several standard deviations past your bedtime.

“Whiskey,” I reply, motioning with my hands in a lethargic manner, “Wait, scratch that.  I’ll have the half-pound angus beef burger.”

And it all happened so fast.  After the burger, I was downing some garlic fries.  After the fries, I ordered a 12-piece buffalo wing platter.  By now I was feeling woozy, my vision fading in and out.  It’s true, I am a foodaholic, and the bartender knew very well how to deal with people like me.

“It’s time for you to go home,” he said, still wiping a mug dry in a very tv-sitcom manner, “do you have anyone to drive you home?”

“No,” I blurted, burping as I said it, “I’m juss gonna walk home.”

And so I left the bar, clutching my to-go container of chicken fingers in a brown paper bag, mumbling obscenities at people passing by.  Some had their children with them, and as I neared, the parents held their children closer, telling them that food was a dangerous addiction, and making them promise never to have any until they were of age.

I finally stumble into my home, my breath reeking of garlic.  Now, all I wanted to do was commit domestic violence.  Unfortunately, I did not have a wife or kids.  So I’m just sitting here, wearing a wifebeater and talking about wife beaters, until sleep catches me by surprise, and I fall asleep on the couch, my arm slowly loosening its grip on my to-go box of chicken fingers, as they trickle onto the ground…

This story is loosely based on a true story.

-Anonymous

Wackos~
After the workweek, I headed home to Fremont for the weekend, via my favorite mode of transportation, the BART.  I was sitting facing the back of the train, when suddenly a dark skinned lady walks in the doors on the El Cerrito stop, rubbing some sort of lotion onto her skin.  As the fumes of the lotion permeated throughout the car, I recognized the smell immediately: Icy Hot. 

She started pacing around the car, angrily yelling some sort of incoherent soliloquy as if she were reciting for a play, gesticulating wildly, and continuing to inelegantly rub that icy hot all over her face and limbs.  The other passengers avoided gawking and retained a posture of being seemingly unnerved by her awkward presence.  Unfortunately, for a split second, my eyes met with hers, and she began pacing towards me, still rubbing icy hot onto her body, still yelling incoherently.  I averted my gaze, and started tightly clutching my bag of dirty laundry close to my chest as if it were a teddy bear, possibly to shield me from an uppercut with that lady’s Michelle Obama-toned arms.

My eyes are now fixed at one my dirty socks, and her footsteps are approaching.  Cue suspenseful music and heartbeat soundtrack.  Closer and closer, the footsteps approached.  As she came right next to me, I held my breath, staring out of the corner of my eye to watch for sudden movements.  And… she passes by my seat, walking into the next car.  Sigh of relief, cut heartbeat soundtrack.  “This would make an okay  blog entry,” I thought to myself.

Shampoo~
My home bathroom seems to constantly go through brand changes every time I come home. This weekend, there was a new shampoo on the shelf: Selsun Blue, a medicated dandruff shampoo with Menthol.  A whiff of it reminded me of Chinese medicine.  After being thoroughly convinced by the long chemical names advertised on the back of the bottle, I decided to give it a shot.  Turns out, the putrid smell emitted by the potion was permanent.  Every time I ran my hands through my hair they would retain some of the smell, which was relatively unpleasant. 

 This leads me to the nonbiographical topic of today, part 1 of a 30000 part series “Stuff I find attractive in women”.  Today’s topic: Hair smell.

When I’m standing behind someone in line at the supermarket, and her hair smells like cherries, peaches, and sweat pea, it hardly matters what she looks like on the other side, or her personality, for that matter.  I’m in love.  I’d go as far as to say great smelling hair will bump girls up a full letter grade on my scorecard.  And when I say great smelling, it doesn’t include hair which smells like Pert Plus or Head and Shoulders.  In fact, I really don’t know what it is these girls dump on their hair to make them smell so darn good.  Herbal Essences?  Vanilla extract?  Tropicana?  Maybe some girls just naturally emit that scent?

Anyway, for all the girls out there with attractive-smelling hair, I dedicate this entry to you.

A long time ago, my leadership and team organizational structure class required me to write an obituary for myself, in order to see what I would like to have accomplished throughout my years.  Here it is:

Simon J. Xu, 142; Abominable business mogul finally dies

    Some called him Scrooge, some called him Mr. Montgomery Burns, but one thing was certain: nobody liked him. Xu, the CEO and owner of International Energy (IE), choked yesterday while he was at Chipotle, where he (humorously enough) choked on a burrito, trying to swallow it whole. Ironically, the local hospital paramedic team was also there eating dinner, but none of them rushed to administer the Heimlich maneuver. When he was pronounced dead 2 hours later, Chipotle customers applauded. He was 142.

    Xu lived a healthy life, far surpassing the world record for oldest age, much to the dismay of his company rivals and consumers. Shortly after IE bought out every competitor in the energy industry and obtained enough seats in the Senate and House of Representatives to repeal the nation’s antitrust laws, IE became the sole provider of the world’s energy. As a result, prices became sky-high and many people of the lower class were forced to live in shantytowns.

    Xu’s selfish disregard to humanity has led to repeated attempted assassinations, though all of them have failed. Xu has never donated to a charity, and instead uses all the money for various forms of entertainment, vacation houses, and of course, Chipotle burritos. His passing away was a welcome relief to energy consumers, and the government plans on using all the gold stashed away in his basements for an economic stimulus plan.

    In remembrance of Xu’s passing, we will be holding a funeral.  Champagne and refreshments will be provided, as well as a free performance by the Jonas Brothers, because Xu hated them.  Dressing in black is not necessary.

“Would you like mint, tutti fruity, or bubble gum toothpaste?”

I laughed out loud hearing the choices.  Unfortunately, it was one of those awkward moments where you’re the only one laughing, and the nurse was wearing a surgical mask so I couldn’t even see if she at least gave a courtesy grin.  But seriously, what 20-year old male in the right mind would choose anything other than mint?  Plus, I am a skinny Asian who is relatively hairless, so I have every reason to need to defend my masculinity.

“Tutti fruity, please.” I replied.

It was pretty good too.

     School starts soon, and I am saddened that this entry was the only one I was not too lazy to write during my entire work-free break (the blog goddesses will be mad).  This semester, there is a high probability that I will be taking my first philosophy course.  Therefore, I have been thinking more.  Specifically, I have been thinking about thinkers.  There are many great thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Kierkegaard, just to name a few.  But then there are many different types of regular thinkers, such as you and me.  Yes, this entry is another one of my categorization entries.

“Nice Ceiling!” thinkers
These thinkers, when answering a question, will inevitably stare at the ceiling as if you were both standing in the Sistine Chapel.  I usually find this pretty annoying, but I try to be understanding in the rare instance when the person is conversing with Medusa.

Angry thinkers
Thinking makes these types of thinkers mad, as noted by a frown (I call it the crinkly unibrow) which forms on this person’s forehead.  Why you would use the same expression when you are thinking as when you are angry is beyond my comprehension.

Beard Stroking thinkers
You probably don’t need an explanation for this one, although there are two types: Confucius (long beard) and Abraham Lincoln (short beard).  It’s really funny when girls do it. 

Itchy Scalp thinkers
When you make these people think, it sets off a complicated chain reaction which somehow causes the cooties on their head to bite.  But that’s just my theory.  

Don’t stare at anyone.  You may notice that once the silence has begun, your acquaintances will start averting their gaze towards inanimate objects.  If you choose to stare at another human being, you will face the consequences.  They will ask you, “What? What are you looking at?” My socially clumsy friend, you have dug yourself a grave.  No possible response will save you now.  Instead, choose to stare at that vase on the table with a fake tulip, or better yet, retreat to the bathroom.

No stories.  You may suddenly find this an opportune moment to share about that time where you cut yourself shaving and had to get stitches, but unfortunately, it is not.  Rather, keep your mouth shut and let someone who is more verbally flamboyant interrupt the silence.